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I went to a boarding school during high school. It was in a mid-sized industrial city and a not so safe neighborhood.

Despite its location, it was a great school and I generally felt pretty safe.

I was a soccer player and during the off season, I played at soccer clubs. So for the first two years of high school, my mom would pick me up at school, take me to the soccer club practice and then drive me back.

This was a lot of work, so for my junior year, I switched clubs. This is important for the rest of the story, so I'll explain a bit more.

Soccer club practice took place during the winter at an indoor facility close to my school.

I arranged with my school to have a security guard drive me to practice five minutes away and then come back to pick me up.

It was a small school with only five or six security guards. They rotated shifts, but I was pretty familiar with them.

When they drove me to practice, I was always driven in a van that had my school's name printed on it and the security guards usually wore a reflective vest or some sort of uniform with bright yellow stripes of fabric.

They never drove me to practice in their personal vehicles, although sometimes I saw a red dodge that belonged to one of the security guards driving around the school's campus, doing rounds.

In the spring, soccer club practice moved outside and it was from 730 to 9 at night.

The soccer club leased out the turf fields of my boarding school for practice, which was one of the reasons I switched to this soccer club in particular.

My school's turf fields were about two blocks away, so I no longer needed a ride since I could just walk to the fields.

Typically, when I walked to practice, I exited through the back gate closest to the street.

On my route, I had to walk past an elementary school and then take a tiny pathway that cars couldn't drive on.

It was light out during my walks to practice, but on the walks home, it was dark. I'm kind of afraid of the dark and typically don't go out at night alone.

But I was new to the team and the soccer club I switched to, so I had yet to find somebody to potentially ask to drive me back to school.

I didn't want to burden any of my new teammates even though it was a very short two-minute ride, so I would just walk home after practice.

Stupid I know, but I was young and idealistic.

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