When I was eight years old, my family, specifically my mother, decided that it would be a good idea for me to transfer schools. I was having trouble paying attention in class, and socially I wasn’t exactly the most adept kid. My parents thought that it might be the uptight nature of the schools I had gone to, all private, religious, costly schools, and that transferring me into a public school might give me a more relaxed environment where I could actually learn and be more of a kid. Later in life I realized we were also pretty broke that year. The housing market crash that happened that year really messed with my family’s finances, and my step-dad at the time ended up losing around a million dollars in investments and property. That may have had as much to do with my educational switch up as my poor performance in school did.
I knew before I graduated the second grade that I would be going to a new school the next year. The last day of school that year is one of the first times I remember ever truly feeling melancholic, though I wouldn’t be able to name that feeling until much later in life. I wasn’t particularly close with anyone, and I didn’t even really like my teachers that much, but there was still something familiar there. The lunchroom, the classrooms, the hallways, even the bathrooms looked different to me, since I knew I was looking at them intimately for the last time.
I wouldn’t truly miss anyone there on a personal level, with the exception of one teacher. Miss Ransom, the theater teacher. See, the private school I went to thought it was important that we had training in the arts, saying that it was some high form of praise and that by making art of the Lord you glorify him in a particularly special way. Being a private school in the South they had the money to actually follow through. The school was able to hire top notch teachers in the various artistic disciplines, but theater was always my favorite as a kid. Miss Ransom from day one seemed to understand exactly how I thought, and truly helped kindle a love within me for acting and performance. But more importantly, she listened to me. When I was having trouble with the other kids, or even just having a bad day, Miss Ransom would always make a concerted effort to talk to me. She’d really listen to my problems, and give me advice on how to get through the tougher parts of being seven. I didn’t have much in common with the kids I went to school with. Granted we were elementary schoolers, so how many common interests could we really have, but where everyone else was into Pokemon, I was into Digimon. Where everyone else would want to play football at recess, I wanted to play superheroes and make up pretend stories about our different characters. Miss Ransom would encourage that, and showed me that being different doesn’t mean you’re bad, or wrong. To this day I thank her for that.
“Can I eat lunch with you today Aggie?”
I looked up from my applesauce to see the familiar face of Miss Ransom standing across the table from me. There was nobody else sitting at my table, I had kind of done that on purpose. I wanted to savor my last lunch at this school, and to truly do that I felt like I had to be alone. But I couldn’t say no to a teacher, especially Miss Ransom.
“Yes Miss Ransom!”
“Thank you Aggie. I heard today is your last day, is that correct?”
“Yeah,” I sighed, returning my eyes to my apple sauce. I had folded the lid over to use as a spoon. My mom must have forgotten to restock on silverware that week. It was alright, I could improvise. “I feel like I should be excited, but I’m not.” I wasn’t sure why I said that, but Miss Ransom always made me feel safe, so the words just sort of tumbled out.
“Oh, Aggie, that’s normal,” she reached into her lunchbox and pulled out a spoon. She put it in front of me and continued saying, “Going to a whole new school is a big change, especially at your age. But you’ll get the chance to make so many new friends, and I know the teachers at the school you’re going to, they’re the best. There’s nothing to be scared of Aggiebaggie.”
Aggiebaggie was her nickname for me. The first time I came to her class on a parent switch day (divorced parent things) she said that all the bags I was carrying almost made her not recognize me. From that day on she would let me into her class before and after school on switch days to drop off my bags so I didn’t have to carry them from class to class.
“It’s not that I’m scared,” I responded.
I wasn’t actually scared. The look on Miss Ransom’s face told me that she didn’t believe me, which was odd because Miss Ransom always believed me.
“I’m really not,” I reiterated, hoping to get the point across, “I know I should be that too, but I’m just not. I don’t know why.”
“Well, what are you feeling?”
