Free The Humanity Project by Jean Thompson Page A

actually video games. From time to time, he made a little money selling pot. He thought about going to culinary school, learning about cooking. He was aware that there were ridiculous aspects to his life, ways in which he could not be taken seriously.
    Louise had nagged him about quitting school and getting a real job, earning real money, and he guessed she had been entitled to do so. It was a wife thing. And it took them longer than it should have to figure out they never should have been married in the first place. What did they know? They kept waiting for marriage to take hold, do its thing, meld them into a single being. Each blamed the other for getting in the way of the process. Louise was beautiful, he was smart, or supposed to be smart. Sort of like Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Everybody knew how that had turned out.
    Christie said, “So why is she coming here?”
    “It was her idea.”
    Christie waited for him to keep explaining. Christie was beautiful too. Not in the voluptuous, strutting style of Louise, but in a way that made you take a second look, and then a third. And she was smarter than Louise because she was careful to keep a certain distance between them. She always behaved as if they were funny, sitcom neighbors, and was he going to spend his entire half-assed life alone and broke because he couldn’t measure up to the things he wanted?
    He said, “You know what your face reminds me of? A Victorian portrait. Of a fairy or something.”
    “Fairy?”
    “They did a lot of these flower fairies. Little creatures wearing flower petals and flying with butterfly wings. They used, uh, all these very fine, delicate lines.”
    “That’s kind of sweet, Art. A little icky, but sweet.”
    He was going to have to work up some more casual compliments. He said, “She’s coming here because they don’t know what else to do with her.”
    He told Christie the story. Maybe she’d seen it on the news, one of those school shootings. Did she remember? Last year? School shootings had kind of died down, but there had been this one. A boy with a grudge, it wasn’t clear against whom. Most likely everybody. He’d come to school one morning with an automatic pistol in his backpack, and a hunting rifle with a scope, ingeniously concealed in its own canvas carrying case. For Christ’s sake, weren’t schools supposed to have security plans these days? What did they think was in there, lacrosse equipment?
    Anyway, in he walked. It wasn’t a huge high school, just medium-sized, in one of those depressed medium-sized Ohio towns that had grown up around a rail line a century ago. The place his daughter had moved with her mother at some unspecified point. Art knew the town, and thought he remembered the school, three stories of dark brick trimmed with granite cornices and a frieze of figures in togas, proclaiming the virtues of an educated citizenry.
    The boy had chosen a place to sit and wait, a partially screened alcove at the end of the main hallway. From television, from certain muscular movies, from video games, he was familiar with the concept of the sniper’s nest. The boy said later (because he had survived, to everyone’s disappointment, had not turned a gun on himself or been shot by the tardy law enforcement officers) that he had meant to wait until class was dismissed and the halls full of students. But another boy had come out to open his locker and seen the boy with the rifle, and run off to raise the alarm. And so the shooting had begun early.
    The shooter fired twice at the boy but missed. These were in the nature of practice shots. He’d needed to get some of the nervousness out of his hands.
    And imagine for a moment that boy, spinning his locker combination, yawning his way through the morning, every part of him turned to the lowest possible setting in order to get through the boredom of his day, his week, and his foreseeable future. He hears something, most probably, and looks up at a place where he