Relatable Pre-Teen Takes $1300 Cab from Arkansas to Florida For a Boy

A daring and resourceful pre-teen in Arkansas gave her family the shock of their lives when she disappeared in the middle of the night. While Alexis Waller’s parents frantically got in touch with police after finding a note from Alexis explaining she had run away, the 11-year-old was sitting in a cab on her way to Florida. All this for a boy. God, this is too real for me right now.

The 11-year-old girl swiped $10,000 in cash that her grandmother had stashed away in her sock drawer, and snuck out of her home in Bryant, Arkansas, in the middle of the night, walking over to a gas station. There, she hitched a ride with a TOTAL STRANGER to Little Rock, about 20 miles away, where she hired a cab. This girl is the perfect mix of amazingly bold and completely clueless about how dangerous that was.

And apparently it didn’t strike the cab driver as crazy or odd or just slightly different that a child was demanding to be driven four states over, more than 800 miles away. Via KARK:

“He didn’t really ask anything, he just asked me where I needed to go,” Alexis told KARK. “I said, ‘I need to go to Jacksonville, Florida’. He’s like, ‘do you have money’ and I’m like ‘yes’.”

The driver said the ride would cost about $2,500. Alexis gave him about $1,300 upfront, and promised the rest when they got to Florida.

The cops quickly found the cab company Alexis had hired, and was able to track her down—in Atlanta. Her parents then drove nine hours in the middle of the night to go pick their child up. According to the cops, the cab driver technically didn’t break any laws because he did not seem to mean Alexis any harm. The cab company is claiming Alexis had worn a lot of make up which made her look older, which is clearly a steaming crock of shit, but her parents are now pushing for laws that require taxi drivers to verify the age of young passengers traveling alone.

Anyway, all of this was just to go see a 16-year-old boy she met two years ago on vacation and and had kept in touch with. Apparently, even he had no idea she was going to come see him. Alexis, girl, it might have sounded like the perfect premise for a circa 2004 Hilary Duff movie (with an original song by Aly and AJ), but no boy is worth that kind of trouble and definitely not worth that kind of money. And definitely not worth the experience of Florida.

Seems like Alexis learned her lesson at the end of the day. “I’m actually glad I got found ’cause I knew I made a mistake after awhile and I didn’t have a phone,” she said, clearly demonstrating an 11-year-old’s exasperating underestimation of the gravity of the situation. As for her parents’ reaction, her father Brent Waller said possibly the most father-like thing possible:

“You have the rest of your life to punish her, and you just want to hug her and just love her because you got her back and that’s what’s important.”