PhillyMag

This past July, Jordan and Joshua Friday confronted one of those endless summer days that teenagers are given. They journeyed by bicycle to an aunt’s house to swim, met up with a friend, and stopped to get pizza. After lunch, the trio went looking for a fourth friend in the Greens of Waynesborough, a small housing development near their Berwyn home. Jordan and Joshua, 15-year-old African-American high-school students, were unfamiliar with this subdivision. They figured they’d reach the fourth kid on his cell phone or find his house. The identical twins, long and thin, both over six feet tall, were dressed in shorts and colorful t-shirts. They wore school backpacks slung over their shoulders, and bicycle helmets strapped tight to their heads. The twins — mom is a lawyer, dad is a doctor — pedaled slowly past wide lawns and big million-dollar houses, feeling right at home. But this development stretched several blocks from the main road.

The fourth boy didn’t answer his cell phone. The Fridays weren’t quite sure where he lived. And at some point, the white friend they’d come with pedaled ahead of them. He was almost a full block away when the Fridays noticed the SUV.

Its driver pulled up near them — a white lady in sunglasses. Her face bore a stern expression, and she held her cell phone, landscape-style, toward the windshield. The twins didn’t know what to think. Jordan Friday waved to her, to say hello. Then they ignored her and went on looking for the other boy. But the woman continued to track their every move. After a few minutes, Jordan wanted out. He pedaled away, hard, to catch up with the third kid. Joshua maintained his slow, rolling pace. But when the woman in the SUV stayed with him, he panicked. He pedaled faster, took every available turn, doubled back on his path. He didn’t know where he was going. He just wanted to lose her. But she stuck right behind him, still holding her cell phone up, presumably to record him. He decided on a new tactic.

“I just thought,” he recalls, several weeks later, “I’d pedal up to her window and ask, ‘Why are you following me?’”

He turned his bike around to face the SUV directly. He started forward, toward the driver’s-side door.

The woman dropped her phone on the seat, put both hands on the wheel, and drove off, her stern expression given over to fear.

Joshua looked around.

By now, he was lost. He didn’t see his brother, their friend, or the boy they’d been trying to find. He tried navigating away from dead ends. He looked for turns that led to the exit and the main road. The streets had been empty before. Now he noticed a lot of people outside. He pedaled past one group that gathered near the curb. A woman’s voice rang out shrilly, calling a man’s name.

“I thought she was calling for her husband,” says Joshua. “I was scared that I was going to be attacked.”