I was 12, walking alone on a gray afternoon when a man driving in the same direction slowed down to meet my pace.

“Hi,” he called from his open window. “Do you need a ride?”

I was an awkward, non-menstruating tween, pudgy with thick, round bifocals and a perpetually greasy ponytail, blissfully unaware of predators. Even with a recent kidnapping in the news, dangerous men were an alien concept to me.

It was the fall of 1993, shortly after a man had abducted a 12-year-old girl, Polly Klaas, from a slumber party at her home in Petaluma, Calif. In the months when the search for her was underway, her face filled TV screens and the magazines in the supermarket racks.

I had just moved to Washington State from Seoul, where my father was stationed at a military base. In that bustling city, I had enjoyed an unbridled freedom to roam — something I thought would continue when my family settled in Lacey, a suburb south of Seattle.

The Burger King was a half-mile walk from where we lived. Even shorter if I cut through the playground. When the stranger offered me a ride, I was on my way home, carrying a warm bag containing a Whopper Jr and fries.

“No thanks,” I said.

He drove off. I watched as he drove toward the cluster of newly built beige tract houses that my family had moved into. At that moment I believed he was a kind neighbor I must not have recognized.