was the braver one and managed to steel a look back over her shoulder at them. I was about to ask her what she saw when she started sprinting forward, and that was answer enough for me.
Futilely, I tried to catch up to her, but she wasn’t about to slow down for me, remaining a few steps ahead. It reminded me of that joke about how fast I had to run to get away from a grizzly bear — faster than my friend. Still following her, we ended up in a mostly deserted parking garage, and I wondered why this seemed like the logical choice to her. There were so many other places we could’ve gone where there would be crowds, but her first choice had been a dimly lit underground parking garage.
Jane dashed around the side of a van, and I allowed myself a look back behind me for the first time. In the darkness, I could see very little, but I knew there were four large guys, and when they saw me looking at them, one of them started to cat call. I ran forward, only I realized Jane wasn’t in front of me. I didn’t have a very good fight or flight reflex, so I just froze when I didn’t see her.
“Over here!” Jane hissed, but the acoustics in the garage were awful and my panic had completely set in. I couldn’t tell where her voice was coming from, so I just stood frozen underneath a flickering yellow light and hoped that my death would be quick and painless.
“Hey little girl,” one of the guys purred in a voice that sounded anything but friendly. Stupidly, I turned to face them. Since I had stopped running, so had they, and they were casually strolling over to me.
“Do you always run from a good time?” another one asked. For some reason, the rest of them thought that was hilarious, and the garage was filled with the sound of their laughter.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I opened my mouth to say something, maybe even scream, but I just gaped at them. I was standing in a pool of cold water and oil, and the light above me apparently decided to go out for good. This was not how I imagined that I would die. At the very least, I always assumed that I would fight back instead of letting it happen like a fool. I think there are many assumptions that we make about ourselves that are completely untrue.
Closing my eyes against the dark, I knew that I didn’t want to risk seeing anything they did to me. Maybe if I just squeezed my eyes, it would all be over faster. They were talking amongst themselves, laughing and making perverted jokes, and I knew I was going to die. Somewhere behind me, I heard the screech of tires, but I was trying separate myself from everything going on around me. I had never understood astral projection, but I desperately hoped I could master it in the last few minutes of my life.
“Hey! What are you doing?!” a voice shouted to the side of me. There was something warm and oddly familiar about it, and I knew that it didn’t belong to the group of guys closing in on me. As soon as I heard him speak, I opened my eyes.
“What’s it to you?” a large tattooed guy growled, but he started taking a step back. A car must’ve stopped in the parking space to my right, because I could see the bright headlights shining past me.
“I think you should just back off,” the familiar voice said.
I peeked over to the side to see him, but the headlights shining in the opposite direction made it too dark for me to make much out, except for the fact that he was wearing a pink tee shirt. He took another step forward, and my would-be-attackers continued taking steps back. But they didn’t seem to be moving fast enough, because I saw the blur of the pink shirt rush towards them.
It must’ve been the darkness and my fear, because I couldn’t seem to trust my eyesight anymore. It almost looked as if the pink shirt was moving faster than I could imagine humanly possible, and when I heard the guys yelling, it looked like they were being thrown. But that wasn’t possible, so I blinked my eyes to adjust them better, and then everyone was gone.
Not everyone, exactly. The light above me suddenly flickered on again, and the guy in the pink shirt was standing next to me. In big black letters across his chest, his shirt read, “Real men wear pink.” I stared at him, probably longer than was polite. Something about him felt so familiar, but I couldn’t place him.
He looked older than me, probably in his early twenties, and he wasn’t particularly muscular or tall. In fact, he leaned more towards wiry than he did muscular, and I couldn’t imagine what had frightened off the other guys. His face was open and friendly, and he had an easy smile that I couldn’t help but respond to, even though I had just been a few moments away from death.
“Are you okay?” he asked, appraising me up and down. There was something weirdly comforting about the way he looked at me. It wasn’t the way the other guys looked; he really just wanted to be sure I was alright.
“Yeah,” I said in a voice that barely sounded like my own. “You saved my life.”
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he replied, completely ignoring the fact that he’d done anything heroic.
“I’m not.” Suddenly, I remembered Jane and started looking around for her. A part of me was angry that she had done nothing to save me, but then again, neither had I, and I didn’t think that I should hold her to a higher standard than I did myself. “My friend Jane is around here somewhere.”
“Two girls?” Even the dark, I saw him raise an eyebrow and shake his head. “Real safe.”
“I think Jane has mace,” I mumbled lamely.
“Where is this alleged friend?” He took his turn scanning the parking lot, and then pointed to something by a van parked on the other side. “I think I see her over there.”
“Where?” I squinted at where he was pointing, but I couldn’t see anything.
“Over there,” he repeated, then took a step towards the black Jetta parked next to me. “Come on. We’ll go over and pick her up, and then I’ll give you guys a ride. You shouldn’t be out here like this.”
I walked around to the passenger side of the car, and it never occurred to me to say no. There was something about him that made me trust him implicitly. His car stereo softly played Weezer, and in the warm glow of the blue dashboard lights, I got my first real good look at him. His skin looked perfectly smooth, like porcelain, but his hair was a perfectly disheveled mess. His eyes, which looked almost gray in the light, were the happiest eyes I’d ever seen.
He sped off across the parking lot, and I finally pulled my eyes away from him to look out the window. Jane was cowering down behind a large white van, and I wondered if she’d even bothered to call the police or anything. The car stopped next to her, and he rolled down the window so he could lean out.
“Jane?” he said, and she turned to look at him.
I expected her to be afraid, maybe even bolt and run, after what had just happened. Instead, she gave him the strangest look. It was almost as if she was in awe. It didn’t make any sense to me. Sure, I did think he was attractive, maybe even very attractive, but I’d seen Jane go home with guys far more attractive then him. But she looked absolutely stunned by his beauty, and I was surprised she wasn’t drooling.
“Hi,” Jane stammered. It wasn’t her normal sultry, flirty voice, even though I’m sure that’s what she was trying for. She sounded too star struck to be sexy, and I wondered if I was missing something. I looked back over at him, trying to figure out if he was famous and I just couldn’t place him.
“Jane, he’s giving us a ride,” I explained when it appeared she was just going to stand there staring at him. “Get in the car.”
“Sure.” Jane finally seemed to regain herself a bit and smiled at him before sliding into the backseat. When she got in, I swear that she leaned forward so she could sniff him. Naturally, I tried to inconspicuously inhale to see if I could smell anything, and admittedly, he seemed to smell good, but it was nothing spectacular.
“Are you okay?” I asked, looking back at her. Maybe in her fear, she’d popped an ecstasy tablet or something.
“I’m great,” Jane cooed, still gaping at him. “Who’s your friend here?”
“I don’t actually know.” It had never occurred to me that I didn’t even know the name of the guy driving the car.
“I’m Jack,” he offered, filling in the blank. “And you’re Jane.” Then he looked over at me, his eyes dancing. “And you are?”
“Alice.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see jealousy flash across Jane’s face. She seemed threatened that he was even looking at me, which was very un-Jane like. Even as conceited as she was, or maybe because of it, she was never, ever threatened or jealous of me.
“Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I could really go for a cup of coffee right about now.” Jack dropped the car into gear and sped off without waiting for either of us to respond. It wasn’t really a question anyway, and neither one of us would’ve protested. When I glanced up in the rearview mirror, I could see Jane staring at him with this intense expression and leaning forward, as if she couldn’t get close enough to him. Even with her rather storied
