By the time I turned three, I had successfully become a con reader. Not a con artist, per say, although I did have the makings of what one might call a “male manipulator” today.

Today, my partner in the literary aspects of my life is my dad. Just this summer, I chose to abandon the heaven that was the only bedroom with working AC in our Jakarta house in favor of the sweltering hell that was our storage room so I could drag out five boxes filled with the comics he used to collect. I started reading Dune not just because the movie starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya will be coming out next month, but because my dad started reading the series when he was my age.

In Chicago, when we stop for lunch at a Japanese restaurant that my parents started going to more than seventeen years ago, my dad will take me to the comic book store right next to it. Nearly all the issues that are now in Jakarta, each of them individually wrapped, came from this store. When I shop with my dad, it’s in stores that have their shelves lined with these not-quite books – from The Adventures of TinTin to Daredevil to Batman, the Long Halloween. I don’t debate the nuances of Dune or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman with my mother. With her, I’ll engage in a back-and-forth as to whether or not a top is worth it or just so-so, and she’ll send me pictures of what she thinks I’ll like when she’s at Zara or TJ Maxx.

Back then, though? When I was a budding three year-old, ready to fake it ‘till she made it?

My mother was the one who read to me – whose voice ran through the lines of Are You My Mother? over and over again at my behest – who set me on the path to memorizing every written word detailing the journey of a baby bird to find its mother. I don’t remember learning how to read. Instead (ironically enough), I remember remembering the words to say and when to turn the pages. By now, I like to think that my parents may have figured me out for that little trick, but still give me credit for it because it was some semblance of sort-of brilliant.

I still don’t remember how I learned to read.

I remember sitting in the bathroom, a green bottle in hand as I painstakingly pronounced the words printed on it at my mother’s behest. Johnson’s no more tangles shampoo, I read. There was some fine print at the bottom that I proceeded to stumble my way through. Even now, I can recall the instructions that indicated how the shampoo caused “no tears.” For the record, no-tears shampoo was a scam back then, and it is still a scam now. I would know. I started my scamming days very early on.

And I may not remember how I learned to read, but I remember my first bookstore. It wasn’t Barnes and Noble, or even Borders, whose facilities had to close down for good – a fact that I still blame entirely on Amazon. More specifically, Jeff Bezos. As if he wasn’t already doing enough to make him my number one target and sacrifice should we enter a zombie apocalypse one day. And no, my first bookstore was most certainly not Amazon. I’m young, but not that young.

The conclusion of that previous paragraph is that I’m not like other girls (I regret that line now but it is past ten p.m. and I believe I will keep it there). My first bookstore was TJ Maxx.

As absurd as it is, three-to-five year-old me was not very interested in shopping at TJ Maxx for, God forbid, clothes, despite the fact that present me is a very different story. As it was, my inherent disinterest in what clothing had to offer did not stop my mother from bringing me with her on her own generously copious shopping trips. Yet long before our cart would be filled with her own purchases, she’d see to it that it would be stocked with something far more important: stacks of books from the children’s section, a curated micro-library for me to pick and read from my seat in the cart. We would roam the store this way – my mother perusing the aisles for whatever blouse or skirt or jacket caught her fancy as I read through the mountain of books sitting in my new mobile library. Occasionally, I would perform a feat of flexibility to make even the finest of gymnasts jealous, all so I could reach the book in the farthest corner without having to wait for my mother to get it for me.

Like this, I used to be able to read a dozen books in one sitting. Sure, they were story books – but it was those fables and fairytales and sometimes Curious George that I thrived on, even if they’ve all blurred together to empty pages of vague colors and maybe some words in my memory.

I hardly ever bought those TJ Maxx books. At the end of her shopping trip, my mother would push the cart back to the children’s section of the store, and we would re-line the shelves with story books once more.

Sometimes, when I go into a TJ Maxx, I’ll take a detour before I get to the young adult clothing. I’ll let myself wander into the children’s aisle, and I’ll pick a storybook.