Real Encounters

*Old junky car sitting at the stop sign*

I was in about the 4th or 5th grade and finally old enough to walk home by myself from school like a big kid. It wasn't a very long path, but I felt a sense of pride in it, as if every single one of those footsteps were tiny bridges bringing me closer and closer to my ultimate independence. Looking back now, it's eerie to think how close my first steps of freedom were to making me run for my life. It was the mid 90s and we had just moved to Miami, Florida. Shortly after we got there, news broke out over an abduction, rape and murder of a boy only a grade older than me. His name was Jimmy Ryce. It was the first time I learned that there were bad people around who did bad things.

I'll never forget how much my parents and teachers stressed me not to talk to strangers, how to dial 911, and other hints, tips and tricks to help keep me safe after that. I think it's safe to say I was a bit more cautious and aware of my surroundings than I would have been otherwise had it not been for Jimmy. Well on this particular day when I was walking down the avenue home from school, I noticed something strange that caught my attention. The same old junky car sitting at the stop sign in front of me was sitting at the last two stop signs behind me. As soon as I would cross the street in front of the car, the driver would zip around and the block and be at the next stop sign, once again waiting for me to cross the road.

But after about 3 more blocks of this, I turned down the last street to my house and he drove away. I remember thinking it was weird, but I figured that he have been lost or something. Just a strange coincidence. I didn't think too much about it after that. Fast forward a few weeks later and it's Friday. I'm super excited for the weekend and my best friend Luis is walking home with me so we can play video games and watch movies after school.

Well as we're walking home together, I noticed that same old junky car pull up to the stop sign. Words cannot begin to describe the speed at which my brain re-calculated the previous event, which I had almost forgotten, and refiled the thoughts I harbored of him "probably being lost", and replaced them with the "oh my god" as I realized I was possibly being targeted by this person.

As soon as I noticed him I tried to play it cool. I didn't want him to read my face. I told Luis not to look, but gave him the run down that the same car ahead of us at the stop sign had followed me one time when I was walking home, and that we needed to make a plan. As we crossed the street I tried to nonchalantly draw my eyes over to the drivers seat to see the face of the man inside the car, but his tints were so strong that I couldn't see anything but the silhouette of a man facing directly at me.

I've read a few times before that when someone points a gun at you and you're in their cross-hairs, your body can somehow sense it, even miles away. I suppose it's the same way you can feel it when someone is looking at you in a room. Now I don't think this person had a gun pointed at me, but my body could feel his eyes watching me while I crossed the road in a way that gave me feel terribly uneasy. The only way to describe it was feeling like a big hungry alligator was really mad at me and I didn't know why.

My skin was crawling as he turned around the street and pulled up again in front of the next stop sign. I could tell by the way he drove that his attitude was different this time. The first time it seemed he was trying to be inconspicuous and just blend in, this time I think he knew that I knew what was happening, and he drove with more bravado, and would inch the car closer to us at the stop sign to intimidate us whereas before he would stay fairly well behind the white line. It felt like he was getting himself pumped up for something.

We were totally freaked out, but we were still trying our hardest to play it cool and act like we didn't notice. While he drove around the block to meet us at the stop sign at the street my house was on, we planned to write his license plate numbers down. As the car pulled up to the stop sign, we made a right instead of crossing him, and Luis pulled the pencil and paper out of his backpack and I read him the plate numbers real quick.

He definitely noticed what was going on, because he peeled away from the stop sign to go back around the block again. At this point he wasn't even trying to hide it anymore. It was time to run.

As soon as he turned the corner we bolted all the way to my house as fast as we could move. I don't know if I said anything to Luis, or if we were communicating telepathically to each other, but somehow we both knew we had to get inside my house before he could see which house we were going to. Anyway, i'll never forget this, but as soon as we were crossing the final street two houses from my house I looked down the road to see if he was there and I saw him turn a sharp corner super fast about 300 ft away and just saw him flooring the car so he could intercept us.

Before that moment I had only seen him pulling up to the stop sign, but this time I was seeing just how aggressively he was actually pursuing us and it was scary as fuck. Luckily enough we were fast and able to unlock the door and get inside just before he pulled down our street. I stared out the peek-hole and watched his car slowly drive around a few times before he finally disappeared. I called my mom and told her to come home because we just got chased my some weird man and she rushed home and we told her everything. Thankfully, my mother works in corrections, and as soon as we told her the story and that we had his license plate numbers she was able to send a few police officers she worked with over to visit the guy.

I don't know if I'll ever really know what happened, but she told me that the cops found the location of the owner of the vehicle and decided to go have a chat with him "off the record". I didn't know it at the time, but I found out years later that she went with them. She said he was some thirty something year old guy living with his parents, and that he denied everything, and his parents were surprised, but that the cops thought he was a fucking weirdo and didn't believe anything he said. They told him they were going to be watching him cause they know what he was doing and that if I ever saw him again they were gonna personally come back for him and they scared the shit out of him.

I never saw him again.