The question hit me hard. I had been so focused on what I wasn’t feeling, on what I should be feeling, that I had neglected to see how I was actually feeling.
“Um, I don’t know, really. I haven’t thought about it.”
“That’s okay, sometimes feelings are a hard thing to figure out. If you want to, you can try to tell me what you think you’re feeling. Sometimes adults are good with those kinds of things.”
I thought for a second. I reflected on what I had felt walking through the school that day. I felt the aforementioned melancholy, but failed to find the words to describe it. But I felt something else too. I felt angry. I said as much to Miss Ransom and she asked me why I felt angry. I thought for a second, and came up with an answer that felt right, if incomplete.
“Well, it’s just that I’m, um, well I’m leaving today. Forever maybe. And everyone else is just, well, acting like normal and like I’m not gonna never see them again. I mean, I don’t really feel sad, because we’ve never gotten along anyways, but even on my last day? Nobody is gonna say bye or anything at all?” I felt tears start to well up. I didn’t realize how much this had been affecting me, but apparently it had been eating me up a great deal.
I took a deep breath, trying to stabilize my voice and willing the tears not to come so that I could continue talking. Miss Ransom must have sensed something was wrong because she started talking about how that was a totally fair and valid feeling to have, and that while she understood why that would upset me, that it would do me more good to focus on all the new opportunities ahead of me to make friends and learn so much more about the world now that I have a whole new group of people to interact with and be around.
The bell rang as she was in the middle of telling me which teachers were her close friends, and I promised her that I would tell them hello when I got to school the next year. She gave me a big hug, and made me promise that if I ever needed anything that I could still always come to her. She took out a card that had her phone number on it, and some written message that I couldn’t make out. As she put the card in my lunch box she told me to give that to my parents and to not read the note that’s on it until I was older. I promised her that too, and left the cafeteria feeling, if not better, at least lighter than I had walking in.
Miss Ransom was right about one thing. There were so many more people at Randolph J. Archer Elementary School. To an eight year old me, it seemed to be at least one hundred times more people standing around the flagpole on the first day of school for the first flag raising. A more conservative estimate would’ve said there were about three times as many kids, and that conservative estimate would probably be right. It would be right seeing as I went from a school of one hundred kids to a school of three hundred kids.
Walking to my homeroom class that first day of third grade was what I imagined Marlin felt when he was riding through the jet stream with Crush and Dory. I have never been pushed along by a throng of people with such force even to this day. It took a force of will to make my way through the initial crowd in the foyer to the hall where my class was located.
I got there just in time, with the bell ringing as I sat down in my seat. I was pulling my composition book out of my backpack when I heard a very sharp “PSST” directly behind me, to the right of my desk.
I sat up and put my book on my desk, turning to see the source.
I saw a dirty looking kid with a close cropped brown buzzcut and a finger deep in one nostril staring back intently at me as he dug for gold deep in the canals of his sniffer. I gave him a look that said “Yeah? What’s up you said something?”
He whispered back, “Who the fuck are you?” The words were harsh but he didn’t actually sound mean. More so like one of those kids who discovered cursing over the summer and couldn’t wait to try his newfound vocabulary out on his classmates.
Not wanting the teacher to get mad at me on the first day of class at a brand new school I grabbed my pencil and started to write my name on a page of my notebook.
“Fuck that shit, the teacher hasn’t even started role yet we can talk still.” Despite the kid’s bravado, he was still whispering, on some level still a little afraid of being caught talking after the bell rang.
I took him at his word though, and whispered back.
“I’m Agrian, but my friends call me Aggie.”
“Hell yeah Aggie, I’m Jensen, nice to meet ya.” He took his finger out of its current position behind his eyeball and extended the same hand towards me. I hesitated only a second before he grabbed my hand anyways and shook it vigorously. “If you’re cool with it, it’d be awesome if we were, like, best friends now,” he said, returning his finger to its previously designated housing.
