I was 13, and my girlfriends and I had just begun to hang out with some older boys. It was the summer before the eighth grade, and they were 16, going to be juniors, and they had a car. We’d hang out late at night, each telling our mothers that we were at the other friend’s house, and we’d mostly hang out on the jungle gyms at the park or drive out to the Las Vegas desert and drink wine coolers.
None of us had fake IDs yet, or looked even remotely close to age 21, so we decided one night to steal some beer from a gas station. I went in with one of the older boys, and the others waited with the car running. He grabbed a case of beer and I held the door open as he ran through it, both of us sprinting through the parking lot into the already-moving car.
We never got caught.
I have thought about this event many times since then. At first, and for years afterwards, I used to tell the story to my friends, because I thought it made me seem so adventurous and edgy. More recently, I would marvel at our luck, as many of those friends and others I knew from Las Vegas became entangled with the law in one way or another.
And now I just think: What if we did get caught? And what if that same story took place in Buffalo, or Raleigh, or Brooklyn?
[For more of this story, written by Roxanna Asgarian, go to http://jjie.org/reporters-note...-many-states/107968/]
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