Every Mall I’ve Ever Loved by Veronica Valdes

A narrator picks up their life and relocates to LA from the midwest with their partner.

The Mall of America (MOA) was the first mall I ever loved. It was built on the site of a former baseball stadium, a pseudo-gravesite, in the late 1980s and opened in 1992, four years before I was born. My first memories of MOA are of its indoor amusement park, which was called Camp Snoopy when I was a child and later became Nickelodeon Universe. It’s shaped like a football stadium, with three and a half floors of stores, food courts, multiple Starbucks, and movie theaters wrapped around a sprawling park. Domed glass ceilings help mitigate the sensation of being stuck inside all day. It’s designed as an alternative to sitting inside your house during the throes of a dark Minnesota winter. There is something so joyous about it: everyone stuffed inside a modern colosseum playing pleasant Christmas music, happy to see people and happy to be seen. It makes perfect sense that I fell in love for the first time in that mall.

Bloomington is a middle-of-the-road suburb 15 minutes outside of Minneapolis and an overall okay place to grow up. By the time I was 15, my overworked single mother pretty much gave me complete independence. I was best friends with three girls at school, but especially Rachel, who was loud and funny and dyed her hair black and wore push up bras and lived five minutes walking distance from me. I had never taken men seriously until I started hanging out with those girls. They were obsessed. This was during the era of Tumblr and One Direction and indie boys. The boys at school were awkward or jockish, so we outsourced. We went to the mall every weekend and flirted with our favorite cashiers. 

One day we saw Andrew and his friends outside of Urban Outfitters. He was a boy in our grade–tall, skinny and cute-ish, but with greasy red hair and acne. He wore Converse and skinny jeans, unlike the lacrosse bro style that was popular among the boys at our school. His friends looked older and cooler than he did, and they invited us to a show for their band, Banana Boys. 

Andrew was the bassist. He and three other white boys thrashed around on stage at a coffee shop patio turned concert venue in big white t-shirts and boxer shorts. It was kind of hot. Tony, the lead singer, had an okay voice, but I can’t remember any of their songs. 

We became regulars at their shows in Minneapolis basements and started to feel cool, like we were part of an in-crowd in the city. A week after my 17th birthday, Andrew asked me out. Truthfully, I felt ambivalent towards him but I loved how he smoked my friends out and drove me around in his mom’s old Buick. I loved his friends and having something to do on weekends. I learned to enjoy kissing him on his stale-smelling bed sheets. I even learned to enjoy sex with him.

I stopped going to the mall so much, except with my mom. It was our bonding time. There is something so transportive about that place. I still make a point of taking my mom to MOA for Black Friday if I’m in town for Thanksgiving. 

Andrew became an asshole during our senior year of high school. He started poking fun at my awkwardness. He made fun of my music taste and my Tumblr. I wasn’t equipped to spar with him. I was a lanky teenage girl, and confrontation was not a skill I had learned yet. I just held his hand tighter and made it my mission to always be around him. I used sex to keep him around. 

“Ava, you need hobbies,” he said to me one evening in my bed, while ripping his nicotine pen. This was before the dawn of disposable vapes, when the cartridges were attached to a rig.

“I asked you not to do that here,” I complained.

“Your mom won’t be home for hours, just open a window,” Andrew responded. 

“Well, it’s also bad for you.”

“Oh my god. Now you sound immature. Like, you have to stop acting like that,” he mumbled. He looked bored. 

“Do you want to watch a movie downstairs?” I offered. 

“The last movie you made me watch was like, creepy. It was for little girls,” he was talking about Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging. “I’m gonna go hang out in Tony’s basement, but I can pick you up before school tomorrow.”

“You’re just gonna leave right after we had sex?” I sounded more pathetic than I had intended to.

“Don’t be like that.” He then looked me up and down, menacingly, “At Tony’s party this weekend, can you not get too drunk? You were annoying everyone last time. I’m fine with it, but I don’t want to annoy his friends. They’re more mature and aren’t there just to be stupid.”

I shrugged and watched him get dressed. He helped himself to a banana, a granola bar and a Diet Dr. Pepper from my mom’s pantry before saying goodbye.

“Ugh I fucking hate diet,” I heard him say to himself as he walked to his car. 

That spring, I found out through my friend Shayla that he had been sleeping with Rachel for 3 months. I had never in my life cried so hard in front of another human being. In front of Andrew. He hardly showed so much as a single emotion. He just bowed his head in shame and awkwardly broke up with me. 

