At last, it was time to set our perfect plan in motion. It was 7:00pm on a Friday night. After a long soccer practice, the rest of the team and I went back into the locker room to get our backpacks, or so our coach thought when she waved a goodbye and hurried to her car.
We had waited all week, through a seemingly endless cycle of classes, practice, homework and little sleep. We lived for the precious time in-between school and the start of practice in the locker room to conspire about the details of the coming Friday’s adventure. It was finally time.

The locker room was actually called our team room, it was separate from the gym locker room and the team rooms for each of the other girls sports. It was a fairly large room on the basement level of our school, and through three doors from the hallway, making it feel especially secluded. It was lined with large, blue lockers atop a spacious bench that wrapped around three out of the four walls.

It had started in jest; we were feeling silly and decided to try to each fit in a locker. When we had succeeded in climbing in, we all tried to shut the locker doors. This too was successful, according to the tennis team member who was taking pictures for us. She uttered the interest- peeking words “I wouldn’t even know you guys were in there…” sparking the idea. Next Friday night we would all plan ‘a team-bonding activity,’ a sleepover at Amy’s house, while Amy told her parents she was sleeping over at another teammate’s house. I knew the deal was sealed when I found myself stashing pajamas in the bottom of my soccer bag before school. So that night after practice we did indeed have a sleepover, we just might have, maybe, accidently told our parents the wrong location.

The team room had enough lockers in it for about double the girls we actually had on the team; which was perfect. Perfect because we were unable to fit both our backpacks, and our soccer bags, and ourselves into any one locker; and perfect because it created plenty of decoy lockers. We were strategic, making sure to have no more than two bags in each spare locker so that if anyone was to come in and open an unlocked locker, she would find the bags of two friends sharing a locker filled with soccer equipment they found unnecessary to their weekend plans. Throughout the week we each checked the papers hanging in the schools bathrooms with the cleaning schedules on them. Complete with times, dates and initials, they were the perfect resources for determining exactly what time a building service worker would come in, service the bathroom for the team rooms, turn off all the lights and lock the doors. We gathered that a Mr. or Ms. L.K.S would be servicing our restroom between 7:30 and 7:45. We decided to be in place by 7:20, just in case the building service worker was running ahead of schedule.

After checking and rechecking that every girl’s locker had a lock, and every lock had the combination written on the back, we had ten minutes before go-time and being the teenage girls we were, we got to talking. The next thing I knew, someone was shouting “It’s 7:22!” we all scrambled to find our locks and clambered into an empty locker. The panic stemmed from the risk we were running that we may be caught in school way after hours, and the honors students among us were not having that on their records. So by 7:24 all but one of us was in place, all except Christy. She was the brave soul in charge of locking her teammates in their lockers, preventing us from being discovered. I can remember breathing heavily from within my locker and listening to the repetitious thud-click! of Christy locking the lockers one-by-one. As our potential window of discovery drew nearer, I could hear a scratching before each thud, Christy’s hands were beginning to shake from the pressure. I went from heavily breathing to scarcely breathing at all, when I heard the locker locking stop. Had we been discovered? I thought, as panic set in and I realized I was more afraid of what would happen to us if L.K.S found us out than I had anticipated. But my panic was short-lived, because a few seconds later I heard the sliding sound of Christy opening the unlocked locker she was to hide in. The already slim odds of someone opening her locker were lessened by our strategic selection of it. Not a corner, not an end, nor dead center, but somewhere much more inconspicuous along the longest wall Christy was now closing her locker. Next came the waiting.

The waiting, and the waiting, and the grumbling of stomachs as we realized that we had not factored in time to eat before we hid, seemed to last for eons. The worry was building, turning the hunger into a solid knot in our stomachs. Later discussion revealed that there had been a continuous chain of us sticking the tips of our fingers through the ventilation holes in the sides of our lockers, to grip the finger tips, or even just the athletic shorts of the adjacent stowaway. We were all silent. Silent, and listening for footsteps, or whistling, or squeaking of the wheels on the mop bucket headed our way. Or better still, the faint vibration of the alarm set on a well planted cell phone in one of the bags in one of the unlocked lockers. Bethany had the idea to put the all clear alarm in there just in case L.K.S was running behind schedule, and was flicking off our light right as he heard the buzz. That way, if he was to follow the sound, he would find a harmless forgotten cell phone, and not a beat red, watery eyed freshman.

7:45 came and went as we listened to the vibration of the all-clear alarm, but to our dismay it was not followed by Christy unlocking the first locker. We all stayed quiet for a minute, reading in to each other’s hesitation and assuming that the others were hearing something she was not. Then Mallory finally whispered “Christy!” but there was no response. “Christy, we’re good now, let us out!” Mallory hissed again. Nothing; no word from Christy. Just then I heard the team room door open, and almost simultaneously the light was flicked off. I held my breath. I was confused, was that Christy? Did she hear someone coming? Or was it L.K.S? But then where was Christy? After what seemed like an eternity, I was able to draw a breath at the sound of Christy’s voice. “Sorry guys, I was checking to see if L.K.S had cleaned the bathroom and left already. I had to turn the light off in case he was in the hall so he didn’t see me come out. But the toilet seats are already up like they have been cleaned, so I think we’re good.”

So she let us out one by one, and we laughed at how obsessive we’d been, pouring over every detail, while pouring maple-syrup over pancakes at I-HOP the next morning. We all agreed that the anticipation and the planning were more fun than the actual sleepover. Hiding in the lockers was definitely the highlight of the night, beating out all the candy and the borrowed wrestling mat bed. We walked back to school from I-HOP and waited for our coach to arrive. And when she did arrive, she found us strapping on shin-guards and tying up pony-tails as if nothing at all had happened. When she asked where our parents were, we informed her of our stay at Amy’s the night before and that her mother had generously driven us all to the field in several trips, but regrettably she could not stay for the game.