One
Six
Seven
Zero
Eighty
Fourth
Avenue

We moved out into the country when I was five, and that was the first thing I was expected to learn. It took my brother mere minutes to lock our address and phone number into his photographic vault of a memory. Something I will never have. My mom would ask me every day if I knew what our address was. I was busy being present at said address. Racing around the barns, chasing cats, playing in the woods behind the farm. I remembered nothing.

She then thought a safety video might be a good idea. This tutorial was a stranger-danger video, and suddenly it wasn’t just about an address. Those numbers were the key to safety. The world was rife with strangers. Fires. Guns.

NINE
ONE
ONE
(That much I knew)

There was a song in the video that kept repeating; “Know-Your In-side Information.” I don’t know if it was the tone in which they sang it, the loud, early 90’s graphics or the scenarios where kids died by fire, kidnapping or violent intruder because they didn’t know how to call 911 and tell the operator where they needed help…but I became terrified of this “inside information.” I felt that if I never learned it, I would never need it.

If the song had been more along the lines of, “Trust your gut,” I would have understood. One day some time later, when I was patiently watching for frogs to pop up in the small creek at the end of our driveway, I looked up to see an old car drive creep past, circle around the dead end of the road I lived on, and slow to a stop across the creek from me. The window was down, and the driver was an older, scruffy man. He spoke to me, asking directions to a place I can’t remember.

What kind of adult needs directions from a child?

“I don’t know.”
“I have a map. Can you come over here and show me?”
I was standing now, wondering if he would dare enter the driveway.
“I don’t know,” I repeated.
“Just come over here.” He grinned at me, and his teeth were the last straw. I pictured him throwing me into the back of his car. The knot in my stomach was on fire, and I turned to run. There was a back door to the house but I wasn’t sure if it was unlocked. I ran all the way through the grass to the front, up the cement stairs and through the front door, locking it behind me. When I looked out the window, the car had disappeared. No video had ever taught me to do that.

You can be book smart, and know your ‘inside information,’ or you can be street smart, and trust your gut, knowing that bad things are going to happen no matter what.

Luciana, 23