Short Cuts: Episode I 
Scenes From A Mall
Meet the teenagers at the Marq*E Entertainment Center, a one-of-a-kind place that offers everything that matters in life: skateboarding, video games, movies, fortune-telling, bowling, miniature golf, T-shirts, ice cream—and close encounters with the opposite sex.
Scene: The second floor of the Marq*E Entertainment Center, a mall in West Houston, around midday. A fifteen-year-old girl, TAMI, and thirteen-year-olds PATTI and ANGEL are standing together in an arcade. Each is wearing tight hip-hugger jeans. TAMI is a petite, talkative girl with Irish features, a spray of freckles, and long hair that has been dyed the color of a plum. PATTI is Hispanic, with shoulder-length curly hair and a round face; when she is not in a playful mood, her expression alternates between concern and boredom. ANGEL is black, with a long, mature face; she is tall for her age, extremely shy, and wears thin gold earrings that spell out the word "Sexy." The three girls are best friends. As we encounter them, they run into a restroom, giggling and gesturing wildly as they talk.
TAMI: Oh, my God. So Ryan and I were just out on the balcony, and he pushes me against the wall? And I say, "Don't look at me like that." And he says, "Like what?" And I say, "Like you love me and you're going to kiss me." And he says, "What if that's going to happen?" And he kisses me!
PATTI: Oh, my God!
ANGEL: Oh, my God!
PATTI: So are you back together?
TAMI: I guess.
I MET TAMI, PATTI, AND ANGEL at Vans Skate Park at the Marq*E mall one Saturday in July. It took no time to see that they were regulars. "We're here every weekend, so we know everybody and they know us, or know of us," Tami explained as she waved to boys who were passing by. The three girls have been coming from Houston's western suburbs to the Marq*E "for forever," Tami said. She specified: "I'd say since . . . September?" This was my first trip to the two-year-old mall near the intersection of Interstate 10 and West Loop. I had come because a friend had told me that the Marq*E was unique and that it is currently the hangout in Houston for unsupervised teens who are too young to drive.
Both the setting and the merchandise announce that the Marq*E is not your typical mall. The exterior is made up of large, irregularly arranged cubes painted bold colors. The interior is not enclosed; its main thoroughfare is a breezeway covered by a sheer canopy. You can walk from one end of the mall to the other in 350 paces—a three-minute stroll that Tami, Patti, and Angel know well. (Because the girls and their friends are minors, their names have been changed, and we can't show you what they look like.)
Its retail outlets are also unusual. The mall has no chain stores—no Limited, no Gap, no Starbucks. However, if you are looking for an ashtray glued to the top of a mannequin leg, this is the place. At Hot Topic you might inspect a pair of red vinyl boots that lace up to the thigh. Or consider an Afro wig at Dapy. Or get your fortune told by Angelina in a pink kiosk. Or get your name hand-painted onto a piece of rice. Or step inside the glow-in-the-dark caverns of an indoor miniature golf course, the Putting Edge. At the ends of the breezeway are the anchor tenants: on the east, the 23-screen Edwards Cinemas; on the west, Vans Skate Park (35,000 square feet devoted to skateboarding and in-line skating) and a two-story arcade called Jillian's, where you can bowl on a video screen downstairs or in an honest-to-goodness bowling alley upstairs. The skateboard park draws large numbers of teenage boys with hair that is spiked, dyed, or purposefully mussed. Sometimes the older boys get jobs at the Marq*E; one clerk explained, "There is nothing around here for people like us except this mall. This place is like Mars."
Scene: A bar table near the bowling lanes in Jillian's, fifteen minutes later. TAMI, PATTI, and ANGEL are sipping Cokes. They have been joined by RYAN, a boy from southwest Houston. RYAN has thick arms and legs and close-cropped hair, and he likes TAMI, which is why he kissed her. But they tell their story best.
TAMI: Okay, so here's how we met. I met Ryan's friend Roberto, who's a buttface and a half, and I gave Roberto my number and he called me and—
RYAN: I was her second to last choice.