I hadn’t planned much for myself after high school. I spent most of the following two years smoking weed with my best friend Jonathan. He was blonde and gay and had a K-pop hyperfixation. Sometimes I would watch him recreate dances as music videos played in the background. Sometimes he would sneer at my outfit choices when we went shopping together, even though his own style was mostly flannels and jeans. 

Every time I hooked up with a guy, I called him right after, and vice versa. Jonathan got me a job at H&M, which was the only place hiring full-time. I balanced that with community college classes. 

The Southdale Center isn’t nearly as grandiose or metropolitan as MOA. It’s about a one-minute drive from MOA–half the distance to Minneapolis. When I worked there, it was still recovering from the recession, with dilapidated closed storefronts and depressing 90s-era tiling. It has since been remodeled and remains somewhat of a novelty. Built in 1956, the Southdale Center was the world’s first indoor suburban shopping mall. It’s the brainchild of Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen. Gruen lived in Southern California and helped design the sunny, car-centric, cookie-cutter model of 50s and 60s American life that made every suburb in this country look like… that. 

The indoor mall was Gruen’s offering to the lonely housewives of the 20th century–a town square for people who live in detached neighborhoods. During college, I lived in my mom’s house in Bloomington. It was cluttered and messy. I spent most of my time in my childhood room. In the dead of winter, I’d hotbox my bathroom with Jonathan until the entire house smelled like weed and my mom would silently turn up her nose and retreat to her room. As long as I promised her I was getting good grades, she didn’t care. My mom’s neighborhood is close enough to the city to be removed from nature, but suburban enough to feel quiet and boring. We went to the mall just to walk around on cold winter days. On weekends, we’d stay in Minneapolis and party with our college friends. But most of the time I did homework and spent languid hours folding clothes at H&M. 

I would stare longingly onto the open concept of the Southdale Mall from my post, dreaming of clocking out. The building has a domed glass ceiling that dips in angular divots. Even at work I could appreciate the artificial gleam that the mid-century design provided to suburban Minnesotans. Like airports, malls are one of the few public spaces where it’s normal for a woman to wander by herself. Then I met Evan. 

Our manager introduced us in 2015. He had beautiful jet-black hair and was the same height as me, his face boyish and warm. Sometimes we talked about music and high school and our plans for the future. We started smoking weed together in his car on our breaks. I would come back to the sales floor stoned and more than once Evan would physically guide me from post to post and remind me how to fix the displays as we both giggled.

I finished my generals at community college and was working towards an architectural design degree at the University of Minnesota. Evan had filmmaking dreams and spent his free time recording his friends skateboarding and posting compilations on his YouTube, which received considerable views. One night, we went to a party together for a mutual friend. I found myself feeling nervous. 

Jonathan, who had also become close to Evan, was supposed to be there, but he had cancelled last minute. Evan made me feel comfortable that night. He seemed to know everyone in the room and introduced them all to me as if I was the most special girl in the world. I wanted Evan. The more I drank, the stronger I felt it. I couldn’t hear a thing he was saying over the loud music but I liked how his hands were animated when he talked. I liked how he emphasized his vowels when he got excited. It made me want to protect him. A girl introduced herself to him and I felt jealous. I glued myself to him until we were dancing together in a dark sticky basement. I drank until I was throwing up over a porch and Evan was holding my hair. After that night, we were inseparable.

We never officially declared our relationship status. When I turned 22, I was practically living in Evan’s bedroom, in a house in St. Paul that he shared with 4 of his friends. I graduated college that summer and we moved into our first apartment together in Saint Paul. I was interning at an architecture firm and Evan balanced H&M with a film editing program. The apartment was old, with brick walls and hardwood floors. We could hardly afford it. I loved the way it flooded with light in the afternoon. I loved the smell of sunlight on shiny oak beams. We lived there for 2 years before moving to Los Angeles. 

The Americana in Glendale, California, is the third major mall of my life. The office of the architecture firm I worked for was located in a conjoined building. The mall has a Disney Land-ish vibe. Its stores surround a sort of town square, modeled after a chic European city with two pool-sized fountains in the middle. I went there after work sometimes just to walk around. It opened in 2008, six years after Rick Caruso built the Grove in central LA. They both have that millennial man-made fantasy city vibe, but the Americana is clearly the pretty sister. It’s really the crown jewel of all those trendy outdoor luxury malls that are designed to evoke a pleasant feeling of dissociation from their surrounding environments. I found Rick Caruso himself disturbing, and when he ran for office, I deeply feared a Los Angeles governed by him. But damn it, he knows how to make a good mall.

