Project X by Jim Shepard Page A

looks up at the history-project covers pinned on the walls. His mouth hangs open, and he breathes through it like something’s clogged. On the floor there’s a poster of a sunflower that somebody’s torn down.
    â€œSo you don’t want to know where that kid lives?” he finally goes.
    I take off a sneaker and shake it out and fish around in it and put it back on. It takes a minute to tie it up again.
    â€œWhere you guys hanging out tonight?” he wants to know. Then he hears the monitor coming down the hall and he’s out of his chair and over to the door in a second. “I’ll come by and see what you guys’re doing,” he says. He bumps into the monitor trying to get through the door.
    â€œThis Student Council?” he asks.
    â€œDoes it look like Student Council?” the monitor asks.
    â€œIt really doesn’t,” Hermie goes. “I’m
all
turned around.”
    I can hear him getting running starts and sliding on the polished floor, all the way down the hall. The monitor’s new today, taking over for the other guy. “What happened to you?” he wants to know when he sees my face.
    Hermie comes by that night and bangs on the back-porch screen, but we don’t let him in. Before he finally leaves he tells us where the ninth-grader lives. We spend the night coming up with things we could do to the kid but nothing any good. We walk over there the next night to see if anything better comes to us and run right into the kid and his friends and they chase us halfway home. One kid gets some great shots in on Flake’s head before we get away, and someone else kicks me in the tailbone again, just when it was starting to feel better.
    The next night we’re all pissed off and depressed and sitting around in Flake’s basement. “So you wanna check out my dad’s guns?” he goes. His parents have gone out to a movie or dinner or Canada. They’re not going to be back until late.
    I’m sitting on the softest pillow in the house and have to keep getting up and moving it around underneath me. “What kind’s he got?” I go. It’s not like I’ve never seen a gun.
    â€œGuns,” Flake goes. “More than one.”
    â€œOkay,” I go. “What kinds?”
    He starts upstairs. “Are you comin’?” he calls down, so I follow him. He’s in his parents’ bedroom. He pulls the shirts on hangers in his dad’s closet to the side, and there’s a box like a suitcase that could hold a little kid. Inside the box are some duffels, and inside the duffels are some guns.
    We look at them on the bed. They’re all heavy.
    â€œThis one’s a carbine,” he tells me. “It’s from WW Two.”
    â€œWW Two?”
I go. I can’t get comfortable on my butt so end up on my hands and knees.
    â€œShut up,” he says.
    â€œAnd what’s this?” I ask him.
    â€œThat’s a Kalashnikov,” he goes.
    I get off the bed to pick it up, and swing it around with the butt on my shoulder, aiming at the ceiling. It feels like a parking meter.
    â€œRussian,” he says.
    â€œDuh,” I go.
    â€œIt’s actually not,” he goes. “It’s Chinese. An AK-47. But the K stands for
Kalashnikov
. My dad says that’s close enough for him.”
    It’s big and ugly and black, with a stubby little barrel and a three-pronged sight.
    The other one’s called a nine-millimeter.
    â€œSo are these new?” I go.
    â€œNew hobby,” he says. “He went to a gun show last week.”
    â€œDoes he have bullets?” I go.
    â€œHe hides them in a different place,” Flake goes.
    The next night he calls when I’m brushing my teeth. My butt’s still killing me. I think it might be broken. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” he asks.
    â€œWhat’re you thinking?” I ask. The mint in the toothpaste stings the scabs