Locked Up

At lunch a few weeks before our school’s Choral Festival, I told my friend that I was going to the piano corridor in the basement.

Every year, before the festival itself, the piano corridor opened for students to practice. I never liked playing the piano in front of my family–a remnant from the disastrous piano-learning days–so I hadn't touched the piano at home for months. This was a great opportunity for me to refresh my skills before my fingers forgot the feeling of the keys.

“Alright.” My friend looked a bit disappointed and was just about to leave the classroom when he turned around and grinned, “I’ll come over and make some music!” He vanished before my eraser could hit him in the head.

As soon as I finished lunch, I skipped downstairs, hoping my friend hadn’t arrived before me. There on the basement floor was the door to the piano corridor. Peering through the window on the door, I could tell from the darkness that no one was in the corridor just yet. Good.

I pulled the door open, leaving a space barely enough for my arm to sneak through to grope for the light switch on the wall, and before long, the whole corridor was lit. On each side, there were single cells with pianos in them. I moved straight into a piano room in the middle, where I had left my music scores from yesterday, and was just about to start playing when I remembered my friend’s words:

I’ll come over and make some music! He grinned like a Cheshire cat.

Well, I’ll make sure to lock the door then! I retorted before he left the classroom.

To get ahead of his mischief, I turned the knob on the handle and locked the door with a “twang”. Either way, it had always been my habit to lock the door when I was alone, especially when I didn't want anyone to enter.

Just then, worries flashed through my mind. Was the door truly locked? What if the door couldn’t be locked? What if the door couldn’t be opened? Immediately my hand was on the handle again. I tried to open the door and it stood firm. Well, it was locked for sure.

Now to check if it could be unlocked. I turned the knob once, and twisted the handle and pulled, but my whole body bounced back to the door as it stayed in its frame, firmly locked. Trying the knob in the other direction had the same results: the door trembled but stayed firm. Confused, I turned the knob clockwise: it twanged as it turned, but when I reversed the knob, it stopped immediately as if it had hit a wall.

“Damn…” I cursed to myself. I twisted the handle both ways again, pushing and pulling the door each time, but nothing worked. What’s worse, after all my random tries, I couldn’t recall how I had locked it in the first place. 

My fear was fully realized: I had just locked myself up in the piano room in the middle of a long corridor in the basement alone. The doors were all pretty soundproof, and I didn’t dare pull the door too hard. Since there was nothing else I could do, I sat down at the piano and started playing the song on my score. Its Chinese name, 凉凉, translates to “doomed.” Fitting.

My friend did come down a few minutes later and saw me in this desperate position. He immediately ran upstairs to call his friend, and together they spent ten minutes laughing in front of my door before going to find help, knowing that I could only watch from the inside. As their laughter filled the entire corridor, I suddenly thought that maybe I should have left the door open, that my friend might have only been joking around. Even if he wasn’t, it wouldn’t have lasted that long and I could have stopped him if I needed to. However, in choosing to act preemptively, I caged myself.

The teachers rescued me after half an hour with one hard kick on the door by the repairman, who explained that there was no key for the door, so the only way to get out was by force. It was actually easy to break because the door was old and a little rotten, so if I had ever made up my mind, I might have come out a lot earlier. I could only thank him and laughed at my own overcautiousness.