Something about the Americana’s artificial leisurely environment brought me a feeling of safety during my first year in Los Angeles. In a way, Gruen’s aesthetic of suburban paradise connects Minneapolis and LA–both car-centric cities. It was Evan’s idea to move here. He decided that his dream was to work in entertainment. He found PA work for a big studio that made real movies. I was able to find my architecture job. We packed up our lives and moved to a one bedroom in Little Armenia. 

My first year here was an onslaught of noises and smells and heat and sunburn. Los Angeles is bigger than I realized. The streets are dirtier and more chaotic than I had ever imagined. One October weekend, Evan and I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway in my Ford Focus and had sex in a mid-century modern motel room in Big Sur. It was the most in love with him I had ever felt. 

I held his hand as we walked down a spectacular and chilly beach. At that point, I wasn’t yet sure what I was doing in California, but I felt divorced from the struggles of my life in Minnesota. I fucking loved it. I didn’t have to think about my aging mother or my friends who were 23 and pregnant. In a sense, I had done everything that was expected of me by my single immigrant mom. I saved money by doing my generals at community college and finished at a state school on a generous scholarship, throughout which I supported myself working fulltime retail hours. I lived at home. Then I lived with a boyfriend. In Minnesota, I was depressed and bored and hadn’t truly had fun since I was a teenager smoking weed in Andrew’s basement.

Life here is fun. The challenge of acclimating was fun for me. Sure, it was hard, but I felt like I was really doing something. The architecture of LA is fascinating. I went to every Nuetra and Wright house I could find. With extra time on my hands afforded by not having a social life yet, I started posting TikToks of my LA architecture tours that went viral. It had partly been Evan’s idea, but he stopped helping me after my third video. 

About six months into living together in Los Angeles, Evan grew increasingly distant. The move wasn’t panning out how he expected. The balancing of low-paying studio work and bartending hours left little time for our relationship. When he was home, he buried himself in video games. One week he took off to Minnesota to visit his family. He hadn’t even mentioned it to me until the night before. 

I was more financially solvent than him. He was stuck paying off an expensive film degree, and I made more money. I was often covering his half of the rent. But I still felt bad for Evan. He didn’t make friends like I did. 

Kai was Jonathan’s friend who I met when Jonathan visited. After spending years with Jonathan and his friends, I felt at home with gay guys. Kai loved me the instant we met; he said so himself. That night we went out to Akbar and he introduced me to all of his beautiful friends and they asked me if I liked molly. I had never tried it before, but pretended that I had. I was nearly falling over, shaking my ass for strangers. The louder and messier I was, the more they loved me. It felt cathartic because Evan had become distant and increasingly boring. He haggled over money and treated me like I was annoying and frivolous, even though I was the clearly stable one in our relationship. He couldn’t stand the weight of his stupid little dreams. He treated me like an annoying little sister.

Alicia was my coworker and happened to be in the same friend group as Kai. The first day I saw her in the office, I did a double take because she looked like an actress or model or heiress of some kind. Her shiny black hair was waist-length. On that day she was adorned with a black mini skirt and accessorized with expensive-looking boots. She introduced herself to me and we chatted briefly. I thought she was too pretty to be my friend. I know it’s not a fair judgment to make, but I just assumed she was a bitch. We ran into each other in the beige colored break room and kept it cordial. I was scared she didn’t like me. Then I saw her at a house party that Kai, who was becoming my best friend, took me to. It was in Silverlake, at a house nestled into a thick bush with an elevated garden that had been turned into a dj booth and dancefloor.

“Oh my god Avaaa,” she cheered as we did shots together. We drunkenly babbled for hours in a semi-warm hot tub. I was shocked by how nice she was, and felt bad for judging her. She invited me to coffee later that week.

“It’s like he wants space from me, but he won’t leave the house,” I confessed over an iced Americano, in a shaded patio furnished with chic terra cotta furniture. 

“Does he even love you?” Alicia asked. 

“I guess so. Sometimes I feel like he couldn’t manage without me, but that’s probably not true,” I responded.

