Project X

by Jim Shepard

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Author

  Also by Jim Shepard

  Copyright Page

  For Emmett and Aidan and Lucy

  Acclaim for Jim Shepard’s

  PROJECT X

  “Project X is a savvy, sensitive take on the tortured inner lives of two eighth-grade boys—Hanratty and Flake, outcasts who plan a Columbine-like revenge on their unwitting school—that builds tension with unremitting skill.”

  —Elle

  “[Hanratty’s] turmoil proves to be an intense experience in anxiety recall: Your most frustrating teen memories will find unholy corroboration. Which makes Shepard’s intimacy with the bleeding psyche of misfitting adolescence all the more discomfiting—we’re so close, we feel the heft of the Kalashnikov.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Of all Shepard’s work, perhaps none blends fact and fiction more controversially than Project X. . . . [He] willfully defies the boundaries by which so much of our culture is defined. . . . Shepard, then, is a writer who, along with a small group of contemporaries, is reconfiguring how fiction works.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “If Jim Shepard’s fiction carried a sign, it might say DANGER: EXPLOSIVES. As this riveting novel progresses, we find ourselves praying for Hanratty’s salvation—and our own.”

  —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “A feat of verisimilitude, with an inspired evocation of the caprices of adolescence, deftly tracing the fine line between idle pent-up angst and the kind that puts a gun in the hand of an eighth grader who might use it.”

  — Esquire

  “Project X truly ups the ante [in] dark realism and depth.”

  —New York Magazine

  “A feat of stunning imagination. . . . [Project X] leaves you with questions that you’ll ask yourself every time you see one of those kids who seem slightly out of place in school, at the mall, at church—or in your child’s bedroom.”

  —The Kansas City Star

  “Shepard puts us into the shoes of two boys with murder on their minds but not in their hearts. His compassion for them rings out like a shout—the kind no one hears until it’s too late.”

  —Salon

  “Shepard’s ear for the speech of today’s youth is remarkable. He has fashioned a kind of staccato poetry out of an often inchoate, vocabulary-poor manner of conveying, or avoiding communication. . . . [The] first-person, present-tense voice varies from deadpan humor to deadpan melancholy. Either way, his narration is unfailingly intense and captivating.”

  —Newsday

  “After all the hand-wringing and glib explanations for school shootings, Project X offers as clear a view as any into the minds of the kids who actually succumb to . . . a deadly impulse.”

  —The Columbus Dispatch

  “Unrelenting and touching. . . . There are scenes that remain haunting long after the book is done. . . . [A] sensitive and unflinching novel.”

  — The Anniston Star

  “[Hanratty] is vulnerable, funny, sullen and heartbreaking.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to acknowledge the following people, without whom this book would have been a paltrier thing, or no thing at all: Karen Shepard, Ron Hansen, and Geoff Sanborn; Gary Fisketjon and Amber Qureshi; and, though the events described herein are fictional, Priscilla Wolff, Tim Carlson, and the students at the Curtis School; Mary Alvord and the students in the Mount Greylock Regional School District; and all of the long-suffering teachers and students from Johnson Junior High and Stratford High School, from way back when.

  1

  First day of FS and where are my good green pants? In the wash. I have one pair of pants that aren’t clown pants and they’re in the wash. They haven’t been washed all summer but today, this morning, they’re in the wash. It’s too cold for cargoes and everything else in my drawer is Queer Nation, and sure enough I’m the only one on the bus in shorts. “Scorcher, isn’t it?” a ninth-grader asks when he goes by my locker. I’m standing there like I’m modeling beachwear. Kids across the hall chuckle and point. I almost head home right then.

  “FS, man,” Flake says when he sees my face.

  “I can’t take it,” I tell him. “It’s like, twenty minutes, and I can’t take it.”

  “Look at your face,” he says, and he has to laugh. He doesn’t mean it in a bad way.

  I put my head on my hands in my locker and try to tear the shelf off the wall.

  “FS,” he says. At least our first period classes are near each other.

  “FS,” I tell him back. We don’t even have homeroom together, though they told us over the summer we would. FS is fuckin’ school. We argue over who thought of it.

  My homeroom teacher has a big banner up on the bulletin board that says WELCOME TO EIGHTH GRADE! Underneath it there’s a sign that says LEAVE NO CHILD UNSUCCESSFUL and a handout for EIGHT WAYS OF BEING SMART.

  In the doorway of first-period English my feet like freeze. I can’t even get into the room. I will not fucking do this, I think to myself. “What?” the English teacher says.

  We’re not in the same gym class, either. And his is fourth period and the first day stuff runs long, so there I am in the cafeteria without him. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, I go to myself, like some god’ll say, “Oh sorry, Hanratty, you want your only friend? I’ll send him along.”

  And who’s there: Hogan, Weensie, and all the other butt-wipes who are always after me. The kid from Darien we call Dickhead who beat me with a plank last spring. He pulled it from his tree house, and his friends held me down. Flake said when he saw my back that I was lucky there were no nails in it.

  “Look who’s watching his figure,” the kid goes. I have like one milk pint on my tray.

