Wednesday Afternoon, April 12th

... 100 Hours and Counting ...

The gray van rolled up to the school crosswalk. Justin, who was just three days shy of his seventh birthday, didn’t look at it. He didn’t have to because he knew it was there. He had been watching it for a couple of days now. He was hoping the stranger inside wouldn’t offer him any candy or anything, because he would have to say no, and he didn’t want the stranger to get mad.

It was a warm spring afternoon in the college town of Davis, California. The hot, dusty days of summer were just around the corner. The sun burned in the blue sky, splattering white glare over the cars in the teachers’ parking lot of Birchlane Elementary School. As Justin left the school grounds, the sidewalks sprouted guardian ash trees that reminded him of marching soldiers. A breeze up from the Sacramento Delta softly pushed and pulled at the trees. Green leaves fluttered and insects buzzed. Justin reached out and ran one finger over the rough bark of each of the trees as he passed them.

He watched an orange-yellow bus pull out of the parking lot and rev up its smoky diesel engine. The kids inside all seemed to be yelling at once, their noise rising and falling with its own rhythm, completely apart from that of the engine. Justin wished he lived far enough away to take the bus home instead of walking. If he had been on the bus now like those other kids, he wouldn’t have to worry about the gray van.

He knew the van was probably no big deal. There were lots of other kids around, and the gray van was probably here every day to pick up some other kid. Despite this, down deep he felt that the van was watching him. He knew that none of the grown-ups would listen to him, because he had told too many fibs. He felt a pang of regret for having gone too far with his stories the past, like the ones about the alligator at school. After that, he was sure they wouldn’t buy anything he said. He had sworn off telling fibs now, and the van sounded too much like a fib. So he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.

Justin reached the corner when something big rumbled up behind him. The brakes squealed, and the sound made the back of his neck feel hot and prickly. He couldn’t resist twisting around to take a look.

There was the gray van. It was one of the old, fat-looking ones with hardly any windows on the sides. He couldn’t see much of the driver—just his arm poked out into the sunlight from the dark depths of the cab. There were a lot of thick, ropy veins on the arm, and a silver ring on the thumb.

Then Justin was falling. For a panicky moment, he thought the gray van had gotten him somehow, maybe zapped him like the Super Smash-Brothers guys did on his Nintendo all the time. He pitched over and fell sprawling. His lunch box with the square yellow sponge character on it sprang open and sent a plastic baggie containing a half-eaten chocolate-chip cookie skittering across the sidewalk. He realized with hot embarrassment that he had not been looking where he was going and had tripped over his own feet. He scrambled up and looked back, breathing through his open mouth.

He half-expected to find the van had magically vanished, but it hadn’t. Instead it was closer. He watched with bulging eyes as it hopped the curb with a groaning noise of old, protesting shocks. It paused there—its big engine chugging—as if it wanted to roll forward and crush him while he was down and helpless.

The driver turned his thumb up. The silver ring glinted in the sunlight. “Good one, klutz,” the driver said with a gravelly chuckle. Then the front tires angled away from him and the van nosed back down into the street where it belonged, like the shark in Jaws reluctantly giving up on the men in the boat. Justin hadn’t liked that movie. His dad had let him watch it, calling it a “classic”, until his mom had chased him to bed. But not even Jaws hadn’t scared him as much as the van did. He watched as the van executed a sloppy U-turn, nudging up on the opposite curb as it labored in the narrow confines of the street.

Justin grabbed up his lunch box and ran. He didn’t stop until he had reached home. The half-eaten chocolate-chip cookie in the plastic baggie lay behind, forgotten.