Locked
I looked over at my cousin, JJ, who was playing with some race cars. My Auntie Tracy had come to our house to say hi and drop something off. They were just about to leave. We said bye, and they drove off. My mom, my friend Katelyn, and I all got in the car to go to my martial arts class.
When we got back, my mom opened the garage door and parked the car. Strangely enough, when we tried to open the door into the house, it was locked. "How could that happen?" I asked. We never locked this door during the day.
"I don't know," my mom replied, "maybe somehow it accidentally got locked?"
"Yeah..." still, that seemed implausible. How could a lock just magically lock itself? "Why don't we go around to check if the sliding door is unlocked?" I suggested.
"Yes, that's a good idea," my mom responded.
Katelyn and I walked around back to our house's patio. There stood the fence, seven feet of cyan-painted metal bars. We climbed over it without too much difficulty, and walked over to the sliding door. The screen door slid open easily. Yes! However, when we got the glass door, it... wouldn't open.
"Huh," Katelyn said. "That's not good."
"What.. but.. we usually keep the glass door unlocked!" I said in disbelief.
"Did you get it open?" my mother shouted from over the fence.
We shook our heads and replied no. Katelyn and I clambered back over the fence, brushing our hair back with our hands and smoothing down our ruffled clothes.
"So.. what do we do now?" Katelyn asked.
No one responded, as the daunting truth set over the group. We were locked out of our house. My mom stepped away to call our landlord, and Katelyn and I were left to survey the possible entrances to the house. We lived in a townhouse that was connected to the neighbors on one side, as our house was on the edge of the row. This definitely limited our options. Excluding the garage and the sliding glass door, there were only two places that we could try to use to enter the house. First, our front door, which was obviously locked. Second, a small window leading to the bathroom on the first floor. There were only two problems with this: The window was really small, and it was fairly high off the ground. Just then, my mother came over, who had finished calling the landlord.
"What did he say?" we inquired.
"He didn't pick up. I had to leave a voicemail." My mother looked slightly worried, and I sighed.
"We could try the window,” Katelyn pointed out. We walked over to inspect the window. It seemed easy enough to open, we just needed to remove the screen.
So we did exactly that. After a few minutes of struggling, we were able to pop it off. Since we usually left this window cracked open anyway, we were able just shove it up to fully open it.
“That’s the first step done! Now… who’s going to climb through the window?” We all agreed for Katelyn to be the one to climb in through the window, as she was the smallest and could probably get in easier than the rest of us.
She stood precariously on the railing of the front porch, which was adjacent to the window, reaching her hands out to the lip of the windowsill. She then brought both of her legs in, placing them on top of the toilet tank. She then twisted around, orienting herself so she could look out of the window at us. She then crouched down and disappeared into the window, successfully planting her feet on the tile of the bathroom floor. A moment later, she appeared and opened our front door, letting us in. Once we were all in, we sat down and basked in the moment of triumph. I sighed in relief.
“Jerry just called me back,” my mother said incredulously. “He said he could open our house for 75 dollars!” We all shared a laugh. Then we decided we were never going to leave the house without a key to the front door. I will never forget the sharp pokes of fear of turning a lock that won’t open and you don’t have a key.
