Our heads were just a couple meters away from each other, but he had no idea I even existed. He sat in the backseat looking straight ahead with the window down while his mother yelled at him in an language I couldn't understand standing out side of the car. The eight year old boy sat still with his unwavering stare though I could imagine his little hands now clenched into solid fists.
When an exasperated grunt, his mother stormed off leaving the boy alone in the car. As she marched into the grocery store, the boy didn't glance back at her once. Five minutes passed and suddenly it was like a spell had been broken causing the boy to become an inquisitive animation. He hopped into the front seat and sat in the driver's seat for a bit, pretending with surprising realism that he was driving. The boy had clearly become an expert in observing and mimicking in addition to his ability to appear stone cold and unresponsive. He moved around the car testing out each seat, and when that began to bore him, he looked for entertainment outside of the vehicle.
The boy peered into my car and suddenly I became the frozen one, not wanting him to see me crouching in the back seat. Despite the one-way glass effect of my windows, if you look hard enough with just the right lighting, you can see inside ever so slightly. Still not totally convince he didn't see me, I got the sense he knew I was in there anyways. Kids have infinitely better intuition about these kinds of things than adults do and it's always when children start poking around my car that I become weary. Deciding that whatever was in my car probably wasn't worth his time, his attention went back to his mom's.
Suddenly the boy stiffened. An idea hit him physically as much as it did mentally. Now moving quickly, the boy jumped into the car and rolled up all the windows. With the driver's side open, he push the automatic lock button and I could hear the mechanical click as he secured all doors at once. He took one last hurried glance around and looked towards a treed area in the distance. The boy started running towards it as fast as he could and didn't look back.
