Project X (8 page)

My dad lets out a huge amount of air. “Sounds fine with me,” he says. “What about the patient?” he goes to me. “How's it sound to you?”

“Fine with me,” I go.

“Fine with you,” he goes. “Everything's fine with you.”

“Well, I guess that's about it,” the vice principal says. “Edwin, do you have anything that you'd like to add?”

“Nothing I can think of,” I go. I stand up. My dad stands up.

“Mr. Hanratty,” Ms. Meier says. “Does Edwin have a chemistry set?”

“Not that I know of,” my dad says.

“Did we get him a chemistry set?” my mom asks.

“Not that I know of,” my dad says.

My stomach feels like it jumped up and froze in midair. Ms. Meier moves her mouth back and forth like she's thinking.

“Why do you ask?” my dad goes. He sits back down.

“Edwin showed me something he was working on,” she finally tells him. “Actually he didn't show me. It fell out of his backpack. He said it was from a chemistry set that you'd gotten him.”

My dad turns to me. “What's the deal, Sport?” he asks.

“Are you a scientist at the college?” she asks.

“Economist,” my dad goes. He looks back at me.

“What?” I go.

“What's she talking about?” he goes.

“I do these stupid drawings,” I go. “They're just drawings.”

“Did you tell her you have a chemistry set?” he goes.

“Yeah,” I go.

“Why?” my mom goes.

“They're embarrassing,” I go. Everybody's looking at me. I can't tell who believes me. “They're
embarrassing,
” I go again.

“So you lied about it?” he goes.

“Yeah,” I go.

My dad looks at Ms. Meier. “I don't know what to tell you,” he goes. “You're not going to lie to her anymore,” he says to me. “Right?”

“No,” I go.

She looks at me for a minute and then turns to him and shrugs. “Well, we'll try and keep an eye on things,” she tells him.

“So will we,” my mom tells her. She stands up and Ms. Meier stands up and they shake hands. “Thanks so much,” my mom goes. “And we're sorry for all the trouble.”

“Oh, don't be sorry,” Ms. Meier tells her. “We all want to do everything we can.”

“What do you say?” my dad says to me. We're all up now and he's got a hand on my shoulder.

“Good-bye,” I go.

The vice principal laughs.

“What else do you say?” my dad goes.

“Sorry,” I go.

“It's all right, son,” the vice principal says. He sticks out a hand and I give it a good shake. “Let's try and see a little less of each other for a while,” he suggests.

“Definitely,” I go. “And thanks again.”

On the way home, my mom thanks me for thanking him. I tell them I'm sorry, and I am. She feels so much better that we have a kind of half-party with just us and Gus when we get home. Gus keeps going “So I get two parties?” while we dish out cake and some of the presents.

“That's right, hon,” my mom goes. “You get two parties.”

8

“It's all right to be queer, you know,” Michelle tells Flake and me at lunch the next day. I'm not in the best of moods and neither is he.

“My sister in high school's in the Lesbian Alliance,” she goes.

“What're you talking about?” Flake finally brings himself to say. Kids go back and forth past our table. It's another rainy day and everybody seems worn out by the suckiness of everything.

Lunch is spaghetti and meatballs and the spaghetti's cold. We've already eaten all the meatballs. I got a 40 on my math quiz. I had headaches all morning. A girl in English stared at me the whole period like I was a fingernail she found in her whipped cream.

“I told you,” Tawanda says without looking up from her dish.

“What'd you tell her?” I go.

“
I
told her not to bring it up,” Tawanda says.

Flake has his elbows on the sides of his tray and his fingers are pushing on his cheeks like they want to get in there.

Everyone calls us queer but they call us everything else, too. It wasn't like we thought anybody thought we were queer.

“My sister says we have the right to our own bodies,” Michelle says.

Tawanda goes, “Girl, I don't think they're liking your helping hand, here.”

“It was hard for my sister, too,” Michelle explains to her. “She says she wishes somebody had talked to her.”

Flake stares at her. She looks back. I feel like resting my head in the spaghetti. I settle for turning over the plate. Most of the sauce and noodles end up still on my tray.

Tawanda passes me a clump of napkins for the stuff that isn't. “
Some
body should've gotten the vegetarian casserole,” she goes.

“You're sitting here and calling me queer?” Flake finally asks. The way he says it makes me even sadder. They're the closest things we had in the school to people who didn't hate us.

“It's not a judgment thing,” Michelle tells him.

“If I called you a fuckin' skank, would you say that's not a judgment thing?” Flake goes.

Michelle doesn't answer.

“I hurt your feelings?” he goes.

She looks off toward the cafeteria line.

“I hurt her feelings,” he goes to me. “She calls me a fucking queer, and
I
hurt
her
feelings.”

“Where'd you get this shit?” I ask her. “Where'd you come up with this?”

“Forget it,” Michelle says. “Forget I said anything.”

