The smell hits you first.
You don't know what it is — some combination of synthetic vanilla, plastic packaging, and pure concentrated girlhood — but the moment the automatic doors of the mall slide open and that wave of Limited Too air reaches your face, your entire nervous system recalibrates. You are eleven years old. You have $47 in birthday money. You are the most powerful person alive.
Your mom said you could spend forty dollars. The other seven are a secret. You've already decided this.
The store is organized, in your mind, by degree of wanting. The section near the door — the graphic tees with rhinestones, the ones that say things like DRAMA QUEEN in bubble letters — that's the want you can actually afford. The back of the store, where the denim lives, where the flare jeans with the embroidered hems hang like artifacts from a better world — that's the want that requires negotiation with God.
Your best friend materializes beside you. She has already picked up a crop top that says ANGEL in silver letters and is holding it against herself with the confidence of someone who has never doubted a single decision. You pick up the matching one. It says TROUBLE. It costs $18.99.
Here is your problem: the butterfly clips are $6.99. The TROUBLE top is $18.99. The flare jeans — the ones, the ones with the little sunflower on the back pocket — are $34.99. You have $47. Your mother is currently at the Yankee Candle three stores down and will return in exactly twelve minutes.
You have twelve minutes to decide who you are.
The butterfly clips would mean clips in your hair every day for the rest of the summer. The top would mean being TROUBLE, which feels important in a way you can't explain. The jeans would mean being the girl with the jeans, which is a whole different category of person than you currently are.
You look at your best friend. She is already at the register with the ANGEL top and a mood ring and what appears to be a strawberry-scented body spray. She has no system. She operates on pure instinct. You have always envied this about her.
Your mom appears in the doorway. She has a Yankee Candle bag and the expression of someone who is about to ask how much something costs.
You make your decision in three seconds.
The butterfly clips. The TROUBLE top. And you put the jeans back on the rack with a tenderness usually reserved for sleeping children, because you'll be back for them. You're always coming back for the thing you weren't quite ready for yet.
You walk out of Limited Too with a paper bag that smells like the best version of being alive. Your best friend loops her arm through yours. Somewhere in the mall, *NSYNC is playing from a store neither of you will identify.
This is the summer you remember when you're thirty-five and the internet gets too heavy. This exact moment. The bag. The smell. The certainty that everything is still ahead of you.
💕 end 💕