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store near school, in the afternoon. Each teen-ager picked out several Liz Claiborne spring outfits. They had agreed to split up and meet outside the store. Stacey put her clothes in her book bag and was apprehended as she left the store. Crystal, at sixteen, was an experienced shoplifter. Whenshe was five or six years old, Florence often took her to “fancy department stores,” like Bloomingdale’s, from which Florence stole clothes to sell for drugs: a child was something of a decoy to throw off security. If Crystal needed a coat, Florence would take one off a rack, pop the ticket, and put the coat on Crystal. Most of the time, Florence just concealed the clothes she selected to “boost,” over a special girdle and under her coat. Crystal was frightened when Florence was caught, arrested, and taken away for shoplifting, but she was too young to understand what the arrest was about. (She had also been frightened when Florence was arrested for welfare fraud and for selling drugs.) At eight or nine, Crystal and a group of her friends frequently stole Silly Putty and other toys from a discount store in their Bronx neighborhood. At the group home, she stole from department stores. It wasn’t because St. Christopher’s clothing allowance was low, or because she couldn’t afford what she wanted, that she stole. Daquan gave her money regularly. Clarence, the father of Florence’s youngest son, gave her fifty dollars here and a hundred dollars there. (A child-care worker who knew her well was convinced that she earned that money by going to bed with him.) Crystal stole because she calculated, “Why buy when I can just take? I can get me a new outfit and still have money in my pocket.”
    That particular afternoon at Stern’s, Crystal didn’t feel comfortable. Stacey, from the room where she was being detained, overheard the store’s security personnel observing Tiffany putting the outfits she wanted in her schoolbag. WhenCrystal hesitated, Tiffany handed her the schoolbag, took the clothes Crystal wanted, and put them in Crystal’s schoolbag. As Tiffany walked out of the store, she got caught carrying Crystal’s clothes. Crystal was caught carrying Tiffany’s. The three girls were taken to a precinct in Flushing. After they were booked, they were released because none of them had ever been convicted of a crime. (Crystal’s drug case was still pending.) Tiffany and Stacey called their parents, who drove to the station house to fetch them. Crystal took the Q-17 bus and the Q-2 bus back to the group home. The child-care worker on duty had already received a call from the police.
    At the time, Crystal thought, Damn, those parents could have given me a ride, but, oh, well, anyway, life goes on. Once in a great while, she envied the few girls she had grown up with whose mothers didn’t beat them; girls whose mothers gave them everything they wanted, including a steady supply of new clothes, and not just new clothes at the start of school, for Christmas, and for Easter, and hand-me-downs and stolen goods the rest of the year; girls who had never lived in an apartment lit by candles because the electricity had been turned off; girls whose mothers didn’t embarrass them when they came to school, as Florence embarrassed her on the infrequent occasions when she was summoned, because her hands were puffy from skin-popping. (The other kids saw her hands and taunted Crystal, saying, “Your mother’s a dope fiend.”) And, as she grew older, she sometimes envied girls whose mothers were there for them—who had apartments, so that their daughters weren’t putinto foster care. Much of the time, Crystal simply acknowledged that her mother and her father, whom she hadn’t seen in years, were drug addicts, who would never be the kind of family she hoped for, and, instead, looked on the bright side of group-home life.
    Back at 104th Avenue, a child-care