“Lots of luck.” I smirked. “I don’t have any friends.”
“Me, neither.”
Pia was so cool, so beautiful, I didn’t see how she could be friendless. We were now each other’s best buddy.
“Three days,” she repeated. “And they’ll say, ‘The mall! How come we didn’t think of it sooner? Kids love the mall.’ They will have a dozen malls to check out.”
Three days sounded like forever to me. “We’re going to need money.” I pulled out the envelope Mother had pinned to my shirt, and sure enough, there was a ten tucked into the folds of her sad letter to Loiseaux.
Pia dug out some crumpled bills and change from a beaded coin purse she carried around her neck. We were rich. I counted $16.83. “That’s about five bucks a day—for popcorn, french fries, Mountain Dew, frozen yogurt, Cinnabons, pizza slices, Gummi Bears,” I said.
“Plus what we can serve ourselves from trash-can foraging.” Pia was way ahead of me in the food department.
I must’ve looked skeptical. “You wait until closing time because they get weird about people eating trash. I once made a whole meal out of pizza crusts. When I bragged to my parents, the thought of their child eating garbage appalled them. Right there in the same class as my tattoo.”
“You have ink?” I didn’t know any kids who had real tattoos. “I thought you needed a parent’s permission to get one.”
“Theoretically.” She pulled down her blouse to the top of her breast to show me a black rose dripping red blood. I hardly got a glimpse before she covered up.
“We could live off the mall for a long time,” she went on. “Hunting and gathering. Begging works, too. Only you have to phrase it so it sounds like an emergency. Clutch a bunch of coins in your hand and ask for fifty cents to complete bus fare. It helps to be in the right place. Stand by the pay phones and ask for a quarter to call Mom. Once, outside the women’s restroom, I got some ogling old dude to give me a whole dollar to buy my poopy baby a diaper. He couldn’t wait to get away from me, the scruffy teen mom.”
Cool as she was, my Marxist righteousness raised its uncompromising head. “It is stealing. Right?”
“Actually, they end up feeling good about themselves. People usually give to a beggar out of guilt. ‘Here’s a dollar, now please go away.’ I let them help a child who could be their own.”
From inside the car, I gazed at the falling snow glistening under the lights on the cute animal posts. I was suffused with well-being, sheltered inside the warm car, invisible behind the fogged windows. There was a sense of inevitability to our adventure so that however things turned out, these moments were a gift.
“Pia,” I sighed happily as my hand inched across the seat to press, very slightly, my pinkie against hers. That first touch, a signal event in the history of the communion of our skins, quickened my breath. “You’re a deep thinker.”
She took her hand back. “We can fool around later. Right now we need monster coats. It’s going to be a cold night. And more snow will make the white van even more invisible.”
The hint at future intimacies strengthened my resolve to follow Pia in the ways of survival. She wanted a beggar? I’d beg. She wanted to flee to California? I’d drive. She wanted me to dive into the trash? Watch me go headfirst. Right then she wanted me to steal.
Pia had shoplifting down to an art. “Inside the store turn down your energy so security won’t notice you. Hold your breath as you pass close to somebody. And don’t touch stuff; it betrays your lust. Look lost, as if you were searching for your parents. People will stay out of your way. If you have a problem, they don’t want to end up with it.” She paused to check if I was absorbing her lesson.
“Ready?”
I nodded uncertainly.
“Do what I tell you.”
“Okay!” I nodded more decisively this time.
“We’ll leave the van separately and go into the mall through different doors. We’ll end up at the coat department at Penney’s. We won’t talk to each other. I’ll stand around looking suspicious to draw attention. You will pick out a coat from the clearance rack. Nobody, but nobody, bothers to shoplift from Penney’s clearance rack. Just stroll to it and grab anything that looks big and warm. Don’t worry about color or style; just pull it off the hanger confidently, as if you were going to take it to a cashier, but instead, saunter out the door with it. Don’t worry about the beeping you’ll set off. Nobody ever thinks there’s an actual theft going on.”
Pia jumped down from the backseat and jogged ahead, weaving her way between the rows of cars to the nearest mall entrance. I knew I should follow suit and head around the building to another entrance, but, once alone, the full weight of what I was doing landed on me. I was filled with courage and self-confidence only when Pia was near.
I realized I didn’t have much aptitude for even the most trivial delinquency. I had to force myself to leave the van and trudge diagonally, dodging the cars circling about looking for a parking space, across the Alligator to the Crocodile lot and on toward the north entrance. My resolve not to let Pia down thrust me onward.
Chapter Five
On the biggest shopping night of the year, the mall welcomed me from the grim night into a feast of light and scents of evergreen and cinnamon; the sounds of familiar ditties surrounded me like a giant music box tinkling and chiming. I found myself humming along to “The Little Drummer Boy” as I wandered past the Candle Shoppe, Grandma’s Fudge ’n’ Taffy, the Baubles, Bangles. and Beads Emporium. The massed generations, the kids tugging at frenzied parents, the trailing grannies and grandpas, and the weaving strollers made me yearn for a kind of normalcy that my family, with its eccentricities and small cruelties, could not give me. Shopping bags were filled to overflowing with wrapped packages, their bows and tinsel promising the sweater to end all sweaters, mittens to warm the heart, dolls to awaken the maternal urge, stuffed bears to comfort toddlers, games to screech and buzz their way into adolescent brains. Me, I’d be getting a good warm coat.
I bypassed Field’s to head toward JCPenney at the end of a wide concourse. No classy couture for me, the apprentice shoplifter, but the tired pickings of the suburban lumpen. The crowds were thicker here than at the fancier shops, mostly with adults who make do with knockoffs of last year’s cool stuff so their children can keep up with brand peer pressure. The store felt overheated, the air stale, as if the scents of the season had been lingering since last year. Here the evergreen smells from an aerosol can collided with the perfume ladies in ambush, spritzers poised. I saw one around the bend of the cosmetics counter, and, holding my hands in front of my face, I fled in mock horror: “No, no, please no!” Several people turned to stare, the perfume lady rolled her eyes, I got no laughs.
I did get a seriously dirty look from Pia, who had been waiting, obviously impatiently, for me to show up in the coat department. I know, I know. I shouldn’t have been attracting attention. But when confronted with the opportunity for a little public theater, I couldn’t resist. I flashed her my most endearing grin, but she had become impervious to my charms. She nodded toward the clearance coat rack. “Hurry!” she mouthed. She went back to fingering blouses, acting suspicious, so I could have a free ride out of there. There was no time for hesitating. If I looked around to see if I was being watched, I’d be spotted by security. I would have to make my move, take my chances, claim my prize. The stroll, the turn, the grab, the flight would happen in seconds: one fluid motion, so smooth it’d be over before anyone noticed.
With no possibility of changing my mind, no hesitation or meandering allowed, I wondered that the thumping of my heart did not attract attention. Then, off I was. To the coat rack in four strides, and even before I knew what I was reaching for, my hands flew