The Last Mall Rat

1

As I step out of ShUSA and into the mall, my Chuck Taylors make a piercing squeak on the tiles. The sound is like a match striking. My heart ignites and thumps into overdrive. Blood throbs like a kick drum across my temples. Muzak whines around me like killer mosquitoes. I cut a sharp right and begin working my way up the north corridor.

Three steps further and I’ve moved into another state of existence completely.

I’ve spent countless hours wandering these waxy floors over the past few years, but right this second the Onion River Mall is a whole new world. I’m not just some mall rat killing time. I’m working—and I’ve got the cash to prove it. Ten bucks. A pale green portrait of President Alexander Hamilton. It’s not much money for what I’m about to do, but, then, it’s better than nothing, which is what I had when I walked in here about an hour ago.

I pushed the Chair for an Andrew Jackson—twenty beans—but he wouldn’t meet my price. He’s a slick negotiator, the Chair. That’s why he’s the best salesman in the whole mall. That’s also why the other salespeople call him the Chair: He can get somebody from Just looking, thanks to sitting down in a chair to try on shoes like no one this mail’s ever seen before.

Slipping into customer traffic, I scan for maneuvering room. I don’t need anyone getting in my way. I’ve got a job to do. This is my territory. This is my mall.

As I pass His New Look and breeze through an invisible cloud of cheap-leather vapors wafting from the store racks, I sense movement across the corridor, bodies pulling away from one another, creating gaps. I weave through the light crowd—the dregs of a so-so back-to-school shopping season. Space opens up as I pass SoundWaves, giving me a good twenty yards of unobstructed cruising past Jade Imports Ltd. and Hattie’s Attic. A quick cut back into a smaller gap down the center of the corridor, and I spot the Ginger bulldozing toward the northwest exit.

A Ginger is what the Chair calls lady customers who are obsessed with the way their feet look in a pair of shoes. I don’t really know what the term Ginger means, since the Chair has his own special language for describing retail work, but I know he’d like payback for the torture this Ginger just administered to him. That’s where I come in—me and Alexander Hamilton.

Lucky for us, the Ginger’s parked out back.

The mental picture of the dark northwest parking lot slams a gate in my mind, obliterating the last squeak of rubber on tile, the last whiny kid in new clothes wrenching a parent’s arm, the last mosquito whine of Muzak. For me, the mall falls silent. Faces drift by like ghoulish balloons, and the fifty yards separating me from the Ginger, who heaves her girth against the exit door like a bronco ramming against its pen, becomes a simple series of interlocking spaces, valves opening and closing in a pattern I can almost predict one step in advance. I spot an angular passage funneling into Big Buy, where I can make up time down the anchor store’s long, straight aisles. I plunge into it.

After passing through Big Buy and exiting the mall, I’ve gained enough lead time on the Ginger to rest a few seconds and fill my lungs with the crisp evening air. The breeze presses my sweatshirt against my body. The sky is a swirling charcoal canopy, as if the clouds over Shunpike Falls are gathering to watch the hit go down, like kids crowding around a fight.

The northwest exit disgorges my prey.

I slip between rows of cars and zigzag toward her.

Only one row of cars separates us when the Ginger finally stops at a vehicle: a big, white, square sedan—a milk carton with wheels, basically. Drawing a few steps nearer, I hear her humming a tune. I crouch down and creep around the back of a minivan parked two cars over. Peeking through the minivan’s windows, I watch her standing at her door, listen to her humming and fumbling for her keys. And I wait. At the sound of her door hinges creaking, I move in.

She turns, startled.

I tense up, thinking she might scream.

The moment passes with a soft, low whoop of wind.

What do you want? the Ginger grumbles, looking me up and down before settling her stink-eye on the torn pocket of my jeans, then on my Chuck Taylors, which aren’t exactly new either. I can’t help you, she says with a snort and begins turning back to her car. Go away—

Caveat emptor, I announce, just as the Chair told me to. Whatever the words mean, they make the Ginger’s caterpillar eyebrows nearly jump into her black squirrel’s nest of hair.

What did you say—

Caveat emptor, I repeat and advance a step.

Pressing a hand to her breast, she shrinks into her halfopen door.

"Caveat . . . —as I speak, traffic, people, time, and the wind all seem to freeze in place—. . .emptooor." The voice that seethes at her—low, even, not the donkey bray I’m used to hearing honk from my mouth—-sounds only slightly familiar. "Caveat emptor." The back of my neck tingles. My head feels light. Caveat emptor.

As the Ginger presses herself harder into her car door, her face a distorted mess of cosmetic seams and fear, I catch sight of my shadow on the pavement: a menacing black form, a bitter scarecrow come to life—coiled and ready to pounce. Caveat emptor! I raise my hand as if to take an oath, and the woman flinches.

I take a half step closer and raise my other hand. "Caveat . . . My voice grows louder, more gravelly. . . . emptor!"

As the Ginger draws another sharp breath, I spread my arms out at my sides and jab my hands in the air like a wizard summoning lightning bolts. My baggy sleeves make shadow wings on the pavement—vampire bat wings.

With a choking whimper, the Ginger scrambles into her car, slams the door, and trips the electric door locks. She gawks at me through her window like some mutant creature in a jar.

