A memory of an alleged attempt at human trafficking…

…from a (young) (heavyset) (blonde) artist who lives in the college town that I now live in:

During early high school when her parents' marriage was rough, her mother and her went to New York City for a long weekend for their major yearly vacation and there they stayed at an out-of-the-way hotel, and when they were in the empty restaurant dining room, this (middle-aged) woman was like one of the only other people there, and she ended up joining them and spilling her guts out to them, and when the (artist-to-be) tried acting mature and told her mom that she was going to go outside for a cigarette, her mom was like, “Wait, I’ll go with you,” but this lady laid her hand across her mom’s wrist and forcefully was like, “No, let her go, she’ll be fine,” and so she went out to the drive to smoke, and while she was doing that her mom needed to run up to their room to do something, and as she went past the front desk she told the desk-clerk to keep an eye on her daughter outside for a minute and the guy said that they don’t do that, and as the mom rushed up to the room, she was outside, and this guy had parked a car outside and was calling to the (artist-to-be) and as she came up to him, he grabbed her hair and tried to force her into the back of the car and all the time he was like, “Come on, get in, you called this cab, you’re just drunk!”, and then the mom looked out the window and saw something and ran down, and as she called out to her, the (artist-to-be) was like able to break free and walked to her, it was like a trance but now it had been broken, and the guy hopped in the car and drove off, and the woman from the restaurant was nowhere to be found, and later she realized that even though it seemed like she hadn’t walked that far from the entrance, when her mom called to her, she was like most of the way up the U-shaped drive that led to the front door of the hotel, and she must have walked that far while smoking or while going out to the man while he called to her, he was like practically parked on the street out there that ran in front of the hotel’s drive.

. . .

(She said that she read later that human traffickers always work in twos, and I said that the man’s lines sounded rehearsed like if someone saw them and overhead what he was saying they would just think she was drunk and not try to intervene, and she said that she hadn’t thought of that, though I also said that I thought most human trafficking was like within family units or with vulnerable people and wasn’t like off-the-street abductions or whatever, to which she had nothing to say, in response.)