“We're not going to forget it,” Flake goes.

“Flake,” I go.

“Fuck you too,” he goes. “Hey,” he goes to Michelle. He taps her arm. “Jizzbag.”

“Get away from me,” Michelle goes.

“Tell her she's gotta talk to me,” he says to Tawanda.

“I ain't getting in the middle of this,” Tawanda says. “I
finished
my lunch.”

“Tell her she's gotta talk to me,” he goes again.

“Somebody said bad shit about you, we'd tell you who it was,” I go to Tawanda.

She thinks about it and she knows I'm right. “Maybe we should tell them,” she goes to Michelle.

Michelle's slurping from her milk pint. She's looking at it like it disappoints her. “I was just trying to help,” she says. She's pissed off but looks embarrassed, too. When she's sitting she always takes her sandals off and turns them around with her toes and then puts her feet back on top of them.

“Who told you we were queer?” Flake goes. He's keeping his voice down but that's about it.

“Matthew Sfikas,” Michelle finally says. “Him and another kid.”

“Who the fuck is Matthew Sfikas?” Flake goes. You can hear him thinking; I don't even know these people.

“Oh, shit,” I go. “He's that ninth-grader I had detention with.”

“What's his fucking damage?” Flake goes. “Why's he doing this?”

“He said he saw you guys,” Michelle goes. “That's the only reason I believed him.”

“I told the monitor he was playing with himself,” I go to Flake. “He's getting even.”

“What did he say he saw us doing?” Flake goes. His voice is a little high. I'm getting as worried as the girls are.

“I don't want to talk about that,” Michelle says.

Flake looks around like he's trying to find something to use on somebody. “Who is he?” he goes to me. “Point him out.”

“He's not here right now,” I go. I make like I'm looking and can see he's not here. He doesn't say a word from there on, and neither does Michelle.

“Nice dining with you all,” Tawanda says when we get up from the table. Nobody answers.

“Isn't your class that way?” I go to Flake as we head down the hall.

He shoulders into a ninth-grader and the kid just gapes at him. “I'm not going to class,” he goes. Then he turns a corner and the bell rings.

He gets detention for having spent fifth and sixth periods wandering around the school looking for Matthew Sfikas. He did his looking by peeking into ninth-grade classrooms one by one. Finally a teacher noticed and went out into the hall.

“You don't even know what he looks like,” I tell him in the detention room. He's alone and there's one kid waiting outside the door for the monitor to show up. I only have a minute before the buses leave.

He sits there hanging on to the front end of his desk with both hands like the floor's gonna tip.

“Why get a hundred years of detention for
this
kid?” I tell him on the phone that night. “Why not just save him for our thing?”

“Save him for what?” he finally goes.

“Our thing,” I go.

There's a little buzzing on the line. Nothing works right in either of our houses.

“He could be first,” I go. “We could start with him.”

“Yeah,” Flake admits. I can tell he thinks it's a good point.

The next day before homeroom someone trips a seventh-grader when he's coming down the stairs with his art project. His art project is the Seattle Space Needle made out of elbow macaroni. Flake and I are at the bottom when he lands. Macaroni ricochets off lockers.

He sits there wailing and scooping up the pieces that are still glued together. He doesn't care who sees him. Kids with lockers nearby look sympathetic. Some kick macaroni back toward him.

“Somebody should help BG out, there,” somebody from our grade goes. He got called Baby Gherkin after some kids saw him in the shower in gym.

A girl carries a bigger piece over and sets it down next to him. “Thank you,” he goes.

People step around him going up and down the stairs, and he tries to fit a couple of the pieces back together.

When I see Flake before third period his middle finger is wrapped in this fat bandage. It looks like a Q-Tip. He's happy about it. He says they were doing dissection in science and he put the little plastic scalpel with the razor blade in his pocket. He only remembered when he put his hand in his pocket later. “Look what I did to my finger!” he says to the vice principal when he goes by while I'm standing there. Kids laugh. “Ouch,” the vice principal goes. It looks like he's already heard about it. He doesn't seem to get that he's just been given the finger.

After lunch Flake spots me at the other end of the room and waves both hands. Both middle fingers are bandaged. When I ask him, it turns out that after he cut the first finger he stuck the scalpel in his other pocket.

“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I tell him.

“No,” he goes, like he lucked out twice. “Hey, Mrs. Pruitt!” he calls. He sticks up both middle fingers.

After school we decide to walk home when Flake's detention is over. I sit on the steps and wait, watching the other kids with their friends. When he finally gets out we hang around the end of the playground for a minute before heading home. A ninth-grader comes up and asks if we want to buy any shit.

“What do you got in mind?” Flake goes.

The kid has a white kitchen garbage bag in his knapsack. He shows us the inside of it without taking it out. I can't tell if Flake knows what he's looking at.

