A few years ago, I was finishing up my Master’s. One night, before a particularly horrid evening class, a friend from school and I decided we would grab some ice cream beforehand to help us get through the class. I picked her up from her apartment and we went to a Coldstone just down the street from the building where our class was. It was a busy, albeit small, strip of shops. We got our ice cream and came out to sit in my car to eat it as there was nowhere to sit outside. As we are walking back to the car, we hear a man call out from behind us and say, “excuse me!” in a somewhat panicked voice. We turn around and it’s a man in a suit, he’s probably in his 40s, the suit doesn’t look like it fits him very well, he has no backpack or laptop bag, and he looks panicked and harried l, but clear eyed and fully aware of his surroundings. He says, “Do you girls know where the train station is? I am supposed to catch this train in 20 mins.” We tell him, yes, the train station is about a 10 min walk from where we were and gave him directions. Now, mind you, we are in a very busy/HCOL area, full of Ubers, Lyfts, and cabs, and we are in a busy parking lot where tons of people are coming and going. His walk, at a leisurely pace would be 10 mins, so he has plenty of time to get over there, and he wasn’t out of shape at all (actually quite the opposite). We turn around to start walking to the car again as he said thanks and it seemed like the conversation was over. The next thing we know he’s following us to the car, and when we turn around to see he’s still there he says, “Could you girls do me a favor? If I promise to be nothing but an upstanding gentleman, could you take me to the train station so I don’t miss my train?” Now, a few things don’t add up here. This area we are in is known for all types of white collar business, but everyone has a bag of some sort, especially if they are taking mass transit. Also, he looked out of place in the suit and the way he asked us for the ride made our red flags go up, why do you need to preface that you’ll promise to be an upstanding gentleman if you are one? While he was asking us about the train station and for the ride several single men walked to their cars, got in and left, including one of the cars next to ours where we were standing. Why didn’t he approach one of them? The whole situation felt off. My friend and I were definitely on the same page, and unlucky for this guy, we are both Master’s students in forensic psychology. So we’re about to go to a class where we talk about people, mostly men, luring, raping, torturing and killing people in attempts for us, the students, to better understand their psychological mindsets. So, even more so than the average person, we are going to have our guard up about strangers approaching us. We unsurprisingly told him, that sorry we couldn’t help, we had to get to class and that he could grab an Uber/Lyft/cab quickly or walk and we hoped he’d make it. Instead of just saying thanks and walking off he hung his head very dramatically in defeat and said “I should have known. If you were my daughters, I wouldn’t have wanted you to give me a ride,” and walked off in the opposite direction of where we told him the train was. I often think about this whole scenario. Maybe he was just late, and panicked asked the first people he saw, got nervous about asking us and therefore asked poorly, but so many red flags piled on and my friend and I both independently thought the situation was very odd when we talked about it afterwards. If he was up to some shady behavior, the audacity to try for two women at once in a busy parking lot in broad daylight was disturbing to say the least.