Lucas and The Time-Traveling Fog

This all started on my first day of Senior year in Highschool on August 21st, 2019. I was your typical teenager in every way. I was always on my phone, always keeping up with the trends...my highest streak on Snapchat was 405. Can you beat that? Most importantly, I loved hanging out with my friends and family without a care in the world. I thought nothing could surprise me because I had been through it all. But I was in for the biggest and scariest surprise of my life, and I didn’t even know it just yet.

My first day started out normal, to say the least, for the first day of school. I woke up from my bed, took a quick shower, dried myself, then got dressed and headed downstairs to make myself some breakfast. As I was preparing some waffles, I looked outside the kitchen window, and I noticed a lot more fog out than usual. But then again, that really wasn’t unusual because I live in the southern part of Illinois, where it’s typical to drive to school with your headlights on almost every morning.

I didn’t think too much about it either, so I just went about my business as usual. Just as I was about to walk out the front door, my mom stopped me.

“Wait! Lucas, you forgot Grandpa’s letterman jacket.”

Now, this letterman jacket, from what I was told, was worn by my grandfather. He was like the coolest dude ever! His life was legendary. He often went to drag races in his youth, was the star quarterback back in his high school days, and was also kind of a ladies’ man in high school.

My mom always said that he and I have a lot in common. My guess is because he was a very outgoing person like me and was friends with almost everyone. But as a grown-up, my grandfather was known around this small town as an honest and hardworking family man. He was a legend in my book, who I seriously idolized. To me, he was Superman.

Sadly, I... uh *cough* never had a chance to meet him because he died a few months after I was born. I’ve heard stories about his life and seen so many pictures, thanks to my grandmother Janet. Since I was little, she would always tell me the craziest adventures that she had with my grandfather. Man, what a life he must have had. I just wish I could spend time with him and get to know the real man. I think he and I would have great memories together.

Anyway, I thanked my mom for reminding me, grabbed the letterman jacket, and before I did anything else, I put it on with pride. Then I got into my car to begin the long 10-minute drive through this thick fog to school. I first plugged in my phone and turned on my favorite playlist, and backed out the driveway.

Everything...even the drive to school...was fine. That was until my phone decided to go dead! I first thought that my phone cord disconnected, but it was still plugged in. I tried a couple of times, hitting the power button to make it work again, but nothing happened. So, I unplugged it and tossed it somewhere in the backseat out of frustration.

Then out of nowhere, this green fog surrounded my car. I was hoping that I wouldn’t be late on the first day, but in the back of my mind, I really wanted school to be canceled by this strange weather so I could get back and enjoy playing Fortnite with my friends and savor my summer just a little bit longer.

But in the meantime, I just had to keep on ahead and continued to drive with both headlights and hazards on at the same time, but this fog was getting so thick that it even made them useless! I was starting to get worried, and my ideas to try and see the road again were running out fast. I didn’t even know if I was on the road at this point! It just seemed like never-ending waves of this green smoke!

I was bored out of my mind as I kept driving. I decided to put the pedal forward and just look at my car radio time, hoping it would change, but I noticed that it had also ceased working. It stopped at the same time as my phone, which apparently was 7:45 a.m., just five minutes before I made it to school. I then just stared at the emptiness of a nonexistent road to hopefully pass the time.

But this fog started to become thicker and greener because now, I could barely see my car, and all I could see was this stupid, thick green fog! All of a sudden, I heard this loud bang! It made me jump in my seat! I said to myself, “Oh great, lightning. Just what I needed right now.” As soon as I said that, I heard a loud screeching metal noise that felt like it was coming from both inside and outside the car. It was so fast and painful that it literally made me scream, all the while trying to keep my car from flipping over and somehow stay on the road from this terrible storm!

While trying my best to keep the car hopefully on the road, I finally noticed a bright light shining through the fog that was ahead of me, and I could faintly see people in this distance. “Ha! Nothing can stop me now!” As I headed into this bright light, I immediately saw the school parking lot, and I looked behind me to see if the fog was still there, but to my surprise, there was no fog at all, and all the noise had suddenly stopped!

When I parked in the empty school parking lot and looked around, I saw that there hadn’t been any rain or lightning in like forever! That threw me off-guard a little bit because I clearly remember hearing lightning strikes outside just moments ago.

