The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly

Author:Erin Entrada Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

16

Ridge didn’t say so, but it was obvious that malls did not exist in his future. And if they did, they were nothing like the Christiana Mall in Newark, Delaware. As soon as he stepped through the entrance, he froze, mouth agape. He turned to his left. He turned to his right. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the floor. He studied the mall map like it was the Declaration of Independence.

“So this is a mall,” he said, peering at the list of stores. “‘A popular meeting place for American teenagers.’”

“Is that from your sumbook?” Michael asked.

“For the record, I’m an American teenager and I hate the mall,” said Gibby.

“Why would you hate the mall?” Ridge asked.

“It opened ten minutes ago and look at all the people here already,” she said. “Too crowded. And I always see people from school.”

Michael was already scanning the environment for former classmates.

“Why wouldn’t you want to see people from school?” Ridge asked.

Gibby shrugged. “I don’t mind seeing them at school. But if I wanted to see them away from school, I’d make plans with them. Plans that do not involve the mall.”

Ridge moved forward like a man on a mission. “I think it’s remarkable,” he said.

Ridge explored every single store—Lord & Taylor, Williams-Sonoma, even the Watch Station—as Gibby walked beside him and Michael lagged silently behind.

“Isn’t it dangerous for you to be here?” Michael finally said, after ten minutes inside Pottery Barn, of all places. “You could be destroying the what-do-you-call-it. The continuum.”

Ridge tugged at the pull string of a display lamp. “You sound like my mother,” he said. “But according to the Saeed Theory, if I was destroying the continuum, it would have already been destroyed in 2199, and I would not have been able to come here in the first place, because I would cease to exist.”

“Well, whatever,” Michael muttered, barely understanding a word Ridge had said. “It seems really irresponsible for you to be at the mall.”

When the three of them walked out of Pottery Barn, Michael continued, “I mean it. We’ve already got Y2K to worry about, and now this.”

“Michael,” Gibby said, stopping in front of the Piercing Pagoda. “Enough about Y2K.”

“What’s a Piercing Pagoda?” Ridge asked.

A girl sat on the piercing stool while an employee steadied the gun. Before either Michael or Gibby could answer Ridge’s question, the piercing gun went off, sending a stud through the girl’s earlobe. She wailed at the top of her lungs.

Ridge gasped. “What the—”

Gibby pulled on Ridge’s sleeve to move him along. “She’s just getting her ears pierced. Don’t people have pierced ears where you’re from?”

Ridge rubbed his own earlobes as they walked away. “Kind of. But not exactly.”

“Whatever,” Michael said. KB Toys was ahead; he slow-jogged toward it. Normally he would try to act cool, like he was too old for toys and didn’t care about KB, but if no one was going to listen to him and Gibby was going to giggle with Ridge and sing Neil Diamond, then what was the point? Besides, there was a display table out front with an ENTER TO WIN sign.

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