  “Eat me,” I tell him. My eyes are tearing up and I want to pull them out and pound each of them flat on the tray.

  “You’re not sittin’ on this side,” the kid says.

  “I’ll sit where I want,” I tell him. But I stand there and then head across the room away from him. I want to set fire to every single fixture and chair and window and crappy water-stained ceiling tile in this cafeteria. I can never eat anything here. Just taking a sip of water makes me want to hurl.

  I’d fight if it was just him. But he’s got eight thousand friends. Every asshole in the school is his friend.

  I’m standing there with my tray. Pint of milk and a Rice Krispies Treat in a little dish. Every table’s worse than the one next to it. It’s the worst feeling in the world.

  When you’re standing there in the middle of the floor with no one to eat with, there are about four kids who don’t look at you. The cafeteria holds three hundred.

  “Nice shorts,” somebody says.

  Even if you don’t eat, you have to just stay until lunch is over anyway. There’s a spot next to a kid from Latvia or Lithuania or something who smells. She has her hair moussed and smashed onto one side of her head like she fell asleep in tree sap. She showed up last year. She has fewer friends than Flake and me. And we only have each other.

  “Is this seat taken?” I go.

  “I yev a fren coming,” she says.

  I end up next to a girl who has to be the most beautiful person in her zip code. The rest of the table is all her friends. One of them I know from grammar sc
hool.

  “This is a S.M.I.L.E. meeting,” the one I know tells me. She shows me her folder: Students Making an Impact Locally and Everywhere. I eat my Rice Krispies Treat.

  “We could sponsor a child,” one girl goes.

  “For a year?” somebody says.

  “Well, what would you do?” the first girl goes. “Sponsor one for a week?”

  They talk about a car wash. After a while they quiet down and I realize they’re looking at me.

  “You know who Kel Mitchell is?” the beautiful girl asks me.

  “What?” I go. I switch my milk and Rice Krispies Treat on the tray. I never know what to do with my hands.

  “You heard of Kel Mitchell?” she says.

  When I keep looking at her, she says about me to her friends, “He’s not a random guy.”

  “He’s a random guy,” one of them says. “He counts.”

  It’s some kind of bet. “Yeah, I know who he is,” I go. “He’s the guy on that thing.”

  They’re looking at me like they found a little lizard asleep on the table. “What thing?” one of them says.

  “That thing,” I go. My Krispies Treat’s all sticky. I can’t think of anything, but I’m not giving them the satisfaction. “You know, that thing on cable.”

  Their faces look like I may have hit it. The beautiful girl goes, “You are so bluffing.”

  “Mr. Hanratty,” my fifth period social studies teacher says in front of the whole class. I haven’t even sat down yet. “You going to be favoring us with more of your particular brand of sullenness this year?”

  I write my name on the inside of the 20th Century Civilizations cover: E. Hanratty.

  “What are you shaking your head about?” he wants to know.

  I’m not shaking my head about anything, I tell him.

  He asks if I’m calling him a liar.

  “I’m not calling you a liar,” I tell him.

  He says he’d like me to apologize to my classmates for wasting everybody’s time at the beginning of the semester.

  I apologize to them. Kids snicker. “Don’t let it happen again,” a kid behind me murmurs.

  “We’re going to be concentrating this year on Innovators,” the teacher says. “Men and women of the twentieth century who found new ways of addressing society’s problems.” A kid in the last row makes a farting noise. The kids around him make snorty and strangled little sounds.

  “Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King,” the teacher goes. “Mr. Hanratty? Any names to add to our list?”

  “Richard Speck,” I go.

  So on day one I get detention. The secretary outside the vice principal’s office congratulates me on being the first kid called in this year.

  I don’t see Flake for three straight periods.

  “What’s the matter with you?” a girl asks me on the stairs.

  I have to call home when detention’s over, since the buses all left an hour ago. My mother comes to get me and drives a mile and a half after I get in before she says anything. I measure it on the odometer.

  “Your friend called four times,” she says. “He didn’t seem to know about your detention.”

  “You mad?” I ask.

  “No, I’m proud,” she says.

  “Sorry,” I tell her.

  “So what’d you do?” she says. “Talk back?”

  “Talk back,” I tell her.

  At dinner my dad tells me I’m grounded.

  “No more malt shop for me,” I go.

  He tells me I’m grounded an extra week.

  Flake can’t believe it when I get him on the phone. “That’s fucked up,” he says. I can hear him sucking down a Go-Gurt. He goes through the things like he’s five years old. “How could you get into trouble so fast with everybody?”

  He likes what I told the teacher. He thinks my parents should’ve cut me some slack. “FS,” he goes.

  “FH,” I tell him.

  All the lights and the TV finally go off around midnight. My dad peeks in to make sure I’m not on the computer or sharpening a spoon to cut out his heart. “You asleep?” he says.

  “Completely,” I tell him. I have the covers over my face and a hand off each side of the bed.

  “Try and avoid any felonies on day two,” he says. “Though I know you already set a standard for yourself.”

  “I think Mom’s waiting for you,” I go.

  “You got some mouth on you,” he says.

