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IMAGINARY LOCKS
The locks we use today were invented by a guy named Linus Yale in 1848, but his son, Linus Yale Jr., made a way improved version in 1861. He was like, Great invention, Dad, but I know how to make it better, and that’s exactly what he did, and then his dad was like, Awesome, thanks.
History is full of cool facts like that. Real life, not so much.
The awesome thing about historical facts is that they’re really easy to learn. You can get them from school, obviously, but also from books or the Internet or TV, and there’s no end. You can learn as many facts as you can cram into your brain. Then, when your mom says things to you at night like “stay in bed” even though you’re twelve and it’s a weird thing to say, in your head, you can be like, Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867, and it almost drowns her voice right out. And when she pulls your tie-dye covers all the way up to your neck, and you look really close at her eyes and realize there are tears in them, you can roll away from her and think, Iceland has the world’s oldest democracy.
And when she says, “I love you, Sophie”—well, that part is okay to listen to, because that’s a fact, even if she has a funny way of showing it.
I rolled back around so I was facing her. “Love you, too,” I said.
Another fact. I really did love her, but after almost four months, this bedtime routine was getting a little old. And depressing. Definitely depressing. Like the kind of depressing where the teachers who promise never to give homework on the weekends give homework on the weekends. But since it was mostly my fault she was like this in the first place, I just had to deal with it for as long as it went on.
She closed my door and made a clicking sound with her throat, which was supposed to be the imaginary lock she put on it so I couldn’t get out.
Imaginary locks were invented in 2017 by Molly Mulvaney, aka Mom.
She put the same kind of lock on the front door to our condo, not when we went out out, like to school or grocery shopping or any of the other regular life things we still did, but usually just at night, and usually just for her. Nights were when she got the saddest, when she wanted to go downstairs to the second floor the most and knock on Pratik’s apartment door, even though she knew that would be a super awkward, bad thing to do, probably even worse than the time I called Demarius Gilbert last year in fifth grade on New Year’s Eve and told him I liked him.
So she pretended she was locked in, and I was locked in with her.
And that was fine with me, mostly. I didn’t have anywhere to go. It was late enough that my best friends, Kaya and Rafael, were probably in bed, too, and it wasn’t like we could go out for pancakes or anything. So when Mom put the imaginary lock on my door, I left it there, and I didn’t go downstairs to Pratik’s apartment (because we both knew that’s what she really meant by “stay in bed”), and she didn’t, either, and maybe my not going downstairs somehow helped her not go downstairs, and maybe that was a good thing. I definitely owed her a good thing or two.
But maybe, I was starting to think, it wasn’t so good at all.
What was so wrong about seeing Pratik? He and Mom had gone out for almost two years, so he was practically family and we missed him a lot, even though they broke up four months ago, not long after school started. Just because he and Mom weren’t together anymore didn’t mean we had to be “stay in bed” about it.
Maybe if I could figure out how to help her, this weird bedtime ritual could end. I pulled back the covers and sat up straight. The problem was, there was only one person I knew who could help me figure Mom out, and that person was Pratik.
I got out of bed.
Maybe Mom’s imaginary lock invention wasn’t perfect. Maybe, like Linus Yale Sr., she needed her kid to make a few improvements.
Maybe imaginary locks were meant to hold firm only sometimes.
Other times, maybe they were better off broken.
Text copyright © 2017 by Abby Cooper
