So this one time, I took the RTA out to a friend’s house in Euclid Heights. This was before cell phones and I found myself at my friend’s house, the lights off, the door locked. I and my boyfriend waited and waited. We decided to give up and wait for the bus only to find that the particular route had ended for the day.
Without much hope of getting out of there otherwise, I started knocking on neighbor’s doors. I made Brian wait down by the bus stop. I could see people watching TV in front rooms. They ignored me. They closed drapes as I peered in.
Finally one woman opened her door a crack, the chain locked, and I explained that I needed to borrow a phone to call someone to pick me up.
“That’s a trick. They do that. They say they want your phone and then they rob you!”
I’m a teenaged girl, you see, and as far as she knows alone. I press my case, asking if she couldn’t let me use the phone on the front step if it would reach, and finally she figures out how to slip the phone through the crack in the door without undoing the chain and I call my sister and Grace says, “Oh yeah, Jen called and said she and her mom had to go somewhere. I’ll come get you.”
I hand back the phone, thank the lady, and now that she’s heard everything, she’s worried about MY safety. “It’s dark, are you sure you’ll be safe waiting?”
“My boyfriend is down at the bus stop,” I said. “In case the bus came after all.”
“Oh, it was good you did that. I would never have opened the door if he’d been with you.”
Then she closed the door, sealing herself safely off from her own neighborhood that I, a teen girl all alone, and my slight, demure boyfriend, also alone down by the main road, had inhabited safely now for hours.
Let me bring up another incident in my life.
I’m twelve. My Dad has just gotten custody of me and Grace, and moved us to his little one-room apartment in Fairport Harbor.
My mother appears at the school gate as we walk home from school. She wants us to get in her car. She starts threatening us.
I grab Grace’s hand and run up the steps of a nearby porch. I open the front door and walk into a stranger’s living room. The elderly man there looks surprised, but I explain, “There’s a woman trying to kidnap us. May we stay in your front room until she goes away?”
“Oh gosh, of course,” he says, and we stay by his front window for about a half hour until Mom stops circling the block and we can continue home.
What would have happened if that door were locked?
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