First day of FS and where are my good green pants? In the wash. I have one pair of pants that aren’t clown pants and they’re in the wash. They haven’t been washed all summer but today, this morning, they’re in the wash. It’s too cold for cargoes and everything else in my drawer is Queer Nation, and sure enough I’m the only one on the bus in shorts. “Scorcher, isn’t it?” a ninth-grader asks when he goes by my locker. I’m standing there like I’m 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 can’t take it,” I tell him. “It’s like, twenty minutes, and I can’t take it.”
“Look at your face,” he says, and he has to laugh. He doesn’t 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 don’t even have homeroom together, though they told us over the summer we would. FS is fuckin’ school. We argue over who thought of it.
Project X, Jim’s sixth novel, can be purchased here.
Jim Shepard 