Page 86 of The Quiet Tenant

“If you can spare one? Please?”

She tells you, Of course, and ushers you in. Her room, the world shaped by her eyes: art on the walls, pictures she liked and must have printed at school. Andy Warhol’s cans of soup, Banksy’s rats, more Keith Haring. She walks to her desk to retrieve a pen.

Think. Now. You need to hurry the hell up and figure something out.

At the foot of her desk, abandoned for Christmas break, her backpack. The design is basic, purple cotton, a couple of zippers, a logo you don’t recognize. But Cecilia, this artsy kid, this crafty kid, has made it her own. She has drawn on it with markers, a tree branchdown the side, a large rose at the top. And at the front, two letters,cc,rendered—you squint—in safety pins. She did things well, made sure the letters were symmetrical, doubled the rows so people could see them from afar.

“This is cute,” you say, and you point toward her bag.

You think about Matt, your almost-boyfriend, who knew how to pick locks. An array of tools strewn over his coffee table, his fingersbending as he slid metal rods into holes, held one into place, and jiggled the other, until something clicked.

A safety pin could do the trick, you decide. A safety pin would be worth a shot.

“Thanks.” Cecilia gives the bag an uninterested glance, goes back to the pens. “Blue ink okay?”

You tell her it is. “Did you do it yourself?” You kneel by the backpack, run your fingers over the design.

“I did.” She shrugs. “It’s nothing fancy, you know. Just some pins.”

She hands you a pen. You barely look at it and stuff it in your pocket. “What a great idea,” you tell her. “So pretty.”

She shifts her weight from one foot to the other. You are trying her patience.

Good.

This is her time to herself, and you are stealing it from her. She will do anything to have it back.

“Do you want one?”

Yes.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” you tell her. “I don’t want the letters to be ruined.”

She kneels next to you. “I’ll just get more and replace this one. It will take ten seconds.”

Before you can say anything else, she removes a pin from the firstcand hands it to you.

“Thank you,” you tell her. “Thank you so much.”

You get back up, gesture around the room. “I’ll leave you to it.”

She nods. Then, because she cannot help herself, because she is sweet and accommodating and if she kills you, it will be with kindness: “Let me know if the pen doesn’t work. I’ll give you a different one.”

You tell her you will. Cecilia’s door shuts behind you.

Downstairs, you search the forgotten confines of your brain.

Matt ordered the lock-picking kit online after getting laid off from his job at a tech start-up. “It’s not that hard when you know what you’re doing,” he said. The way he told it, all you had to do was put the thing in another thing and twist this way and that, andpoof,the world opened like an oyster, soft and briny in the palm of your hand.

He showed you a video on YouTube, on a channel called—you had to read the name three times to make sure—Essential Skills for Men. A dude demonstrated how to insert one tool vertically first, how to apply the right amount of pressure, how to insert another tool perpendicular to the first one, and how to work both tools against each other until the lock gave.

“It’s a matter of pressure and counterpressure,” the man said.

What you made of it: at the end of the day, it’s the magic of two opposing forces that sets you free.

In front of the door under the stairs, you bend the safety pin until it breaks into two pieces: the sharp one and the curvy one.

You insert the curvy one, then the sharp one. Work slowly. Softly. Everything hinges on this, the pressure of your fingers against metal. The right amount. Enough, but not too much.

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