Grasshopper Jungle - Andrew Smith

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coughed nervously and straightened up, while I pulled my shorts back over my hips.

      “One of you,” Robby said sternly, “up front now. Let’s go get our shit.”

      I squeezed my way back into the front seat.

      Robby gave me an intense, scolding stare.

      He shook his head and laughed at me. Robby wasn’t angry. Robby was as shocked as I was. He and I both knew what probably would have happened if he had waited about one more minute before coming back to the car.

      I extracted my shoe from the center console. Somehow my socks had come off, too. I tried to find them. Clothing has a way of abandoning ship sometimes.

      Then Robby dropped a pack of cigarettes in my lap and pushed in the dashboard lighter.

      He started the car.

      “Light one for me, Porcupine,” he said.

      WE CASED THE Ealing Mall.

      We sat across the street at Stan’s Pizza, where we ate and watched through the window.

      Stan’s closed at midnight. Stan was visibly angry that we came in and ordered. There was nobody in the place, and Stan wanted to go home.

      I ordered a large Stan-preme in an attempt to cheer Stan up.

      “We’ll have a large Stanpreme, please. For here,” I said.

      In the same way that Johnny McKeon was proud for coming up with the names Tipsy Cricket Liquors and From Attic to Seller Consignment Store entirely on his own, and just as Dr. Grady McKeon was considered a genius for inventing the brand Pulse-O-Matic®, Stan must have been very pleased with himself for creating the concept of the Stanpreme.

      People from Ealing were very creative.

      We didn’t know for certain that Stan’s real name was Stan. We never asked him.

      Stan was Mexican, so probably not.

      We sat, ate, and watched.

      Stan watched us.

      Everything was dark at the Ealing Mall across the street, except the sign over the Ealing Coin Wash Launderette. The launderette never closed. There was no need to. Between the hours of 2:00 and 6:00 a.m., it was more of a public bathroom, a hash den, or a place to have sex than a launderette, though.

      Thinking about having sex on the floor of the Ealing Coin Wash Launderette suddenly made me horny.

      Nobody was out there.

      This was Ealing at nighttime.

      Nobody ever had any reason to be out, unless they were standing on the curb watching their house burn down.

      I wondered if Ollie Jungfrau had gone home. Ollie worked at Johnny McKeon’s liquor store. Tipsy Cricket closed at midnight, too, but it was already completely dark by the time Stan scooted the tin pizza disk containing his eponymous creation down on our table by the window.

      That was the first time in history anyone from Ealing, Iowa, used the word eponymous. You could get beaten up in Ealing for using words like that.

      Just like Robby and I got beaten up for sitting there smoking cigarettes and being queers. But I don’t know if I’m really queer. Just some people think so.

      We ate.

      Robby asked Stan for three ice waters, please.

      Stan was not a happy man.

      We couldn’t finish the Stanpreme. It was too big. Stan brought us a box for the three slices we had left on his tin disk.

      “Do you think we should make a plan or something?” I asked.

      Robby said, “This is Ealing. There’s some kind of prohibition against making plans.”

      If we didn’t hate being Lutherans so much, Robby could easily have been a preacher.

      ROBBY PARKED THE Explorer at the end of Grasshopper Jungle.

      He positioned the vehicle facing Kimber Drive, so we could make a quick getaway if we had to.

      Like real dynamos.

      The pretense of doing something daring and wrong made the rescue of our shoes and skateboards a more thrilling mission to us. Nobody, ultimately, would give a shit about two teenage boys who’d been embarrassed and beaten up by some assholes from Hoover, who climbed up on an insignificant strip mall to get their shoes back.

      Shann waited in the backseat.

      When we were about ten feet from the car, Robby got an idea.

      “Wait,” he said. “We should leave our shoes in the Explorer.”

      It made sense, like most of the shit Robby told me. Once we got up on the roof, it would be easier if we didn’t have to carry so much stuff back down. We could wear our roof shoes to make our descent.

      It was really good that Grant Wallace and those dipshits didn’t throw our pants up there, too, I thought.

      We went back to the car.

      Shann was already asleep on top of Robby’s underwear and shit.

      We took off our shoes and left them on the front seat.

      Robby grabbed his pack of cigarettes and a book of matches and said, “Now we can do this.”

      A narrow steel ladder hung about six feet down from the roof ’s edge. It was impossible to reach the bottom of it, so Robby and I rolled the heavy green dumpster across the alley and lined it up below the ladder.

      Then we climbed on top of the dumpster in our socks.

      I didn’t believe the garbage collectors ever emptied the thing anymore. The dumpster was sticky, and leaked a trail of dribbling fluid that smelled like piss and vomit when we rolled it away from the cinder-block wall beside the pubic-lice-infested couch.

      From the top of the dumpster, we could barely reach the lowest rung on the ladder. I gave Robby a boost. His socks, which were actually my socks, felt wet and gooey in the stirrup of my palms.

      I felt especially virile doing a pull-up to get myself onto the ladder after him.

      Soon, we were up on the roof, where we could stand and look down at the dismal, cancerous sprawl of Ealing.

      We lit cigarettes.

      Robby said, “You should never name a pizza joint Stan’s .”

      We stood, looking directly across Kimber Drive at the yellowed plastic lens that fronted the long fluorescent tubes illuminating the lettered sign for Stan’s Pizza.

      Someone had painted an A between the S and T, so the sign read: Satan’s Pizza

      People were always doing that to Stan.

      They did it so many times that Stan simply gave up on cleaning the paint, and allowed the sign to say what the good people of Ealing wanted it to say:

       Satan’s Pizza

      People from Ealing had a good sense of humor, too.

      “I have seen Pastor Roland Duff eating there,” I said.

      “Did he order a Satanpreme ?”

      It was difficult to find our shoes and skateboards up on the roof at night. As I had originally theorized, there was plenty of cool shit up there, so Robby and I kept getting distracted. It didn’t matter much, since Shann had fallen asleep, anyway.

      We found a plastic

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