Justin reached the corner when something big rumbled up behind him. The brakes squealed, and the sound made the back of his neck feel hot and prickly. He couldn’t resist twisting around to take a look.

There was the gray van. It was one of the old, fat-looking ones with hardly any windows on the sides. He couldn’t see much of the driver-just his arm poked out into the sunlight from the dark depths of the cab. There were a lot of thick, ropy veins on the arm, and a silver ring on the thumb.

Then Justin was falling. For a panicky moment, he thought the gray van had gotten him somehow, maybe zapped him like the Super Smash-Brothers guys did on his Nintendo all the time. He pitched over and fell sprawling. His lunch box with the square yellow sponge character on it sprang open and sent a plastic baggie containing a half-eaten chocolate-chip cookie skittering across the sidewalk. He realized with hot embarrassment that he had not been looking where he was going and had tripped over his own feet. He scrambled up and looked back, breathing through his open mouth.

He half-expected to find the van had magically vanished, but it hadn’t. Instead it was closer. He watched with bulging eyes as it hopped the curb with a groaning noise of old, protesting shocks. It paused there-its big engine chugging-as if it wanted to roll forward and crush him while he was down and helpless.

The driver turned his thumb up. The silver ring glinted in the sunlight. “Good one, klutz,” the driver said with a gravelly chuckle. Then the front tires angled away from him and the van nosed back down into the street where it belonged, like the shark in Jaws reluctantly giving up on the men in the boat. Justin hadn’t liked that movie. His dad had let him watch it, calling it a “classic”, until his mom had chased him to bed. But not even Jaws hadn’t scared him as much as the van did. He watched as the van executed a sloppy U-turn, nudging up on the opposite curb as it labored in the narrow confines of the street.