When I was coming home from picking up my cousin, who lives in Virginia, my family and I stopped at a gas station. My mom needed to get coffee, and I needed to go to the bathroom. During this time I was around twelve years old, and it was a cold, chilly fall night.

While we were sitting in the gas station at about three in the morning, my mom went it to get coffee, while I went to the restroom. It was a large rather clean restroom, not like the normal “around-the-back,“ outside bathrooms. In the restroom while I was going to the bathroom, a man started talking to me from inside the stall. He said, “Hey, what are you doing? Can you give me some toilet paper?” While this guy was asking me these questions, I thought I needed to get out of here. I never answered the man because I was taught to never talk to strangers. Being the curious kid that I was, I looked under the stall door, and I saw his dirty brown boots. I had to hurry up and finish because I was scared and wasn’t quite sure what to think.

When I left the restroom and found my mom, who was getting her coffee, the cops came rushing in, so we hauled out of the gas station and back into the car. When we left the gas station, I remember hearing the loud sirens and seeing the flashing red, blue, and white lights from the police cars. The sounds and lights really scared me and when the cops arrested the drunken guy’s partners. The officers approached my mom’s car and started asking me what the drunken guy was saying.

After I explained everything that the drunken guy said to me, the cops said, “The man who was in the bathroom with you had a gun, and he could have shot you.” After hearing this, my mom broke down, and she started crying and hugging me. This information and experience was just something that scared me, and it has stuck in my mind.

Ever since this life-changing incident, I will not ever use public restrooms no matter what the circumstance is because it traumatized me. Whenever my family and I go camping, I usually try to never use the restrooms until late at night because who knows who could be there? It was such a bad experience for me that I won’t even use the public restrooms in my own school. As soon as I arrived home, I searched the whole house. I still do that to this very day.