I didn’t know how to respond. Nobody had ever just flat out asked me to be their friend before, let alone their best friend. Was it really that easy? Is that really how it worked? Was Miss Ransom really right and making friends was as easy as shaking someone’s hand and saying “we’re friends now”?
“Sure.” I said, rather unenthusiastically. Then, not wanting my new best friend and I to start off on the wrong foot, added a “hell yeah!”
I was maybe a bit too enthusiastic, as the kids sitting in front of me immediately turned around and stared at me, eyes wide and mouths agape.
“Young man! I don’t know what kind of neanderthal hippie commune you so far have clearly been raised in, and I don’t care. That kind of language is never acceptable in my classroom.”
My relationship with Miss Garfield never truly recovered from that first day incident, but I think that moment solidified in Jensen’s mind that he was never going to leave my side. You win some, you lose some.
Jensen and I hung out almost every day after that, barring days when one of us was sick or our parents were too busy to take us to each other’s house. It was Jensen who, after fearsome debate, got me to try Pokemon for the first time. This was right around the time Platinum had come out, and boy was that an amazing first game to try out. I was hooked immediately, picking Turtwig as my starter and blazing through the game faster than any I’d ever played. I ran through the rest of the available games, with Jensen helping me whenever I got stuck on a puzzle or couldn’t beat a gym leader. Jensen introduced me to all sorts of cool games and toys and gimmicks, a lot of which made their way to the playground at school that year.
One specific trend that Jensen and I fell hard into were Crazy Bones. Essentially, they were little colored pieces of plastic shaped into cool creatures that you could use to play five or six different games. Our favorite was the one where you’d line up ten of the things across from each other, and take turns flicking one to see who could knock all of their opponents down faster. The games would get pretty heated, and often bets would be placed, with the winner being able to take one of the loser’s Crazy Bones. There were rules to the bets, like you had to establish before the game started, even before you selected which bones you were using, that there was a bet taking place. Either player could refuse, but if both accepted, then each player could choose one or two or three, but usually one, of their bones that the other player could not take from the loser.
Me and Jensen were known sharks, and would happily take Crazy Bones from our unwitting classmates when they made the foolish decision to challenge us to a bet match.
One day, this kid named Derrick Ross decided to make the absolutely moronic challenge me to a bet match. He had just come off of a three bet win hot streak, and figured he’d test his luck against the master.
Now, what Derrick lacked in skill, he made up for in his collection. The kid’s parents were loaded, so he had all of the newest and rarest Crazy Bones, most of the time just ordering them directly from EBay instead of buying the gacha packs they normally came in. I salivated at the opportunity to relieve Derrick of one of those rare pieces of plastic he so viscerally didn’t deserve.
The time came, and as we were deciding on a game and bets, I knew that I was going to take one specific Bone when the time came. We both made our selections for our safe pieces, and the piece I wanted was still on the board when the game started. I think Derrick realized his mistake shortly thereafter, knowing that if I won I would take that piece, since he came out of the gate swinging and almost gained some serious advantages in the first couple of shots. But when the halfway point was approaching and it was clear that he just couldn’t match me, he started the backpedal attempts.
“Naw man, come on. You know that I just slipped up, I actually meant to make sure that Mr. K was safe and you know that.” Mr. K was the piece I wanted so badly.
“Sorry man, you know the rules.” I replied, lining up my next shot, which would turn out to be the second to last shot I made all game. Aceing two of his pieces I shot back, “Maybe you shouldn’t have challenged me if you didn’t want to lose a Bone.”
His next shot was pathetic, clearly I had gotten to him. I easily swept his last remaining piece with my next shot, and held out my hand expectantly. A bit of a dick move for sure, but I was kind of pissed that he would try and con me out of my hard earned plastic when he knew he was losing.
Reluctantly, he handed over Mr. K., and we both walked away to consider the consequences of our actions. Jensen was ecstatic, almost as happy that I shut Derrick up as he was that I won Mr. K. after so long.
