Excerpted from ‘Remembering to Forget’, a journal by Beverly Figueroa
Runaway train and the friendly stranger
The runaway rides the train again…….she’s still in Brooklyn. She is tired, very tired; so she falls asleep only to be suddenly jolted awake to realize that she’s lost. She finds herself on 14th Street in Manhattan. So she gets off the train and hurries over to the other side of the platform to get back to Brooklyn, familiar ground.
She unwittingly boards the wrong train, jumping on the first one approaching the station. She wasn’t sure why she did that, just that she usually felt uneasy about staying still. It was an impulsive and wrong move on her part, but she just felt better being on a moving train. At least it was taking her somewhere far from home, anywhere was better than being home, or near ‘him’.
She was trying to make sense of the wall map when a tall, hispanic looking man approached her and starting talking to her. She felt immediately unnerved by him. He had dark black hair, and a big, black bushy mustache. He looked a little scary. He seemed friendly enough, but she still felt uneasy. But she dispelled these concerns quickly, doubting her inner warning bell as just her intrinsic sense of distrust for people in general. He asks her where she wants to go. She confesses to him that she is lost (big mistake, little girl of 16) and offers to help her. And although she senses that something is amiss, she does not heed the warning of that inner voice and follows the stranger instead……
She realized her terrible mistake and the strangers’ bad intentions when he tried to kiss her. She said “no” very timidly, almost in a whisper, afraid that he would get angry. Her voice was trembling, as she fought the desire to cry and tried to assert herself, telling him that she wanted to leave. But he wasn’t having it. His voice took on a different tone, as he pulled out a very large kitchen knife, seemingly out of thin air. He urged her to keep quiet and do as he said, and gently stroked the tip of the blade across her throat, gesturing what he would do to her if she didn’t comply. He whispered instructions for her to follow into her ear, warning her that he would kill her. She knew at that moment, that her first instincts about him were right. She had to get herself out of there somehow, otherwise, she would not live to see 17.
