radioactivepeasant:

I won’t be online for a lot of tomorrow, so I’m posting Storytime now.

This week’s episode: The Creepy Car (Or: why I didn’t ride my bike much as a young teen)

My neighborhood is probably one of the safest you’ll find around here. The neighbors look out for each other – to the point where some habitually leave their doors unlocked. Small packs of neighborhood children roam freely and without fear through everyone’s yards, and nobody minds. My house tends to be a central focal point for shenanigans.

The adults in this neighborhood all tend to keep an eye out for youngsters, whether they’re the parents or not. Same goes for the grownups too. Once, when I was probably 16, a policewoman chased several big guys into the neighborhood. She stopped them on our street and cuffed all three guys by herself while waiting for backup. She never knew, but she had the occupants of five different houses ready and waiting to run out there if things got violent.

So now that you have an idea of how safe our neighborhood is NOW, let me point out that there was a time when it wasn’t so safe. When I was about 15, and the neighborhood was still only about half full, there weren’t as many kids as there are now. There were two about our age who lived four streets away from us, and sometimes we babysat their younger siblings. My sister and I used to have to ride our bikes down there. There was a short route with few hills, but we couldn’t take it.

You see, a registered sex offender lived in one of the houses on that route, and none of the kids were allowed to walk or ride past his house.

So we had to take a longer route with two giant hills that were absolutely killer to skinny little teen and tween legs with no muscle like mine.

Well one Saturday morning the girl from the house four streets down (let’s call her Sam) and a girl two houses over (let’s call her Natasha) had come over to hang out. We were goofing around on walkie talkies, playing with nerf guns, typical kid stuff. Anyway it gets close to lunchtime and we decide to ride over to the one Sam’s house on the other side of the neighborhood.

So here’s two 15 year olds, a 14 year old, and a 13 year old all on our bikes and riding through the streets. Natasha had these little mirrors on her bike, if I remember correctly, and I think she’s the one who noticed the car first.

A big black car was driving very slowly just a few feet behind us. We couldn’t see through the windshield. Well we thought maybe he wanted to pass and couldn’t get around us, so the four of us rolled up onto the sidewalk and didn’t think more of it. But he maintained his slow speed and kept up right behind us.

We thought that was a little weird, but ignored him and turned onto another street. So did the big black car. Well maybe his destination was in the same direction as ours, we thought, and made that one awful turn that takes you up a giant hill.

The car turned too.

By that time all four of us were on edge, being alone with no adults in sight. One of us (it may have been my sister) tersely said, “Speed up.”

And hill or no hill we started pedaling like our feet were on fire. The black car got closer.

At the end of the street, Sam’s cul-de-sac was visible, with her garage door open. We pedaled like the devil was behind us, over the last stretch of road, up over the curb, onto the long driveway. All four of us dropped the bikes on the grass and pelted across the yard to the garage, not daring to look behind us. We charged into the garage, and someone yelled “GO!” while Sam fumbled with the doorknob into the house. After what felt like minutes, the door opened and we fell into the house. Sam slammed and locked the door and we all ran to lay flat on the floor in the front room, out of sight of the windows. We could just see the road outside, but we couldn’t be seen. As we peeked through the curtains, the big black car sat in the cul-de-sac.

It didn’t pull into another driveway. It didn’t pull into Sam’s driveway. It sat there for about twenty more seconds, then it turned around and drove away. We all giggled with relief, feeling very proud of ourselves, and soon forgot the incident as we made sandwiches and went to build a lego metropolis.

It wasn’t until this year that it actually occurred to me how dangerous that could have been. I don’t know what the driver of the big black car was doing, or what their intentions were. I don’t know what, if anything, would have happened if we’d stopped.

There’s a part of me that can’t shake the feeling that we had a close call that day.

Ok in hindsight, well over a decade later, I really should have told my parents about that. That was kind of alarming.