The Hitchhiker
I don’t know why I picked her up, but I did. 
When I saw her at the side of the road with her thumb stuck out, I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t seen a hitchhiker in these parts in the twenty years I had been here. 
She couldn’t have been more than twenty with bright pink hair that I could see even before I pulled up close.
As I neared closer to her, I knew I just couldn’t pass her by. What if something horrible happened to her? She looked to be about my daughter’s age. Maybe she too was trying to return to college after Spring Break.  
I had to do it. I just had to. Hoping I wouldn’t regret it, I pulled over to the side of the road. Better me than some perv.
I craned my head out the window. “What are you doing out here?”
She just stared at me blankly, her eyes dead. I shuddered. What trouble had this girl gotten herself into?”
“Come in,” I said.
She opened the passenger door and slid in. Her short black skirt slid up to reveal white panties and fishnet stockings. Was she a prostitute? Dear Lord, what was I doing?”
“What are you doing, honey?” I asked her. “Don’t you know that’s how nice girls like you get killed?”
She didn’t say anything.
I merged back onto the highway.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Alex.”
“Where are you headed, Alex?”
“I want to go home,” she said.
“And where’s that?”
She didn’t answer, but stared solemnly out the window.
Still keeping my eyes on the road, I said, “My name’s Maureen.”
She still didn’t say anything. 
I tried to think of something to get her to talk, maybe to ease her mind a little bit. “I’m headed back home too.”
“Where’s that?”
“Newtown.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s right outside of Philadelphia.”
“Oh.”
For a moment, she was quiet and I focused on the road. She certainly wasn’t a prostitute. Was she a runaway?
“How old are you, sweetie?”
“Nineteen.”
I gave her a skeptical look. “You’re not a runaway, are you?”
She just looked at me and gave me a look so sad it broke my heart. “No, I’m just lost,” she said. “I want to go home.”
Now that I had her here, I had to make sure that she was okay. “Where’s home?”
“Yonkers, New York.”
“That’s quite a ways from here. I don’t think I can take you there tonight. Do you want to spend the night at my house? I’ll get you a bus.” 
She smiled at me. “That would be nice, thank you.”
“No problem. Are you hungry?”
“I’m okay.” 
“I didn’t see you with a suitcase or anything. Do you need some clothes?” I asked.
“I’m okay.”
“Alright,” I said.
She stared out the window the rest of the time, quiet. I considered making small talk, but I figured that she was exhausted enough. 
She didn’t even turn on the radio.

Soon enough, I pulled up to the driveway. “Here I am.”
“Thank you,” she said, forcing a smile. 
“I have to get some things out of the trunk and then I’ll be right there, alright?”
She didn’t say anything. 
I swear now, it wasn’t more than a couple minutes. I just took out my suitcase and my laptop.
“Alright, we can go in now,” I said. 
She didn’t say anything.
“Alex, are you still there, honey?” I asked.
Still nothing. 
I walked up to the driveway, dragging my suitcase behind me. She wasn’t in front of the garage or anything.
“Alex, honey, where did you go?”
My heart started to race. Maybe I hadn’t been so smart after all. What if she was planning on breaking into my house or worse? I turned my head and looked around, but still, I didn’t see her.
“Alex!” I called.
I walked to the sides of my house to see if she had tried to walk away. Surely, I’d see her from far away with that hair. But still, nothing. It was if she had vanished.
Had she broken into the house somehow? Surely, I would have heard the garage door open, though.
Did she pick the lock at the front door? I went to the front door, but it was locked. She hadn’t broken in that way then.
As I unlocked the front door, a pit formed in my stomach.
“Alex!” I called as I stepped in the door. “Alex!” 
Still no response. She was gone.

