In Which I Put My Skills to Good Use

Scene

It's 11:30 pm. I am reading, the LT is sleeping next to me, getting his beauty sleep so he can impress the interviewers tomorrow. (The LT's civilian job search has begun! What will I call him when he isn't an LT anymore?)

I myself am getting sleepy, and Titan has to go out one more time, so I get up, grab a sweatshirt, leash Titan, grab my keys, forgo shoes, and slap my hair up in pigtails to get it out of the way. We step outside. Titan does his thing. I look at my keys, shaking them to get the door key to hang down right.

The door key does not hang down.

I look at my keys more closely, and as I do, whispers of conversation come back to me:

"I'll be done with my interviews around 3 pm tomorrow," the LT said.

And I said, "Why don't you just take my keys, since I'll be home later?"

And the LT took my door keys off my key ring and added them to his own, and my mind I thought, 'I'll have to grab those when I take Titan out later', but that's as far as the thought got.

And so here I am, outside, no shoes, locked out of my apartment, with a dog, at 11:45 pm.

SHIT.

Titan and I run around the outside of my building, and a few other buildings. I yell the LT's name several times, as loud as I dare, waking up several dogs and by proxy, their owners, but no one's head pops out of their window. I throw rocks at my own window. No movement. I knock on my own front door and my neighbors' windows. Nothing. It's 11:55 and I'm stuck. And then I look up, and see that the window in the main hallway--a floor up--is open. And my porch is surrounded on two sides by a wooden trellis, attached to some columns. I shake the column. It appears pretty steady.

Which is how I ended up climbing up my porch at 11:45 pm in barefeet and pigtails. I bellied up to the roof of the porch and then raised the window sash in the hallway. Getting into the window is actually the hardest part of the whole process, as it's shoulder level to me, but I get my head through first and heave my butt through, and pretty soon, I'm standing in my own hallway.

Glory day. I go into my apartment, get my keys, run downstairs, retrieve Titan, run back upstairs to my apartment, set down the keys, and crash into bed.

The End.