One night, on my way home from my family’s place in the city to my apartment in a tiny college town, I noticed a car behind me.  I still don’t know what, maybe the following distance, but something set me off and I had the creepy feeling that I was being followed by some kind of creepy stalker.  Not cool.

My first instinct was to go home.  Fortunately, I knew better: going home is the worst thing you can do when you’re being followed because it involves leading your creepy stalker to your home.  I took stock of what I had to work with: my phone, my car, a not utterly comprehensive but somewhat passable knowledge of the town I was driving through the outskirts of.  In retrospect, I would have felt better if I’d had my .32 with me, but this was a few years before I even got it let alone found out I was a decent natural shot.  Anyway, fortunately, I had all I needed.

I turned into town on the first street that I knew wasn’t a dead end, hoping that the car behind me would go straight.  No such luck; it turned down the same road behind me, driving up my anxiety level.  I took a deep breath, reminding myself of the reasons I shouldn’t freak out, starting with “lots of people could turn down this road because it’s on their way to somewhere” and finishing with “if they are planning to make an SVU episode out of me I’ll do a better job of categorically refusing with my wits intact.”

The road I had chosen was slow — a 25 mile per hour speed limit, even though it was a nice flat straight road without a lot of cross streets that might usually be a 45 zone and probably driveable at 55, because three schools were on it and the kids walked to the playgrounds outside school hours — and I drove even slower in hopes that the person behind me would get annoyed and pass me.  If they passed me, I could stop worrying, because either they weren’t a creepy stalker type after all or even if they were I wouldn’t have to worry about it any more because they wouldn’t be behind me.  They didn’t pass me; they drove even slower, falling back but without ever losing sight of me since I never lost sight of their headlights.