You’re nine years old, wandering around in a mostly closed mall with a cousin, three years ahead of you. This was before they started closing off the bits of the mall with the closed shops; before all the new security, maybe before all the crime, who knows, you were young, you accepted the world as it was. In any case, you’re with your older cousin, and you discuss whether to get a soda or not; it’ll be a while yet before your grown-ups reappear, and you’ve got some coins in your pocket- thick coins without holes in them, old coins. The only bit of the mall still alive is the grocery shop. (This means it’s not late, even though it feels that way- back then, a shop staying open after seven in the evening was unheard of.) You suggest going in there to further consider the purchase of a soda. But your cousin says no, we can’t do that. She points to the plastic bag she’s carrying, you can’t remember what she carried in it. Look, she says. Your attention is supposed to be on the logo printed on the bag; it’s the same as the one above the entrance to the grocery shop. That’s why we can’t go in there, your cousin says, she’s not even patronising. You can’t go in the grocery shop because she has a bag from there already and this is, this is wrong.
You’re nine years old, and you start to understand about the rules that aren’t written down anywhere and no one will tell you about.
This cousin of yours, she was the closest thing you had to a hero. The last time she called, you didn’t even answer, the last time she invited you to spend time, you rejected, because you had other things to do- or maybe you didn’t. She’s not your hero anymore. A couple of years ago she married, before that she traded education for a job as a maid, and before that she had a violent boyfriend. But when you were seven, she taught you about Michael Jackson and hairspray. When you were ten, she told you Kurt Cobain was dead, and when you asked who that was, why she had the name written on the back of her hand, she played Nevermind to you, from one end of summer to the other. You built a treehouse together and used it to store both the romance magazines you didn’t want your fathers to see, and the magazines you didn’t want your fathers to know you had stolen from them.
You’ll remember that summer, reading strange words about skin and looking at strange skin pictures, you’ll remember it as though it was briefer than the time you sat waiting at a café table somewhere on the Canary Islands, covering for your fourteen year-old cousin who was meeting a man somewhere else. (She was sorry about the t-shirt, it had widened when he put his head under it.)
On the way home that night, your cousin and the blonde friend spoke in English, because it was cool, they smoked secret cigarettes while you paced two steps behind. You felt angry and alone, and you frowned at them when they laughed over brightly coloured drinks offered to them by other men, and you didn’t know that it wouldn’t be very long before you would discover these rules, too, the rules that one night got your cousin cornered in a deserted street by two very large men. That summer, after the birthdays, your cousin acquired a new wardrobe of tight fabric and a straps, and you didn’t see one another so much anymore. You were on your own when you discovered these rules.
The first time you broke one of the old rules, the written rules, you were a couple of years older and running away from home. You think it was the longest summer in your life. It was, as you recall, the last summer you would say no to the beer bottles offered to you outside of festival tents. The first time you’d watch a sunrise sharing a thermo-cup of tea with someone who enticed you more than the people you knew in school; the first time you would go through several days without sleep. You slept in a man’s bed, but didn’t anticipate it when he tried to kiss you. (You hadn’t been kissed before.) When you got home, you bought new clothes, considered yourself in a mirror, and watched Fight Club because someone had made you think you should. You tucked away your new secrets in a diary, together with reports on changes in appearance and a long-lasting, ever present, goodbye to the old rules.
The last time you saw your old classmates, at the graduation party by the beach, you had to decide who to sit with; the ones who thought you were one of them for lack of choice, or the ones who said you were one of them because you were cool. This girl with a lazy eye generously offered you beer, and you said yes. Later in the evening she bit your thigh and kissed another girl; you laughed as much as they did, and for a moment you belonged, and you knew how the world worked. She taught you how to smoke your first cigarette, and later on you made someone older buy you your first Lucky Strikes. (You would learn to get creative in order to convince shop clerks you were old enough for your bad habits. Once, you’d develop a whole fake identity as a psychology student.)
Your old treehouse was torn down, years ago. You don’t know what happened to the pictures, the magazines, the flashlight mounted on the wall. Your lip is pierced; it was raining that day, and your friend had a needle driven through her tongue, and you shrugged and thought about Michael Jackson and hairspray. Most of the sunrises are spent in solitude. Over the years, you have had many homes; full ashtrays, brightly coloured drinks. If anyone asks, you’ll boldly state that you make the rules now, but you don’t eat in front of people you don’t know very well, and you like to avoid conversation about wars and the world, because you’ve found it so difficult to believe in anything.
You’re still not sure you understand about your cousin’s plastic bag and the grocery shop and the myriad of rules people make up, skipping over the cracks in the paved streets, chasing the four-leaf clover; but you don’t frown so much anymore. You wait until you understand. Summer is just around the corner. You’re not nine years old; you’re just old enough to know you don’t know everything yet.