Hearing her muffled shriek through the glass snaps me out of my daze. I dart for the bushes separating the mall parking lot from the bank next door. Someone beeps a horn, but I don’t stop.

Branches rake my arms raw as I flee, scrambling through the bushes, unable to slow down. Go, is all I can think, my heart pounding in my chest like a sledgehammer against the side of a submarine.

Go.

As if I’ve become the hunted.

2

Mom’s peeling vegetables at the kitchen sink when I walk in the front door. She doesn’t say anything, though. She must be mad at me. I’m a little late. It’s seven o’clock. We try to eat at six.

Hi, Mom, I say.

She turns around and wipes loose hair out of her face. Her hair’s pinned up with takeout chopsticks, and in the butter-yellow light of the kitchen I can see silver strands weaving through the black. Some nights I think I can tell she’s getting older. Hey, Mitch, she says, glancing at my jeans. You’re pushing it, timewise.

Sorry.

And those pants are getting a little ratty, don’t you think? Since when is it okay to go to school looking like that?

I shrug. We don’t have a dress code. At least not one that I know about—

Well, I don’t want you wearing those jeans, understand?

But a lot of other kids—

"You are not a lot of other kids." She bangs the vegetable peeler on the counter, just missing the glass of wine sitting next to the sink. The noise seems to frighten her more than it does me.

Mom doesn’t get mad very often, or at least she doesn’t usually show it, but lately she’s seemed on edge. I’m not sure why.

You’re my kid, she says in a slightly ragged voice. Understand?

It’s clearly not a good night for debating with Mom, not that it ever is. She’s pretty amped about something. And I doubt it’s something as simple as my torn jeans or being late for dinner. I just pray she doesn’t know about the Ginger—not impossible in a town the size of Shunpike Falls, where bad news gets around faster than a fire truck. But, then, that’s probably being paranoid. Yes, I say. I understand.

I don’t like you walking around looking like you just don’t care, Mom goes on. Because if you don’t care, that makes it look like I don’t care. Know what I mean?

Yes.

Good. Now go wash up. She turns back to the sink. We’re eating in ten.

***

I wash my hands and splash cold water on my face, then look in the mirror for a few moments. I look guilty. I try a couple more splashes, but the look doesn’t go away. It’s pretty subtle, but I can see it. Did Mom see it?

I sit on the edge of the bathtub and try to get the Ginger’s horrified face out of my mind. Caveat emptor. What does it mean? Would Mom know? Should I ask her?

Have I lost my mind?

Had I lost it even before I went to see the Chair?

The decision to stop by ShUSA seemed rational enough at the time. But, then, I’ve said that about a lot of things in my fifteen years of life that turned out not to be so rational after all. Here was my thought process, if you can even call it that:

I’m flat broke—was flat broke, I should say. I thought the Chair might have a solution to my problem. He’s helped me out in the past, teaching me the three most important words in a kid’s employment vocabulary:

under

the

table

Money paid to someone under the table doesn’t get reported to the government. It’s about the only way to hire a kid younger than sixteen. It’s illegal, of course. Even though the under-the-table arrangement the Chair and I had going at ShUSA fell apart about a month after it started, I was banking on him having some other ideas up his suit sleeve. He’s a quick thinker—kind of harsh sometimes, but smart when it comes to business.

Clearly, though, he was facing his own dilemma when I strolled in: the Ginger.

For a couple of seconds, I thought ShUSA was completely empty—no salespeople, no customers, no Chair. Then I found him down on the floor in Ladies Formals, directly beneath the Steppin’ Out banner, straightening a woman’s nylons. I could tell, from the pink shade in his ears and cheeks as he scrambled around his customer’s feet, that she’d been keeping him busy for a while. From where I stood, over by the ShU-ShU the Choo-Choo display, the Chair reminded me of King Kong in that old movie I caught on late-night TV: trapped there in a little city of canary yellow shoeboxes. The thirty or so ladies’ shoes scattered around could’ve been cars the big ape had already crushed.

For the time being, though, the Chair seemed calm, which wasn’t that surprising. While he’d earned his nickname for being what the mall salespeople call a closer—as in deal closer—he’s no less legendary for keeping his salesman’s cool, never letting customers rattle his nerves. Still, I wondered if this would be the Ginger that broke him. I mean, he’d shown her a lot of shoes. Boxes also filled the seat to the Ginger’s left. A fur coat looking like stitched-together roadkill lay in a beaver-sized clump in the seat to her right.

Now, keep in mind, I heard the Chair say as he sliced off a smile, "that when these shoes stretch, which they will do fairly quickly, your foot will sliiide forward slightly." With one hand he flicked something from the leg of his blue suit, then ran his fingers through his corporate-looking brown hair. His other hand reached for a box under the Ginger’s seat.

I caught a glimpse of the black shoe as he pulled back the sheets of its tissue-paper nest: a narrow style with a tall heel and tiny strap. Just looking at it made my feet ache.

The Ginger nodded in a way that gave no clue as to whether she liked the shoe, hated the shoe, or expected the Chair to kiss her feet.

The Chair caught my eye, his expression oozing two seconds’ worth of pure, distilled disgust before he took the Ginger’s hand and helped her up.

I remember she did a wobbly turn to her left and walked toward the