Associate editor E. Drever on today's bonus story: Jess Golden's narrator explores an acquiescence to growth beyond an exhilarating, sentimental past. This piece tenderly captures a soft grief for youth that stole my heart.

Shoplifting at the Northgate Mall

I had hoped I would get off on it too, but I just felt anxious the whole time. My chest squeezed into a space too small for lungs to work within, too small to imagine. The check-out girl never looked up from the book propped against the register, but I imagined her biding her time, ready to toss the paperback aside and grab us as soon as I pocketed a set of silver-colored bracelets. It's funny to imagine that happening now, a bored seventeen-year-old with red-rimmed eyes and home-dyed black hair throwing Howl on the ground to come after me for stealing from a pre-teen jewelry chain. But, you know, at the time it seemed like the most likely outcome.

I was there with my best friend, Leah. She was incredible. She made most of her own clothes and survived entirely on chicken fingers and quesadillas and had natural little streaks of red hidden throughout her hair that were only visible in direct sunlight. She always painted each of her fingernails a different color, and she would let the paint chip away until each finger had a bright, jagged little patch in the middle. I loved how Leah's hands looked. I would watch them wave through the air, mesmerized by them, while she talked about her stepdad's new birdwatching phase or her suspicion that Mr. Carson had his wife grade our ninth-grade history papers.

Anyway, she had this thing for shoplifting. She would get all sparkly-eyed and talk really fast and swing her hand in mine when we walked around the mall afterward, past the mannequins in sweaters and soft pretzels in glass cases. I was happy to have her colorful fingers wrapped around mine, so I spent a lot of afternoons watching her fill a backpack with cheap earrings, lip gloss, off-brand office supplies. It didn't really matter what it was—it was about the moment when it happened. When we walked away and back into our lives and there was something nestled in her bag that she didn't really have the right to have. At the time she was trying out the second or third SSRI that wouldn't work out for her, a process I wouldn't go through until college. According to her Twitter, she has a girlfriend now, and I did too until a few months ago, but at the time we used to say it was too bad one of us wasn't a boy because that was the only way we knew how to talk about those things.

Of course, the check-out girl didn't even look up when we walked out with the bracelets. When I tried them on later that night, I thought they made my wrists look weird. I was almost definitely wrong, but I still never wore them. They stayed in my jewelry box as a souvenir until my parents moved one too many times and I lost them. At least that's what I assume happened to them, but all I can say for sure is that within a couple of years they weren't mine anymore.

Jess Golden lives in California with her partner. More of her stories can be found in Lunate, (mac)ro(mic), Cotton Xenomorph, and elsewhere.