ANONYMOUS - saratoga county
It’s the summer of 2020, July or August, me and my friends on our school’s colorguard team were doing a fundraiser to raise money for our team—a car wash, something we do every year, 9:30-11:30 am on a Saturday.
It’s not like we had a choice, it was either that, pay out of pocket to be on the team, or quit. So, we got up at 8 on a Saturday to go wash cars for pocket change.
Technically, the patrons had no fee. You didn’t have to pay us, but most did, about five dollars a wash. Sometimes we got lucky and colorguard alumni would pay us fifteen whole dollars to wash a car in 95 degree heat outside of a good year. It wasn’t the whole team though, no, that’s far too many people. You had to sign up for it, there were two shifts a day p, one day a month in the summer. One in June, one in July, one in August. It was either July or August when a man in a pickup truck, probably in his 40s, came to our little fundraiser. Everything was as it should be: “customer” exits the car, rinse the car, soap the car, rinse the car, dry the car, collect money.
Until he told us to bend over and “make sure to get the wheels.”
None of us knew what to say, so we pretended we didn’t hear or just laughed it off. All of us were between the ages of 10 and 17. I was 14. We tried to get over it by making jokes that we should run the car wash while wearing bikinis to drive in more customers, but no one could get over how uncomfortable we all were.
My dad came to pick me up in his car after he made us wash it and handed a whopping five dollars to the tip jar. I told him about what had happened, expecting sympathy or comforting, but instead I got talked back to. He said I was overreacting, that it wasn’t that bad, and that I only thought he was creepy because he was some random guy.
I had to do the car wash again this year, and was paired up with one of my friends that was in that same group last year. That was the day I told my mom what happened. She didn’t respond. She looked uncomfortable, not knowing how to respond to us making jokes about us, teenagers, being harassed by creepy men.