Project X (16 page)

Someone at the other door yells. Someone screams. Flake starts firing. My head recoils even at that distance and I put a hand to my ear. I forgot the earplugs again.

The sound freaks me out. The whole place ricochets with screaming. I see Weensie bumping down the bleachers headfirst on his back. Another kid's knocked backward into a girl, and red confettis up his shirt.

Everybody who's not running away from Flake is running at him. One kid gets him around the neck and then falls over somebody underneath him and Flake puts the carbine in his belly and fires. He pulls the barrel away from that kid and keeps firing at everyone around him, the gun so low I can't see it anymore.

“Shoot your fucking gun!” he screams, and across from me a fat kid loses his footing trying to get off the bleachers and bowls down five or six girls. Flake fires off more rounds and there are other gunshots and he disappears. A security guard out in the middle of the floor is still aiming at him with a pistol and the vice principal knocks me flat and when I hit the ground the Kalashnikov goes off and wild thin trenches spike up out of the hardwood floor until my hand comes off the trigger. The concussion blows in both my ears, and over all the other noise there's a grinding, high-pitched sound like you hear at the bottom of a pool. It feels like my head is spiraling in on itself. An elbow cracks my ear and it sounds like a wooden block. I can't see if Flake's okay and somebody's got my legs. Some ninth-graders jump on the pile and the vice principal yells for them to get away but they don't listen. Kids are screaming and colliding trying to get through the doors and falling and climbing on the kids already down.

And I'm screaming louder no matter how deaf I am because I know where I'm headed, with cops and reporters and counselors and shrinks asking what I knew, everybody wanting to know what I was in on and what we wanted. The vice principal's shouting something in my ear and some kid's working on a headlock but I keep getting out of it. I'm crying and screaming Flake's name, which pisses off whoever's holding my arms, and they start punching my face to shut me up.

And weeks from now when they tell me how Flake died and actually
show
me on the tape from the security camera I'll see myself in the background, standing there pointing my gun and doing nothing with it. And Michelle will be like He didn't shoot and the vice principal will be like He didn't shoot and everybody will be like Flake was the bad one, Flake fucked him up, Flake
made him what he was.

Because they know who Flake was. He took no shit and never lied to himself. Good, I think, do it, while they grind my head into the floor. Now I'm like everybody else—a liar—and nobody knows and nobody cares. Nothing about me is any good. Nothing I wanted to be is left. If I could get hold of the gun I'd turn it on myself. And sometime soon they'll be right: the danger
will
be past. My dad will say, standing in the hall one night when he thinks I'm asleep, “Maybe we're out of the fucking woods here.” And we will be. No more woods. I'm a faggot. I'm a joke. I'm a blowup with nowhere to go, a dick who couldn't do one simple thing, a house burning down from the inside out.

Jim Shepard

PROJECT X

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels and two story collections, including most recently
Love and Hydrogen
. He teaches at Williams College and in the Warren Wilson MFA program, and lives in Williamstown with his wife Karen, two sons, and tiny tiny daughter.

Also by Jim Shepard

Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories
Flights
Paper Doll
Lights Out in the Reptile House
Kiss of the Wolf
Nosferatu
Batting Against Castro: Stories
AS EDITOR
You've Got to Read This
(with Ron Hansen)
Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs
(with Amy Hempel)
Writers at the Movies

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, APRIL 2005

Copyright © 2004 by Jim Shepard

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

 

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Shepard, Jim.
Project X: a novel / Jim Shepard.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Eighth grade (Education)—Fiction. 2. Male friendship—Fiction.
3. School violence—Fiction. 4. Suburban life—Fiction. 5. Teenage boys—
Fiction. 6. Revenge—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3569.H39384P76 2003
813'.54—dc21 2003047575

 

www.vintagebooks.com

 

www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-42733-5

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