Razor Blades in Candy Apples

Susan Orlean's profile of Colin, a ten-year-old American male was incredibly intriguing. She described his personality and daily tasks with such ease and interests, I couldn't help but want to know more. On the third page, one particular paragraph grabbed my attention:

"It happened to be Colin's first day in fifth grade. Before class began, there was a lot of horsing around, but there were also a lot of conversations about whether Magic Johnson has AIDS or just HIV and whether someone falling in a pool of blood from a cut of his would get the disease. These jolts of sobriety in the midst of rank goofiness are a ten-year-old's specialty. Each one comes as a fresh, hard surprise, like finding a razor blade in a candy apple. One day, Colin and I had been discussing horses or dogs or something, and out of the blue he said, 'What do you think is better, to dump garbage in the ocean, to dump it on land, or to burn it?' Another time, he asked me if I planned to have children. I had just spent an evening with him and his friend Japeth, during which they put every small, movable object in the house into Japeth's slingshot and fired it at me, so I told him I wanted children but that I hoped they would all be girls, he said, 'Will you have an abortion if you find out you have a boy?'"

The initial line that grabbed my attention in this paragraph is, "...like finding a razor blade in a candy apple." When I read that line I just thought it was utterly genius. It is such a good metaphor and so pleasing to me, I want to write it out and post it all over my walls. The rest of the paragraph made me laugh and gasp, and appreciate a truly intelligent ten-year-old.  I liked how it started off on Colin's first day of fifth grade. It made me remember my first day of fifth grade and I know, no one in my class was talking about AIDS. No one in my class probably even knew what HIV was. Orlean depicts this highly intellectual group of children that are concerned about the world and recycling and that excites me. I want to hangout with these kids. Colin jumps from asking where to dump garbage, to asking if Susan will have an abortion. These questions are shocking to the reader because they are coming from a ten-year-old boy, yet they are important "grown-up" questions. Colin has no sense of appropriateness, although he is well informed. Ultimately, ten-year-old boys have no filter, and Orlean conveyed that very well throughout the entire story.