I was 12, walking alone on a gray afternoon when a man driving in the same direction slowed down to meet my pace.
“Hi,” he called from his open window. “Do you need a ride?”
I was an awkward, non-menstruating tween, pudgy with thick, round bifocals and a perpetually greasy ponytail, blissfully unaware of predators. Even with a recent kidnapping in the news, dangerous men were an alien concept to me.
It was the fall of 1993, shortly after a man had abducted a 12-year-old girl, Polly Klaas, from a slumber party at her home in Petaluma, Calif. In the months when the search for her was underway, her face filled TV screens and the magazines in the supermarket racks.
I had just moved to Washington State from Seoul, where my father was stationed at a military base. In that bustling city, I had enjoyed an unbridled freedom to roam — something I thought would continue when my family settled in Lacey, a suburb south of Seattle.
The Burger King was a half-mile walk from where we lived. Even shorter if I cut through the playground. When the stranger offered me a ride, I was on my way home, carrying a warm bag containing a Whopper Jr and fries.
“No thanks,” I said.
He drove off. I watched as he drove toward the cluster of newly built beige tract houses that my family had moved into. At that moment I believed he was a kind neighbor I must not have recognized.
With no other vehicles around, I headed to my shortcut, hoping to make it home in time for “General Hospital.” But when I came upon the next street, I froze.
The man was parked a few feet from the entry to the playground. He had made a U-turn and he was waiting for me. He leaned his head out the window and asked once more: “Do you need a ride?”
In Seoul, I had often walked home from school by myself. I would push through the crowded subway station between the Army base and our apartment building, sometime stopping at a food stall selling hotteok, a doughy pancake filled with syrupy brown sugar.
Other times I would ride my bike for miles or take the bus alone to my best friend’s high-rise so we could play Sonic the Hedgehog on her Sega Genesis. The only rule my parents had was that I return by dark, a rule I often broke.
In that metropolis, never once had my heart rate spiked and my spine electrified the way it did when I was standing on that empty sidewalk, the focus of the man’s gaze.
“Where are you going?”
His tone was gentle. The look in his eyes was not.
I didn’t answer.
I looked toward the stretch of pavement that led to my neighborhood. A thicket of towering pine trees blanketed one side. On the other was a row of houses with For Sale signs out front, their bare walls partly obscured by a tall wooden fence.
Directly ahead of me was the opening to the playground. Reaching it meant passing directly behind the man’s car.
My feet remained cemented to the curb.
“How old are you?”
Again, I didn’t respond.
How many seconds passed with the two of us in a standoff? No one else in sight. Silence screaming in my ears. My body buzzing like a hive of bees. Ten seconds? Twenty?
And then, the click of his door handle.
The sound was like a starter pistol. I took off, sprinting past his car. My house blurred by in the periphery — I didn’t want him to see where I lived. I kept going, legs pumping, until my lungs burned.
I waited behind a bush, watchful, panting. No sign of him. I raced toward my house and slithered through the back gate. Once inside, I crawled across the living room carpet and hid myself in a sliver of space beside the sofa. The oily Burger King bag, now containing a squashed burger and clump of potatoes, was still clutched in my hand.
I was in that same spot when my older sister returned from high school. I pleaded with her not to say anything to our parents when she asked me why I wouldn’t come out of my corner. I was worried that the incident with the man had somehow been my fault, that I would be in trouble.
Hours later, when our mother arrived home from work, my sister relayed what had happened. Mom called the police.
The officer seemed to loom over me as we sat in the ornate rosewood chairs of our tiny foyer. He jotted down my answers to his questions in a pocket-size notebook.
In a shaky voice, I gave what little detail I could provide. The man was white. Chubby. With a dark, bushy beard. Round glasses like mine. Around my dad’s age? Maybe younger?
More specific information, like his license plate number or the make of his vehicle, I couldn’t provide. All I remembered about the car was that it was blue and had four doors.
The officer told my mother he would check to see if any similar reports had come in. Then he instructed me to dial 9-1-1 if I saw the man again.
He patted me on the shoulder. “You were smart to run.”
Once he was gone, my mother admonished me for not having called for help earlier. What was I thinking? She made it clear that the independence I had long cherished was over.
It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to do anything alone ever again.
In the mall, I would hold my mother’s hand while checking over my shoulder. In the back seat of my parents’ car, I would slump down, keeping out of sight.
Nights I lay awake, imagining what would have happened to me if the man had caught my arm as I flew past. Had he chased me? And when I’d gotten beyond his grasp, did he go searching for another girl?
In December, the nationwide search for Polly Klaas came to an end when the authorities recovered her remains in a shallow grave. The next month, Mistie May Micheletti, 11, was snatched from a suburb 100 miles south of where I lived. Her body was discovered days later, floating in a river. Both girls had been sexually assaulted. (A man was later convicted in the Klaas case; the murder of Ms. Micheletti remains unsolved.)
As I grew into a young woman, I stayed vigilant, hyper-aware of my surroundings, clocking who didn’t belong, who lurked in the shadows.
I didn’t know about the other types of men to watch out for. The ones who smiled. The ones who told disarming jokes. The ones who made me feel safe at first.
All the times I wasn’t smart enough to run.
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