inklingfair Disclaimer: The “I” here isn’t me; it’s one of my CW140 classmates. We each were supposed to write a story that wasn’t ours. This interpretation isn’t wholly true, but may be much closer to the truth than I know. I hope I did it justice.
I started at six. My first one was fun – a plastic electric guitar that came with Rock Star Ken. It was my friend Hannah’s. She got Ken for her eighth birthday; I sort of gave it to her. Her Barbie was two years old, she’d said, and was lonely. Mom overheard that and thought it was sweet, so she bought a Rock Star Ken when we went birthday-gift shopping
Hannah invited me the next Saturday to her Barbie and Ken’s wedding. My two Barbies and I were to be the bridesmaids, Hannah the maid-of-honor, and would I please bring my dollhouse for the honeymoon? I did, and Voltes V pronounced them man and wife.
Ken and Barbie were in the middle of their honeymoon when Hannah’s mom called her in. Her dad was on the phone, calling from Canada to say happy birthday. He’s a dentist there, and Mom says he never sends them money. Hannah has rotten teeth. My dad was a millionaire and left everything to mom when he died when I was two. He was old and ugly.
Anyway, there I sat, waiting. I looked at my two lonely Barbies lying in the sandbox. Hannah was laughing loudly at one of her dad’s dentist jokes. Ken’s electric guitar was on the little kitchen table. Hannah doesn’t need Ken’s dumb guitar, I thought. I grabbed it and shoved it into my skirt pocket, just as Hannah was saying, “Bye, Daaad!”
I hid the guitar in a little empty toy box.
It was quite easy after that – taking things. Marbles, doll combs and play pots, Lego pieces. I wouldn’t call it stealing; they were too small to be missed anyway. Besides, I did it for the fun of it, for the thrill of almost-getting-caught. (With Hannah I did it out of spite.) I was fast, cunning, invincible.
Mom caught me when I was eleven.
I’d stuffed a pack of calling cards into my back pocket while Mom was at the Parker counter of National Bookstore. Big mistake. My shirt was too short to hide it. I struggled to pull it out but my jeans were too tight. Mom hustled me to the cashier, oblivious to what I was doing. She was late for a facial.
The cashier rang up my mom’s pens. I started to shuffle to the exit, but he coughed. “Miss…”
I turned. My hands were cold. He pointed to my butt. My ears grew hot. I dug the cards out, handed them to Mom. She dropped the pack on the counter as if it were a hot coal.
“She hates using shopping carts… You know – teenagers…” She smiled widely, her eyes too bright, and waved her Platinum MasterCard under the cashier’s nose. He nodded stiffly.
Mom and I drove to the beauty salon in silence.
At a stoplight, she sighed and said, “I know about your little toys.”
Invincible. I sat still, breathing.
She tried again: “You don’t need to…” her right hand fluttered awkwardly, “…you know… You can have anything.” Her fingernails were crimson. “Do you need anything?”
“No,” I said dully. “Nothing.”
That was my last one. Back home, I wrapped my toy box of stolen goods in a black garbage bag and took it out with the trash. It was quite heavy now.
The garbage man picked it up the next day.
Photo by tamara garcevic on Unsplash
