In late high school I made friends with a dude one year my senior.  We were friends for a year, year and a half, maybe?  The context of this friendship: I needed a reason to get out of my house and away from my borderline-abusive sister, and he needed some company as his family grew busy and were rarely home.  Though we had little history, our relationship was cathartic, and we'd spew whatever the hell we had on our minds - basically, a lot of unfiltered thinking out loud, without fear of judgement.  From the start, we agreed on one thing: we were both very inexperienced socially, had social anxiety, and in my case the question of high-functioning autism has been raised by several teachers and doctors.  We were to be blunt and clear with each other, ask for clarification when we were confused.  No hidden resentments, no unvoiced objections about the other's rant of the day, etc.  No wondering if that tone was suggestive or not - we would ask, and we would know, and that was comforting to the both of us.

This also meant there was NO question about what we were.  We were not romantically involved.  Until the event I'll cover in a minute, I didn't think there was confusion even without our agreement to be blunt.  In fact, this was the first non-asexual person to whom I outed myself as asexual.  Whether or not me outing myself is relevant to what happened next, I am unsure.

We went to the drive-in movies one night.  I didn't have a car or a license, so we went in his car.  We left a little early to avoid the jam on the way out, and he told me he was out of gas.  Like, he was driving on E all day.  This is where shit got weird.

He wanted to go to the gas station near his house.  His house was WELL out of town, and that gas station was maybe like the tenth on the list of ones closest to us.  It struck me as odd, but I figured he might just have a coupon or membership or some other discount for that station, and since he'd paid for the tickets I didn't say anything about it.  I don't remember if I offered then, but if it were to happen now, I'd offer to pay for the gas (and insist on a closer station).  We get to that gas station and the outside lights are off, but the inside lights are on.  We can't see any other cars in the lot.  The gas station door sits wide open.  He locks me in the car and goes in, and then rushes back out.  There was no cashier, just someone in the back rifling through shelves.  We got the fuck outta there and he said "There's this back highway by my mom's house, if we go down that for ten minutes we'll find a gas station there."

And I think, *there's no way in hell we're driving ten more minutes out of town*.  If the gas ran out, we didn't need to be in the middle of nowhere (which - the town itself is just one tier above "middle of nowhere").  While I didn't have my license, I did have a learner's permit, and I knew the roads pretty well.  I told him we were better off returning to the drive-in and stopping at a gas station near there.

From here, something in my gut was telling me something was *wrong*.  He would not make eye contact with me.  He was very intently focused on the road, which was unlike him.  He really didn't want to go back into town, and he started giving me excuses for it: we could just stop at his one of his parents' houses until one of them came home (in three hours).  We could still go to that other gas station he knew of.  I chalked this up to nerves and insisted no, we need to get out of dark residential areas and onto lit streets, we need to be near town where we have multiple stations and tow options, we need to stay where there's wifi/phone signal, etc., and he agreed we should return to town.

2 minutes down the familiar highway into town, there's an intersection, and despite 1) agreeing to return to town and 2) him taking this route to school every day for the past 2 years, he is in the wrong lane when we pull up to the intersection.  He tells me that there's a cop here and it's too late, he has to head down this other single-lane road that leads out into the prairie.  And he doesn't say "I'll u-turn" or "I'll turn around", he says "We'll look down that way for a gas station."  He wants to drive down that road.

But there *is no cop*, and I have no idea where that road goes, and this is where I realize that I might be in trouble.  I am locked in, I am far too small to get the wheel away from him, and nobody knows we are out here.  We weren't supposed to come this way, let alone down a road neither of us was familiar with.  I cannot let him take that road.

I tell him to turn anyway, fuck the cop.  There's nobody else out here at 2 in the morning.  We're not hurting anyone.  And I *yell* this.  Loudly.  Over halfway through the intersection, he turns, and we resume the road back into town.