“I’m calling social services for you, girl” She said flippantly. I laughed. “Sorry, relationships depress me. I don’t want to say anything I’ll regret,” she added. I couldn’t believe how cool and vulnerable this beautiful LA girl was being with me.  

“Girl, fuck him, I don’t care.” 

She, Kai, and I formed a little trio. We made inside jokes. We were together, with other friends, with Laura, and Jessica, who was blonde and dressed like a Disney Channel actress. We went to see a movie at the Americana AMC every Tuesday. Sometimes I brought Evan along, but he felt like dead weight. He didn’t like the parties we went to, where women and gay guys got obnoxiously drunk together and acted like straight men did not matter or even exist. 

One night, I was out with Alicia and a few other friends at a small, dark and heavily perfumed bar called Silverlake Lounge and I wandered into part of the bar where I met a man who reminded me of Andrew, my first boyfriend, except more handsome. He was tall and lanky with strawberry blonde hair and he worked in music. I chatted with him while Alicia and my friends spied on us. 

“You’re not from Minnesota, are you?” I asked, drunkenly wondering if it was Andrew, all grown up.

“That’s random. No, why do you ask?” he responded. His face was eerily similar to Andrew’s, or maybe I was just drunk. The bar felt easy and graceful that night. I felt more comfortable than I usually do at these places. The dirty tile floors were crowded with young, hot women who were dressed in a sort of 2000s preppy/goth hybrid style. I was also dressed that way. Not-Andrew looked at me curiously, like I was about to say something funny. I was awestruck by the prettiness of this man’s face. As I watched the dim lights fill in his high cheekbones and cat-like facial structure, I fell deeper into his magnitude. Not-Andrew was just as irresistible as Andrew had been all those years ago. 

“Oh, sorry, I thought you looked like someone I used to know,” I responded, embarrassed. 

“An old boyfriend?” He grinned. What a bold thing to say. This tall, skinny Silverlake man in a tweed blazer that he obviously thrifted made me want to be bold.

“Yes, actually. His name was Andrew,” I offered.

“Well I’m Jeremiah,” Not-Andrew responded. We kept chatting for a few minutes when

I heard Alicia scream.

“OH MY GOOOOOOD,” she dragged out her words as she fiercely hugged him. My heart dropped. This meant he wasn’t just a handsome douchey man at a bar, but a real person, who knows my people. And my people know that I’m nothing but a sad midwestern transplant with no money and an even sadder boyfriend who I simultaneously hated and couldn’t live without. 

We spent the rest of the night chatting. He was a musician–of course he was–who conveniently lived walking distance from the bar. We all ended up at his apartment, shared lines of coke and laid on a pristine Persian rug that was elegantly splayed across his mid-century modern apartment. It wasn’t the apartment of a young struggling musician; it was bigger than the apartment I shared with Evan and expertly decorated in organic wooden tones and modern beiges. We played cards, and then at 4am, Alicia and Jessica left, and I planted myself firmly on Andrew’s couch. Bye girlllllllllllllll they sneered in a you-know-we’re-gonna-be-talking-about-this way. 

Finally, we were alone, and I laid my head on his lap. He stroked my hair, something Evan hadn’t done in months. Before I allowed myself to sleep, I slowly lifted myself to his level and kissed him. He seemed sweet and felt warm and I dug my hands into the base of his neck. Then--and before this, I did not believe that this was a real thing that men actually did--he lifted me off the couch and twirled me around. I screamed and giggled as he placed me delicately on the ottoman.

“Should we go to my room?” he grinned. 

We had sex for hours, taking breaks to smoke cigarettes on his balcony and drink water and cuddle and laugh at each other’s jokes. It was 7am when I finally dozed off. He woke me at 11 and offered to drop me off on his way to a recording session. I didn’t have to worry about Evan–he was visiting his family in Minnesota again. 

Before he drove me home, we laid together in his bed for a brief while longer. We held and looked at each other and absorbed the white sunlight coming through his windows. I held his hand against my bare chest. I felt him get hard, but we did nothing about it. By noon, I was in my home, alone. 

On the following Monday, Alicia came to my cubicle and crouched beside me. “Bitttchhh how was it?”

“I just ruined my life.” 

“I know you and Evan are in a tough spot–” 

“We’re not in a tough spot,” I interrupted, defensive. Alicia tilted her eyes to the side. She motioned to get up, but I pulled her back down to me. 

