Locker 237
It all started when my math teacher, Mr. Donaldson, decided he was done with my “I forgot my textbook” excuse. He called me out in front of the whole class: “I hope your locker isn’t secretly a black hole, Kayla, because I expect to see your textbook tomorrow!” Cue the snickers from the back of the room, and that one kid, Jake, yelling, “Roasted!” like he was at Comedy Central’s roast of the decade.
The problem was, he wasn’t wrong. Locker 237 was basically a black hole. I hadn’t opened it in weeks—not because I was lazy (okay, partly), but because every time I tried, the door just... wouldn’t budge. At first, I thought it was jammed. But the more I tried, the more it felt like something on the inside was pushing back.
So, there I was, in the hallway after school, facing down my nemesis: a dented, slightly rusty locker that smelled faintly of peanut butter and gym socks. “Alright, 237,” I muttered under my breath. “Let’s dance.”
I tugged the handle. Nothing. I yanked harder, gritting my teeth, until my fingers slipped off the metal, sending me flying backward into Alex, the senior with perfect hair and a permanent smug expression.
“Uh, you good there?” he asked, raising one eyebrow like he was auditioning for a shampoo commercial.
“Totally,” I said, brushing dust off my jeans. “Just, uh, stretching.”
Alex smirked. “Sure. Looks like your locker’s winning, though.”
Great. I was now officially the kid who lost a battle to a stationary object in front of the entire lacrosse team. Fantastic.
After Alex left, probably to tell the story of my failure to his 10,000 Instagram followers, I glared at the locker again. “Fine,” I said, cracking my knuckles. “If you won’t open for me, I’ll call in backup.”
Enter Mia, my best friend and the reigning queen of chaos. Mia had a certain flair for solving problems in the most unnecessarily dramatic way possible. She showed up armed with a bobby pin, a stick of gum, and what she called “an aggressive attitude.”
“Stand back,” she said, like she was about to defuse a bomb.
The bobby pin trick? Useless. The gum? Just ended up stuck to her fingers. The aggressive attitude? Well, it mostly involved her shaking the locker and yelling, “OPEN UP OR I’LL SUE YOU!” Spoiler alert: the locker was not intimidated.
At this point, a small crowd had gathered. Jake from math class was there, along with his sidekick, Dylan. “You need some WD-40 or something?” Jake asked, clearly enjoying my misery.
“No,” Mia snapped. “What we need is for you to go away.”
Eventually, the crowd lost interest, and Mia and I decided to call it a day. But as I walked away, I could swear I heard a faint click from Locker 237, like it was laughing at me.
The next day, I arrived at school armed with reinforcements: my dad’s toolbox. If brute force couldn’t solve this problem, maybe a crowbar could.
“I’m telling you, there’s something alive in there,” Mia said as we approached the locker.
“Yeah, and it’s eating my math book,” I replied, setting the toolbox down.
Operation Locker Liberation was underway. I pried, I pulled, I even tried sweet-talking it: “C’mon, 237, don’t you want to show everyone how great you are at opening?” Nothing worked.
But then, just as I was about to give up, Mia noticed something. “Wait a sec,” she said, squinting at the handle. “Is that... tape?”
Sure enough, there was a strip of duct tape wedged into the locking mechanism, holding it shut.
“Who would...?” I started, but then the realization hit me like a dodgeball to the face.
Jake.
Of course it was Jake. The same Jake who’d laughed at me in math class. The same Jake who thought fart noises were the height of comedy. The same Jake who probably spent his free time scheming ways to make my life more annoying.
Fueled by a mix of rage and righteous determination, I yanked the tape out, twisted the handle, and—finally—the locker swung open.
Inside was... chaos. Papers crumpled into balls, an empty water bottle rolling onto the floor, and—oh no. Oh no, no, no.
Sitting on top of my math book was a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich, mold growing on it like it was auditioning for the role of “Worst Science Experiment Ever.”
I gagged. “Mia, what is that?”
“It’s art,” she said, snapping a photo. “I’m calling it ‘Locker of Shame.’”
At that exact moment, Jake rounded the corner, saw the mess, and burst out laughing. “Guess you finally found your sandwich!” he wheezed.
My sandwich? My sandwich?! I hadn’t brought peanut butter to school since fourth grade.
“You’re paying for the therapy I’ll need after this,” I said, pointing at him dramatically.
“Worth it,” Jake replied, still cackling.
I spent the rest of the day airing out the locker, dumping the sandwich in the trash, and plotting my revenge. Let’s just say Jake’s backpack may or may not have ended up taped to the flagpole the next morning. But that’s a tale for another time.
Moral of the story? Never trust a locker—or Jake from math class.
