My High School Stalker

The Balance of Compassion and Righteousness

At some point, I realized that all the big white vans I’d been seeing were the same big white van. At nineteen years old, I was too foolish to be afraid and instead wanted immediate proof. On its next pass, I checked the license plate of the big white van. When it circled back, like a good scientist, I confirmed my hypothesis.

Then I realized I had been seeing the van, if at greater distances, for weeks.

I continued my walk to my summer job at the sawmill, holding my hard hat and lunch pail under one arm, as I tried to reason through this strange circumstance. I tried to tell myself that the driver was on drugs, or that they must have a commute that mirrored my own. Except, it couldn’t be that they got turned around in a town of our size no matter how many drugs they were on. If the driver was sober enough to drive a big white van, then the driver was sober enough to navigate three streets. The driver’s confusion certainly could not have lasted for weeks.

They couldn’t be trying to look at me, could they?

Except if it wasn’t me they were looking for, I had no idea what they were doing. It was the only thing that made sense. I might not have noticed the van at all except that my relative inattention over the last few weeks had made the driver too bold. He was circling the block, sometimes less than ten feet from me, not once, but multiple times. It was only that obvious and aggressive act that caught my attention.

Who on Earth would want to follow me?

The windows were tinted black and impenetrable to my sight.

The only explanation became obvious.

Oh.

Him.

I was instantly furious.

I waited for the van to pass me by and dipped into a drug store near the intersection. I left my lunch pail and hard hat by the door then ducked behind a display. My luck was in and he got stuck at the light on the next loop. I couldn’t be sure with the tint, but I was confident enough to act. Only one person in the world was interested in me in this particular way.

I ran out of the drug store, sprinted up to the van, and yanked open the passenger side door.

“You got somewhere to be, Ken?” I asked in a cold voice.