I Believe I've Been Hoodwinked

Last night, I was driving my mother-in-law home when she asked if we could stop at CVS. I pulled into the parking lot and sat in the car while she went inside.

After a few minutes, a young girl, petite, white and about 20 years old, came up gingerly to my window, and asked me for money. She said she was from Rochester and she was down here for a wedding for her job. She was wearing a short, strapless cocktail dress, so the outfit fit the story.

She looked visibly upset and scared, and had a large black mark on her shoulder that looked like either tar or marker. It was too black to be a bruise. It looked like she had been abused. She said she had no money and her gas tank was empty and she just needed to get home. I gave her everything I had, which was $12.

Her story was kind of original. Not the part about the empty gas tank and needing to get home, that’s as old as the hills. But if she wasn’t upset, she was a damn good actress. And she was wearing that cocktail dress. I didn’t have a line-of-sight to her car so I never saw where she went after she left me.

This morning I was visibly upset because I felt so completely taken advantage of. Last night, I felt it was a 50/50 chance. Right at this moment, I’m fully convinced that she was lying, and I spent the entire drive to work in anger and rage. You know those five stages of grief? Well I think there are also five stages of being taken advantage of too.

Now I’m writing about it to get the weight of it off my chest and to find some sense of closure. What I really want is to see her get caught. So I’m sitting here trying to think about the best way to get back at her and the answer is obvious. Put the scene in a future novel!

Someday, I may be a guest of a talk show and the host will say to me, that’s an interesting scene. How did you come up with that? And I’ll say, “It really happened to me.” All it is for me now is fodder – ammunition for my writing.

In the meantime, here’s how I would like this story to end:  I run into her again in the same parking lot and I say, “Oh you poor thing, you’re still here? My my. I would have thought the $12 I gave you last time would have gotten you home. You poor, poor thing. Here, let me call the police for you, because you certainly need help beyond anything I or anyone else can give you.” At that point, she runs like the wind, never to be seen again, at least, not in our neck of the woods.

Please check out my novel, In Fashion's Web on Amazon.