…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.)
