Free Unaccompanied Minor by Hollis Gillespie

go with the odds.
Never get in the car! If someone pulls up beside you, points a gun at you, and demands that you get in the car—don’t! They probably won’t call attention to themselves by shooting at you. And if they do, they only have a thirty percent chance of hitting you, and of that even a lower percent chance of hitting anything vital. Whereas if you get in the car, your pretty young ass is almost certainly dead—unless you jump out. Oh yeah, if you find yourself in the car,
jump out
.
Learn how to escape from a locked car trunk. Here are some tips: In recent-model cars, glow-in-the-dark escape handles have been installed for you to pull and free yourself. If you can’t find an escape handle, yank out the wires to the taillights so the killer/rapist will get pulled over by the police.
If someone jumps in your car, pulls a weapon on you, and demands that you drive to a secluded area, jump out of the car and run. If you can’t do that, then floor it and steer straight into the next streetlight. The airbag will deploy. You’ll be fine—maybe a little banged up, but that’s better than dead. If there is no streetlight nearby, rear-end a police car.
Don’t succumb to peer pressure! Your friends are idiots. Don’t listen to them when they say things like, “Drink this” (said the date rapist with the roofie cocktail), or, “It’ll be fun” (said the soon-to-be-dead friend who wants to hitchhike to Bisbee), or, “It’s not addictive if you only do it once” (said the crack dealer/future pimp).
Improvise a weapon. Plenty of everyday things can be deadly. Why do you think I wear a chopstick in my hair? If the day comes I won’t think twice before shoving it into someone’s jugular. Believe me.
This bears repeating: Go for the gonads. Don’t be shy.
    And two, the second reason I was prepared when I got abducted was because of
MacGyver
. Flo is also a mad
MacGyver
fan and now she and I are both red-star commentators on the
MacGyver
community website. That means we can post comments without having to wait for them to be screened by the moderators. You have to
earn
a status like that. Flo earned hers by pointing out that in episode fifteen of the first season, when Mac is making a homemade defibrillator, he uses a cable cut from a microphone as a power supply when—this is probably common knowledge to you—microphones don’t have electricity running through them. So that was a huge faux pas on the part of the writers, and Flo is pretty legendary for pointing it out.
    Flo has been flying for forty-six years. A funny thing about the airline business is that once someone gets hired they never quit, especially the flight attendants. The longer you have the job, the more control you have over the trips you can fly. So someone like my mother, with only seventeen years of seniority, is still relatively junior and would need a secret weapon to be awarded the “turnaround” trips with high flight hours that would still have her home in time to make me dinner. For example, a San Francisco turnaround, which would take her to SFO and back with no overnight layover to keep her away or connections to eat up her day, would put such a hefty chunk of hours on her schedule that just four of those trips each month was enough to maintain her full-time status.
    This is the job the GAL said was bad for a single mother to have.
    My mom worked as little as four days. A
month
. Thanks to the fact that she taught me the WorldAir crew computer interface. She needed to make sure none of her flights overlapped her custodial periods, because the common assumption about flight attendant mothers is that their jobs keep them from being able to care for their kids. It’s a false assumption, and one that pilots never seem to face.
    So I was her secret weapon. While my mom was working her trips and dealing with family court, I was working the flight attendant swap boards for her, grabbing those high-time trips when they showed up. I was