Miri rummaged through her backpack anxiously.
It was a sunny afternoon on Thursday August 4th. Miri and quite a few other teenagers were currently in a classroom attending Summer School, which ran from 12: 00 pm to 3: 30 pm on weekdays. Normally Miri would be paying attention to the teacher, but she had just gotten a message on her flip phone.
Please walk home today, I can not pick you up.
Miri’s mother usually picked her up from Summer School, but today she had to go to her workplace to use some equipment there. It was only a thirty-minute walk, but Miri had searched every pocket in her new backpack and didn’t find her house key.
Glancing around to make sure that no one was looking, Miri discretely broke the clips of two of her mechanical pencils, one plastic and one metal. They were around the same size as her key, and she intended to see if they could carry out the same functions as well. If it worked, great, and if it didn’t… well, she’d cross that bridge when she got to it.
And get to it she did. Miri internally berated herself for her stupidity. If it really were that easy, there would be a lot more robberies.
Miri sighed as she dropped her backpack and the newspaper and package she found at the front door onto the patio. After arriving at her house, she had tried to use the clips as keys on the front door, and, when she realized she was standing outside for a suspiciously long amount of time, the back door. Aside from a series of clack that had her cat Ryan meowing at the promise of people to feed him, her clip-keys had produced no results.
Miri assessed her options as she settled into one of the white plastic lawn chairs. Her mom wasn’t coming back until six, and her dad would be coming back around the same time. That was – she checked her phone – more than one and a half hours away, and she didn’t feel like being scolded for her carelessness. She had tried all the doors, and even removed the screen of one of the basement’s windows, but it was also locked.
Wait, that’s it! Since it was still hot during the summer nights, Miri often left her room’s window open, a plastic mesh screen being the only thing between her and the elements. The window was approximately half a meter by half a meter, which should be big enough to squeeze in. If she wasn’t mistaken, today she hadn’t locked it. While an opening like that would normally cause her worry, today she was thankful, as all the measures that kept everything outside, well, out, were keeping her out.
Huh. Guess her carelessness could be useful. Wait, this whole thing was her carelessness’s doing! Nevermind.
Miri ran to the side of the house, where she knew her window was. As she suspected, the window was too high for her to reach, so she went to get the lawn chair she’d been sitting on. She hoped she didn’t look too suspicious as she moved it under the window and climbed onto the seat.
On the ground directly beside the wall with her window, there was a bed of rocks, and on the other side of the bed of rocks were some low steps for people to access the garden. To reach as high as possible, Miri has placed the lawn chair directly on the bed of rocks. The uneven, slanted surface had her wobbling as she removed the screen from her window. Success! Miri jumped in celebration as she placed the screen a safe distance away, lobbing the newspaper and package in.
Unfortunately for Miri, standing on the lawn chair only allowed her to reach up to the windowsill. She needed to get higher to push herself in from the window. Undeterred, Miri ran back to the patio, easily finding the folding ladder her family sometimes used to pick plums from their plum trees during summer. Running back under her window with the ladder in hand, she carefully unfolded it.
Miri knew what she was about to do next was very dangerous and most certainly going to earn her a scolding if anyone knew what happened. Standing on a low lawn chair was one thing. If she fell from the ladder, there was a high possibility that she would break something. After placing the feet of the rear side, the step ladder on the stairs and the feet of the front side on the bed of rocks, Miri took a moment to think. She then ran back to the patio to take her binder from her backpack. She ran back placed her binder under the lower foot of the front side to make the ground more even and stabilize the ladder.
With bated breath, Miri carefully climbed the ladder from the side planted on the rock bed. When she got to the highest rung – the highest rung she felt relatively safe on, that was – she slowly turned and gripped the windowsill, shifting her weight so that her arms could support her.
Just as her feet began to leave the step ladder rungs, she felt the ladder begin to wobble. No, no! Panic welled up in her stomach as Miri shifted her weight and hastily grabbed the step ladder’s front side rails, descending to the safety of solid ground. It took her two more tries before she finally pushed her head into the window. Just as she was about to celebrate her success, her head bonked into something hard. She pulled aside her curtain to reveal the object she bumped into. Her desk. Oh, right. How could she forget? Her desk was placed in a corner of her wall and blocked a part of her window.
Miri took a deep breath as her feet descended back on the step ladder’s rungs. She had gone too far for her to go back now. She tried again, poking her head through the small gap between her desk and the window. She managed to get her entire torso through before her waist got stuck. She struggled fruitlessly, not willing to give up, until the glint of brass caught her eye. On a golden necklace chain on her desk was her key!
Positively bursting with delight, Miri snatched it and withdrew her body from the window, remembering to replace the mesh screen before putting the lawn chair and ladder away, making sure to tidy up so that nobody would realize they had ever left the patio. Then, she retrieved her binder and backpack. It was now 4: 39, she still had an estimated one hour and twenty minutes before her parents came back. She rushed to the front door and unlocked it, placing her dusted-off her binder and retrieving the package and newspaper from her room, placing them on the floor before the front door. Miri spared one last look at her handiwork before heading off in the direction of Ryan’s renewed meows.