The Stinky Locker

This post is dedicated to my faithful locker buddies of 1998-1999.

This morning as the announcement came on that it was time to clean out the lockers, as tradition holds for the end of the school year, I was taken back to an experience I once had with a locker. The first day of school in my junior year one of my good friends came to pick me up, since we were planning to walk to school together. As we made the trek up to the high school we talked about our schedules and the lockers that we were assigned to. I remember the previous year I hadn't put any name down to share a locker with for the next year. I was really surprised to find that this friend and I would be sharing a locker, along with one more friend. Neither of us had put each other's name down, so we assumed that it was the third friend that had listed both of us.

We located our locker that first day and continued to use it throughout the year. The third friend never used it much, but since it was close to our trig class, which we had with another friend, she started using it as well. A few months into the school year we started noticing an unpleasant aroma every time we opened our locker. We tried to get the janitors to clean it for us, but that was fruitless. We stayed after school one day and cleaned it ourselves. Still, the stench was there. We put air fresheners in the locker (perhaps too many). People walking by would comment on the strong smell of the air fresheners when we were at our locker. Besides, it was one of those air fresheners-mixed-with-stink smells that was now protruding from our locker. Eventually we started smelling the stink during our classes too...it had spread to our text books. Nothing we tried got rid of the smell. We think something had died behind our locker or underneath it or somewhere in close proximity to it.

The best part about this stinky locker experience was that a couple years later my friend's little sister was in a trig class. Her book still carried the rotten locker stench.