Also, I saw people walking, sitting, and talking to one another. Like, just talking. Nobody was looking at their phone. In fact, nobody had a phone in their hand! I was so dazed and confused, like what did I just get myself into here? Finally, I saw people that I hoped were girls walking to school in a poodle skirt. For real, who are these people?

Then came the school...Oh Yes, school! Which looked so different. I said to myself, “Why this can’t be my school, can it?” I convinced myself that it was and maybe was just remodeled during the summertime without me knowing. I then had the courage to look around the inside of my car instead of being glued to the window to see what else had changed. Everything in my car was completely different. Seriously, I noticed that my seats looked interiorly different, almost as if it were the 1950s again.

“That’s strange, but there’s got to be something else. I just know there is!” I muttered. So, I checked under my seat and even the car air conditioning to make sure that what I was seeing was indeed real. All seemed normal, to say the least, but I still wasn’t convinced that everything was fine. So, in a moment of panic, I said, “I know it must be the windows!”

I looked at all of my windows to see if they were cracked or broken, but to my surprise, they were perfectly fine, so that tossed the bird-hitting-my-window scenario out of the question. I thought maybe something or somebody hit my car! Maybe I hit them? Without any hesitation, I turned my car off and put my keys in my pocket. And as soon as I got out of the car and walked around the entire vehicle, to my amazement, it didn’t hit or hit anything at all. But it did change.

I rubbed my eyes to make sure that this was the same car that I drove through the fog, but nope, my 2014 Chevy Impala had changed to a 1959 black Chevy Impala. How. How did this happen? But man, that’s one cool ride! But this can’t be the same car? Can it? I wondered to my astonishment. So, to make sure that it was,I put my hand in my pocket to check my keys, but what came out was a ring full of keys that I’d never seen before in my life.

So, if this is my car, where did my actual car keys go, and how do I get in without my remote? I thought to myself. It can’t be as easy opening the door, right? I tried to open the door, but it was obviously locked.

Wait a second; I have tried this before. I then remembered that I had, and it was during the summer when my friends and I went to a car show downtown Chicago, and when they were looking at other old rides, I went the opposite direction and stumbled upon this gorgeous red 55’ Chevy bel Air.

The owner of this car was some old man, and he got up from his lawn chair and decided to test me by asking, “Hey kid, do you think you can open my 55 Bel-Air?”

“Ya, sure. Where’s the remote?” I asked.

The old man laughed at my face and said, “No tricks, no remote...son, just the key.” “What! ... your joking”

He stated, “Look, I’ll show you. See, old cars like this don’t need remotes, just a basic key... see,” as he unlocked the car. “Now, you give it a try!”

I tried to open it using the key, and bam, it worked like magic. I thanked him for showing me, but before I left, he said, “If you ever buy an old car like this one day, you’ll remember now how to lock and unlock it.”

Now, I could finally take this old man’s advice and try to open the car door, and it immediately unlocked. I shook my head in disbelief that it actually worked with this car. I said, “So I found my car that I drove here but what happens now? If there isn’t anything wrong with the car ... then there must be something wrong with me!”

I checked my mirror to see if I was bleeding. But when I looked in the left side mirror, I could not for the life of me see my own reflection but one of a brown-haired, brown-eyed boy in my place. He looked to be my age and nothing like me at all and dressed like he came straight out of a thrift store, which for me, is something that I would never wear. No...No... this can’t be me, can it?

I then started to make silly faces in the mirror to see if this truly was me, but I quickly noticed that he was doing exactly the same. This cannot be real because none of this makes any sense. This must be some weird lucid dream, I guess, because that explains the green fog.

But I didn’t know about my answer to that because when I took a closer look at “his” shirt, it just didn’t explain why my outfit had to change too. A couple of obvious signs are that I would never...ever wear a nice button-down shirt for my first day of school, but most importantly, my phone was gone! I desperately tried to look for it in all of my pockets and the back seat, where I distinctly remember tossing it to.

Finally, my grandpa’s letterman jacket was missing somehow, even though I wore it while driving through the fog. Oh man, my mom is going to kill me when I come back home without the jacket. I just gotta stay calm for now and head into school. But I couldn’t get my head straight about what I saw in the mirror reflection of that brown-haired kid. I wanted to find out more about him, but for now, I had to try my hardest to ignore that question in my head, for I had other things to worry about, such as school, especially before the bell rings. So, with that, I grabbed my backpack, which seemed and felt different too, but whatever, and headed to my school.