“Okay, okay, it’s true, but I fucking cheated on him,” I was whispering now. “Have you ever cheated on someone?” I asked, hoping she would say yes.

“Well, um, I haven’t been in a very serious relationship yet. I mean, kind of, but I guess I didn’t cheat on him… also, I think I might be a lesbian. I told you I’m on gay Hinge now,” she stammered. 

“Well…” my voice trailed off. I had so much more to say, but I couldn’t find the words. 

“Listen, babe, I have to go, but let’s go out for lunch. We need to talk about this,” Alicia dashed out.

For the next couple hours I stared at my computer screen blankly. I had earned a reputation in the office for how quickly I worked. By some divine grace, I’m the kind of person that’s able to sit down and pour myself into design software for hours. I usually finish a day’s work in half the time. On that day I was paralyzed. Alicia was right that I had been on the fence about Evan for a while now, but I had never cheated on anyone. 

Selfishly, my biggest problem with the entire situation was having to withhold my infidelity and possibly lie to Evan. I don’t like lying, not because I’m morally opposed to it, but because it’s hard to do and requires a lot of effort. It’s awkward and befuddling. A good cheater–as in, morally good–would probably have called her partner and confessed her sins. She would have flown to Minnesota and cried to Evan and Evan’s mom and asked for forgiveness and gone to that awful church with them. Maybe I would’ve been that girl a few years ago. But as guilty as I felt I also felt indifferent to the mopy, bitter man I was living with. 

I also couldn’t stop thinking about Not-Andrew. I didn’t even try to hide it from Alicia. I asked her everything she knew about him. They had gone to high school together in Pasadena and remained friends. He was always in and out of relationships and often on tour as a guitar tech for huge bands, which impressed me. He had an air of importance.

When I got home I called Not-Andrew. He responded, and I asked if I could see him tomorrow night, before Evan came back. He said yes, but when tomorrow came, he cancelled over text:

Hey hottie, I’m sorry I can’t make tonight work. Swamped.

I stared at the text as if it were written in Cuneiform. This couldn’t be real. I hadn’t been single for a while, and I didn’t remember men being this unabashedly douchey. I couldn’t stop pacing around my apartment. What the fuck was he doing? Surely something couldn’t have come up. Unable to spend the rest of the night alone, wondering why this fuckass man wasn’t available anymore, I drove to his house by memory, using my understanding of the Los Angeles grid; a skill I cultivated from being addicted to google maps. 

I called him when I was outside the gate of his apartment and he buzzed me in. He opened the door defensively and stood in the way of his apartment, looking concerned. 

“I want you,” I said, ravenously. 

“You’re crazy,” he grinned. He pulled me in and we fucked, again, but in the kitchen this time and even more intensely. Then we fucked again. And again. 

“What if you lived here with me?” he said into my ear as we lay in bed, still half inside me. 

“Don’t fuck with me,” I responded. I wasn’t even thinking about Evan, who Not-Andrew did not know about. Something was happening to me. It was like I could feel myself turn cynical. I found myself responding sharply to the ridiculous things he said. 

The next day, I offered to pick Evan up at the airport. “I can just take the flyaway, it’s okay, babe.”

He took the shuttle, and I waited for him on our small kitchen table. As I sat waiting, I noticed the clutter of Evan’s things: cameras, boxes, skateboards and books that had infiltrated our living room. When he walked through the door, he smiled, took off his shoes, kissed me on the forehead and said he was turning in early tonight. 

Not-Andrew invited me over. It wasn’t hard to hide it from Evan, who was avoiding me after I had asked him to keep his things more organized (I mean, he was practically home all the time). As I was leaving Not-Andrew's apartment, he asked if he could take me to dinner next time, on a real date. I stupidly said yes. In the following weeks, he never followed up or responded to any of my texts. Evan even commented on how I was always staring at my phone.

Finally, I decided to show up at Not-Andrew’s apartment again. Again, I called from his front gate, this time to no response. I waited for twenty minutes on the lush Silverlake street he lived on. The flowers in LA are so crazy looking. I fixated on a bush with pink flowers that looked like they had sharp little teeth coming out of them. Right as I was about to give up, Not-Andrew came back holding the hand of a pretty and tiny goth-looking girl. At almost half his height, she looked more like an accessory than a person. He was clearly shocked to see me (can you blame him??). Before he could say anything, I speed-walked away. 

