Summer: Learning the rules Six weeks earlier, when Kitten first started hanging out downtown, street life wasn’t so inviting. But at least it seemed better than her mom's house. According to Kitten, her mom drank, and Chuck, her mom's boyfriend, was abusive to Kitten, her older brother and their mother. One day, she said, Chuck knocked Kitten's mother on her back during an argument. Kitten moved to her dad's one-bedroom condo. But he hit her when she disobeyed his rules. Kitten knew a girl from school who had joined the "mall rats," teenagers who lived on the streets of downtown Eugene, streets closed to traffic decades ago to create a pedestrian mall. Most of them were runaways. Like Kitten, many were fleeing homes where they were beaten, raped, or otherwise abused by the adults. Some of the kids didn't even know where their parents were. When she settled into life on the streets in late August, Kitten had only a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, so she borrowed clothes from Tanya--an older (and larger) woman who sometimes looked out for people downtown. Tanya also gave her some earrings and a red book bag. Everything Kitten owned was in the bag. The mall rats also gave the young girl her street name. Her real name was Olivia, but they called her Kitten. Maybe it was because she looked so cute and helpless--she certainly felt that way. She knew it'd be tough to live on the streets, but to her and the other kids, however tough it was, it was better than home. Kitten had a lot to learn, and quickly. All the things she'd taken for granted at home weren't there for her now. At home, even though there was trouble, she had a bed of her own. When it rained, she had a roof. When her stomach growled, there was food in the refrigerator. Now all that was gone. The first time she felt hungry and had no food or money was scary. But she wouldn't go back. She'd watch what the other kids did, like learning how to get money by "spangin'" (a conflation of "spare change" that rhymes with "changing"). Her first night on the street was tough. She didn't know where to sleep. A young girl asleep outside was an obvious target for sexual predators. If a cop found her she could be locked up--it's against the law to sleep outside or in a park after 11 pm. Mall rats knew certain alleys or even fire escapes they could sleep in when it was warm. They told her a good spot was in a green newspaper recycling box--mall rats knew the location of every one of them in the downtown area. And that's where Kitten slept on her first night. She tossed out the papers and flattened cardboard boxes, climbed in, and covered herself with more papers. After a long time, she fell asleep. Over the next few weeks, Kitty learned how to snag free food. The veterans showed her which restaurants, such as IHOP, would let you stay there all night, until the 5 am breakfast crowd came in, as long as you paid 99¢ for a bottomless cup of coffee. They could sometimes get food boxes from Catholic Community services, St. Vincent de Paul, or a program for homeless youth. Any mall rat who had food shared it with the others. Kitten found out that true mall rats were the ones who really had no choice but to live on the streets and who were able to get along with the others. You had to get along to learn the rules of survival. Those who didn't -- who refused to share food when they had it, or who stole from the other rats, or who narked to the cops – were ostracized, sometimes beaten up. They wound up back with their families, or in foster homes or in some state institution. Or on some other street corner in some other town. Kitten found out that sometimes a mall rat would get a temporary job and scrape together enough money to rent an apartment where everyone could crash. Other times, mall rats would pool their spanging take and rent a hotel room for the night--as many as 15 of them crowded into one tiny room. Some kids, like Kitten's friend Sierra, had cars, so they would look for a place to park and sleep where they wouldn't get spotted by cops. As a last resort, they might camp down by the river, even though it was illegal and cops often rousted the campers and confiscated their tents.