A friend of mine was in a major car accident in January, putting her in to a halo (a metal contraption to restrict neck movement if you don't know) and basically rendering her useless for about 5 months. Just recently she had the halo removed, but she's still holed up at her mother's house for the time being. She had to quit her job and move out of her place since she wouldn't be able to afford rent while she was out of action for so long.
Earlier in the week she was texting me, almost begging me to take her out so she could escape from the house and interact with people for awhile. We decided on Friday night and when it rolled around, I set out to go pick her up. She lives in a remote area, about 30 minutes from me so it takes awhile to get to her. While I was driving she begins to text me and call me persistently. She's texting "pls hurry", and "I need out of here fast". I didn't answer her phone calls because I'm using GPS to find her Mom's house in the sticks. Her calls are interrupting my navigation since the roads are so windy with so many turns. It's becoming frustrating.
I finally get to her driveway and she's standing in it with a large backpack, a cup of water in her hand, and her cellphone on the ground. She reaches for her cellphone and her hands are shaking. She goes to the driver side of the car, and then looks up at me and sort of shakes her head and changes course to the passenger side of my car. She gets in and she's a fumbling twitchy mess. She's speaking to me, but not completing her sentences and sort of fidgeting with her hands and her clothes. She has her phone in her hands, and she's still calling me. I hang up on her since she's sitting next to me, and she immediately looks at her phone and presses Call again. My phone begins to ring, and I have to remind her that she's sitting right next to me.
I guess in my naive way, I just assume she's been cooped up for so long, coupled with some slight brain trauma she's a little out of sorts. She begins to tell me that right before I picked her up her Mom was giving her a lot of grief and that she needed to find a place to stay. She starts to hint at the idea of moving in with me, but I quickly shoot that down as I do not deal well with roommates. I very much have to have my own space and deal with my living situation by myself. We come to a stop light and she asks me if I can pick up a pack of cigarettes and a lighter for her since her Mom doesn't like that she smokes and she can't drive, since her car was totaled in her wreck. I pull in to a gas station at the light and walk inside to get her cigarettes. While I'm leaving the gas station, I notice she's left my car and now standing with her hands in her back pockets talking to two guys in a lift kit pickup truck, covered in mud. I walk over and both of the guys, probably barely 21, begin to size me up and assess what's going on. They hand her a beer from a case they apparently just bought and try and hand me one, but I'm not in the mood for cheap beer and certainly not when I'm about to drive. The last thing I need is a country cop to catch me with a beer in-hand. She asks the driver for a pen, and scribbles her number down on a scrap of the beer case box and hands it to the driver and tells him to share it with the passenger. She smiles and giggles a little and we walk back to my car, while she's inhaling the beer she just received.
We get close to the bar where we had planned to go to, and she's murmuring directions under her breath on how to get to where we are going. Right before we park I get a text from her mother telling me that "... is on muscle relaxers, please do not let her drink. She will tell you she is OK". Great.
We go inside the bar and I see my friends sitting at a table and I introduce her to my friend and she smiles and tells him flatly "I'm not going to remember your name, Honey". He looks a little puzzled but doesn't come off insulted, and continues on to discuss the workweek with me. While we are talking, she interupts us and asks him "what is your shoe size?" while cocking her head to the side and staring at his boots. He replies jokingly "12.. do you want to try them on?" and without breaking her stare at the floor, she asks him where he had his tattoos done. He looks at me with a side glance, and then looks back at her, who still isn't making eye contact and pulls a card out of his back pocket from the tattoo artist. She takes it, finally looking up to receive the card and slides it in her back pocket. She spins around in her bar stool and buries her head in to her cellphone. She's pressing the screen on her phone and nothing is happening.
She scrambles for her bag and begins pulling out what seems like everything she owns before drawing out a wad of cable, which is apparently her phone charger. She yells for the bartender and asks him to plug her phone in. She then disappears in to the crowd of people and eventually on to the patio outside where she hugs a guy and begins chatting him up, apparently a friend of hers. I continue to chat with my friend and assume she's fine outside.
Some time passes and my friend and I head outside to see if we can check in on her, only to see that she's nowhere to be found on the patio. A moment later she's emerging from the dark street with the guy she was talking to previously trailing behind her smoking a cigarette with his hands in his pockets. She makes a beeline for the front door, without acknowledging me and my friend who are directly in her path to the door. She comes out of the bar once more looking panicked and confused and said she lost her phone. She said she looked everywhere for it and can't find it. I ask if she checked behind the bar, since she was charging it earlier and she stood up to go look without a response. She didn't come back out to sit with my me and my friend, so we decide to go inside to make sure she's found her phone.
I find her sitting in a guy's lap, sucking on his neck while at the same time scrolling through pictures on her phone. From what I can see she's showing him Facebook photos from when she was in her early teens and explaining how she used to be attractive, etc. I recognize the guy she's straddling and know him through some mutual friends. I don't mind that she's all over him as I know him to some degree. Eventually she stands up, and stumbles towards me and tells me that she's going home with him. I nod to her, give her a half-hearted hug and send her on her way.
The next morning her Mom is blowing up my phone saying that my friend isn't answering her phone and she wanted to make sure she was okay. I felt like a complete asshole not safeguarding her daughter the entire night, but I didn't sign on to be a babysitter. I didn't expect any of this to happen. Sometime in the afternoon my friend text me, almost out of character thanking me for the night and that she was home with her Mom, about to have dinner.