The mall was the first place I could rebel.
As an overachiever with typical 90s helicopter parents, that wasn’t something I did a lot. At least not in middle school.
My friends weren’t the cool kids. We didn’t smoke or drink, and we didn’t see the R movies. But at the mall, no one knew that.
It was the place I could pretend we were the cool kids as we sauntered around for a couple hours, miraculously unsupervised.
It was, admittedly, also the place I committed my first crime: I shoplifted from Claire’s.
Maybe it was a cool chunky ring or a second set of hoop earrings. More than two decades later, I don’t remember. It must have been a passing fad or a one-time dare, because my short-lived interest in theft died out when my interest in malls did.
But now I hear that malls are dying out, too. As a journalist covering crime, I envision this in the most sordid way possible: abandoned skeletons of shopping plazas of yore, left out to rot in the American countryside.
I’m not sad; I hate shopping. I guess I’ve never been good at buying things.
—Keri Blakinger (New York Daily News)
