TEEN STRUGGLES TO LOOSEN WEM'S GRIP

Years Scouting For Drugs In Cavernous Hangout Over

EDMONTON - She is 13 years old, loves to draw and wants to be a model one day.

At 12, she smoked weed and crack, and took ecstasy, mushrooms and a
drug called "Special K." Skipping school landed her two expulsions
before Grade 8.

Faith knows all about addictions. But since completing a
youth-oriented rehabilitation program, the one habit she can't quite
kick is hanging out at West Edmonton Mall.

"Everybody kept telling me, 'Oh, the mall is so awesome,' " the
self-described "mall rat" says.

"We'd just sit there and look for drugs."

In order to protect her identity, Faith's name has been changed.
Sitting in her father's west-end living room smoking a cigarette, she
discusses how she became one of about 100 kids who regularly wander
the mall with no interest in buying anything but drugs.

A month after she finished rehab, Faith approached police officers at
the mall to apologize for past behaviour and gave them a handwritten
letter. She says she doesn't remember why she wrote the note. She
knows her relationship with the mall has to end.

"I only go to the mall once or twice a week, maybe three times a
week" now, she says. She's working on cutting back.

Faith looks at least two years older than she is. Even with little
makeup, her height is misleading. She has a tiny heart tattoo on her
right shoulder, a little dolphin tattoo on her ankle. She could pass
for 16 or 17.

At the mall, she says, she never lied about her age. But she never
corrected anyone, either.

"Everybody thought I was older," she says. Everyone told her she was
beautiful. When I started going there I dressed slutty," and in
Faith's words, "slutty" outfits include really tight pants or
"bootie" shorts and tank tops.

The mall's colourful brightness, its busy-ness, presented a whole new
world for the pre-teen. She could hug total strangers, other kids who
hung out at the mall. She could strike up conversations with people
she had never met before.

But at the heart of Faith's daily trips to West Edmonton Mall was the
knowledge she could easily find Ecstasy there.

"Everything was there. Everybody just said, 'Hey, you looking for
this?' and they'd go get it," she says.

She could "boost expensive stuff" from stores, bring her stolen loot
to a drug dealer -- usually a guy in his late teens or early 20s --
and get high on the spot.

Once high, Faith could kick around the mall for a whole day, at least
from noon through midnight. Sometimes she was invited to parties away
from the mall by people she'd just met, and she would go. "It just
goes by fast," she says of the days she spent hallucinating and
wandering around. "You're just having too much fun."

It's possible to sneak into the mall's back hallways through doors
that are left open. Faith would hide there with five or six other
kids and sleep.

"A lot of people that I know do live there," Faith says. "A lot of
people are homeless, so they stay at the mall."

Security was not an issue, but defending herself was never far from her mind.

"I always run when people try to fight me," she says. "I know what
they're capable of, these mall rats."

She has seen the pocket knives some kids carry. She has seen people
pull sticks out from their pant legs just as a fight breaks out.

Faith's "mall rat" days ended in April, about two weeks after her
13th birthday.

"Me and my dad, we'd get into fights a lot," she says. He tried to
check her eyes or talk to her when she was stoned. He watched the way
she walked to see if she stumbled.

One morning, she just didn't go to the mall. For whatever reason, she
chose to stay home and play board games with her father. They live
together in the west end; Faith doesn't know her mother.

"All of a sudden, cops came to the door," she says. She had just
asked her father if he planned to send her to rehab, and he'd said
no. In fact, he had gone to court and asked for an apprehension order
so Faith would be taken to a safe house.

As she went upstairs to her bedroom, this seemed like the ultimate betrayal.

Coming back downstairs with the clothes she'd need for the next five
days, Faith told her father not to talk to her.

But before she was driven to the safe house, he came outside. "He
told me he was just doing it because he loved me," she says. "I was
mad, but at the same time I was kind of disappointed."

At the safe house, Faith was given a bed and an alarm clock. Almost
everything else was locked up -- there are no mirrors, snacks, sharp
objects, belly shirts or tank tops at rehab.

"The only thing that actually made me quit doing drugs (after) detox
was we watched this movie about what crystal meth does to you," she says.

She describes before and after pictures -- people who were "clean"
and "perfect" before drugs, then lost their teeth and had pits in their skin.

"Everything is gone, your life is down the drain," she says. "I
didn't want to turn out like that."

Faith says she's been drug-free since April. Her uniform has changed
- -- she wears skinny jeans, skater shoes, loose shirts. She hopes to
return to school, somewhere, in the fall.

She is still trying to break her mall habit.

This is the first of a three-day series about the children who hang
out at West Edmonton Mall and the adults who are their keepers.