Your Girl

My feet pound out a simple rhythm on the frozen pavement while my mind chips away at a complex engineering problem. The frigid wind is bracing, but I've still worked up a light sweat by the time I round the corner at the far end of my run. Three miles down, three to go under the dull, steel gray skies of a mid-February Friday morning.

Winters in Minneapolis are cold, cloudy, depressing affairs, and despite my ancestry and life-long experience with this kind of climate, I'm starting to long for a place where the temperature never dips below freezing, much less to the current two degrees below zero. Fahrenheit.

I'm trying to stick to a seven-minute-mile pace while doing calculus in my head and listening to the local classic rock station, so my mind is fully occupied, yet the DJ suddenly manages to catch my undivided attention. Believe it or not, he's just called out my full name, right over the air. This isn't something that happens to me every day, (or ever, that I can recall) and the complex equation I was working out evaporates into the frosty air as the morning jock goes on.

"You've got 103 seconds to call in, starting right now!" he informs me. The DJ rattles off the special contest line's number, which I memorize.

I would normally be listening to one of my playlists, but this is the morning of the big contest drawing on Classic Rock KIRA 103. They'd been yakking about it for weeks, so I'd gone ahead and entered, though still mostly on a lark. As someone with a good intuitive grasp of statistics, I'd known my chances of winning were miniscule, but despite the odds, I'd tuned to 103.1 megahertz this morning anyway. Someone has to win, right? Well now I guess it's going to be me.

My hand automatically goes for my left front pocket, but the pants I'm wearing don't even have pockets. "Damn," I curse under my breath. Why did I go out of my way to listen to the drawing if I wasn't going to bring my phone? Sometimes I can be a real idiot.

I stop and scan for a payphone. Yeah right, this is the twenty-first century. If I've seen one of those things in the last few years, I've completely forgotten about it.

I'm in an upscale residential area and there are no businesses that I could sprint to in the minute and a half I've got left. I can also forget about running up to a house and asking to use a phone. With my appearance, it's unlikely the average resident would open their door to me. That leaves people on the street. Maybe someone's got a phone they'd let me use.

Naturally, the sidewalks are nearly empty. There's a clump of kids a block ahead of me, waiting at a school bus stop, but other than that, the only person in sight is a little girl. She's maybe a fourth or fifth grader and she's just come out of the big house I was approaching, apparently on her way to join the other kids. I mentally write her off, but then notice that she's looking down and fiddling with what appears to be a phone. Jackpot! I run toward her, pulling my left bud out of my ear.

Unfortunately, with my mental clock counting down the seconds until I lose out on a totally sweet prize, I don't take my usual painstaking care in analyzing the situation for appropriateness.

Her parent's front yard is terraced, with a brick retaining wall of about table height, right up against the sidewalk. She reaches the edge of it, where the morning paper is practically teetering on the edge, at almost the same instant I arrive at the bottom. I note that we're almost at eye level with each other this way.

"Hey, I need your phone," I blurt out.

She looks up and, as I would have expected if I'd given it even a fraction of the consideration I should have, her eyes get huge with fear. But this isn't just the shock of a sudden surprise; I can see in her expression that she honestly believes I'm about to do something truly monstrous to her. Worse, her eyes have the look of someone who has experienced that kind of horror before.

Truly, I'm not in the habit of scaring the bejesus out of innocent children, but I've quite obviously done that now. This time, I go to my training for the correct response under these unhappy circumstances. I put an apologetic expression onto my face.

"Oh, hey, I'm sorry," I say, making my voice as calm and friendly as possible. "I didn't mean to scare you. I just have a really big emergency and I need to make a quick phone call. May I please borrow your phone for just a minute?"

She's wearing jeans, light boots, and a long winter coat in a mature style that says to me that her clothes are chosen by her mom, not her peers. She has a thick wool scarf wrapped around the bottom of her face.

There's a long silence as I wait for her response. I'm already calculating whether it would be smarter to continue my run and be well down the block before she regains her voice and starts screaming bloody murder, or if I should stay to explain my thoughtless actions to her parents when they inevitably race out to rescue their beloved daughter from a monster.

I'm waiting for the scream, but instead I watch something truly fascinating. A change is coming over her. I can't see much of her face, but the parts I can see begin to calm down and relax. But it's more than that. Her expression becomes that of someone more confident, wiser, and... well... older. Her eyes meet mine and I can see that she no longer fears me. I've never seen anything like this, and it's weird.

"What kind of emergency?" she asks directly in a high-pitched little voice.

I'm the unsure one now. Watching her for the last ten seconds has been one of the more surreal experiences of my life. "Uh, a radio station just called my name to win a contest."

"A Mexican beach vacation for two?"

"How did you know that?"