Mr. Ballin

But there was another reason Barbara wanted to get away from BYU.

And that was because she had started to feel unsafe being a young woman on a college campus.

So recently there had been some scary national news stories about college women being attacked on campus.

One student in Washington State had been beaten and almost killed in her dorm room in January.

And another woman had gone missing the following month.

And even though these attacks had not literally happened at BYU, it still freaked Barbara out.

I mean, especially because these women who had been targeted just looked a lot like her physically, with long dark hair and sort of similar features.

And so as a precaution, Barbara had been taking judo classes at school and even got her best friend, Jerry Hicker, to help her buy a gun.

Except Barbara had actually lost her gun recently.

She'd not been able to find it for the last few weeks.

She'd reported it missing to the campus police, but she really had no idea where it went.

But for now, Barbara forgot about the gun and just took a deep breath and finished up her goodbye letter.

Then she glanced over at the clock and saw it was almost 10 a.m., and so she had to get to class.

So she grabbed the letter and put it inside of her purse, where she also was holding a turquoise necklace, which she planned to sell that day.

It was the single most valuable thing that she owned, and she was going to pawn it to get some seed money to leave town.

She'd figure out her actual destination based on how much she got for it.

As Barbara threw her bag over her shoulder and got ready to leave, she heard a car pull into the driveway outside, which was a relief because she'd actually let her best friend, Jerry, borrow her car to go skiing the other day, and she had been hoping he would drop it off before she left for class.

And so clearly, that's what he was doing.

And so Barbara hurried out her front door, and sure enough, there was her car, and there was Jerry climbing out and waving her keys, basically being like, hey, I'm back.

As Jerry handed the car keys back over to Barbara, he asked her if they were still on for hanging out later.