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Memoir Thriller
How One Bad Choice Nearly Cost Me My Life
When day turned night, I knew I was in trouble.
“Hop in honey, looks like trouble ahead.”
Choosing two cowboys in a pickup over the group of leering men ahead, I jumped in, squeezing sideways onto the jump seat.
Looking back, I could have turned around, crossed the street, run into a business.
If you find it hard to understand my destructive choices in this story, I get it. At times, I shake my head in disbelief, too.
I have excuses — lame ones — landing in the blame category. Youth doesn’t justify every bad decision. Plenty of young girls have known better. I can’t say I didn’t — duh, ‘don’t get in a car with strangers’ was standard advice, even in my crazy childhood.
Back then, stubborn at 18, I wouldn’t have admitted how desperately lonely I was. I’d been on my own a couple of years by then. I lived in this old downtown apartment building — kid you not, I was the only one under 80. I moved from Auburn to Yakima, a mountain pass away, to live with my grandfather to appease my worried mom. My dramatics over a breakup with a man way too old for me had her concerned.
