One morning when I was a teenager (maybe freshman or sophomore year) I woke up and left my room to get some breakfast. In the kitchen there was a man I’d never seen before standing in front of our fridge inspecting its contents. He noticed me, and asked if we had any beer.

I said “No,” and lingered for a second, more bewildered than anything else. Then my brain started working, and I realized how Not Very Safe the situation was. I turned around and walked around the corner, then to my mom’s room, which was the furthest I could get while putting a door between me and the man. I closed and locked the door before typing out a message on my school iPad to my brother, who I could hear in the shower the next room over. I could also hear the sound of paper tearing from the direction of the kitchen, but then it went quiet. The problem was that I’d forgotten the latch bolt in that door was a bit quirky, and that it needed a little extra force to make sure the door was shut properly. So when the man tried the door, it swung open.

The first thing he did was apologize. I had been in nothing but my boxers this whole time, and for whatever reason this was the moment he detected some impropriety in the scene. Still, he approached me, and started asking me to swear by the Hippocratic Oath. I saw he had some pieces of paper in his hands, which turned out to be from my mom’s physical therapy textbooks. I played along and said yes as earnestly as I could, still not sure if it was some kind of weird game that I could play and win to stay unharmed. It seemed to satisfy him.

This is where things get fuzzy. I think he left at that point, just as my brother was leaving the shower. I talked to my brother, but he didn’t seem super concerned about the whole thing. I guess that lead to me matching that energy, because I went about the rest of my morning routine, typing out a recollection of what had happened to my mom while eating cereal. I actually left for school and got halfway there before I got a call from a friend of a friend saying he saw police pulling up to my house, and then got a call from my mom telling me to come back home. I got there and gave a statement to the police (i wasn’t based yet). Turns out the man was my mentally unwell next door neighbor. He lived with his parents, but I guess he slipped out and found his way into our backyard, where my brother had left the back door open. He’d had incidents like this in the past, but was never violent. My brother was aware of this, which is why he was so nonchalant earlier, but nobody had told me!

Ultimately nothing happened, no charges or anything, which I glad for since ultimately no harm was done, I guess. I stayed home from school and was shaken up for a while but now I look back at it as a weird thing. Still, there was a brief stretch of time that morning when I thought there was a serial killer or something of that ilk in our house, and that asking for beer or the hippocratic oath stuff was part of his M.O., like that axe murderer in New Orleans who only killed people when they didn’t have jazz playing. i hope this counts for your prompt, i have a hard time judging how scary this is because of how strange it was

will also prob rewrite this tomorrow since it’s kinda doodoo but it’s late and im tired