Klepto

Table of Contents

 

 

It’s too easy.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” he said with some kind of accent, and we said hi back.

Then, like a flock of chirpy birds, these three women about our moms’ age came in, looking so rich and Park Avenue. They were in navy and tan and looked like they were going boating. The moustache man got really flirty with the ladies and they were giggling, and I started checking out these really expensive knee-highs. I was thinking,
Jesus, twenty dollars for a pair of knee-highs just because somebody painted some swirly colors on them?
I mean, come on. Julie was near the window inspecting this opalescent white purse with tiny beads on it. She called me over.

“Check this out,” she said under her breath. She opened and closed the purse a few times and the snap was kind of magnetic. It was fancy. Sixty-five dollars.

“Very cool,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, and then suddenly, with her back to the guy at the register, she stuck the purse in the waist of her jeans, pulled her shirt over it, and whispered, “Let’s go!”

The next thing I knew we were running down the street, my Chocolate Soup bag thumping against my side and the swirly-colored pair of knee-highs balled up in my fist.

SPEAK
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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Viking,
a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2006
Published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2008

 

Copyright © Jenny Pollack, 2006

All rights reserved

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s
imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses,
companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Pollack, Jenny.
Klepto / by Jenny Pollack.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1981, fourteen-year-old Julie, a drama major at the High School of Performing Arts in
New York City, becomes best friends with an attractive new girl who introduces Julie to the exciting but
dangerous world of shoplifting.

eISBN : 978-1-101-17670-2

[1. Shoplifting—Fiction. 2. Stealing—Fiction. 3. Best friends—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction.
5. New York (N.Y.)—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.P7566K1 2006 [Fic]—dc22 2005015809

 

 

 

 

 

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume
any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

Prologue,1981

It Wasn’t Like I Hadn’t Done It Before

I wore my baggy red overalls ’cause Julie Braverman said to, and she wore her big army pants. Wearing baggy pants to Fiorucci, this totally cool clothing store, was really important, Julie said. She was acting like what we were gonna do was no biggie. She said it was so easy at Fiorucci. Especially on a Saturday if it was pretty crowded. We headed straight downstairs to the jeans department. There were floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves that held all the different kinds of Fiorucci jeans and pants by size and color and style. Leaning on the counter in front of the shelves was a guy with spiky green hair, ready to get down the pair you wanted.

Julie went up to the spiky green hair guy and said, “Hi. Could I please try on one pair of regular jeans, size twenty-eight, one pair of turquoise corduroys, size twenty-seven, and ummm . . .” She paused to act like she was mulling it over even though she knew exactly what she was going to say. “One pair of the rust-colored jeans? Twenty-eights?” Then I asked him for my three pairs.

As we walked toward the dressing rooms with our armloads of pants, Julie said under her breath, “Try on all three and decide which are the ones you want, okay?”

I was pretty sure it was going to be the regular blue Fiorucci jeans.
Oh my God,
I suddenly thought, getting excited,
I’m gonna have a brand-new pair of Fiorucci jeans for free!
I tried to my hide my nervousness. I mean, it wasn’t like I hadn’t done it before. I’d done it once or twice. Only, it was just little stuff, like candy or lipstick from Woolworth’s. I’d never walked out of a store wearing a pair of expensive jeans under my pants!

I tried on the pink corduroys, but they made me look fat. I’ve always wished I was one of those skinny girls like my sister who could eat anything all the time. When we were little, Ellie was really skinny, so Dr. Beaumont said she should drink one milk shake a day to gain weight. Mom didn’t want me to feel left out so she let me have a milk shake, too, even though I certainly didn’t need it.

I tried on the regular jeans and thank God they fit. Then I put my red overalls on over them and looked in the mirror. Pretty good. You couldn’t really tell. A little bulky, but not much more than usual. I felt my heart kind of beating fast then, and for some reason I couldn’t stop smiling, even though I was alone with myself in the dressing room.

1

A Month Before

I got off the subway at 50th Street and Broadway and walked down to 46th Street feeling excited and thinking,
I can’t believe I’m finally in high school
. It was the Tuesday after Labor Day in 1981, the first day of freshman year. I was actually going to the High School of Performing Arts (or P.A. for short, as everyone called it), where I got accepted as a drama major. There were only three departments: drama, dance, and music. P.A. had academics, too, but just the basics like English, math, history, science, and foreign language. You spent half the day in your major and half in academics—what a change from my old school.

As I walked up to the old brown stone building, I saw this girl on the top of the steps, and I knew I recognized her from somewhere. I thought,
My God, she’s so pretty!
She looked kind of like Brooke Shields. She was wearing these dark-blue-and-purple-striped painters pants from Reminiscence, and I thought,
What a coincidence,
’cause I was wearing my new striped cotton boat-neck shirt from Reminiscence. I had bought it as my first-day-of-school shirt. Reminiscence was my all-time favorite clothing store. It was on Macdougal Street in the Village. They mostly sold 1950s-type stuff, which I totally loved, and these really cool pants in a zillion different colors. It was a store that made me wish I was rich, ’cause I wanted almost everything. The rest of my outfit included my Levi’s and white Keds—I had carefully laid out this combination of clothes on my orange pillow chair the night before.
Maybe we’ll be friends,
I thought, looking at this girl, since we had the Reminiscence connection.

As I stood that morning outside P.A., the sun made me squint my eyes and scrunch up my forehead. It was just before the first bell, and it seemed like there were zillions of kids hanging out outside, not going in. Some were in covered-with-pins jean jackets and tight Jordache jeans. I could hear a few different boom boxes playing WPLJ or The Police or Human League or whatever. All I could think was,
How do I know that girl in the painters pants?

I noticed this cool-looking group of friends: two girls and a guy smoking clove cigarettes. The girls were wearing black suede boots with their jeans tucked in. They also had identical hairstyles—long one-length perms and frizzy bangs with lots of mousse—only one was a dark brunette and the other was kind of an orangy-blonde. They must have been upperclassmen, ’cause they seemed to be a little clique already. I started to get that annoying hollow feeling in my chest, like no amount of deep breaths would make it go away. My parents always said I had no trouble making friends, but I was still nervous. I knew I’d see my old friends Kristin and Olivia sometimes, but it wouldn’t be the same since we were going to different high schools.

“Eye-ee-sha!”
I heard someone scream.

“Queechy!” screamed another voice, and two tall, thin black girls wearing leg warmers and their hair pulled back in tight buns ran to each other and hugged, jumping and squealing.

“You got taller!” “You lost weight!” and “How was your summer?” called random voices. It felt like everyone knew someone except me.

I looked back up at the familiar pretty girl on the top step of P.A. again. At that moment it suddenly came to me, and she turned around as if she knew I was going to say, “Didn’t you go to Caitlin Braunstein’s Bat Mitzvah?”