  “Good night,” I tell him.

  And I can’t sleep. The digital clock on the nightstand makes loose little flipping noises when the minutes change. I put my underwear over it and then can’t take it anymore and have to see how much time has passed. 1:14. 1:51. 1:54. 1:55. I lie there swearing like I’m calling Jesus Fucking Christ on my pillow radio. The flipping noises keep going, each one getting me closer to school.

  I get up and go to the bathroom mirror. My nose is eight feet long and I’ve never had a haircut I liked. My glasses are crooked from always being broken. My lips are too big. If I get any skinnier I’ll be able to pull a sock up to my neck.

  “Somebody help me,” I go. I squat on the floor with my hands behind my head and rock in place.

  “You look worn out,” my mom tells me at breakfast.

  “Can I just have orange juice?” I go.

  “I’m worried about your weight,” she goes while she watches me drink it. My dad isn’t even up yet. He’s an econ professor at the college and his first class on Tuesdays isn’t until two-something.

  “Your pants are ready,” she tells me, to cheer me up. “If you want to wear those green pants you were looking for.”

  At the bus stop I squat again. I pull my knapsack by the straps up to the top of my head. The two ninth-graders waiting with me look weirded out.

  “That girl who’s on everybody’s shirts is like Satan,” Flake goes at lunch. “She’s like Evil Incarnate.”

  “You ever notice how many people around here wear green?” I ask him. “Everybody wears green.”

  “Yo,” a seventh-grader says as he passes our table. Flake gives him a miniwave.

  “What’s he want?” I go.

  Flake’s looking at the dessert line. “I want like a million billion dollars just for travel,” he says.

  “Yo, faggot,” a ninth-grader calls from a table across from us. When we look over he lobs something he’s got wadded up. It’s off by like six feet. Me and Flake make like we’re looking for it way off in the distance. The kid wads up something else, but someone else whacks the back of his head with something and then they get into it.

  Two girls from sixth-period art, Michelle and Tawanda, ask if they can sit with us.

  “Free country,” Flake goes.

  They give him a look and turn to me. “So listen,” Michelle says. When her jeans ride down, you can see the “Victoria’s Secret” on the elastic band of her underwear. “We have to do this World of Color thing with three people.”

  “And?” Flake goes.

  They look at him again. “Tawanda says you’re really good,” Michelle says to me. She’s got ponytails that start way up on both sides of her head. “She says you’re a really good artist.”

  “You’re really good,” Tawanda says.

  She was in my art class in seventh grade. She did a self-portrait of a round face with big tears dripping out of the eyes called Coffee Skin! that the teacher went apeshit over. I did a drawing called War the Scourge of Life that had War swinging his mace through a whole city, with tiny bloody victims hanging off the spikes, and it got hung next to hers. After everybody’s stuff was up she told me in the hall that my thing was amazing.

  Flake starts doing his constipated-monkey thing. It’s so impossible to describe: he grits his teeth with this sleepy expression and jiggles around in his seat and goes Inka inka inka inka. It kills us both. He’s got thick brown hair and his ears stick out, so he makes a good monkey.

  “What are you doing?” Michelle says.

  “Inka
inka inka inka,” he goes.

  “Yeah. Well,” Tawanda says, “you want time to think about it? Want to tell us in class?”

  “That’d be good,” I tell them.

  “He’s not that funny,” Michelle says.

  “Inka inka inka inka,” Flake tells her.

  They both get up, holding their trays. “Don’t forget,” Michelle says.

  “We want you,” Tawanda says, pointing at me. “For our trio.”

  “We want you,” Flake says after they’ve gone to sit at a table full of girls. All of them are talking and looking over at us. Michelle gives the back of her pants a tug.

  “You da man,” Flake says. “Tawanda wants to touch your art.”

  The whole table’s still looking and laughing and Flake points at his crotch and then at them and then at his mouth. One of the girls nods and waves him over.

  “Wouldja draw me a picture?” Flake asks me. Then he grits his teeth and acts sleepy. “Inka inka inka inka.”

  “So I was thinking,” my mother says after school, standing in my room, on my clothes, waiting for me and Flake to stop what we’re doing. She just walks in whether I’ve got the door shut or not. The lock doesn’t work because I Jackie Chan-ed the knob a month ago when I was pissed and my dad said he wasn’t going to fix it.

  “Get off my clothes,” I go.

  “You don’t want people walking on your clothes, get them off the floor,” she tells me.

  “Ouch,” Flake goes. “Zinger, Dude.”

  “I don’t need smart comments from you either, Roddy,” she tells him, and Flake makes like he’s zipping his lip.

  She rubs her eyes with her fingertips. She takes her time doing it. Flake and I line up the fat girl in the plaid jumper and miss her but tip the frame, and the whole thing falls off the windowsill. Lately we’ve been aiming at my little brother’s preschool class pictures and seeing who we could hit from across the room with our potato guns. You dig the barrel into the potato before you shoot. We’re always arguing about who hit what, but what’s good is that the potato plug leaves a wet spot. So you can check.

  “You’re going to have little bits of potato everywhere,” my mom says.