This happened about two weeks ago. I (15F) went on an extracurricular event through my school and spend 5 days at a convention. Aside from my crippling social awkwardness, and of course this, it was great and I had a lot of fun hanging out with my friends at the convention.

On the second day we were at the convention, there was a dance/social being held for all the kids in attendance (approximately 1,300). Before I even left home, my mom convinced me to bring a new dress I bought, a cute blue floral dress with brown buttons down the front and lettuce crimped straps, which cost about $10 from my local Walmart. So I decided “hey, I feel absolutely fucking beautiful in this so I’m going to wear it.” And I did.

So I’m at the dance, it’s 10 at night, the music is so loud my ears are dying, and the room the dance is in is just like a slow cooker. I don’t like dancing, especially in large crowds of strangers, so I just went and stood leaning against a wall in the back, which is what quite a few other people were doing. This is where it started.

This girl (who will be referred to as “G”) walks up to me, she’s about my height and age and behind her is this taller guy (who will be referred to as “J”). She says to me “oh my god pure so pretty, just so pretty. Don’t let anyone tell you other wise”… etc. A friend of mine from my school (who I will refer to as “E”) walks up to us and says to the girl “I know, I tell her that all the time and she never believes me” (Not once has E ever called me pretty btw). G then says “my friend thinks you’re really beautiful too. He doesn’t do well socially, but he wants to know if you’d slow dance with him when a slow song comes on.” And me, not wanting to be rude, said yes. E and I both walked away and. Stepped it to get on air.

I come back to the dance about 10 minutes later and I see another one of my friends (who will be referred to as “T”) and J. I walked up to them, said “hi” to T and then we both started dancing because the song Stacy’s Mom came on. The song ended and J started talking to me. I could hear him so I motioned to the doors that lead to a lobby area outside the dance room.

We find a couple of chairs and sit down so we can talk. I came to find out that he is 18, which is the only part about him that he said about himself. He began talking about YouTube shows such as “Hazbin Hotel” and “Helluva Boss,” continuing further into religion, saying he doesn’t like Christian girls (I am Christian) and he continuously keeps saying “gods fingers *snap* *snap*.” He then makes some orphan jokes and Fortnite jokes before then saying “yeah, my friends are always like ‘J, you should carrying condoms around with you because safe sex and what not’ so I’ve got condoms in my Fanny pack.” And I was just really uncomfortable, even more so than I had been during his orphan joke rant. Lucky for me, a group of his friends came by and I slipped away, saying goodbye. He followed me as I was leaving and asked to get my number since I had already told him that I didn’t have a snap (I do, but I don’t feel comfortable giving it to people I don’t already know). I said to J “sorry, but I’m 15 and you’re 18 so I don’t feel comfortable giving my phone number to you.” But he just said “well we’ll just give a couple years and see about it then, and you can ask your friend for my snap.” I left shortly after that to return to T.

I met back up with my friend and we both agreed that we found J creepy and that we weren’t comfortable around him. We headed bro a table where other people from our school were and we could see J scanning the room for us. One of the girls at the table (who will be referred to as “C”) told us to follow her to the bathroom where we could get away from him. T received a text from C about 5 minutes later saying that he was waiting outside of the bathroom for us to come out.

By this point I was on the verge of crying. Maybe it was a bit of an overreaction but I was scared of J. Another 5 minutes passed and he finally left. T and I headed back to the table of members of our school and J had found us again. He tapped my friend on the shoulder a few times and then sat down at the table right near us.

T and I decided that it would be best to leave. And so we did. As we walked out I started to lose it and I began to cry. We passed two adult women as we left and we told them what had happened. They both then proceeded to March back to the dance and find J.

We got back to the dorms we were staying at and T called the teacher who was our supervisor and I called my mom. That night I didn’t sleep alone (both T and I got dorms to ourselves) and I stayed in the extra loft bed in T’s dorm.

I got a call from our teacher that morning. He said that they’d found who it was and that he was being escorted off of campus that morning.

Even though two weeks have passed, I still can’t stop thinking about what happened and how it could’ve potentially gotten worse if anything would’ve happened at all.