Locker Thief

Note: This is a half-nonfiction, half-fiction story since it’s more of an amalgamation of all the locker stories I’ve heard rather than being based on one specific experience. As such, some of the details in this story may be somewhat unrealistic (such as someone actually leaving their phone and not having it on their person at all times) but I beseech you all to suspend your disbelief.

It begins with the typical scene of a school locker room: light chatter, rustling fabric, clanging metal, and clicking locks. The only anomaly was the click of one person’s lock: or the lack thereof.

“…What?”

My friend, who was content and lighthearted just a moment ago, had fallen into disbelieving silence. Gaze fixed on her locker, her eyes scrutinize the contents inside with an unexpected gravity. Her hands soon join her hands, flinging through folds of clothing, pushing aside other arbitrary objects. However, in such a small space, there was never that much to search for in the first place.

“My phone is gone,” she said, her tone resigned with a sense of begrudging finality.

“Did someone steal it?”

But the question was unnecessary. How else would a phone mysteriously disappear in the locker room? And no matter what we questioned or who we questioned, we were rendered powerless, at a loss for any solutions, unable to do anything but report it to a teacher.

The teacher too asked an unnecessary question. “Did you lock your locker?”

No, she did not. But who would want to?

Every year, the PE teachers would tell us how essential it was to keep our possessions safe by transferring everything to one of the “larger lockers.” The capacity of these larger lockers was quite pitiable, being only somewhat wider than the freshmen lockers and about half their height. To store all your belongings — backpack, clothes, textbooks, whatever else you may be carrying, and whatever else may be in your small locker — in that is a hassle, moreover considering the gracious 6-minute changing time limit. Thus, for high school students who are most likely not here by their own volition, they simply ignore this “essential” suggestion.

It is an unspoken principle: before going to their PE class, some leave their locks hanging but not completely closed on their small lockers; a few more would store an extra few bags or textbooks into the large lockers; most leave their backpacks out, innocuously lined up along the walls. It is an unspoken principle, and some could say it was founded upon an established trust or mutual commiseration, but neither is particularly accurate. Instead, it was the shared desire to avoid an inconvenience and the individual presumption that we all knew which lines not to cross.

Yet someone, some time entered the school locker room when it was farthest from its typical scene: empty, silent, vulnerable. They saw how the room was suspended by the same delicate balance that held unlocked locks in the air, and then, they chose to break it.