Our joy was ruined that afternoon when we were both called down to Principal Chapman’s Office to talk about our “illegal gambling ring” that we had set up at recess. Apparently, Derrick Ross had been so upset at himself that he lost Mr. K. to me, that he started crying as soon as he got back to his homeroom class. His teacher had him go to the front office and call his mom, as she had no idea how to console the crying Derrick. It was then that he told his mom, and by proxy the Principal as it was in his office, how me and Jensen had set up a system where every kid would have to play them in the Crazy Bones game, and if anyone lost then me and Jensen could take whatever piece we wanted.
Obviously this was made up, well not the part about the gambling existing, but Derrick had lied about almost every single other detail. Even saying that it was ME who challenged HIM to the battle where he lost Mr. K.
I was so pissed that I couldn’t even form sentences. I tried, and with Jensen’s help eventually managed to say that Derrick was lying, and that I won the piece fair and square. That HE challenged ME even after so many people warned him not to. Principal Chapman didn’t believe a word I said, and told us that Derrick’s parents were already on the way to the school to make sure I returned Derrick’s property. Apparently, if I didn’t return Mr. K., then the Rosses would press charges against us, our families, and the school for allowing this to happen.
I shot a glare over to Derrick that I wish he had looked up to catch. The coward didn’t even react as I fished Mr. K. out of my pocket and tossed it over to him. I left before Principal Chapman could say anything, and luckily I wasn’t called back down when the Rosses came to get their kid. From my seat in class I could see out the front door into the foyer as Derrick hugged his mom and cried like something actually terrible had happened to him.
I got the distinct sense that day that if Derrick could remove me from the Earth he would, for no reason other than his own terrible ego. Derrick would be arrested twelve years later for assaulting a movie theater usher after the usher accidentally brought Derrick to the wrong seat. The usher returned minutes later with the correct patron, asking Derrick to move as the usher had clearly messed up. Derrick didn’t let the usher finish his sentence before he started yelling, and when the usher raised his voice a bit to try and calm Derrick down, the already on edge Derrick jumped the poor man, throwing blow after blow at the vulnerable young kid under him.
It was discovered during the trial that Derrick had an amount of meth in his system that rivaled that of a fifteen year user, that the result of what Derrick had done more closely resembled the work of a rabid animal than it did a human. He posted bail fifteen hours after he was sentenced, and somehow the charges were dropped. I heard he went off to a rehab facility and that his family paid the usher’s family somewhere in the realm of five hundred thousand dollars.
The usher had permanent brain damage and had to have half his jaw reconstructed.
Derrick had to go to a facility for ninety days and came out worse than before. I haven’t heard much of him since that, I just hope he got the help he needs. I doubt it though.
There was a dynamic to public school that hadn’t really existed in private school. Not for the best reason, but still the difference was there. In private school, everyone has some sense of how expensive it is to go there, so everyone kind of assumes that your classmates are all at a certain threshold when it comes to tax brackets. The demographics of public school can vary widely, with the Derrick’s and the Jensen’s of the world coming together in one place to duke it out real gladiator style. It was the first time someone else made me feel poor, which is insane looking back on it because I was more well off than so many other people I knew my age. But even then, Derrick Ross would still turn his nose down at me, and he would until the day we graduated from Jacob J. Jones Senior High, when I would see his slicked back hair and slick smile for the last time.
The Derrick Ross incident happened on a Thursday, and it just so happened that the next night was Halloween, so whatever ill feelings Jensen and I had leaving school Thursday, they were quickly replaced by abject bliss knowing that the next day was going to be the best night of our young lives. Halloween is special when you’re that age. It’s the one night of a year where wearing costumes doesn’t get made fun of, it actually gets rewarded. It was my dream holiday.
I was going to remember this Halloween forever. I would make sure of it.
