THE GOLD FISH: The Gingerbread Man (2.4)

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The drive to the shopping center was way too short. To Barbie, anyway. After all, it wasn’t every day she got to ride in a car driven by a popular teenager. But as Don liked to say, time flies when you’re having fun and soon Wes was swinging the Fairlane up to the mall’s entrance, and it was all over.

Perring Parkway shopping center was that paragon of 70s retail experiences: the open-air pedestrian mall. Anchored by an iconic watch tower, it offered the very best of suburban Baltimore retailers: Korvette’s, Woolworth’s, Fashion Bug, Baker’s Shoes, Joanne’s Fabrics, Wockenfuss Candies, etc. And its point-to-point layout couldn’t be more perfect for teen and preteen cruising.

Bridge and the other Sullivan brothers spilled out of the car first, but given Barbie’s backseat, driver-side position, she was the last to exit. And unfortunately, it was less graceful than she could have hoped. As she scooted across the bench seat, one sneakered foot got tangled in the pile of paperback books that littered the car’s floor, sending one -- The Hobbit -- right out the door and onto the parking lot tarmac. “Oh Sorry!” she cried to Wes.

Blushing self-consciously again, she retrieved the dog-eared book and was placing it back with the others when the book’s cover illustration caught her attention. It was like nothing she had seen before, although it did have a strange familiarity. While its colors were muted, its fantastical nature brought to mind the groovy, neon-colored black light posters of wizards, unicorns, and misty mountain-scapes that all the head shops on Ocean City’s boardwalk seemed to carry. In other words, the cover looked cool. Framed by unusual looking trees, it featured a winding river upon which floated a line of wooden barrels. Perched atop the last one was a smallish person who appeared to be heading off to parts unknown and presumably, adventure. It was intriguing. And strangely mesmerizing.

BEEP.

An impatient driver idling behind Wes made their annoyance clear.

Barbie’s head whipped up. “Sorry,” she cried again, and placed the book back with its friends.

Wesley shrugged. “Don’t sweat it, Ginger cat. There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. Or so says my man, Thorin.”

Barbie understood Wes was speaking English, but that’s about all she understood.

“Um okay,” she muttered, closing the door.

Wesley tossed back his golden hair and laughed. With a wink, he shot her the peace sign, put the car in gear, and zoomed off.

While the Sullivan boys had immediately made off towards Korvette’s -- there had been talk in the car about checking out Alice Cooper’s new School’s Out album -- Bridge had waited.

“Jeez,” she huffed at Barbie once Wes had driven off. “Get out of a car much?”

Barbie shrugged in mock apology, then grabbed Bridge’s hand and dragged her away from the mall and towards the car wash that stood at the other end of the parking lot.

Bridge looked up at the darkening sky and flashed her fangs. “Lucky!”

“So lucky,” echoed Barbie.

It wasn’t long before Barbie was crouched behind a coin-operated vacuum cleaner machine while Bridge stood watch. Car wash vacuum cleaner machines were a veritable gold mine for acquiring funds IF you knew how to crack them AND the weather cooperated. Fortunately for the girls, they did and it had. Barbie and Bridge had discovered years ago that a metal snap barrette was a perfect picking mechanism for the machine’s crappy lock, and that whenever rain was in the forecast, the car wash would be deserted and its attendants lethargic. Today, the stars had aligned.

Thankfully, the barrette lived up to its promise and the back of the machine sprang open with a cloud of dust. Barbie moved to the next step of the operation: rooting around in the collection bin for dough, which was no pleasant task. The bin always held a disgusting accumulation of dirt, leaves, cigarette butts, and other detritus from countless cars, but its saving grace was gravity ensured most of the heavy stuff -- i.e., coins -- ended up towards the bottom. Soon, Barbie was elbow deep in the muck, a pile of dusty coins growing before her.

Despite being no stranger to unpleasant tasks, even Barbie had her limits. Her hand encountered something icky and with a grimace, she recoiled and extracted it to reveal a dirt-encrusted, half-licked, sticky red lollypop stuck to her fingers. “Ewwww…” she cried.

“Ha!” erupted Bridge with a giggle. “Eat it!”

Barbie flung it towards her friend. “You eat it!”

Bridge managed to dodge it with an ear-piercing shriek, but in doing so, alerted the attendant, who had been -- until this rude interruption, anyway -- happily engrossed in a battered issue of Mad Magazine.

“Hey,” he screamed, rolling up the magazine like a baton and advancing on them like they were naughty puppies. “Get away from there.”

