Free Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith Page A

of shit .
    I am Krzys Szczerba’s great-great-grandson.
    That is the only thing I know about myself with absolute certainty.
    I think I would like to smoke a cigarette with him. I have a feeling Krzys Szczerba could cuss, had hair the color of russet potatoes, and Quaker Oats skin, just like me. I feel like I could ask him anything. He would tell me what to do.
    He came to America when Theodore Roosevelt, a man who apparently never took a shit in his life, was president.
    Connie, my mother, drove me to work at Johnny McKeon’s From Attic to Seller Consignment Store that morning.
    I did not have a big Lutheran Saturday breakfast with my mother and father because I needed a bath more.
    On Saturdays I shave.
    I did not actually need to shave. It was something that boys in Iowa start doing when they are sixteen, regardless of necessity. I ran the tip of my finger around my lips before applying the shaving cream. Robby’s lips had some spiny little whiskers around them. I felt them when we kissed. I found the feeling to be a little unexpected. Also, his lips were thinner, not as heavy, as Shann’s. I never thought about it before, how maybe Shann felt spiny little whiskers around my thin, un-meaty lips when we kissed.
    I was disgusted with myself.
    I called Shann while the bathtub was filling and I sat on the toilet, locked inside the bathroom. My mother and father ate their big Lutheran Saturday breakfast downstairs.
    I told Shann I loved her.
    She said she loved me.
    I was naked, so I knew I was telling the truth.
    Also, Shann did not say I love you, too.
    Everyone knows I love you, too does not mean I love you.
    The too makes it a concession, a gesture, an instinct of politeness.
    History lesson for the morning.
    I turned the water off and slid into the tub. My face began to sweat.
    â€œI am in the bathtub, Shann,” I said.
    â€œAre you naked?” she asked.
    â€œWell, I would be normally,” I said, “but since I knew I would be talking to you, I went out and slipped into a modest bathing suit.”
    She knew I was kidding. It made me very horny to admit to her that I was, indeed, fully naked.
    â€œI am totally naked,” I admitted.
    Shann told me that she slept well, that she was not scared in her new old bedroom as she thought she would be. But, she said, at exactly 6:00 a.m. there came a ticking sound from inside her wall. Shann explained that it sounded like a typewriter.
    Nobody uses typewriters anymore, I told her.
    At exactly 6:01 a.m. I was taking off all my clothes and going to bed.
    Johnny McKeon was buying donuts.
    The Contained MI Plague Strain 412E was dying off, but managed to wriggle around on three slices of Stanpreme pizza we threw in the dumpster, where it wormed its way down the esophagus of its last initial carrier, a homeless man named Hungry Jack, who participated in the killing of an entire village of women, elderly people, and children in Vietnam.
    Ollie Jungfrau was probably masturbating.
    Ah Wong Sing was taking a shit.
    Something was ticking inside Shann Collins’s wall.
    She said the ticking stopped after a moment. Shann used words like moment . The way she talked made me horny. I told her if the ticking came again, maybe she could record it on her phone because I’d like to hear it.
    She told me she would do that.
    I shaved.
    â€œ The Pancake House is busy this morning,” my mother said when she pulled into the front lot of the Ealing Mall. Then she said, “We should eat breakfast there sometime.”
    â€œOkay, Mom,” I said. “If you want a donut, Johnny always brings coffee and donuts in for me and Ollie Jungfrau on Saturdays.”
    â€œJohnny McKeon is such a nice man,” my mother said.
    â€œYes,” I agreed, “Johnny takes good care of us.”
    She parked almost as far away from the secondhand store as you could get and still be on Kimber Drive. My mother was not very steady-handed at squeezing our Chevrolet