In order to make sure we had the optimal Halloween, Jensen and I had to first make sure that we had the optimal Halloween Crew. We needed to be able to hit a good number of houses to improve our candy getting ratio, but we’d be stupid not to use this time to make some more friends and see if we could maybe improve our social standing a bit. At that point, Jensen and I were regarded with a bit of wariness as a chaotic duo. Bad things seemed to happen whenever we would team up, and I was so accident prone that nobody wanted to be responsible if I one day put myself into a situation where I was in real danger.
We came to the conclusion that we shouldn’t ask anybody who would clearly say no, and that we should ask people outside of our homeroom, so that if they said no we didn’t have to be embarrassed when they showed up on Monday. Jensen didn’t so much care about that last point, and said that anybody who said no to trick or treating with us was “fucking stupid” and didn’t deserve the candy riches we’d be experiencing.
We decided on two prime candidates. Jensen’s pick was a kid named Oswald Diaz, or Ozzy as we had come to know him. Ozzy was a beast when it came to Crazy Bones, and was one of two people to actually beat both me and Jensen in bet matches. We figured that if anybody would respect our game enough to tag along it was Ozzy. Jensen had also added that the year before I got there, Ozzy had come to school with all of his candy, and that it had taken three full pillowcases to bring it in. For that reason alone I said yes.
The second pick, and my pick of the two, was a girl who both Jensen and I didn’t actually know that well. Her name was Anna Logan, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t initially pick her because I had a bit of a crush on her. Jensen knew, even if we didn’t actively say it, so he was okay with me having her as my pick. He was pretty sure that Ozzy would say yes anyways, so I could waste my pick on a dream.
When Anna showed up at my house the next day in a hulk costume the feeling was comparable to Christmas.
“Dude, dude dude dude she’s here holy shit!”
“What, who, what? Aggie chill out who’s here?” Jensen moved towards the door to see who was walking up. “Well holy shit, look who decided to make an appearance.”
“Who is it?” Ozzy chimed from the couch, too immersed in beating the Johto Elite Four to make an effort himself to see.
“Hi Anna!” I said as I threw the front door open, “I’m Aggie, er, right now I’m Spiderman, but I’m Aggie usually.”
“Hi Aggie usually, I know who you are,” she laughed, “I couldn’t have come if I didn’t, can I come in?”
I laughed as I stepped aside to let her in. Jensen and Ozzy didn’t so much as budge from what they were doing, only letting out small grunts to give acknowledgement that someone else had arrived. It was going to be my job to show Anna around the place and make sure that she knew the plan for tonight.
Unfortunately, there had been a last minute fly in the ointment. My mom had decided that eight wasn’t quite old enough for us to trick or treat unsupervised. Seeing as my parents and their friends were all busy with my mom’s ork party, and my Uncle’s couldn’t be assed to help, the responsibility fell on my older cousin Sandy. Sandy was Randall’s oldest daughter. Having turned sixteen over the summer she was now able to drive, which meant that she was readily available when my mom offered her two hundred dollars to go trick or treating with us.
Sandy was mean, and not just mean in the way a sixteen year old was mean, she was mean mean. Every time I saw her I dreaded it. She was the kind of older cousin who thought it was funny to genuinely torture her younger cousins. Every family pool party Sandy would play a game where she would hold me underwater and see how long it would take me to escape. If I beat my previous time, she wouldn’t do it again. This would repeat until I was too weak to actually beat my time even if I tried, and she would just hold me underwater until I acted dead enough for her to get bored.
I could only imagine what she had planned for tonight.
In order to mitigate the disaster Sandy could bring, we all had agreed to a plan. When she arrived, we would promise her a whole quarter of candy from each of our bags, provided she drove us to all the richest neighborhoods in town. We figured that even a mean sixteen year old likes candy, and that approaching immediately with a bargain wouldn’t give her time to consider how she could fuck this up for us.
She agreed to the plan, as we thought she would, and just like that we were off to The Wynwoods.
