The Boy With The Backpack

It was a dark, rainy night in Cambridge. Driving home the same way she had driven home for years, Casey felt that something strange was in the air. It felt too dark, too still, too windy, too much of everything.

As she maneuvered the car through the quiet residential side streets, the wind whipped through the natural wind tunnel created on the road between the ten-story apartment complex and the golf club. Casey reduced her speed, and startled at the small branches and leaves popping off her car.

All of a sudden, the wind stopped. The small branches and leaves fell to the street. Even the rain let up. Her car was just past the apartments, and approaching the back wall of the cemetery. For a moment, Casey blinked and rubbed her eyes; it was 3:30 in the morning, and after another long Friday at the restaurant, she was just so tired.

When she fully opened her eyes again, after trying to blink and rub her fatigue away, Casey let out a low, “Goddammit!!!”, and slammed on the brakes.

There stood a boy with a backpack in the middle of the road. He had an umbrella in one hand; he turned and looked directly at Casey, holding her gaze for several moments. Casey sat frozen behind the wheel; she sat there in her car, her breaths coming in quick and unsettled huffs. “Where in the fuck did he come from?”, she asked herself. There wasn’t even a sidewalk on the right side of the street. There was no traffic, there were no car lights, and no other people. How does a boy with a backpack just end up in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night, coming out of nowhere?

The boy slowly started to move away from the car; Casey watched him carefully head off towards the other side of the road. Towards the cemetery.

Casey couldn’t take her eyes off the boy. He almost glided away, his figure becoming more and more of a silhouette as he got further away. He slid between two fence sections, and he stopped once he was on the other side of the fence, and inside the cemetery. He turned around, and looked back at Casey. She thought perhaps she saw a small smile curling at the corners of his mouth.

In an instant, he was gone. No sooner had Casey sworn she saw the boy smiling at her, he was gone. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She instinctively reached down to make sure the car doors were locked. All of a sudden, the wind picked back up again, and it started to pour. Small branches, leaves, and even some recycling and trash, swirled all around the street. She looked at the dash, and noticed the time was 3:33am.

Feeling too scared to move, but knowing she needed to get out of the middle of the road and start driving, Casey took her foot off the brake, and slowly inched forward. Each street light she passed, flickered as she went by. Feeling somewhat terrified, she looked to her left, to see if she saw the boy. Seeing no sign of him anywhere, she started to wonder if she had just imagined the whole thing. The wind was now fierce. An errant garbage can sailed past the windshield of the car. Now truly frightened, Casey stepped on the gas, and hard. As badly as she wanted to, she didn’t look to her left. She didn’t look towards the cemetery. She took the right turn on a rail, and floored it up the street.

Collapsing into bed, Casey slept hard that night. She knew she needed it, and awoke feeling refreshed, and ready to take on another day. As she was getting some late morning coffee ready, she turned on the TV. The 12 o’clock news had come on, and she was half listening. Until the newscaster said, “And an update on the near catastrophic accident that happened early this morning on the corner of Grove and Market Street.”

Casey almost poured her coffee out all over the counter, as her eyes were glued to the TV. The reporter said, “At around 3:40 this morning, an out of control 18-wheeler slammed into a house at the corner of Grove and Market. Incredibly, there were no injuries, but the driver of the truck, reported that right before he lost control of the truck on the rain-slicked street, he swore he had seen a figure of a boy with a backpack in the road, holding an umbrella. The driver said he had swerved to avoid him, and that he felt like if he hadn’t pulled sharply on the wheel, to steer the truck left, he may have careened head-on into the main living area of the house.

Casey made that turn from Grove Street every night on her way home; she knew the exact house the reporter was talking about. She always had admired the landscaping, and the solar lights that illuminated the walkway. If she had been just a minute earlier . . . If she had been just a minute later.

Years later, every now and then, Casey drives that same way for one reason or another. Every time she does, the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Feeling no ill will of any particular force, she simply felt like so long ago, she was being protected from something that was out of her control. The boy with the backpack may have just been looking out for her. A story she’ll never know, she thought to herself.