Project X by Jim Shepard

Author:Jim Shepard
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307427335
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

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. “ Somebody 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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.