Now The Wynwoods aren’t actual woods, not fully anyways. It’s the name of the nicest neighborhood in Tatumsville FL, and we had heard legendary stories of what the residents there were giving out this year. Everything from full size Snickers bars to literal bags of Sour Patch Kids. It sounded like heaven, and it would be the first stop on our multi-legged journey through the most affluent parts of town.
Sandy was surprisingly kind on the ride. She seemed to take our deal seriously, agreeing but warning us that if we didn’t give her what we promised that we were more fucked than she was when Uncle Randall caught her drinking. We were all piled in the backseat, so excitedly buzzing about the hauls we were going to have and the houses we were going to see that the ride to The Wynwoods flew by. Sandy only yelled once, when Jensen kicked the back of her seat too hard in a game of wrestling with Ozzy. I don’t know what the objective was other than them just wrestling, but they seemed to be having a grand old time.
Our time in Wynwood was fruitful, even more so than we had thought, and we considered calling it quits right then and there since we had such a good haul. We decided against it though, as Ozzy pointed out that collectively we just barely had more than he had solo last year. We thought that was reason enough to hit at least one more neighborhood.
We had three options according to my research with Jensen. The furthest neighborhood was Castle Hill. A very rich neighborhood, designed almost to give us a good turnout, but so far away that if we went it would be the only neighborhood we’d have time to hit. We figured that the other two were close enough that we could go to one, and get to the other one quick enough if we finished or we found our first choice dryer than expected.
Our options were The Hampshire Estates, and Whistling Village. We ended up going with The Hampshire Estates, as it was slightly closer to our current spot and definitely more promising as far as the rumors we had heard. The drive there was uneventful, although at one point I remember seeing something odd out of my window. We were driving past a stretch of houses that lined the main road we were on. It was one of those local highways that saw a lot of traffic but still had spots where houses were directly attached.
Anyways, in one of these lawns there was a decoration that caught my eye. It was a clown, or had the head of a clown, but the body was draped in what appeared to be multiple priests’ cassocks. All of them different colors, each slashed and torn and covered in what was supposed to be blood. The clown looked at me and waved, and its head followed us as we drove past. I thought that was so cool, that they had a decoration that was able to track cars as they passed.
I watched out the back window to see the clown in action again as the car behind us passed, but I noticed the clown hadn’t returned to its original position. It was still staring straight at our car as we pulled away, staring straight at me as I drove away. Still waving, still smiling.
I turned around, shaking off the goosebumps that had appeared on my arms and neck.
“It was just a malfunction, it got stuck.” I mumbled to myself.
“What got stuck?” Anna asked from my left. I had forgotten I was sitting next to her on this leg of the journey, and her question took me by surprise.
“Hm? Oh, um. Nothing. Just someone’s decoration, it looked like it got stuck that’s all.”
The rest of the ride went by without a hitch, and we arrived in The Hampshire Estates with time enough for us to do a quick run through here and still be able to speed over to Whistling Village. In order to maximize profits we had decided in the car that we would split into two groups of two to cover the most ground. That way, if we hit a house that was lacking in supplies, only two of us would take the damage and the other two would be free to potentially be at a house with more candy. Sandy would stay with the car, being ready for whenever we returned so that we could hot foot it over to our final stop as quick as we could. She actually seemed to enjoy that she was the “getaway driver” and I remember thinking that Sandy was actually being pretty cool tonight.
Our plan was brilliant, and I felt pretty smart myself when I suggested that Anna and I be partners. Ozzy and Jensen were more than happy to team up, immediately strategizing on the best openers to get someone to potentially give you more candy. They got very excited which elicited an exasperated but still patient sigh from Sandy, as she shot a look at Jensen that said “If you’re going to talk, do it quietly.”
Coupled with the words “Your voice annoys me,” Jensen took his cue and quieted his tone.
I immediately turned to Anna and started by asking her what her favorite TV show was.