The girls scooped up the coins and ran.

On one of the mall’s benches, Barbie’s filthy hand pushed half the pile of coins towards Bridge. “A dollar, forty-seven for you.” She gathered up the other pile and stuffed it in her pocket. “And a dollar, forty-eight for me.”

Bridge nodded. After all, it was Barbie’s barrette that had picked the lock and her hands that had rooted around in the muck. It was only fair that Barbie got the extra penny. But extra penny or no, she had amassed -- in less than a day! -- almost 5 bucks. She could scarcely believe it.

Her smile faded, however, when Bridge flashed her fangs, waggled her eyebrows, and said “where should we go first?!”

Oh jeez, thought Barbie. How was she going to avoid spending her hard earned cash, when the mall had so very many temptations?

It was in Joanne’s Fabrics, of all places, that her resolve was first tested. Barbie stood before the most dazzling display of shiny new embroidery threads in every color imaginable, and she wanted them all. She’d been trying her hand at embroidery for months, her crude attempt at replicating caustics on her shorts merely the latest. It was hard to tell whether her failure in capturing a good likeness was due to clumsy stitches, ignorance of embroidery techniques, OR -- and this was her hope -- poor source materials. In other words, the crappy collection of regular thread she found in her mother’s sewing box. The beauties laid out before her were, as the carriage driver in The Wizard of Oz was fond of saying, a horse of a different color. They were thick and silky and just begging to be stitched into something amazing. Something, Barbie thought, like a beautiful gold (pause) fish.

“So pick one already,” Bridge nudged her impatiently. “I want to hit Woolworths.”

Barbie stood in awe, fingering two different colors. One was a yellow gold like sunshine, the other, a more orangey gold like, well, an orange. And, of course, her. She wasn’t buying either, but enjoyed weighing her hypothetical options.

Bridge did not, however, and her patience was expiring. She began to skip up and down the aisles to amuse herself. One circuit past Barbie. Two circuits.

On the third circuit, she feigned a stumble and bashed into Barbie and the embroidery carousel, sending cardboard packets of thread flying and skittering across the floor.

“I’m sorry,” blurted Bridge dramatically when a store attendant appeared, a disapproving look on her pinched face. “We’ll put them back.”

While Barbie did her best to gather and return the packets to the correct hooks, Bridge made a show of helping, but all she really did was help herself to one of the packets of thread. The orangey gold one that Barbie had stared at the longest. That, she tucked into the side of her sneaker until it disappeared.

:::

The girls were in Woolworth’s when Bridge shoplifted the second time, and it was equally as creative as the first. Munching from a tall bag of popcorn purchased with her share of the car wash profits, Bridge paused at a rack of cheap hoop earrings, lifted a pair from the display, and held them out for Barbie to admire. “Far out, huh?”  Then, with a flash of fangs, she dropped them into the popcorn and shook the bag to bury them. Cool as a cucumber.

“Bridge!” Barbie hissed.

“Be cool, woman.”

Barbie grabbed Bridge’s arm and hustled her out of the store. “Are you crazy?” she asked, once they were outside.

“No...” Bridge waggled her fingers. “Just the master of the five-fingered discount.”

“You’re going to get us arrested.”

“They can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.”

“You’re cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs, is what you are.”

Bridge started to respond, but something -- someone -- at the far end of the mall caught her attention. Her eyes narrowed, a look of pure hatred crossing her face.

“Well, well, well. If it isn’t Donna Pickles, the slut of Kingsbridge Apartments.”

Barbie followed Bridge’s gaze to a group of girls at the far end of the mall. Donna wasn’t a friend, but Barbie knew her and her pack of cronies from around the neighborhood. The hot rumor that summer was that Donna had made out with Stevie Edwards, the neighborhood bad boy, and Donna’s own mother’s boyfriend... on the SAME DAY. It seemed a ludicrous story, but you couldn’t put anything past Donna, who always gave off a sort of dirty feeling. Barbie assessed her anew. Greasy brown hair cut in a limp shag. Angry red zits on her forehead. Purplish shadows under her eyes. She was creepy, Barbie decided. Like a member of the Addams Family or something. Barbie couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to kiss Donna, but who knew what boys were capable of?

Bridge fished the earrings out of the popcorn and stuffed them in her pocket, before tossing the bag into a nearby trash can. “C’mon,” she said to Barbie, striding off towards Donna. “I owe that bitch.”

Barbie skipped after her. “Owe her what?!”

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