Here’s how my school gym works: You enter and they scan your Student ID, you walk downstairs to an area where you can check out one of those 
key-locks and a towel. Then you proceed to the locker room. You stuff your stuff in one of those long lockers, slap the lock on it, take your key, your ipod, and your water upstairs to the cardio room. When you’re done with the elliptical machine, you hop on the treadmill and run for a half hour. Afterwards, you get this little feeling of superiority inspired by the fact that you still feel like you’re walking on a giant conveyor belt. You glide into the weight room, lift ten pound weights and feel like you could be that bandana-woman on the tampax posters until you become intimidated by giant frat guys and football players lifting twice your own weight. You stretch like you only meant to be in there for two minutes and walk quickly back to the locker room, realizing that you just sweat so much in the cardio room that you must look like you just escaped a lochness abduction. You take that very important locker key, open your locker, strip, grab your towel, conditioner, and soap, lock your locker, and hit the showers.
Now if you’re me last Wednesday, you’ve gotten this far but made one fatal mistake: you forgot to remove the key from your lock before you walked to the showers. I hadn’t realized this until I had taken a nice, steamy shower and humiliated myself in front of the other showering gym-goers (I thought no one was around when I attempted to shave my legs, lifting them one-by-one at nearly 90 degrees to my body and bracing them against the shower wall, giving them a graphic anatomy lesson).
These three, perfect-bodied blondies stopped to stare at me for about five seconds with their mouths agape, an eternity when they exchanged looks directly afterwards. I lowered my leg from where it was on the shower-cubicle wall, stopped admiring my flexibility. I snapped my towel off its hook and turned off the shower as they drifted away in a daze.
I really, really wanted to get dressed. I rushed to my locker without the aforementioned key, ran back to my shower, thinking I’d left it behind, and then began to panic. I pulled on the lock, hoping I’d get lucky and it would pop open.
My first class was in half an hour.
God forbid I should ever be stranded on a desert island – I consider the contents of my gym bag as necessary to my survival as food. In ten minutes, my curly hair, without maintenance, would look like a byproduct of electric shock therapy.
In a panicked frenzy, I paced back and forth for about 20 seconds, breathing heavily. I pathetically tugged on the lock as my bottom lip began to protrude, preparing to quiver. I sat down on the concrete bench and held my face in my hands until I heard a trio of voices advancing. The same three girls were heading toward me, talking about their opposition to tights, as they really all focused on me, avoiding even looking at me. They were still about 20 feet away when I abandoned my conditioner and soap, fled the bench and ran into the sauna to hide.
I sat down on one of the wooden shelves – the heat felt good, but I once again thought of my hair and the tragedy it would become when it dried without anti-frizz serum. I wondered how long it would be until I could come out and they would be gone. Some other girl came in, spread out her towel and lay naked on top of it on the wooden shelf across from me. To avoid seeming like I was watching her, I mirrored her and lay naked on top my own towel.
I didn’t realize I was falling asleep until I woke up drenched in sweat, feeling as though my head were too big for my body. I stumbled out of the sauna and nearly passed out.
What time was it? I ran out into the locker area and found a mounted clock– somehow 45 minutes had passed. No key. My second class started in twenty minutes. I don’t know if it was an effect of the sauna, my panic, or both, but I became conscious of my racing heartbeat.
I sat down in front of my locker and began to cry. A Mexican woman had begun to mop the floor at the end of the row of lockers, but stopped when she saw me walking toward her, dabbing tears from my eyes with the corner of my towel.
“I lost the key to my locker. I’m going to be naked forever,” I told her.
“¿Che?”
Why the hell was I taking Russian?
I grabbed her hand to lead her to my locker and show her the situation – thinking maybe she had a skull key or something.
We made it halfway to my locker before my towel fell off. She stared at me. I stared down at myself and nodded slowly. Why wasn’t I better endowed? Where did I get my breasts from? My father?
Unexpectedly, Maria (so said her nametag) began to laugh her head off as I recovered slightly and suppressed the urge to squeeze her gratefully.
When we reached my locker and I turned the invisible key in the lock and then shrugged my shoulders and lifted my hands palms up in an “I don’t know” gesture, she nodded and held up her pointer finger to mean “one minute”.
Maria disappeared for half-an-hour during which I studied myself in the hall mirror and tried to wipe off the excess make up beneath my eyes with my towel, making the skin red and swollen. My hair had begun to sprout little baby hairs.
Maria returned with a key and I jumped up and down in excitement. She joined me and we jumped together. Then she opened the lock and opened the locker triumphantly.
My first thought: These aren’t my clothes.
Fuck.
All these lockers look alike. Next one over. It was the next one over. It had to be. I tap it hurriedly. Maria put her head in her hands before she left to get the next lock.
When she returned, an authoritative-looking woman accompanied her. Her bright, red lipstick scared me. She was probably there to make sure I wasn’t stealing anything.
I explained the situation to her and promised her I had my Student ID in the locker so that I could prove I wasn’t stealing anything. She opened up the locker and to my relief, my gym bag was hanging peacefully on the hook within it.
Maria clasped her hands together happily and I gave her a giant hug. She returned to her mop bucket and I scrambled to make my 1 o’clock class, arriving just in time to catch the beginning of the Parliament of Foules discussion.
