Grasshopper Jungle - Andrew Smith

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you mad at me?” he said.

      “Shit. I’m not mad.”

      “Okay. Look.”

      I hadn’t been looking at Robby. Until he’d said that, I didn’t even notice that I was staring at my shoelaces, tracing the zigzag path of them up, down, back, forth with the tip of my finger, like a train on a white switchback track, from one shoe to the other, over and over.

      Around the loop, crossover, back and forth.

      I raised my eyes.

      Robby scooted through the gravel away from me.

      He had lifted a square metal door in the roof, propped it open. I hadn’t even realized it was there.

      “Roof access ladder,” Robby said. “It goes down into the secondhand store.”

      “It was left unlocked?” I said.

      “Nobody ever comes up here.”

      “Up here has a watch-flamingo, and a lemur head.”

      “No one wants to mess with shit like that.”

      Robby lowered his face down below the rim of the trapdoor.

      He said, “Do you want to go down there?”

      I had already done something with Robby I never believed I would do. Climbing down inside Johnny McKeon’s secondhand store in the middle of the night was meaningless shit in comparison.

      I said, “That would be cool.”

      When I stood up, I was dizzy.

      I was like the tip of my finger, zigging and zagging from eye to eye, following a string, making history.

      Robby watched me get up. I caught his eyes looking at me. I knew we’d never look at each other the same, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. I caught him trying to see if I had an erection. I tried to pull my T-shirt down to cover it.

      The basketball shorts and boxers I’d been wearing that day revealed yet another strategic flaw for the history books.

      History shows that erections happen at the worst possible times, and they stick around until someone else notices them. Often, it is either a librarian or an English teacher, like Mrs. Edith Mitchell.

      I went to the edge of the roof, to the top of the small ladder we’d used to get up there.

      “Shann,” I said. “I just want to make sure she’s okay.”

      Robby didn’t answer.

      Words like okay can mean all kinds of things.

      Robby knew enough that saying anything might nail down a definition of okay that wasn’t what either one of us wanted to hear.

      The Explorer was dark and quiet.

      Shann was still asleep.

      We hadn’t been gone for more than twenty minutes, even if time seemed to slow to a crawl now.

      Across the street, Satan’s Pizza winked. The fluorescent tubes inside the sign made an audible hiss like a dying wasp when it went dark.

      Robby climbed down the trapdoor.

      I followed him.

      ON WEEKENDS AND over the summers I earned money doing jobs for Johnny McKeon at his From Attic to Seller Consignment Store. Johnny felt obligated to me because I was Shann’s boyfriend.

      Usually, the jobs required cleaning the store.

      Secondhand stores are like vacuum cleaners to the world: They suck in everybody’s shit.

      History shows that, like Ealing, when towns are dying, the last things to catch the plague are the secondhand and liquor stores.

      Johnny McKeon was on top of the world.

      Sometimes, Johnny would receive new consignments out in Grasshopper Jungle, and then leave me to go through and sort boxes, unroll and sweep off rugs, and clean out the drawers in dressers and nightstands.

      I found a lot of condoms and Bibles in them.

      Johnny told me I could do whatever I wanted with those things.

      I threw the Bibles in the dumpster.

      Robby and I climbed down the ladder. It deposited us, like visiting aliens, into a common back room that connected Tipsy Cricket Liquors with From Attic to Seller.

      The ladder was attached by metal brackets to a plasterboard wall where the electrical panel box for the store was located. I’d seen the ladder there plenty of times. I had even noticed the Roof Access↑ sign posted on the wall with an arrow pointing up, as though you might not know where a roof could be, direction-wise.

      I never thought about going up on the roof of the mall before I went there with Robby.

      On the other side of the wall was the shop’s toilet. It was such a small space that you would be looking straight across at your own face in the mirror, and could reach the soap and paper towel dispensers and wash your hands in the sink while you were sitting on the toilet.

      Ollie Jungfrau could never take a shit in there.

      There was a sign on the door that said: No Public Restroom

      Everyone knew the public restroom was at the launderette, or between the dumpster and the couch in Grasshopper Jungle if you couldn’t hold it that far.

      There was a homeless guy who’d come riding through on his rickety old bicycle about once per week or so. His bicycle was always teetering, precisely and ridiculously balanced with huge bundles and bags strapped to any available rusted crossbar. Robby and I called him Hungry Jack, but we never asked him his name.

      Hungry Jack didn’t have any front teeth.

      Hungry Jack fought in Vietnam.

      When he came through, Hungry Jack would stop and climb into the dumpster, dig around for things.

      Robby and I caught him taking a shit one time, between the dumpster and the couch.

      I have read that the human memory for smells is one of the most powerful bits of data that can be etched into our brains. Although it seemed so foreign to me, being inside From Attic to Seller in the middle of the night, the smell of the place was entirely familiar. The shop had this constant, perfumed odor of sorrow, death, abandonment, condoms, and Bible verses; that was like nothing I’d ever smelled anywhere else.

      I felt as at home there as you’d have to feel, lying in your own coffin.

      “THIS WAY,” I whispered.

      Robby had never set foot inside the secondhand store until that night. I’d told him about it enough times.

      “This is rather scary,” Robby said.

      Now Robby was speaking like a non-Ealingite.

      “Do you want to get out?”

      “No.”

      Robby put his hand on my shoulder so he wouldn’t trip on anything. I led him out around the back counter, which was a rectangular glass case where Johnny McKeon displayed watches, jewelry, cameras, guns, and three framed insect collections.

      There were only a few things in From Attic to Seller that I favored. The insects were among my most appreciated abandoned items.

      One of the frames contained only butterflies. For some reason, I always found the butterflies to be boring. But the other two frames were wonders: One displayed forty-one beetles. I counted them. There were all kinds of oddities in the frame,

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