The Last Mall Rat by Erik E. Esckilsen

Author:Erik E. Esckilsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

12

Weekends are supposed to help a person clear his mind, give him a break, some rest, all that stuff. But this past weekend might as well have never been on the calendar. Come Monday morning, I still have the same problems I had on Friday. Sure, I got some homework done on Saturday and Sunday—but not much, not with all this stuff about Jimmy on my mind. No one has seen him since he decked that guy at the mall. I called his house, but his mother hung up when I asked for him. I’ve sat on the Mound for hours. Nothing. He’s basically disappeared.

Telling Marcus and Page about seeing Jimmy punch that guy didn’t make the weekend any more pleasant. Now they’re wigged that Jimmy’ll get caught and rat us out. I don’t think he’d do that, but I’d definitely feel responsible if he did.

That’s why I spent practically all day Saturday just riding my bike around town, looking for him. It was weird, but just doing that, just cruising Shunpike Falls, brought back some nice memories of what life was like before the mall was built. Jimmy and I used to spend every weekend riding around, first down at Legion Park—the Mound seemed so much bigger then—and then up and down Winston Road.

The strip being what it is—a half-mile of fast-food franchises and gas stations, with a couple of cheap motels wedged in here and there—one night a week we’d spread whatever money we’d scraped together over a few different fast-food joints, making a banquet of the whole deal. I was getting a small allowance then, and Jimmy was pretty good at scrounging up returnable bottles and cans.

Anyway, we always got our burgers at McDonald’s, especially once Jimmy figured out that if you ordered a burger without those lame-o little onions, they’d have to make it fresh instead of giving you one premade. At least that’s what he’d heard. We’d cross Winston Road to get our shakes at Burger King, mainly because I decided they made them better there, though I can’t remember now what made them any different from the McDonald’s shakes. And for french fries, there was only one serious contender: Mo’s Hots—then, and still, the only nonchain restaurant on all of Winston. Then we’d race back to the picnic table under the Legion Park rain shelter and eat. “Fast-food connoisseurs,” my mother called us. If one of us had a little cash left over, we might get donuts at Dunkin’ Donuts for dessert. Or maybe split one.

I guess Jimmy and I complained a lot back then about not having anything fun to do, but we seemed to have a pretty good time anyway. Still, we couldn’t wait for the Onion River Mall to be built. No one could, except Mrs. Pegg, who regularly trashed the mall in her paper—and, of course, my father, who basically blew his real estate career on some stupid idea for a building project he claimed would be much better than a mall.

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