I was 4 - 7.
I remember the girl, too.
Our mothers both knew, they thought it was cute so they let us play together for a while...
At least, until my mother learned a little more about their family...
Her biological father was involved in some shady business.
Their house was subjected to drive-by shootings.
I was actually there one time when it happened.
Her parents had trained her to treat it like a sort of scary survival game. The father had heavily reinforced the interior with lumber as his dayjob cover was in landscaping and construction. In retrospect I'm pretty sure he was a cartel smuggler.
I don't remember much, just her telling me to help push stuff against the walls that he'd already reinforced, and to go hide on the other side of the house.
I'm...not comfortable talking about this in detail publicly, only because in adulthood I tried to look them up, her and her younger brother, in my late teens/early 20s, just to reconnect as adults, and I'd found that they'd both had previous records which had been expunged, but the disturbing part is that they were classified under some kind of witness protection program.
I'd ran into her only a couple times in my teens, the last of which was when I was 17 at a restaurant. She'd completely changed her hair, went by a different name entirely, and even though she knew who I was she talked very indirectly to me as if she was being recorded or watched. She gave me a suggestive look of concern with her eyes as if to say "get out of here" and so I just took that notion and ran with it and never looked back.
That whole night was hazy for me. I was sober, I hadn't started experimenting with drugs and alcohol yet, but by my early teens I developed hardcore insomnia and by my late teens I was stone cold sober awake 4 days at a time without sleep, so my memory is a little hazy from them, along from some other stuff that happened to me in my teens.
I never saw her again.
I looked her and her brother up, they'd had a couple other arrest records under their legal birth name, but again expunged, all charges dropped, and again off the books of identity, no signs of online activity, literally the only two people I've ever known who *never* touched Social Media, not even MySpace during its time.
The whole of it is sort of a permanent Blue Dahlia style mystery in my mind. **** knows where she and him are now. Honestly it kind of gives me chills to think about given my own experiences with shady people.