Alone

A little context before we begin: I'm a 16 year old girl and work as a waitress at a restaurant. There's a lot of other girls around my age who work as waitresses too. Each waitress/waiter has certain sections of tables to serve.

Now let's begin. I haven't worked here for very long but I've worked here long enough to manage a section on my own. I'm fairly friendly with my coworkers so when one of the janitorial workers would make small talk with me I didn't think anything of it. He'd talk to me fairly often as I would often see him working in my section when I'd come out to clear tables. I figured it was pure coincidence.

I was taking a break in the back room eating my dinner when the janitor guy walked in and sat down at the table behind me. He once again made small talk, literally nothing super important, as I inhaled my pancakes. Then one of the other girls walked in and we began talking for a long while. The janitor left about five minutes into me and the other girls conversation and I, once again, didn't think anything of it. While I was cleaning up I thanked the girl for talking with me and she said;

"Oh I just came in to make sure you weren't alone. No one should be alone with him."

I later learned from the other teenage girls that the guy had a habit of pestering them, being generally creepy, and following them to their car while he was a middle aged man. I was freaked the fuck out of course and looking back, I am 80% sure the dude was following me around while I worked in

He started running at us

I grew up in a smallish town, there was never much to do past 11 pm. So one night after a late movie got out a group of my friends and I decided to drive around and talk and tell stories. It was close to 11:30 pm. I was the only one with my license so I was driving with three of my friends (important to note we are all girls).

We drove through the parking lot of the abandoned Toys-R-Us (rip), talking and blasting music and having as good a time as you can driving to different parking lots. Next I decided to go to the community center parking lot just down the road.

Again, all was normal at first. There were plenty of lampposts and we had the windows down since it was the middle of summer and my shitty 20 year old car didn't like to have working air conditioning.

That's when we saw the man in the parking lot.

He was dressed in baggy, dark clothes and was pretty far from us, standing in the empty parking lot. I mean fully empty, it's a huge parking lot and we were the only car there. I didn't think anything of it, we weren't doing anything illegal, we didn't have curfew, I had had my license for over a year.

He started walking towards us, I had stopped driving now and we were sitting in the parking lot watching him. I remember making my friends turn off the music and close the windows. He was still pretty far from us, I want to say 100 feet at least but I'm a bad judge of distance.

Then, he started running. Not jogging but full on sprinting right towards us, kind of like that scene in Get Out? He was yelling something and sounded angry (Before anyone asks he wasn't a security guard, he got close enough to where it looked like he was wearing a hoodie and jeans, and he didn't have a vehicle or flashlight).

We all started screaming and I put the car in drive and drove out of there as fast as I could. I don't know what that man wanted, who he was, but I'll never forget the primal fear I felt when he started running at full speed for my car. So, parking lot creep, let's NEVER meet, okay?