In the meantime, all he had was oversized jeans and shorts to wear. As a consequence, Howard had decided to wear shorts to the Mall. At least he couldn’t trip over the cuffs of the shorts like he did the jeans. He wore one of his old blue polo shirts over the shorts to hide some of their bagginess, but the camouflage wasn’t very effective. The sagging spaciousness of the short’s bottom was obvious from behind. The polo shirt wasn’t an improvement either, it had become so large on him that the shoulder seams slide down over his thin deltoids and the hem of the shirt draped around his hips like a peasant tunic of the Middle Ages. Fortunately for Howard, the poor dress affected by the teens of the nineties had returned to style. Dirty, bedraggled bagginess was in, sharp clothes for teens was out. He would have been able to emulate the part perfectly had his footwear been an expensive brand of air-cushioned sports sneakers, but all he had to wear were the rubber zorries that Anita had purchased from Goodwill. Nonetheless, He looked like any one of the hundreds of teenaged Mall rats who spent their weekends haunting the broad walkways and atriums of the Mall looking for entertainment and freedom from parental control. His shabby ensemble merely gave him the air of being fashionably unkempt, thus validating his freedom from parental discipline to the eyes of the symbol-obsessed, self-conscious near-adults who could find nothing better to do with their time than walk up and down the Mall looking at merchandise they couldn’t afford. He followed behind Anita, going from store-to-store as she made her purchases.

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