“White crosses,” the kid goes.

We look at them. You can tell Flake's thinking the kid might be fucking with us.

“What happened to your fingers?” the kid asks.

“What fingers?” Flake goes.

“Those,” the kid says, pointing at the bandages.

“Boating accident,” Flake goes.

The kid takes some time to work that out. “So you interested?” he finally says.

“How much?” Flake goes.

The kid tells him.

“I don't think so,” Flake goes, like that's too much. The kid shrugs and twist-ties his bag and zips up his knapsack. He walks back over to his friends.

“You know what white crosses are?” I ask.

“You?” Flake goes.

“Yeah,” I go.

On the way home Hermie comes running over from a side street. He must've seen us going by. “What happened to your fingers?” he asks Flake.

“Boating accident,” Flake goes.

“Yeah, right,” Hermie says. “That kid try and sell you something?”

“How do you know?” Flake goes.

“He's always ripping people off,” Hermie goes.

“How'd you know he was trying to sell us something?” I go.

“I saw you,” he goes.

A black Camaro goes by and does a U-turn and slows down when it reaches us. A girl hangs out the window and a much older guy is driving. “Eat shit, Herman,” the girl goes.

“Fuck you,” Hermie calls.

The guy guns the car and they peel out.

“My sister,” Hermie goes.

“You got a sister?” Flake goes.

“I guess I must, if that's her,” Hermie goes. I laugh.

“Shut up,” Flake goes.

“Duh,” Hermie says. Flake lets it go.

“So what happened to you?” I finally ask Hermie. He's got like a huge scuff mark on the side of his head. It's a black-and-red scab.

“Budzinski,” Hermie moans. He touches the scab with his fingers like it's come off before.

“I'm gonna have to see this Budzinski,” Flake says, like he's impressed.

We walk along for a while. Nobody says anything or asks where Hermie thinks he's going. You can see how happy he is about it.

“My dad's got a gun, you know,” he goes.

“Everybody's dad's got a gun,” Flake goes.

“I know where he keeps it,” Hermie goes.

“I guess we're all in trouble now,” Flake tells him.

I start to say something, but I don't even know what I was going to say. I'm such a loser and a half. I'm the kid you think about when you want to make yourself feel better. If I were me I'd talk about myself behind my back.

It rains for three straight days. One morning it's so dark that I think it's still nighttime until my mom comes upstairs and strips the covers off the bed with me still lying there. Flake's detention lasts until the end of the week, so when school's finally over I just go home and do homework.

The girl sitting next to me in homeroom cries all three days. The teacher asked about it on the first day and they talked at the front of the room, but he hasn't brought it up since.

“Here he is, Mr. Greenpants,” my math teacher says to everybody when I show up a minute late.

I spend the rest of the class not believing he did that to me.

Every Monday morning we have to hear on the PA system, along with the rest of the horseshit about blood drives and smoking on the playground, how JV football did. Half the kids cheer when it turns out we won. The principal always goes, “And in JV footbaaaaall . . .” and then waits, like it's a cliffhanger. It drives me nuts. It feels like it's six in the morning and these idiots are getting excited about a game they
saw
last Friday. Weeks when it turns out we lost, a few of us around the room cheer. “That's very nice,” the homeroom teacher goes.

Our nickname is the Hilltoppers. The student newspaper has headlines like LADY TOPPERS O'ERTOP LADY PANTHERS. During Student Fair the first week of school when I found myself over by their table the editor asked if I'd be interested in working on the paper. He had no idea who I was. I told him I would if I got to do a Dirp column.

“Sure,” he said. “What's a Dirp?”

“Dicks in Responsible Positions,” I told him.

“Hey,” he said to a kid standing right behind me. “You interested in working on the school paper?”

My dad had the same idea that week. He sat me down and gave me the college-and-extracurriculars talk.

“College?”
I went. We were all in the kitchen and I was helping my mother break the ends off of green beans. “I'm still deciding if I'm going to
high
school.”

“Very funny,” he said.

When he sees me in the living room looking like death warmed over and staring out the window because school sucks and it's been raining for four years and Flake's been in detention all week, he goes, “Now, what do you want?” and makes a face at me. “
You
going to turn into an aggrieved minority group?”

“What?” I go.

“Your father had a bad day,” my mom calls from the other room.

He disappears to change and seems like he's in a better mood when he comes back. He's carrying a beer and has his ready-to-talk look on.

“Given any more thought to the school paper?” he goes, like we were just talking about it. He's home from class or office hours or the Mascot Committee or whatever he had today, and he's got his beer and now he's ready to talk.

Gus wanders through the living room and hands him a carrot. “I don't want this,” Gus says, and then leaves.

My dad takes a bite of the carrot and a swig of the beer. “I'm going to write a book about domestic life in America,” he goes. “It's gonna be called ‘Dads Eat What No One Else Wants.' ”