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her closet. Green-dyed Fioruccis with the lavender plastic tag around the belt loop, rust-colored Girbauds, stonewashed jeans, three pairs of blue denims in different shades, magenta jeans, baby pink corduroys. I was thinking, What’s it like to have all this clothing? How could one girl have so much? Julie appeared at the doorway in a towel. She had a look on her face like the cat who ate the canary, as my mom would say.
    “So . . . how did you . . . ?” Then slowly I started to get it. I gasped and whispered, “Oh shit! Julie, did you steal these?”
    She nodded, grinning. “You don’t have to whisper. My mom’s not home. And Mandy does it, too. Mandy made up a code word for it, in fact. Getting . Like if you got something, it means you didn’t pay for it.” She smiled even bigger, like, isn’t that clever?
    “Oh my God.” I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or gasp again. “How?” I moved to her bed, holding the pair of Fioruccis I had picked, eager for the details. “How do you get away with it?”
    “Well . . .” Julie exhaled like it was an old story. “You wouldn’t believe how little security some places have. Even department stores.” She sat down at her vanity to do her makeup. “What are you doing tomorrow? Saturdays are perfect at Fiorucci.”
    “I’m free,” I said.
    “Cool. We’ll wear baggy pants. That way you can walk right out of the store wearing the jeans underneath.”
    “You’re kidding!” I said.
    “Nope. It’s easy. You just walk right out; nobody says anything. Once I even tried walking out wearing just the jeans, no baggies over them, and nobody stopped me.”
    “Oh my God.” I started to crack up and fell back on her bed. “How many times have you done this?” I said to the ceiling.
    “Um . . . I’m not sure, maybe fifteen times?”
    “Always at Fiorucci?” I asked.
    “There, and certain department stores. Macy’s, for one, is so easy,” she said confidently. I didn’t think I could look up to Julie any more than I already did, but this made her the coolest person I’d ever met.
    “And you’ve never been caught?” I asked.
    “Never,” she said. She blotted her lipstick with a tissue.
     
     
    Fiorucci was in the fancy neighborhood of East 59th Street, near Bloomingdale’s. They sold lots of different kinds of designer jeans and corduroys there, in tons of colors—all Fiorucci brand, of course—and the best clothes, mostly kind of punk stuff and jewelry.
    I felt this weird combination of excited and nervous. When I’d been to Fiorucci before, it was to buy stuff or get the free posters they gave out. I was collecting them. So far I had four: the two angels one that Julie had, the David Bowie- looking punk rocker one (his face was kind of severe), the big red lips one, and the one with the topless blonde woman in red leather Fiorucci pants hugging her knees so they covered her boobs.
    In the dressing room I tried on a bunch of jeans, and then left the pair I wanted on the hook. Acting perfectly calm, I went back out to the guy in my red baggy overalls and my socks. I gave him the two pairs I didn’t want and asked for three more. Julie was right; there was almost no security there—what a laugh. Nobody was counting what we took into the dressing room, and the clothes didn’t even have those plastic sensor things on them. What was the catch? I tried on three more pairs of pants—a magenta, a green, and a dark brown—returned them, and asked for two more. This is what Julie had told me to do—by that point the guy didn’t remember how many I had. On my way back to the dressing room, I heard Julie whispering to me.
    “Jule! Juuu-lieee? Can you come here a sec, please?” I stepped into her dressing room and saw that she was red in the face and kind of sweating. Her jeans zipper was stuck.
    “I can’t get these off!” she whispered.
    “Oh my God,” I said, trying not to laugh.
    “It’s not funny,” she said, trying not to laugh, too. “I