A couple of days later, my mother sat me down after school and said she needed to talk to me. “This man you’ve been emailing with. You can’t email him anymore.” She was very stern, very angry. “There are things you don’t know about him.”

What were those things? “He has a record.”

What kind of record? “Just…you can’t email him anymore.”

I was confused. “I had him investigated, Kate.” Investigated for what? How had she found out his name? “If he contacts you again, tell me, and we’ll call the police.” What did the police have to do with anything? All he had done was email me and give me Lilith Fair tickets. What had I done wrong?

By the time of my mother’s talk with me, my emails with the man from the plane had started to go a little stale, and he had started to seem like just another adult after all (and something of an ingratiating adult, as well), so I wasn’t particularly angry that this was happening. But the look on my mother’s face, and her tone of voice. She was at her most intimidating, her most furious. I didn’t understand. “You’ve been very lucky, Kate. Don’t let this happen again.”

Lucky? Don’t let what happen again?

What had I done wrong?