Read Online Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith - Free Book Online Page A

countless times.
    Our house got robbed twice, too.
    â€œYou’re a good dog, Ingrid,” I said. I wriggled my toes in her fur.
    I wrote.
    Even when I tried to tell everything that happened, I knew my accounts were ultimately nothing more than an abbreviation. It’s not that I neglected to write details—I told the truth about Shann’s room, the staircase leading down to nothing, what the main ingredients of a Stanpreme pizza are. I wrote what it felt like to have my bare penis pressing upward against the cool skin of Shann Collins’s thigh.
    That was also true.
    I told about Robby kissing me. I described it in detail, down to the taste and feel of his tongue. I kept accurate count of the cigarettes we smoked, and described the things trapped inside the jars we found locked up in Johnny McKeon’s office.
    But no historian could ever put everything that happened in a book.
    The book would be as big as the universe, and it would take multiple countless lifetimes to read.
    History necessarily had to be an abbreviation.
    Even those first men—obsessed with recording their history—who painted on cave walls in Lascaux and Altamira, only put the important details down.
    We killed this big hairy thing and that big hairy thing. And that was our day. You know what I mean.
    My name is an abbreviation.
    Three grandfathers back, a man named Krzys Szczerba came to the United States from Poland.
    People in America did not know what to do with all those consonants and shit in Krzys Szczerba’s name. They decided to swap some out for vowels, and to take others away from Krzys Szczerba, so my three-grandfathers-back grandfather became Christopher Szerba.
    I imagined. Sometimes I drew this picture: An official stone building, a repository for all the consonants and shit taken from refugees’ names when they arrived on the doorstep of the United States of America. It is piled high everywhere with the letters we don’t find useful: C s and Z s in great heaping mounds that looked so much like the black-and-white photographs of luggage or shoes from World War 2.
    Krzys Szczerba.
    History, and the United States of America, can call him Chris.
    History is full of shit like that.
    Krzys Szczerba came to America when he was seventeen years old.
    In 1905, being seventeen years old made you a man. In 1969, when Hungry Jack fought in Vietnam, seventeen years old was a man. Now, I wasn’t so sure. My brother, Eric, who was somewhere in Afghanistan, was twenty-two.
    Krzys Szczerba came across the Atlantic with his father. They planned on working and earning enough money so Krzys’s mother, brother, and two sisters could come to the United States, too. People who did that were called Bread Polacks . They came here to make money.
    Krzys Szczerba’s father died on the boat in the middle of the ocean.
    His body was sent down naked into the water with prayers and a medallion of Saint Casimir.
    Krzys Szczerba’s family never came to their son.
    Chris Szerba ended up in southern Minnesota, where he met a grocer’s daughter named Eva Nightingale. Eva had breasts like frosted cupcakes and skin the color of homemade peach ice cream. Her body was a soft and generous pillow of endless desserts. Chris Szerba’s semen found its way into Eva Nightingale’s tummy, where it produced a good, cigarette-smoking, Catholic Polish boy named Andrzej.
    Sometimes when I wrote my history, I would slip in pages I drew about Krzys Szczerba and his lonely and sad life in the United States.
    It was hard for me, at times, to separate out the connections that crisscrossed like intersecting highways through and around my life in Ealing.
    It was the truth, and I had to get it down.
    And that was our day. You know what I mean.
    I took off my boxers and went to bed.
    It was 6:01 a.m.
    The end of the world was about four hours old. Just a baby.
    Johnny McKeon was picking up two dozen donuts at that moment.
    Ollie