Grasshopper Jungle. Andrew Smith
met a woman, got her pregnant, and expatriated to Guatemala.
And, just like a lot of boys in seventh grade, I started erupting quite frequently then, too.
A real dynamo.
And, that year Shannon Collins’s mom moved to Ealing, enrolled her daughter at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy (where we were all good, non-smoking, non-erupting Christians), and married Johnny McKeon, the owner of From Attic to Seller Consignment Store and Tipsy Cricket Liquors.
And I fell in love with Shann Collins.
It was a very confusing time. I didn’t realize then, in seventh grade as I was, that the time, and the eruptions, and everything else that happened to me would only keep getting more and more confusing through grades 8, 9, and 10.
I will tell you how it was I managed to get Shann Collins to fall in love with me, too: My best friend, Robby Brees, taught me how to dance.
I was infatuated with Shann from the moment I saw her. But, being the new kid at school, and new in Ealing, Shann kept pretty much to herself, especially when it came to such things as eruptive, real dynamo, horny thirteen-year-old boys.
Robby noticed how deeply smitten I was by Shann, so he selflessly taught me how to dance, just in time for the Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy End-of-Year Mixed-Gender Mixer . Normally, genders were not something that were permitted to mix at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy.
So I went over to Robby’s apartment every night for two and a half weeks, and we played vinyl records in his room and he taught me how to dance. This was just after Robby and his mother had to move out of their house and into the Del Vista Arms.
Robby was always the best dancer of any guy I ever knew, and girls like Shann love boys who can dance.
History does show that boys who dance are far more likely to pass along their genes than boys who don’t.
Boys who dance are genetic volcanoes.
It made me feel confused, though, dancing alone with Robby in his bedroom, because it was kind of, well, fun and exceptional, in the same way that smoking cigarettes made me feel horny.
Seventh grade was also when Robby and I stole a pack of cigarettes from Robby’s mom. By the time we got into tenth grade, Robby’s mom started buying them for us. She might take drugs and not have one of those sensor things in the palm of her hand like real moms do, but Mrs. Brees doesn’t mind when teenage boys smoke cigarettes in her house and dance with each other, alone in the bedroom, and that’s saying something.
That year, at the end of seventh grade, Robby confessed that he’d rather dance with me than with any girl. He didn’t just mean dance . It was very confusing to me. It made me wonder more about myself, whom I doubted, than about Robby, whom I suppose I love.
At first, I thought Robby would grow out of it—you know, start erupting like everyone else.
But there was nothing wrong with Robby’s volcano, and he never did grow out of it.
So it was at the Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy End-of-Year Mixed-Gender Mixer that Robby casually and bravely walked up to the new girl, Shann Collins, and announced to her:
“My friend Austin Szerba is shy. That’s him over there. He is good-looking, don’t you think? He’s also a nice guy, he writes poetry, he’s a really fantastic dancer. He would like very much if you would agree to dance with him.”
And everything, confusing as it was, worked out beautifully for me and Shann and Robby after that.
DOORS THAT GO SOMEWHERE; DOORS THAT GO NOWHERE
“OKAY. SO, BASICALLY this house is, like, infested with demons or something,” Shann told us.
Demonic infestations have a way of making guys feel not so horny.
“It’s in the Ealing Registry of Historical Homes,” I pointed out.
“People died here.”
“You should get that kind of air freshener shit that you plug into outlets so it masks the scent of death and decay with springtime potpourri,” Robby offered.
“Look at this,” she said. “There are doors that go nowhere, and I swear I heard something ticking and rattling inside my wall a moment ago.”
Shann used words like moment .
She wasn’t from Ealing.
One of the walls in her creaky room had two doors set into it. The wall itself was kind of creepy. It had wallpaper with flowers that seemed to float like stemless clones between wide red stripes. If I pictured a room where I was going to murder someone, aside from the instruments of torture and shit like that, it would have this wallpaper. If I was on death row, awaiting electrocution, I’d be wearing pajamas with the same pattern on them.
Shann went to the door on the left and pulled it open.
When she opened it, there was only the jamb and frame of the door, and then a wall of bricks behind it.
“See?”
I could only imagine what was on the other side of the bricks.
Robby, naturally, felt compelled to say something less than comforting.
“I suggest you don’t liberate whatever’s imprisoned back there,” he said.
Shann was getting angry. I knew I should intervene, but I didn’t know what to say.
“Nowadays, people spend a lot of money for distressed bricks like those,” I said.
It was probably for the best that Shann wasn’t paying attention to me.
“And look at this,” she said.
When she opened the second door, a long, narrow stairway extended down into darkness on the other side. The chasm was at least twenty feet deep, but it dead-ended at another distressed brick wall, and there were no other doorways leading off in any direction that I could see.
“What can you expect from a house this old?” I asked.
It was a good question.
Ghosts and shit like that, was what I was thinking, though. You wouldn’t expect miniature ponies and trained talking peacocks that dispensed Sugar Babies and gumballs from their asses, would you?
“I don’t want to stay in this room by myself,” Shann said.
And that made me very horny again.
I also wanted candy.
Shann, obviously stressed, looked at Robby, then at me.
“I need to talk to you, Austin,” she said, and motioned for me to go with her down the candyless staircase of death and decay.
Robby took the hint. “Uh. I need to go to the bathroom. Maybe Pulse-O-Matic® my teeth. Or take a shower. Or something.”
He made a tentative, weight-shifting creak onto one leg and I followed Shann behind door number two.
We sat beside each other on the staircase.
Our bare legs touched.
Shann had a perfect body, a Friday-after-school body that was mostly visible because she was barefoot, and wore tight, cuffed shorts with a cantaloupe-colored halter top. A boy could go insane, I thought, just being this close to Shann’s uncovered shoulders, wheat hair, and heavy breasts.
This staircase to nothing was a fitting dungeon for constantly erupting, real-dynamo sixteen-year-old boys like me.
“Why is Robby wearing your clothes, and what happened to you and him?”
While we sat there, three important things struck me about Shann: First, I realized that, like most girls I knew, Shann could ask questions in machine-gun bursts that peppered the male brain