“What the fuck was that?” I heard the girl say in a squeaky voice.

For the next month, I tried to bury myself in work and social media, which had also become work, to distract myself. I posted videos about discrepancies in LA’s urban grid, tours of historic houses, and really anything that catered to the audience I was building. 

I found the goth girl who Not-Andrew seemed to be dating on Instagram. Her name was Lia. I spent hours every day looking through Lia’s profile. I couldn't quite place how old she was or what she did, but I did learn that she has perfect tits. (BTW, have you ever noticed how girls with perfect tits almost always have awful haircuts? What’s that about??) When she posted her first photo with him, I cried, not because I wanted to date Not-Andrew, but because he had so clearly used me for sex. 

Evan and I were bickering all the time about money, space, and friends. I urged him to come out with me more. 

“I’m sorry but, like, that’s just not my vibe,” he said about getting drinks with Kai and a few others. 

“What do you mean?” I asked, defensively. 

“I mean, I just want to have conversations with substance,” he responded. 

“YOU DON’T HAVE CONVERSATIONS PERIOD, UNLESS IT’S WITH YOUR FUCKING FAMILY ON THE PHONE.” I stormed out of the room.  

The heat wasn’t helping. Our apartment had bad air conditioning, and we were in the midst of a September heatwave. The glaring sun and hundred-degree weather put me on edge. It was my first encounter with a real LA heatwave. As I drove home from work through the flat, prairie-style houses of East Hollywood, I could see billowing clouds of heat form above them. They looked like underwater currents, crashing over the urban grid. The streets were so dry they looked like they might crack. 

I didn’t want to be at home that weekend, and my friends seemed to all be out of town, so I asked Evan to accompany me to the Burbank Town Center, to sit in the air conditioning and record a new TikTok series about LA’s mall culture. Each video would take place on location and span the history of a mall’s construction. I wanted to track the development and failure of Gruen’s vision for the indoor American mall. I thought Evan would be excited to help, but instead, he asked why I would choose to spend my time at a mall.

“Because it’s a hundred fucking degrees,” I responded. 

He reluctantly agreed. The next morning, as we were about to leave, he asked if we could stop in Highland Park to pick up a furniture rack that he found on Facebook Marketplace. 

“Babe, it’s too hot out,” I pleaded. He complained that he was already doing my thing and that I had asked him to de-clutter. I caved. When we got to the car, the AC wouldn’t turn on because it was too hot. 

Evan drove us to an impressive-looking house where a man with visible sweat stains stood in his driveway with the rack. It was massive and hardly fit in my car. I was sweaty and furious by the time we managed to load it in. 

We decided to eat at the Ikea next to the mall. Evan already looked sour. He then, between bites of Swedish meatballs, began to complain about Los Angeles and my friends and his family and how hard it was to find work. It felt like a monologue, one that I was forced to endure. 

“Can we just go home?” he asked after his monologue, looking like a petulant little boy.

“We haven’t even gone to the Town Center, though,” I responded, as if he were one.

“We don’t even need anything there. Why do you want to go?” 

“I told you I want to do a TikTok series, and it’s too hot at home,” I pleaded. 

He pondered this and offered, out of nowhere, “I just don’t think LA is for us.”

“What?” I responded.

“I don’t think we’re happy here,” he said. We were in the middle of the bright Ikea food court overlooking the freeway, surrounded by families and old people and tired-looking couples. 

I thought about arguing, but instead said, “You know what, you’re right, let’s go home,” because I wanted to get away from Evan. Anywhere would suffice. We cleared our trays and walked out of IKEA without a single item. 

The car was a sauna and the AC wouldn’t pick up. “You didn’t ask me how I like LA, by the way,” I huffed. 

“I just don’t like this version of you,” he responded calmly, “I was talking to my parents and–”

“What do you mean you were talking to your parents? About what? Do they hate me too, now?” 

“Everything is about you. That’s great, everything is about you,” he said, mockingly. “Even this fucking heatwave, let’s make it about you.”

“I’m sorry, I want to be proactive about the heat today. It’s driving me insane, and you’re driving me insane.” We drove in silence for the rest of the ride. 

Before I could get out of our parked car, Evan took a deep, serious breath and waited for my complete stillness to announce, “I think we should move back. I think we were doing much better in Minneapolis. I think you’ll be much happier.” He then proceeded to reach over and squeeze my hand.

