Sable Monroe

At 16, working in New Hyde Park, I thought I was just getting home.

I was working, making what little money I could, and sometimes the bus wasn’t convenient, or it ran too late, or I simply didn’t have enough. So when someone offered me a ride, I took it.

These weren’t random men.

They were my coworkers.

People I worked with. People I saw regularly. People who knew my situation.

That was it.

But people were watching.

They saw me getting into different cars. They saw different male coworkers picking me up and dropping me off. And from that, they built a story about me that had nothing to do with the truth.

I wasn’t selling anything.

But people decided I was.

And it wasn’t just the men.

It was the women too.

Women my age.
Grown women.
Managers.

They saw the same thing and came to the same conclusions. They labeled me without ever asking a single question.

And what I still don’t understand to this day is this:

If they truly believed I was underage and doing what they implied…

Why didn’t anyone step in?
Why didn’t anyone ask if I was okay?
Why didn’t anyone report it?

They knew how old I was.

So if they really thought something inappropriate was happening, where was the concern?

Where was the protection?

It never came.

Because it wasn’t about protecting me.

It was easier to talk about me.
Easier to assume.
Easier to spread a story than to take responsibility for what they thought they were witnessing.

And the men who gave me rides?

They knew the truth.

And they let the story run anyway.

At 16, I thought I was just getting home.

I didn’t realize I was being watched, interpreted, and talked about.

I didn’t realize my reputation was being shaped in rooms I wasn’t even in.

I got home safely.

But not without a cost I didn’t understand yet.

Because survival will have you making decisions that don’t look like survival to anyone watching from the outside.