Beth puts her cigarette out on the grass and stares.
“Look at those two guys,” she says, awed.
We are sitting on the warm grass in the park, and two men are playing tennis on the nearby public court.
It is September 1992, and we are both 14. We are not good at estimating the ages of older people, but we decide they are in their early 20s. One has long brown hair in a ponytail and big brown eyes. The other is not as obviously attractive, but still good-looking - smaller, slighter, with spiked punky blond hair. They are both fit and well-muscled. We gawk, poleaxed by lust, as only teenage girls can.
“Let’s walk past them. Take your blazer off,” says Beth, and we both hook our blazers over our arms and fluff out our hair; Beth has long black straight hair and mine is permed into tight red curls. Beth has rolled up her grey school uniform skirt to make it a miniskirt, just as I have. Her white school shirt is unbuttoned to cleavage level and the tie is correspondingly low, but my shirt and tie are up to the collar; it makes me uncomfortable when boys look at my (very new) breasts. We saunter lazily past the tennis courts, practicing being seductive, playing at being older.
“Don’t be so obvious,” Beth hisses under her breath. “Don’t just stare…”
And then she catches the eye of the dark-haired man.
He raises a hand and smiles widely. The blond man turns, and smiles at us as well.
We smile back and walk on by.
“We should have gone and talked to them,” Beth says. She’s disappointed in me, I can feel it. We turn out of the park gate and head towards the ice cream stand.
“I have to get home,” I say, which is only half a lie. My parents are easygoing, but nowhere near as easygoing as Beth’s. It will take me half an hour to walk home from here, and if I’m not home for dinner my mother will want to know why.
Beth’s family, on the other hand, don’t appear to notice if she comes home for dinner or not. I envy her.
We stop at the ice-cream stand for some ice lollies and eat them, then turn left on to the main road.
“Hey, girls.”
We look round. There is a silver car slowly crawling down the road beside us. In the front two seats are the two men we saw on the tennis courts. The blond one is nearest. The one with the long dark hair is driving. The car pulls over next to us.
“Want a ride?”
I hang back. There’s a shimmer around the car. It’s warm for autumn, but not hot enough for a heat wave. Something is wrong.
Beth looks round impatiently. “Come on, Fee,” she says.
“No,” I say.
The faces of both men darken.
“We’re just going for a little ride,” coaxes the dark-haired man. I notice one of his ears is pierced with a gold ring. The blond man still hasn’t spoken.
Now I see them close up, they aren’t as good-looking as they seemed from a distance, and nearer 30 than 20. There’s something about them I don’t like close up. It’s hard to put my finger on what. But they remind me, somehow, of a pair of wolves wearing human suits.
They are both in jeans and shirts. It’s only been 15 minutes or so since the dark-haired one waved at us on the tennis courts. They were in tennis whites then, and in the middle of a game; they must have left the court for the changing rooms immediately after seeing us.
Beth has her hand on the back seat door.
“Don’t be boring, Fee.” she says. The disgust in her voice cuts me with shame. I’ve always been the boring friend, the sensible friend. I never take risks. I hang out with Beth because I want to be like her, and in the end, doesn’t that mean…?
I hesitantly take a half step towards the car.
“Yeah,” the blond one says. His voice is unexpectedly deep, with a rough edge. “Don’t be boring, Fee.” He smiles at me. Beth has already claimed the attention of the driver so this one will be mine, by default. His smile is charming, lighting up his face.
“She’s just a bit shy,” Beth says. “She just needs a minute.”
She walks over to me. “What’s wrong with you?” she whispers.
I look her in the eye. “You can go,” I say. “I’m not stopping you.”
I see a flicker of uncertainty in Beth’s eyes then. She doesn’t want to get in the car without me, and I realise that on some level she knows these men are not right. But she’s headstrong, determined to be a rebel, and in 1992 that means riding in cars with wolves.
Our standoff is interrupted when the dark-haired driver loses his patience, and his temper with it.
It’s hard to describe what he looks like; it’s not annoyance, not anger. It’s uncontrolled fury, so childish it’s terrifying. His pupils dilate and he slams the steering wheel with his fist.
“Will you just GET IN THE CAR!” he shouts, and I jump backwards.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” says the blond one, putting a hand on the driver’s arm, and now I understand the blond one is the boss. He looks at me and turns on the same charming smile, only now my mind is made up.
“I’m not getting in your car,” I said, meeting his crystal-blue eyes.
“Fuck you, then,” the blond one says coolly. He turns to the driver and says something I don’t catch. The car turns back into the traffic with a screech of wheels and is gone.
We stand in silence and watch them leave. Beth is furious with me.
“I don’t know why you have to be so fucking boring,” she says. “They were hot. If I was with Diane, we’d have got in the car. You scared them off.”
Now the moment’s passed, I feel utterly ashamed. Of course, Diane would have got in the car. Diane is much cooler than me. Diane and Beth shoplift together, smoke weed together, set fire to post boxes. Beth is only with me today because Diane is with her 21-year-old boyfriend, having sex in the back of his car while Diane’s parents believe she’s with us.
“No wonder you don’t have a boyfriend,” Beth spits at me. “You’re fucking lame, Fee.”
NOTE: This is a true story. It describes an encounter I and my then best friend had with two men when we were 14. I’ve taken some liberties with dialogue – after all this time, I can’t remember exactly what was said – but, other than that, this is an accurate description of what happened.
About three months after these men failed to get us in the car, a 16-year-old girl was killed a mile or so from the house where I grew up. Almost exactly a month after she died, a 14-year-old girl was found dead in a village a few miles away. Nobody has ever been charged in connection with either of these murders, and the deaths have never been officially linked. But I have never been able to get these two guys out of my head when I think of those murders, and I thought they belonged on r/nosleep.