TAMI: Aw—[She grabs RYAN's hand and tilts her head toward him]—you were the last choice but my favorite choice. And February 16, 2001, or somewhere around then, Roberto called me on my own line at home, and we ended up three-way-calling Ryan at three o'clock in the morning, waking him up, and I ended up going out with Roberto. We were all meeting at Vans in that area by the concession. So I went out with Roberto—not even for two months, though.
RYAN: And she started talking to me all the time.
TAMI: Ryan started asking me my name, my age, and I started liking him, and then Roberto started cheating on me with a friend of mine.
RYAN [Shaking his head]: What an idiot.
TAMI: I broke up with him the same night, and Ryan really, really wanted to go out with me, right? And then Ryan and I made a bet on the OUUT game: He bet on Oklahoma, and he said if Oklahoma won, I'd have to go out with him. I said, "Okay." But I ended up going out with Roberto for three more days anyway, and then Ryan said, "Are you and Roberto still going out?" And I said, "Yeah, but we're going to break up." So Ryan broke up with that smart rollerblade chick that day, and then I started going out with Ryan. Then Patti's ex-boyfriend Peter kissed me on my fourteenth birthday—right over there in the corner of the room? By the stairs? That caused some problems. Can you hold on a minute? I have to go to the bathroom.
[TAMI gets off her bar stool, then spots two well-coiffed, tan, skinny girls in their late teens exiting the restroom and sits back down.]
TAMI: Whoa. I'm not going in there. Look—Abercrombies.
RYAN [Cupping his hands around his mouth, he shouts at the two girls as they pass by]: Prep!
TAMI: I'm going to wait.
FOR THE SKATEBOARDERS AND THEIR friends who are Marq*E regulars, as well as the store clerks, the mall is a stage on which drama crescendos and fades within minutes: Gossip flows, relationships develop and dissolve, friendships are saved, fistfights break out. As the day wears on, though, more and more teens arrive, most of whom have no interest in the skate park. They come from as far away as Clear Lake, on the southeast fringe of the city—a 45-minute drive.
The kids have come here to cruise the strip, strolling in groups as big as ten or as small as two. They check their cell phones, stop for ice cream at Maggie Moo's, pump tokens into the video games at Jillian's, and duck into the theater to catch films like Halloween: Resurrection. Boys sporting do-rags and oversized basketball jerseys introduce themselves to groups of girls dressed in low-riding baggy jeans. A pair of spindly limbed, baby-skinned brunettes flash their braces at a boy wearing XXXL clothes and a puka shell choker. Some kids dress like athletes, some like hard-core punkers. Clusters of both genders discuss their sexual exploits. A punk store-clerk recalled overhearing one twelve-year-old girl tell another twelve-year-old girl, "You think he's cute? I had sex with him; he's cool. You should do him."
I joined the promenade, trying to catch snatches of conversation. A group of eight preppy, black sixteen-year-old girls dared a member of their pack to gather the phone numbers of boys of different ethnicities. She wrote on a piece of paper the letters B (for black), W (for white), M (for Mexican), C (for Chinese), and I (for Indian). Within fifteen minutes, she had collected numbers for all but the Indian. Not willing to give up, she tried to charm Hispanic boys into helping her cause, saying with a wink as her girlfriends giggled and the boys blushed, "Come on. Are you sure you're not Indian?"
Scene: Still at the bar at Jillian's, an hour later. TAMI, PATTI, ANGEL, and RYAN have decided they want to bowl, and they wait for a lane to become available.
TAMI: Okay. So Ryan had asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I said, "White roses with pink trim," and Ryan brought them to me! [She bats her eyes at RYAN.] That was downstairs at Jillian's. We stayed there for a while and then went to Maggie Moo's. He did all that for me and then cheated on me. See, Ryan has a friend John—some guy, John. And John was hanging around with this French guy named Fred. But John told Ryan he had been going out with me himself, and then Ryan got mad and started going with a girl named Carrie. He didn't meet her here at the mall. But I found out and got her number from Roberto.
RYAN: Me and Roberto are still friends.
My Library