We had covered music, movies, TV, clothes, celebrities, actors, and were working through our favorite musicals when we first noticed something was seriously odd about this neighborhood. Even though every house had a light on, only one in four, sometimes one on an entire street, would actually have someone who came to the door giving candy. I was so wrapped up in conversation that it took me twenty minutes of this pattern to notice. I said as much to Anna.
“Oh, yeah. I didn’t really think about it but now that you say something you’re right.” She looked around, up and down the street we were on. “And, hey. Where is everybody?”
She was right. We were the only kids, hell, the only people at all on this street.
“What the-” I said to myself trailing off.
“I don’t like this, something feels weird.” Anna’s voice trailed off behind me as my focus was grabbed by something at the end of the street we were on.
The clown was back. Standing in the yard of an undecorated house at the very edge of the street. The same hand was waving, but now the clown was frowning.
“Aggie. Aggie what is that!”
Anna had noticed too.
“I don’t know. Let’s go. Now.”
And we wasted no time running back to the car.
Ozzy and Jensen had already made it back, seemingly making the same observation as us much quicker, and not wanting to waste any time, immediately returned to the car so that as soon as me and Anna returned we could leave.
“Hurry up! Let’s go we don’t have a lot of time,” Jensen was practically crying with impatience, he wanted so badly for us to hit Whistling Village and double our haul. But we were running out of time. I was getting in the car when something out of the corner of my eye made me stop.
The Hampshire Estates as a neighborhood was located just off of that main highway I mentioned earlier, with the main street and entrance running directly parallel to the street where they intersect. Sandy had parked just outside the main wall the separated the neighborhood from the thin strip of shoulder that lay on the side of the road. Across from the entrance were more houses like the ones I had seen before. And in the yard of the house directly across the street stood the clown. At least, I thought it was the clown. The light was worse there, and I realized that the head shape was different.
I thought whoever must have been wearing the mask had taken it off, and something in me needed to take a closer look. I had unknowingly crossed to the other side of Sandy’s car, getting closer to crossing the street towards the figure that wore the same cassock as the clown had. It’s waving hand turned around and reached out to beckon me forward. I caught a look at one of the rings on its hand and recognized it. Was that Miss Ransom’s ring? It couldn’t be. The hand returned to a pocket in the robe the clown was wearing and I couldn’t get a closer look, but I kept walking, the beckoning hand burned in my brain, there but not there, calling me forward. Something to my left got incredibly bright, incredibly fast, snapping me out of my trance. I turned to see two bright lights barrelling towards me, and a figure running fast on the side of the road.
The next thing I knew I was lying on my back in the grass.
I immediately sat up, looking around a full three sixty. The clown was gone. I was in the yard right where it had been, but it was gone. I looked in the direction the car had gone, the car that seemingly hadn’t hit me. I could see the tracks it left behind as it sped away, and followed them with my eyes back to see how I had avoided certain death.
The imprint that the tire tread left on Sandy’s face is an image I will never forget.
A neighbor had caught the tail end of events from their window and called the cops. When they got there I gave them my name and Sandy’s name, and told them the numbers to call to let my family know what had happened.
I had never seen my Uncle Randall cry before that day.
The paramedics announced her dead on impact. The way Sandy had dove to shove me out of the way meant that she basically threw herself directly under the tires of the truck that killed her. There was no chance she survived at that level of impact.
They never found out who was responsible for the accident, the tread of the tires didn’t match any of the tires on local trucks that could have had tires that size. But there was a detail that, to this day, I wish I had shared with investigators when they asked me if I had seen anything. I told everyone that I had been crossing the street to see if there was candy at any of those houses, and the next thing I knew I woke up in the grass. But that’s not true.
When I turned to look at the lights as they approached, I saw two distinct figures through the rearview. One was just a shape, and I didn’t have time to get a good look anyways. But the face in the passenger seat was one I’d know at a glance any day of the week.
My Uncle Jeremy was riding shotgun that night.