I was taking the shuttle bus back from Edinburg after a long, grueling day of class. Around me were many exhausted students, several of them falling asleep in order to endure the tedious hourlong ride ahead of us.
I turned over and slouched in my seat, ready to sleep too, not before noticing that the man next to me, who was in his late 30s, had also fallen asleep before we even departed from the campus. When I awoke about 40 minutes later, the man was still asleep, but he was holding my hand in his lap.
At first, I laughed it off as a silly misunderstanding. I thought that maybe he had just moved around in his sleep and accidentally grabbed onto me. I tried to pry my hand out of his grasp, but as I did, his grip on me tightened. That was when I realized that this wasn’t an accident.
The uneasy feeling I had intensified when we arrived to our destination. I rushed onto campus, but he followed and eventually caught up to me. He proceeded to ask me my age, and tried to get my phone number, despite me clearly telling him “No!” multiple times as politely as I possibly could.
As we reached the most traffic heavy area of campus, he pulled me into a spontaneous side hug and held onto me. It was at this point where I shoved and yelled at him, hoping that he’d leave me alone or at least get the attention of the people around us.
He let go of me, but still stuck around.
He continued to call me “beautiful” and insisted that we should go on a date. I kept denying his advances, but he persisted nonetheless. He then told me that he had to make an emergency phone call, but his phone didn’t have service, so me being naive, lent him mine. As expected at this point, he used my phone to call himself in order to obtain my phone number.
I didn’t report the incident to the police until the next day. I didn’t think that anything that happened was worth reporting because the man technically didn’t break any laws. At 18 years old, I was legally an adult, so I figured that things like this were just a part of life.
In hindsight, I know that I was being too polite, too passive. I should’ve stood up for myself and bluntly let the man know that I wasn’t interested and left the situation completely. I wish I would’ve known what I do now, but at the same time, I’m grateful that it happened because it made me open my eyes and realize that I should be more aware of dangerous situations and less hesitant to report them.
My advice to everyone would be to adopt a more assertive demeanor in college in order to avoid being taken advantage of, like I was.