“Okay, well, I need to think about it,” I responded, feeling my stomach drop. I moved his hand away and got out of the car.  

“The thing is, I just… It’s the only way. This is my only option. I think we need to be realistic about where we are and what we want,” Evan said. We were now both standing in our building’s parking lot, facing each other. I felt my mouth go numb, and my mind began to race. Weirdly, in that sliver of time before I responded, I found myself thinking about Andrew, my high school boyfriend, and the way he made fun of my stutter, how I didn’t dress sexy enough, and how I never knew the right thing to say. 

“I cheated on you. Last month, with one of Alicia’s friends.” 

“What?” he said, staring at me blankly.

“It was a month ago with this guy I met at a bar, and he knows Alicia. I’m sorry, I just think you need to know,” I said, through tears. I hate crying.

Evan looked shocked and I saw his face turn to anger. Not the anger of a violent man, but a child. He then hurled his iPhone at my left tit. 

“OW!” I screamed. 

The phone fell to the ground with a symphony of clunks. He stomped off as soon as he threw it, as if he were running away. It was the most childish thing I had ever seen him do. 

I picked up his cell phone and followed him inside. He locked himself in our room and asked me to leave. I sat on the ground outside the door until he came out, then we proceeded to cry and fight for an hour. Evan slept on the couch, which made me feel terrible, because wasn’t I the one who should be doing that? Wasn’t I the cheater?

The following morning, as I sat at our tiny kitchen table, Evan stood firm on his offer, “We can move back to Minneapolis and try to fix this, or it’s over.” 

How enticing. I didn’t respond. I just winced and shrugged. What more was there to say? The following week, Evan’s family came to help him move out. I helped them, though they treated me like a criminal, or an adultress; as if I bore a scarlet letter on my chest. 

I slept in Alicia’s roommate’s bed that week. Conveniently, he was moving to New York at the end of the month and pretty much already living there. Evan stayed at our apartment for a week after his parents helped him move his things out. We had been living there for just over a year, and our lease was finally month-to-month, which allowed Alicia’s roommate to offer the room to me. I accepted. I called Evan weeping on Saturday, two days before he left LA, to ask if he wanted to spend some time together while he was still in town. 

“No, I’m good,” he said coldly over the phone. 

I spent the day locked in my new room, crying. Alicia begged me to go out that night, but I refused. The next morning, I woke up early and drove to the Beverly Center. I had decided that I would start my mall series there. I had over 100k TikTok followers. They knew me as a quirky LA urban planning and architecture girl. Sometimes my videos went into great detail and other times I just walked around pretty places spewing random information. I made sure to dress in loud, trendy clothes. I made sure to always shoot from several different angles and I edited the videos meticulously. I enjoyed building a public persona. In a way, strangely, it felt like a fuck-you to Evan. 

The Beverly Center was the perfect place to launch the series. It’s known for a droll, ominous kind of vibe. It’s an ugly white spaceship overlooking La Cienaga–a monument to the decadence of LA in the 80s. 

Its odd structure is shaped by several angled intersecting Beverly Hills roads, and the Salt Lake Oil Field. Underneath the mall live 45 active oil wells, like bugs nesting in the dirt. Inside, it’s a fishbowl of Victor Gruen’s vision for suburban life, in the fucking middle of Los Angeles. The noise of La Cienaga and Beverly fails to penetrate its icing-white, cold walls. The stores inside cater to rich Beverly Hills customers and are usually empty. This is due in part to its outdated style. LA’s most popular malls incorporate lush outdoor elements, such as the Century City Mall and the Americana. A $500 million renovation in 2018 tidied up and millenial-ified the gleaming white building but ultimately failed to give it a resurgence. 

I spent the greater part of my Sunday at the Beverly Center. I had my laptop and a notepad. I sat on the modern red chairs and took notes for my TikToks. I treated myself to Starbucks and Gelato. I walked into Nordstrom and looked at the shoes. I love malls because they are a rare public space where I can comfortably kill time and be alone. 

As I walked around, I thought about Evan and how he judged me for liking the things I like. I thought about the massive building I stood in, built atop a fracking operation, hiding its true purpose with sparkling modernism and luxury. In that moment, the decadence of LA, a complicated city that never appears to outsiders in real life as it does to them on their screens, made sense to me. My heart wasn’t with Evan. It was here, at the mall.