For a decade, I spent about 70 percent of my waking hours inside shopping malls as a child. My family was relocated multiple times in the 1980s across South Carolina and Georgia by my father’s employer, a shoe company that owned retail locations in malls. Using my dad’s stockroom as home base, I passed the 12-hour workdays by transforming the detritus of commercial transactions into material for creative play. I made drawings on the backs of inventory forms and built robots, spaceships, and forts using discarded shipping boxes. As the child of a manager, I was bestowed with a backstage pass to the malls, allowing me to wander unhindered between storefronts, backrooms, and hidden hallways.