Inhale. Exhale. One foot and then the other. The pounding of the pavement, the beat of the music—nothing else mattered. Out here on the trail, there was no judgment, no criticism. No demanding professors or annoying roommates. Out here, she could be herself, alone with her thoughts with nothing to worry about in the world.
Jasmin Brown ran the same four-mile stretch of Boxer’s Trail every evening. It gave her the opportunity to clear her mind and get ready for the next day. She loved to go out in the afternoon so that, by the time she returned to the apartment she shared with two other sophomores at Drexel University where she studied accounting, her roommates were already out partying or holed up in their rooms. She didn’t get along with either of them, and even though the semester had just started, she was seriously considering relocating, or if things continued to get worse, maybe even moving back home and taking public transportation to school each morning.
But she couldn’t think about those problems right now, not while she was on her run. This was her time to free her mind and let the pavement reassure her that she was all that she should be. As she turned a corner near a copse of trees, a mother pushing a stroller caught her eye, and she smiled, absently wiping the sweat from her upper lip onto her wristband. Two more miles to go, and she was really getting into a rhythm now.
Her mind drifted to her mother. She had worked so hard to make sure Jasmin and her older brother, Damon, had the opportunity to go to college. Two jobs—a waitress in a café by day, a custodian in an office building by night—meant not a lot of quality time with her children. But that didn’t mean she loved them any less. In a lot of ways, it was solid proof to Jasmin just how loved she was. Her mother’s sacrifice meant that she would be able to fulfill her dream of becoming an accountant one day.
A giggle escaped her lips as she thought of her mother. Always the worrier! She was constantly warning her about something. Had she heard about that restaurant downtown that gave all those people food poisoning? Was she careful to look behind her before she unlocked the door to her apartment at night? Just the other day, she’d called to tell her to be careful when she was out running. “You’re not jogging the same path every night, now are you, honey? That’s a good way to let someone know your habits,” she’d advised.
Jasmin had rolled her eyes, glad her mother couldn’t see her expression on the other side of the phone. “No, Mama,” she promised. “I’m mixing it up, I promise,” she’d lied.
“Good,” Michelle Brown replied, with a sigh. “’Cause you know there are plenty of crazy people in this world, and there’s a couple girls’ bodies already been found dead around here the last few weeks.”
“I’ll be fine, Mama,” she assured her doting mother. “Don’t worry about me. Any fool tries to put his hands on me, he’ll be tasting pepper spray for the rest of his life.”
“That’s a good girl,” her mother had said, “but keep your eyes and ears open, honey. If something happened to you, I don’t know what I’d do. You’re my world, girl. You’re my whole wide world.”
Jasmin couldn’t help but smile at those last words. She always said that—she was her world, her whole wide world. While she knew it was human nature for her mother to worry, Jasmin was strong, fast, and always carried pepper spray next to her iPhone on her waist. There was no way any hoodlum was going to assault her.
Mile three down, one more to go. Just a few more turns through the most heavily wooded area of Boxer’s Trail. The sun was fading on the horizon, not another soul in sight. Kanya streaming through her earbuds; life was good. She was young. She was free. The world and all of its possibilities lay before her.
Jasmin didn’t hear or see anything unusual, yet—suddenly--her body was being ratcheted to the side, a strong arm around her chest and arms, another clamped over her mouth. She tried to scream, but she couldn’t get anything out. A black-gloved hand restricted her breathing as well, and though she tried to pull away, her assailant was clearly much stronger than she. She attempted to dig the heels of her pink Nikes into the dirt, to keep him from dragging her, but she couldn’t get a grip on the slippery pinecone covered earth.
He must have pulled her a good twenty yards off of the trail into the deep shrubbery before he said anything at all. Finally, she heard a gruff, sharp whisper in her ear. “Shut up!” he growled. “You shut your mouth, dirty whore!”
With a violent shove, Jasmin felt her body hit the ground, hard, her head slamming into the trunk of a tall pine tree. Before she could even contemplate getting up and sprinting away, he was on top of her. She tried to roll over, to get a glimpse of her assailant, to see if maybe she recognized him, maybe he was someone she knew, but the pressure from his black-gloved hand was pressing on her head now, his fingers tangled in her short black hair as he kept her face in the dirt. She opened her mouth to scream, to beg for mercy, but all that came out was a soft whimper.
“I told you, you’d never get away with it,” he spat at her, the saliva dripping out of his angry mouth and splashing against the side of her face, mixing with the tears that began to dampen her cheeks. “Now, it’s time to pay the price, bitch.”
“Please, Jesus, help me,” Jasmin managed to whisper, praying it would all be over quickly. A sharp pain in her throat took her breath away, and she began to choke, sputtering out drops of blood with each cough. She closed her eyes, pressing them tightly against the pain, the inexplicable horror, the shock that this was actually happening to her, and concentrated on the face of her mother, remembering the hug and smile she’d left her with the last time she’d seen her, a few days ago. As the world began to fade away, Jasmin Brown muttered two last words, softly: “Sorry, Mama.”