It happened when I was in the third grade. I was in a girl scout troop composed of girls from my school, and after Tuesdays every week, we would meet in a small room on the first floor of our school building.
The school was an informal K-8 school, meaning that kids ranging from kindergarten to the eighth grade all walked through the same hallways together. The building was large and rectangular, four stories, with the hallways following a capital I pattern. This meant that there was one very large hallway that had two major ends, and classrooms filled in to the perimeters. That’s all boring dumb stuff, though, so let me digress.
Our girl scout troop meeting had fallen on Earth day that year, and of course, as the bright eye cheery little rats that we were, we had to do something about taking better care of the Earth. Our troop leader had decided that we would decorate recycling bins to give to the teachers in our school. I can’t tell you why our teachers didn’t already have recycling bins, but we were too young and focused on the stickers and glitter glue in front of us to really give a shit.
Once all of the bins were horribly decorated by third graders, we were split up into groups of three to go to each of the four previously stated floors in the building to give them to teachers who were still in the building an hour after school ended. My group was told to go to the third floor of the building, and so we trekked upstairs with bins in hand. The way the building was set up, once you got up one case of stairs, there was at least two classrooms before you got to the long hallway. So when the girls I was with rushed into the second classroom to give a bin to a teacher, I stayed behind and did the third-grader equivalent of fucking off. I wandered out into view of the hallway, and I stopped.
At the opposite end of the hallway was a man close to one of the walls. I felt my stomach drop. There were so many reasons why I could explain why I felt that way. I could say that I simply didn’t recognize him, which still holds a lot of weight since, as a K-8 school, we did a lot of intergrade activities, projects, assemblies, or whatever the school wanted us to do. It wasn’t odd to say that I could decently point out a number of our school’s middle schoolers from a crowd. But I didn’t know this person. He was taller than any of the eighth graders, maybe 6’1? General appearance-wise, he looked grimy even from that long distance away. The most I could make out from his face was acne and the whites of his eyes. His big giant ass fucking eyes that were bulging out to look at what had originally unnerved me in the first place.
There he was, facing the wall, tearing apart the displayed art project of someone from the sixth grade class. Slowly tearing off shreds of paper, and shoving them in his pocket. And while I couldnt hear him from that far away, the way his back was moving in and out I assume he was quietly giggling to himself. It was jarring enough of a sight that I had stopped moving to stare in awe.
From out of view, the girls were walking out of the classroom, approaching me to loudly tell me that it was my turn to pick a teacher to give a recycling bin. Loud enough that he snapped his head in my direction, to see that I had been watching him the entire time. I could’ve sworn I heard his bones crack to move that quickly. You could tell the exact second he locked eyes with me, that they had widened larger than they had before. Not like he was shocked. It was like he had found something more interesting to tear apart into pieces to put into his pocket.
And I watched him, as he then opened his stance and took a big breath of air with an open, gaping mouth, and screamed the most guttural primal scream I have heard anyone to date be able to produce. Loud enough that it could’ve chipped the decaying paint off of the walls.
“OH, I AM GONNA FUCKING KILL YOU!”
He started running at me as fast as he could. The scream was so startling it snapped me out of the shock I had been in, and I started running while grabbing the wrists of the two other girls who weren’t able to see the approaching man. They weren’t able to see him, but there was no one who couldn’t have heard what he just screamed at me. They knew what was happening, and we began flying down those three flights of stairs as fast as we could run. His foot steps were behind us, but we didnt dare look to see how close he was. When we got to the first floor, we charged into the room with the other girls. I suppose that he stopped chasing after us at some point, because he was nowhere in sight.
I charged right into the arms of the only person who I knew would protect me at that moment–my father. Otherwise known as the assistant girl scout troop leader. He was the only male leader in the state at the time, and he took the position because he wanted to spend more time with his daughter. He is a very bubbly and goofy person, and all the other girls in the troop loved having him around.
However, while he held me in my arms as I mumbled out through tears that a man said he was going to kill me, I cannot imagine how his face contorted. His voice got low and dark, and he told me to tell him what he looked like, and I described him the best way a crying third grader could. My dad told me to stay in the room with the door locked.
Id say it was less than ten minutes before we heard my dad on the first floor calling for the front desk worker to call somebody. I peered out of the small window in the door and saw that my dad had the man with his arms behind his back. My dad towered over him, his stocky build overpowering him completely.
The police were called, and it turns out that he was the son of one of the female teachers and was killing time waiting for her. His mom came down and tried to defend her son’s behavior, saying that we must have antagonized him somehow. The son tried to say that he was just rehearsing a line for a play he’s in for his school. That all he was doing was some sick twisted method acting. When a cop asked where he went to school, he named the closest high school in the area. The woman then quietly muttered to the officer that he doesn’t go to school- he’s a dropout. No school, no job, no car, nothing. All he does is wait for her to get off work. He was banned from school property.
As his mom ushered him out of the building, crying into her worn-out old sweater, he noticed me watching him from the safety of a closed door. He locked eyes with me and gave me the same wide-eyed look he had before, mumbling something I couldn’t hear since the door was closed. I don’t know what he said to me, all I know is he said it with his three fingers up, and his elbow bent.