My friend, Claudine and I, with whom I always got into trouble and
never felt safe anyway, were somehow convinced to get into the big old
hot rod of Bruce, the older kid from down the street who had a mean
younger brother named Brian that tried to rip my clothes off in the park
one night. Bruce was popular as a bad boy with his big blue car and
propensity for having the pot we all wanted. He didn't pay much
attention to the younger girls like us; he
only ever noticed me to laugh in my face and make me feel as ugly as I
thought I was.
So, when he asked us to go for a ride to pick up something outside
of town, we went, excited to have been noticed. I probably slipped out of the house without telling my
mom. Not that it would have mattered much; she had no control of me and
I didn't listen for shit. Which sucked actually. If she had and I did,
then I might have avoided feeling as if I were so often on the verge of
danger: rape, murder, accidents, fights.
We got into the back seat of Bruce's car with its jacked up back
tires, some chick I didn't know in front, him laughing, passing us a
bottle to drink from, a joint to toke. We went all the way out of town
on Commercial Street, to I-5. He wouldn't tell us what was up - where we were
going, exactly what we were picking up. I got scared when the town
dropped away behind us and we were out by Enchanted Forest and the
Turner exit on the freeway. That's where he turned off. Nothing much there -
an abandoned gas station, a hill with a rough rode. The freeway on the
left, dark night shadows on the right. And then he pulled over at the gas station and told
us to get out and wait. Said he'd be back as he and blond girl in the front laughed and screeched off up the hill.
There were no cell phones back then, not even a phone booth. There wasn't an open
store or people driving by except on the freeway. Night. Isolated. We
didn't understand why he dropped us off. We didn't know when he'd be
back. Down to our last two smokes we waited. And waited. But Bruce never
came back. Which we figured was why he was laughing when he dropped us
off. Stupid, inconsequential girls. Gullible wannabes.
We had to get down to the freeway from the exit overpass and stand
on the side with our thumbs out, finally getting picked up by some old
man whose eyes were a little too bright. Lucky for us he said he was an
off-duty cop and he actually took us back to my house. Lucky.
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