For a few months, I forgot about Alex and got on with my life. Yet, as I was on that same highway picking up my daughter yet again, I saw her again, a pink-haired hitchhiker in the distance. 
Against my better judgment, I pulled over to the side of the road again. This time, I got out of the car before she could get in.
“Alex, what are you doing here again?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer, still staring out at the road with her thumb stuck out.
“Alex, do you remember me? I was the lady who picked you up here a few months ago,” I said. “Whatever happened to you?”
She still didn’t answer.
“Alex?”
Only then did she finally look up at me and when she did, I saw that her eyes were bloodshot. “I just want to go home,” she said.
“I can get you home.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Of course I can,” I said. “Now, I’m heading up to Penn State to pick up my daughter. You know, the main campus? It’s up north. You’ll be a little closer home. I can take you if you’d like.”
She shook her head and started to cry. 
“Oh honey…” I started to pat her shoulder, but as I did, it was not her shoulder I felt, but air. 
She looked up at me with sad eyes. “See? I’m not ever going home.” 
For a moment, I couldn’t do anything, but stare at her.
“I just want to tell them I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for not coming home. I’m so sorry.”
I wanted to reach out and say something, but I couldn’t.
When I finally got my wits together, I hopped in my car and drove away as fast as I could.  As I looked in the rearview mirror, she was still hunched over, sobbing.

When I went to pick up my daughter, I pretended everything was normal. Packing away her things helped get my mind off of the strange situation. 
It was only in the car that I brought it up again.
“You know, the strangest thing happened to me on the way here, Katie,” I told her.
“Really, what?”
“Well, I was driving up Route One when I saw a hitchhiker on the side of the road.” 
“Mom, don’t tell you picked them up, please.”
“Well, I did. Twice.” 
“I don’t get it.”
“A few months ago when I was dropping you off after Spring Break, I picked her up. I didn’t want some perv getting to her, you know.”
She put her hand on her face. “Oh Mom, I can’t believe you. Do you know how stupid that is?”
“She was only your age. Nineteen, she said she was,” I said. “I figure she couldn’t do much harm.”
“Ugh.”
“Anyway, she said she wanted to go home. I was going to take her, but it was all the way up in New York, so I told her she could stay at our house overnight and I was going to send her on a bus the next morning. 
She groaned. “You weren’t.”
“I was. Poor girl needed a place to stay and I figured she couldn’t afford a hotel room. Anyway, so I picked her up and took her home and as I was unloading my suitcase from the trunk, she just vanished. I looked in the house, the backyard, she wasn’t there. If she left, you figure I’d notice her, you know with that hair and all. I wasn’t long at all, I would’ve seen her, right?”
“Yeah…”
“So I forgot about it and, wouldn’t you know, she was in that exact same spot hitchhiking again.”
“She’s probably a prostitute.”
“No, she wasn’t a prostitute. She wouldn’t get in the car with me this time around and I kept asking her why and she said, ‘I can never get home’. I told her I’d take her up to the campus and fetch her a bus there, but she wouldn’t go. Poor girl started to cry. When I reached out to try to comfort her, all I felt was thin air. It was the weirdest thing. Now, am I crazy or something or what?”
Her eyes widened. “She must have been a ghost. You know what they say about ghosts. They’re supposed to be troubled spirits. They’re still on Earth because they have some unfinished business.”
“Maybe she was.”
“Maybe she was a prostitute and she got killed there.”
“Oh, Katie! That’s a horrible thing to think.”
“It would make sense.”
I shook my head. “She seemed like such a nice girl. Although now that you say it, she was dressed a little… immodestly.”
“See! She was a prostitute.”
“Poor thing. Said her name was Alex.”
For a moment, she didn’t say anything. “Did you say it was on Route One?”
“Yes, it was.”
“There was a car accident there around New Year’s. These two Rutgers kids were coming back from a party and hit a guardrail. Must have been going eighty, ninety miles or something. Their car flipped over and they both died.”
“How sad! Their poor parents.” 
“Well, yeah, I think he was high too. Or maybe drunk or both. I can’t remember. It was during Winter Break. She didn’t even see them over the holidays. Wanted to stay with her boyfriend instead. Lot of good that did her.”
“Oh my. How did you hear about this?”
“It was all over the Internet, Mom,” she said. “Probably on the news too.”
“Either way, that poor girl,” I said. “That poor, poor girl.”