“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.’ ”
“If you fell asleep on your back and it was raining hard enough, do you think you’d drown?” I ask him.
“No,” he goes.
“I think you would drown,” I tell him.
My dad eats his carrot. “You seem a little down,” he goes.
My hands are holding up my chin. I let my head slip through them until they finally have to grab my hair.
“Your mother tells me the Nightrider’s run afoul of the law,” he goes.
“Yeah,” I go.
“He’s a misunderstood figure, there’s no doubt about that,” my dad goes.
I make a sound like a horse.
It makes my dad laugh. “Only in junior high can you be the object of awe and derision,” he goes.
“What’s that mean?” I ask.
He shrugs. He looks at his beer like he admires it. “Economics humor,” he goes.
“Doesn’t sound like economics,” I tell him. I still haven’t turned around from the window.
Gus is in the den singing to himself and playing with a toy that needs batteries and has no batteries. Lately he’s been going around the house butchering one of his favorite songs from a kid’s show he watches. The song’s called “We All Sing with the Same Voice.” He sings it “We all sing with the same boys.”
“Remember that thing you hung on the Christmas tree?” my dad goes. He says it like he doesn’t need an answer, and I don’t say anything. It’s raining even harder.
“It’s like blue out,” I finally go.
What he’s talking about was last year when my English teacher told us at the beginning of a class that she’d just read the greatest short story in the history of the English language. She held up the book and hugged it to her chest. We were like, Please.
She read the beginning of it in this hushed voice.
“I’m so moved,” this kid next to me whispered, and a few kids giggled.
There was one line that sounded right, though. I went up after class and asked if I could see it. It probably made her month.
The line was “Christmas came, childless, a festival of regret.” I copied it down while she stood there. She asked if I wanted to read the whole story, and I told her I’d get it out of the library.
When we were decorating, I put the line on a star-shaped piece of paper and hung it on the tree. “What the hell is this?” my dad said when he finally found it.
9
Flake had the idea to bury something we wrote in a box for people to find like years later. There’s a word for it but I forget what it is. He said it had to be a good box to keep the water out so what we wrote wouldn’t rot. He said to work on what we were going to put into it. I’d work on mine and he’d work on his. Then we’d put our stuff in together. We don’t know where we’re going to bury it yet, now that we can’t use our fort under the underpass. He thought it would be funny to put it next to the flagpole in front of the school, but I thought people would see where the ground had been dug up. He thought we could do it so nobody could tell.
I have a pad I’ve been writing stuff in and hiding in a space above where my top drawer fits into my desk. There’s nothing on the cover but on the first page I wrote PROJECT with a pair of crossbones underneath. They look like an X. On the second page I have a score sheet divided into days of the times that people haven’t looked at me or talked to me or answered me at school. I make a crossbones for each one and put them in a column. I fill it out when I get home from school or, if Flake comes home with me, before I go to bed. Mondays are ahead of Thursdays for first place.
On the third page I have a drawing of these huge Gatling guns they use in Chinook and Huey gunships. They fire like eight million rounds per minute. After that I have a drawing of Gus in sunglasses that I think is funny. I did it when he fell asleep in my room and I was supposed to be watching him. After that I have some demon faces that I can never get right.
After that there’s a lot I still need to write down. Like: What happens when you hate yourself?
What happens when you know you’re worse than anybody else knows you are?
What happens when everything you touch turns to shit?
What happens when you feel sorry for yourself and then sit around feeling sorry for yourself for feeling sorry for yourself?
Poor kids or kids who can’t walk or pick up anything and have to work a computer with like sticks in their teeth: we’re lucky compared to them. We’re whiners. We’re babies.
We’re good at reminding each other how pissed off we are and how nobody cares, not really. Sometimes one of us’ll whack the other on the side of the head to remind him of what we have to do.
So when we get his dad’s guns and go into the assembly and we see like some special-ed kid in one of those chairs, do we bail and come back later when we hope there’s only going to be people we hate around? We need to make sure that once we’re in, we can’t be going, Hey, watch out for Tawanda, or Let’s not get Mrs. Pruitt, let’s get Ms. Meier.
Flake says nobody’s going to be taking him alive and that he’s not going to shoot himself, either. I don’t think we have to decide about that yet.
We might get away.
After a sign-up sheet for achievement tests went around the homerooms last week, he had us get out his father’s guns again when the house was empty and he squatted on the bed and had us hold the Kalashnikov and the carbine up over our heads. Here’s my achievement tests, he said. Here’s yours.
For the next fifty years, people who weren’t anywhere around will swear they were right here when it happened. “So there I was, bullets flying.” Shit like that. It makes us wish they were here. Then we could shoot them and they’d get what they want: proof they’re not bullshitters.
Flake gives me a 50 percent chance of wussing out. He says if I do he’ll shoot me himself. “I’ll shoot you, you fuck,” I tell him. It always makes him laugh.
He says to remember that out of everybody in the gym there’s still only going to be two kinds of people: the ones who don’t know anything about us, and the ones who don’t want to know.
10
He hasn’t given up on Matthew Sfikas. I can see his brain going, trying to figure something out. When I tell him again about my idea about waiting he goes, “I’ll kick his ass now, and we can shoot him later.”
“How are you going to kick anybody’s ass with two fingers like that?” I want to know.
“I’ll use a shovel,” he goes. “I’ll use a rake.”
“You can’t use a shovel,” I go. “You can’t use a rake.”
“What do you care?” he goes. “I’ll use a chain saw if I want.”