volume way up. Slipknot screeched from speakers all around us. Pia and I bounced on our seats. I liked the domestic picture we made, a nice couple out to view the neighborhood’s Christmas lights, glowing since before Thanksgiving. Happy kept running after us as if he expected to catch up. I eased the van out the gate and onto the street. We were free.
Time to get serious, I decided as I concentrated on staying on the right side of the street and easing to a stop at the first intersection. I looked right and left and broke loose from the pull of the big house behind us. Pia’s earlier rowdy mood was replaced by a pensive quiet. She pulled the seatbelt across her chest and clasped it securely, as if preparing for a long ride. “Take a right at the next corner,” she instructed. “We’ll get on Snelling and then it’s a straight shot all the way to Rosedale. We’ll be there in less than fifteen minutes. We can park in one of the mall lots, and nobody will find us for days. I always go to the mall when I want to be alone. I like the trees and planters, the fountains, the food court, and the Sticks and Wicks store. The mall is my favorite place for solitude and reflection.”
I didn’t admit that I’d never driven on a street before. On that snowy night, I felt squeezed in by trucks and buses bearing down on me with their blinding headlights.
“The police will come after us,” I said.
Pia shut off the CB. “No radio signal for them to track,” she said, and I was again impressed by her sophistication. “We’ll be safe once we get to the parking lot,” she insisted. “It’s going to be packed for the biggest shopping weekend of the year. People camp out to get their first crack at the bargains. Some stores are opening at midnight. It’s a great time for shoplifting.”
“You are evil.” I couldn’t contain my admiration.
“Let me know what you’d like for Christmas.”
I could tell she was starting to like me. “You’ll get me a present?”
“Better, I’ll show you how to steal it. If you can carry it, wear it, or swallow it, you can own it.”
I realized I was in love for the first time in my life, if you didn’t count Cousin Iris, whom I loved only theoretically because she was unreachable. With Pia, my lust might be satisfied one day. I wondered what it would be like to taste her tongue, feel her budding chest, wear her clothes. I was looking at her with adoration when a chorus of honks and beeps alerted me to the van swerving and sliding away from me.
“What we don’t want to do right now,” Pia said coolly, once I’d regained my place in the middle lane, “is to get noticed because of your stupid driving.”
“I got distracted.”
“I’ll let you know when you may gaze upon my bosom,” she said. “For now, keep your mind on the road as if our lives depended on it.”
“What made you think I was looking at your tits?” My attempted sneer turned into a stupid grin.
“That’s a very disrespectful term. You are to refer to them as ‘breasts,’ or you can believe you’ll never get to see them.”
“Yes, breasts!” I nodded but didn’t dare look away from the road. The entrance to Rosedale Mall was right ahead. And so far no sign of cops.
“Look for the Alligator signs,” she said as we circled the parking area. The lots are marked with cute animals to help people remember where they left their car. Zebra lot, Lion lot, Hippo lot.
“Why Alligator?”
“It’s near Marshall Field’s. Easier to be invisible if we’re jammed in by cars.”
I found a space between two fuck-you-vees, proud that I did not scrape their sides. Pia covered our license plates with handfuls of snow, then climbed back inside the warm van. I think she had done this sort of thing before. Fortunately, Loiseaux had avoided putting any identification on the sides of the van to protect the passengers’ privacy on their way to the madhouse. Very thoughtful. A Megan Alert APB for missing children likely had patrol cars cruising the freeways, our names flashing on LED screens. Help find the joyriding children in their stolen van, which looks just like a million other vans on the road. Soon our pictures would be out there on TV screens and milk cartons. But for now we had happily vanished into the frenzy of the big shopping night.
As we burrowed in the backseat, scrunching down below the window line, laughter poured out of us, a cascading mix of triumph and relief. To be in love and driving at the same time is a giant leap, a rite of passage rivaling the second birth of the Christian, the satori of the Buddhist, the transformation of the alchemist. Eureka! I drive, I love. I was way ahead of myself, becoming the prodigy I knew I was.
“When do you think they’ll find us?” said Pia, suddenly rational.
“Never, I hope.”
“I’d say three days. One day to give up on the highways. Another day to check out hospitals and shelters and friends’ houses.”
“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
