It was a warm day at my cousin’s house. We had spent it playing outside, as ten and eleven-year-olds do. As the sun began to set, my two cousins, my two sisters, and myself decided to play hide and seek, as the hiding spots would be more abundant. Since they lived on a road in the country with about five roads branching off of it, theirs being the last, we decided to play on those as well but to use a signal to give hints as to where we were. The seeker would yell, “Pump it!” and the hiders would yell back, “Louder!” It was a joke on our favorite song to dance to on Just Dance 3.
My cousin, Cody, and I wanted to go a little farther away to hide on one of the other streets. We ran up to the first street from the highway, hiding carefully in the shadows, and hid behind a RV trailer postioned across from an old man’s house, who happened to be outside at this point. He stared at us as we crept out from behind his trailer, and my cousin called back, “Have a good night, sir!” as we ran off down his street. We got one street over, admiring how well the trees cast shadows from the moon and discussing how that could be our new hangout at some point. While we were talking, a truck drove down the first street and turned right, heading towards my cousin’s house.
I turned to look at Cody. “Was that the old man from that house?”
He seemed to be thinking that as well, but when he didn’t turn down our road, we didn’t worry about it much anymore. However, about five or less minutes later, that same truck pulled onto our road. My cousin and I both shrunk into the shadows, hiding behind the base of separate trees, whispering back and forth. The truck rode slowly down the street, a spotlight searching for us. Once he got far enough down the street, we bolted.
We took off towards the end of the road, running towards Cody’s house, two small dogs coming from a nearby yard and running at our heels. The truck spun around quickly and sped after us. We got around the stop sign and jumped across the ditch into someone’s yard as he sped around the stop sign right behind us. He pulled into the yard, got out, and at that moment, I was almost sure that he would pull a gun on us. He did not.
He screamed at us to come here, and then, he proceeded to yell at us for trying to scare his mother, how he had already called the sheriff and he was on his way, how he was a U.S. Marshall, and that we were gonna go to juvenile detention. I was frozen in terror, as was Cody, but he was the only one able to form any kind of response, stuttering an apology and how we wouldn’t come back. When he got done, we walked off, sure to not let him know where we were walking to and then booked it once we got out of his sight.
Once back on his road, my sister met us, anger contorting her features as she yelled at us, telling us that they had been looking for us and asking where we had been. However, that was all cut short almost immediately when she saw our faces and I ran and hugged her and started to cry. She asked what happened, we went inside and told my mom and my aunt, and mama bears appeared in a fierce moment. They asked where he lived, told us to stay there, and went to his house, where they set him in his place. He lied to us about all of it (which we soon had figured out anyways) and he thought we were both boys trying to cause trouble.
Once they got back, we found out that we could press charges against him: for him getting in the truck with the intent to find us, for chasing us with his truck, and endangering the life of minors. We decided to not press charges in the end, but there has become a sort of inside joke in our family about a ‘Fake U.S. Marshall.’
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