It felt like the blood drained from my face and then coalesced into a rock that dropped to the pit of my stomach. Instant regret. I had just learned firsthand why the rule I had broken was established—or rather, I was reminded that willfully breaking rules always comes back to bite me. However, in all fairness, I don’t think anyone in my position would anticipate that a house key could be twisted and broken by the resistance of a doorknob keyhole that didn’t want to turn.
It had been such a lovely Saturday up until that point. “Tornado,” the hospitable neighbor and top-notch baker down the country road, had kindly driven me and a member of her church all around the Austin area, exploring and shopping. Because 18 years have passed since, the only specific thing I remember from that day was Tornado’s necklace—and that she told me it was from Egypt, while we were en route from one place to another. Oh, and that we stopped at Chipotle for dinner on the way back to Thrall.
In the summer of 2007, I was an intern for HM Magazine. So far, that experience has been unmatched in terms of pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I spent the longest amount of time away from home—over 350 miles away. I was fortunate to have a built-in companion on this very specific, singular journey: the other summer intern, Amanda. She too was far from home. For two months, we each slept on air mattresses in the master bedroom of the mobile home that was conveniently also the HM HQ at the time. No commute! Looking back, I’m pretty sure anxiety would have soured a lot of the experience if Amanda wasn’t there almost every step of the way. A perfect segue for the following paragraph, ha.
A few weeks into the internship, Amanda went home for the weekend. Dallas wasn’t nearly as far from Austin as OKC was, so it made sense. I remember feeling pretty unsettled about spending an entire weekend alone in such a remote place. That’s where Tornado came in clutch—the time we spent in town was the perfect distraction from dreading the alone time… and from possibly getting spooked by the faulty doorbell that rang whenever the wind blew too hard.
Next thing I knew, I was outside in the dark staring at that broken house key—awash with dread for this unforeseen predicament. I don’t know if I had momentarily forgotten or if I simply didn’t care from fatigue, but I tried to get into the house through the door closest to the driveway. The one Doug asked us not to use. The door’s deadbolt unlocked without issue. But when I tried to unlock the doorknob lock, it didn’t turn—but the key did. Well, part of it anyway. Much to my surprise, the part that is essential for unlocking something remained in the lock.
Out of desperation, I tried to use the severed part of the key to unlock the door I was supposed to use, with no success. I remember pacing around the gravel driveway with my flip phone, leaving voicemails for the editor/owner of HM that I was locked out. I think his phone was just powered off that night, of course. One of the voicemails began with, “Hey Doug, it’s your favorite intern again…”
When it was clear I wouldn’t be able to reach Doug, the broken key became my last resort. The haphazard plan was to try to get a copy of the house key at the nearest Walmart Supercenter using the brass shard I pried out of the keyhole. My rationale was that since I was able to get the shard into the deadbolt of the front door, surely they would be able to put it into the machine that copies keys… right?
I was finally on Highway 79 in my 1996 Honda Civic Coupe, and I think that’s when the absurdity of my circumstances started getting under my skin. At one point I legitimately considered just driving through the night until I reached home in OKC. As mentioned earlier, who could have foreseen such an inconvenience? The key had just twisted into two pieces like it was nothing. I tried calling my parents… I don’t know what they could have said that would have helped. I think I just needed any voice of reason in my increasingly frantic state.
Then my spidey senses started tingling about something else. I noticed that the same set of headlights had been in my rearview mirror for a good stretch of highway. I quickly pushed away the thought that someone might be following me, though. I certainly didn’t need another layer of complexity added to this evening. Besides, Highway 79 is pretty much the only way to any kind of civilization from Thrall and other rural places east of I-35.
The more miles I was followed, the more I kept rationalizing why. I dismissed the red flags that kept flapping in my mind because I was already stressed out. But by the time I got into Taylor from 79, I was about 85% sure someone in a pickup truck had followed me for several miles… yet still kind of in denial because it seemed too crazy a coincidence.
Walmart was finally in sight, at least. But this fool was definitely still behind me. Instinctually, I pulled into the Walmart parking lot without using my turn signal and parked as close to the store as possible. I was relieved to see the pickup drive past the entrance I took, in my rearview mirror. Then, to my horror, I saw it pull into the next entrance of the parking lot. To my added horror, I watched the pickup truck pull up right next to my car.
A white, boomer-aged man in civilian clothes got out of the pickup and approached my driver’s window. He motioned for me to roll down the window. I respectfully declined by slowly shaking my head “no.”
After a bit of a standoff, against my better judgment I cracked the window open just enough to hear him.
He then had the audacity to ask me if I had been drinking and driving.
This is when an internal switch flipped from fearful to furious. I emphatically told him I had not been drinking. He seemed taken aback by that response, but he also doubled down on his decision, informing me that he was a volunteer police officer and that if he had been on duty, he would have cited me for driving “under the influence.”
He told me I had been driving “erratically.”
His accusations made my anger boil over. I don’t remember anything I said to him after that. I just remember talking through my clenched jaw, trying not to yell so I wouldn’t provoke this idiot into anger or—Lord knows—anything else. Whatever I said, he eventually relented and left.
Maybe, just maybe, I had been driving erratically (I wasn’t) because a stranger in a pickup truck had followed me from the highway to Walmart. And if this man was a volunteer police officer as he claimed, he needed some retraining. He should have known better than to confront a young woman late at night by following her into a Walmart parking lot to scold her about erratic driving. That just doesn’t seem like the right protocol.
In case you were wondering, the plan I had for the key shard didn’t work as I hoped. After watching the dummy “volunteer officer” actually leave, I dashed from my car into the Walmart Supercenter. When I presented the shard to the cashier by the key machine, she handed me a phonebook to call a 24/7 locksmith. And despite reaching someone who could service the remote area of HM HQ, I had to sleep in my car—which I parked in the gravel driveway—the rest of the night.
Right on brand with how things had been going, the locksmith arrived just as the sun came up the next morning. She got me into the office minutes before Doug arrived to try letting me in. The locksmith also backhandedly told me I needed a shower as she left.
Unlike the boomer that followed me to Walmart, she wasn’t wrong.