I wore my sunhat indoors because the ribbon matched my glasses, which matched my skirt, which was more matching in one day than I usually did in a week. I was actually pretty proud of myself for that. My mom said she was proud of me, too. She was lying. She was relieved.
She’d have been more relieved if I had gotten rid of the keys, which I would never, ever do. It was a feat—if I did say so myself—to accumulate tens of thousands of keys in a mere nineteen years. Less, if you considered that I hadn’t started collecting until I was five. The first one was the key to my bedroom door, or at least it had been, before my dad took the lock away. Then I got a key to the front door. Then I found one on the street. Then a friend gave me one that she found. Then I found another.
Those first five were up on my walls—my mom glared at them every time she entered my room, which she hadn’t done often since I’d decided not to go to college. That had made my mom mad, and she blamed the keys, as if they were a banner that said, “MY DAUGHTER IS NOT NORMAL.” She was the only person I knew who didn’t give me their old spare keys.
My dad accepted it. He said that collection was fine, not wanting to go to college was fine, wearing sunhats indoors was fine. But locking myself in my room for most of my life, he said, was not fine. I could stay in my room, but he was taking the lock away. He still gave me keys, though. He said he liked how happy I looked when I got one.
And why shouldn’t I be happy? They were my children, and just because I had enough to fill up shelves with Mason jars didn’t mean that I still didn’t love new ones. I counted them and organized them and drew pictures of them. I sewed one of my favorites to my hat, which I wore indoors even when my skirts were orange or floral print or both—when it didn’t match.
It would have made my mom crazy if I’d started sewing keys to more of my clothes. She’d yell at me, and stop sending me for groceries, and try to keep me indoors. My dad would fight her on that. He’d tell her that I was nineteen, and if I wanted to go hang out at the locksmith’s shop, that was my prerogative.
I hung my house key around my neck on a blue ribbon, because that matched, too.
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