From here, he continues to give excuses to get us off the main road.  "I don't know this place", "this doesn't look familiar", etc.  This is still the route he would have taken every weekday for the past two years.  It's... literally just take this highway, the only four-lane highway, all the way to the high school, where you turn onto the main street.  It's not a hard route.  I drove it once before this and I knew where we were.  I direct him to a gas station in the middle of town.  It is well-lit, no robbery this time.  While he's filling up I text my sister to tell her we're close to the house (my parents made her stay up and wait for me because last time I was out late, I got locked out of the house - I had no idea if she was actually waiting, though).  When he gets back in the car, even though she hadn't responded yet, I told him she texted me asking where I was and that I told her we were on our way.  My house was also quite a ways out of town, in the other direction - a route he was much less familiar with, but after hearing my sister was up and waiting, he had no more trouble navigating darker, smaller, more confusing streets to get to my house.

Once I'm safe, I write down what I remember happening for later reference and spend an hour calming down, then go to bed.  And what followed was years of me wondering what the fuck happened.  I cannot stress how bad my gut feeling had been that night.  I am a forgiving person.  I've forgiven and salvaged friendships from worse, believe it or not.  But that night every ounce of trust I had in this dude *evaporated*.  Every instinct I had was screaming *danger, danger*, to the point where I considered grabbing at the wheel anyway and forcing us off the road once we were a little closer to town and someone might stop to check on us.  I almost did, at that isolated intersection with the invisible cop.  Had his weird behavior been because of the robbery (which - I didn't realize until now, actually, that I never saw this robbery; I'm pretty sure he wasn't lying about what he saw inside b/c what I saw outside was also so strange), or had there actually been bad intentions?  If it *was* bad intentions, how far had he planned to go, and what had stopped him until I'd had the chance to contact my sister?  Not long after this happened, I wrote about the incident for a class.  It was a private assignment, just read by the teacher, and I kept the kid's name out of it (this teacher didn't know him, anyway).  The teacher said I was right to trust my gut.  Years after, I have come to the following conclusion, the only one that reconciles the strange events of the night, my gut feeling, and who I knew this dude to be:

He had no bad intentions.  He didn't go into it with a plan to put hands on me.  I think what he wanted was for us to end up in a house or in the car alone with nothing else to do so he'd have a chance to make a move, set the mood, whatever you'd want to call it.  I don't think he'd have touched me without consent.  But it just... never crossed his mind that locking me in his car and trying to force us first to his house and then into the middle of nowhere without telling me why would be *terrifying*.  It would breach our pact about being blunt, but we did have social anxiety, and maybe he took "asexual" to mean "straight but a little nervous" and decided a sideways approach was best.  Maybe, once we were parked somewhere, he would have bluntly asked.  But he never got farther than trying to set the stage, because of the robbery and my insistence we head back into town instead.  I am very certain that this is what happened.

He didn't contact me for two months after that.  He knew he'd done something wrong.  After some time had passed (though - keep in mind I was still processing what happened, hadn't quite reached the above conclusion, still had no idea what he'd intended that night) he asked if I wanted to join him for lunch or something.  I turned him down.  I was terrified of the thought of being alone with him again.  He invited himself to my graduation at the end of the school year, and I told my classmate - "Don't leave me alone with him."  She didn't treat him badly or anything - in fact, they hung out with each other more than I did with either of them - but she followed my request without question.  He rode with me and my mother to the ceremony and we exchanged a few words, but he spoke mostly to my mother.  He was avoiding me, too.

I never addressed him directly about what happened, and that's where I wonder if I'm the asshole.

See, I was afraid to be alone with him, but this wasn't something I could ask him about in front of others.  I could have texted, but every time I chickened out.  It seemed like a conversation best had face-to-face, like texting would result in misunderstandings and reading with the wrong tone.  If his answer was "No, I was just nervous," I don't think I would have believed him right away.  And if his answer was "Yes, I wanted to get us alone toge