Flasher Exposed!

So I get to class barely on time this morning. I hitched a ride with my boyfriend's roommate and his girlfriend to campus, and we hit every red light imagineable, not to mention being stuck behind very indecisive drivers. I get dropped off at my building at 8:01... class started at 8, and i still had to walk a flight of stairs to get there. I say bye and jet out while they're still sayaing goodbye, and it's a good thing I left too because they were getting mushie up in there.

I run up the stairs, down the hallway, and open the door to my classroom. Deliberately disrupting class, I went to my usual spot, set my stuff down, and searched for the attendance paper being passed around the room. Then I sat down, and made myself comfortable for the next hour and a half of rambling from my professor. Forty-five minutes into lecture I pulled out my phone and started playing "Dope Wars," the perennial classic that allows me to buy drugs low in Amsterdam and sell high in Kabul, earning $6 million dollars within 20 days. If only I could be a drug dealer in real life.... or maybe not.

Anyway, thirty minutes into my quest to suppress boredom, class is ended, and I walk back towards lab. I pick up the campus newspaper, and flip through a couple pages before halting on the bolded words GPD: Flasher Captured. And reading more and more into the article I understand more of what happened to me early one morning at the bus stop.

I woke up early that morning so I could go to campus and finish some homework before class at 8AM. My stupid self thought that the bus ran before 7, but I learned the hard way that it did not. I arrived around 6 at the bus stop. Fifteen minutes later, another girl sat down next to me on the bench.

Around 6:30, while I'm thinking "any minute now, the bus will come," a tan-skinned man wearing a baseball cap, sat down on the bench across from us two. I felt that something was amiss when I saw him come from a different direction, but maybe it was the fact that he wore shirt and something that looked like a sarong that caught my attention. Using my peripheral vision while trying not to make obvious that I was scoping him out, I soon realized that he wore nothing underneath the sarong. After he sat down he spread his legs wide (this I also caught peripherally) so that his sarong, which hardly covered his lower trunk when he sat regularly, was concealing nothing at all.

Thoughts raced my mind like what would happen if I made eye contact?, what happens if I try to walk away?, and what if this is nothing at all? were superceded by the prevailing fear not knowing what he had in mind and what he planned to do next. My mother had always warned me to never be out past dark because of all the stories about college girls who get mugged/assaulted/raped/murdered while doing activities at night. Her advice always applied to the night and never the morning, because anytime that the sun was up makes crimes against college girls unseemly. I've constantly broken this advice-- shopping for groceries at 3AM and going out clubbing. In times like those there were sketchy people who tried approaching me, but I never felt as vulnerable in those instances as I had at that moment, with the sun peering through trees in the eastern sky.

I still sat there fairly complacent while my mind was suspended in disbelief over the strangeness of the situation.

Five minutes later, he got up and started walking back in the direction from which he came. I watched him peripherally, and once he was a couple yards away I watched as he broke into a full run to a nearby parking lot. He got into his blue sedan, and drove away. I was too shocked at that time that I hardly noticed his license plate number.

I laughed it off later that day, retelling my story to those who said I was "flash-propositioned." I told my mother the story and she asked if I called the police yet. Mulling over the thought, I knew that I could not identify him nor aptly describe him had I been questioned to.

Reading into the article, I found out the flasher was a early-thirties Italian who would flash girls in the early morning as a stress-reliever. Characteristic to his cases were sightings of a blue, 4-door Dodge that would drive by moments before he would expose himself.

:::Sigh of relief::: at least that's one less weirdo that's on the streets.