Jim Shepard - Project X

Project X is a savvy, sensitive take on the tortured inner lives of two eighth-grade boysHanratty and Flake, outcasts who plan a Columbine-like revenge on their unwitting schoolthat builds tension with unremitting skill.

Elle

[Hanrattys] turmoil proves to be an intense experience in anxiety recall: Your most frustrating teen memories will find unholy corroboration. Which makes Shepards intimacy with the bleeding psyche of misfitting adolescence all the more discomfitingwere so close, we feel the heft of the Kalashnikov.

The Village Voice

Of all Shepards 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 Shepards fiction carried a sign, it might say DANGER: EXPLOSIVES. As this riveting novel progresses, we find ourselves praying for Hanrattys salvationand 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 youll ask yourself every time you see one of those kids who seem slightly out of place in school, at the mall, at churchor in your childs 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 shoutthe kind no one hears until its too late.

Salon

Shepards ear for the speech of todays 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

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.

First day of FS and where are my good green pants? In the wash. I have one pair of pants that arent clown pants and theyre in the wash. They havent been washed all summer but today, this morning, theyre in the wash. Its too cold for cargoes and everything else in my drawer is Queer Nation, and sure enough Im the only one on the bus in shorts. Scorcher, isnt it? a ninth-grader asks when he goes by my locker. Im standing there like Im 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 cant take it, I tell him. Its like, twenty minutes, and I cant take it.

Look at your face, he says, and he has to laugh. He doesnt 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 dont 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 theres 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 cant even get into the room. I will not fucking do this, I think to myself. What? the English teacher says.

Were 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. Cmon, cmon, cmon, I go to myself, like some godll say, Oh sorry, Hanratty, you want your only friend? Ill send him along.

And whos 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 whos 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.

Youre not sittin on this side, the kid says.

Ill 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.

Id fight if it was just him. But hes got eight thousand friends. Every asshole in the school is his friend.

Im standing there with my tray. Pint of milk and a Rice Krispies Treat in a little dish. Every tables worse than the one next to it. Its the worst feeling in the world.

When youre standing there in the middle of the floor with no one to eat with, there are about four kids who dont look at you. The cafeteria holds three hundred.

Nice shorts, somebody says.

Even if you dont eat, you have to just stay until lunch is over anyway. Theres 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 school.

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 theyre 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, Hes not a random guy.