Venti Vanilla Frappe with Whip
This morning I popped into Starbucks on the way to work - mostly because it was the only place on my way and I was starving. As I stood in the line and looked around the sparsly decorated coffee chain I couldn't help but feel nostalgic.
Starbucks will forever remind me of Friday afternoons at Mercato Mall. Vanilla Ice Frappes with that nasty whipped cream that coats the top of your mouth with a thin layer of something awful.
When Mercato opened in 2002 it was a game changer for teens. Not only did the mall have a cinema and food court but it was near enough to our house that none of our mums minded having to drive us there and back if it meant we'd leave them alone for a few hours.
For the most part, the mall was safe. That being said, I can't count the number of times we were followed around by gangs of boys.
The mall was small but it had lots of little corridors and corners where there were almost no people around, making them places you did not want to end up when you had five or six teenagers a few steps behind you.
Once we went to the mall to go to the cinema and try on clothes we couldn't afford. We went into Berska on the ground floor on a hunt for a belt and after a little bit of browsing, we walked out of the shop to head upstairs to the cinema when we noticed four boys following us.
They were older than us, probably about 16, and had these jeering smiles plastered across their faces. When they realised we'd noticed them they quickened their pace, jumping on the escalator right behind us, knowing we couldn't go anywhere.
They stood just far enough back that they were able to look up our skirts (this was the early 2000s, they weren't exactly long) and one guy reached out and grabbed my friend's ass.
She slapped his hand away and as we got to the top of the escalator we jumped off and made a beeline for the cinema where there were more people and, primarily, adults.
The boys followed us, undeterred by the crowds, they 100% believed they were untouchable; that was when the catcalling started.
They taunted us with vulgar comments about our bodies, told us what they wanted to do to us and no one did anything. People looked put out that they were being disturbed by these loud teens but paid no mind to the two 13-year-olds trying to get away from them.
We ran up the cinema stairs to the screens, where the guy tore our tickets and we rushed into our movie, hoping we'd be safe in the darkness of the theatre.
The whole movie was tainted by the fear that the boys would follow us in, that they'd be waiting for us when we left - thankfully one thing you can always count on is the short attention span of a teenage boy so they weren't.
As we left we both swore to not tell our parents what had happened. Mercato was the only place we were allowed to hang out on the weekends, if they thought it wasn't safe too we'd be stuck at home with our younger siblings all weekend.
