Pick the lock, p.1
Pick the Lock, page 1
Dutton Books
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First published in the United States of America by Dutton Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2024
Copyright © 2024 by A.S. King
Illustration on this page © 2024 by Anna Kueck
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Ebook ISBN 9780593353998
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Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Lesson One
Act One: Home Movies / the Americas
Home Movies
Home Movie—04.12.2018
Home Movie—06.03.1999
Our Home
Tubes & Cargo
The Ballad of Mina Placenta
Vernon’s Rules
Gemma
The School of Vernon
Lesson One: The World and Its Seven Continents
Home Movie—03.09.2007
Henry’s Algebra
Home Movie—07.19.2008 (498 Days After the Last Home Movie)
The Islands
How Jane Came to the Punk Opera in Her Head
Meet Brutus
Exam Day
The Ballad of Vernon and Finch
Exams at Noon
Suitor #20: Jed from the Orchestra
Applesauce Day
Our People
Let’s Get to Know Marta!
Let’s Get to Know Milorad!
Let’s Get to Know Gemma!
Lesson Two: How I Came to Know My Mother Is a Witch
Ticket to Ride
Family Game Night
Home Movie—03.02.2022
Ticket to Ride / Present Day
Clorox Test
Lady’s Maid
Postcards
Lesson Three: How to End a Shitty Date
Suitor #22: Jefferey from My Old School
Suitor #23: Robert from the Country Club
Suitor #24: Todd from the Library
Suitor #25: Andrew from My Old Camp
How to End a Shitty Date
Brutus’s Laughter
Act Two: Old Business / Europe, Asia & Africa
Old Business
Cottage Pie
Home Movie—08.05.2021
Home Movie—05.23.2016
Walking
Lesson Four: European Geography
Scavenger Hunt
Home Movie—07.19.2016
Salinger
Jane’s Memory—07.19.2016
Our People II
Let’s Get to Know Marta!
Let’s Get to Know Milorad!
Let’s Get to Know Gemma!
Lesson Five: Walking Is Good for the Digestion
Witchcraft
The Rules
Brutus’s Favorite Trick
Happy Holidays from the Vandermaker-Cooks!
Afterglow
Lesson Six: Geography of a Slap
The Letter
Free Jane
Six Days and Six Nights
Thursday Visitors
Home Movie—01.14.2025 (Two Days Ago)
Thursday Visitors (Cont’d)
Lying to the Principal
Free Mother / Act Two
Lesson Seven: The Biology of High School
Homeroom
Introduction
Biology / Geometry / Lunch
Library / History / Tennis Courts
Day Two
Lunch / Regrets
Addi
Who Is Brutus Today?
Act Three: Real School / the Truth About Everything
Lesson Eight: Babies
The History of Placenta
Home / Henry
The Call
Home Movie—12.23.2011
Home Movie Mixtape—Henry Stories
Caveman’s Burden
The Great Hibernation
Eyeliner
Mayhem
Dancing Lessons
Snowball Fight
If Ever
Snow Days
Lesson Nine: Hot Chicken / Cold Oven
Station Six
Safe House Mother
Back to the Dining Room
Quick Start Guide
Jane’s Reprise
Sorry to Break It to You
Clorox Mixtape (Chronological Order)
The Postpartum Chorus Collection
Ten Years Later
Omniscient Rat
Our People III
Let’s Get to Know Marta!
Let’s Get to Know Milorad!
Let’s Get to Know Gemma!
Lesson Ten: For the Useful
The Reclaiming
Rabbit-Rabbit
Ask Milorad Why He Doesn’t Lock Brutus’s Cage Sometime
Station Six Mixtapes
Seventeen
Home Movie—01.15.2019
Balloons
Home Movie—03.03.2025 (Twenty-Four Minutes Ago)
It’s a Party! / Family Game Night
How the Rat Arrived
Act Four: Spring: Reclaiming / Do Not Fuck with My Mother
Lesson Eleven: Witch Trials
Calling Jane Vandermaker Cook to the Stand
Home Movie—05.21.2018
Home Movie—05.14.2018
Witch Trial (Cont’d)
Home Movie Mixtape: Mina’s Willing Surrender
Henry’s March Surprise
Verdict
Lesson Twelve: Frogs
Home Movie—09.02.2024
Home Movie—08.27.2024 (The Tuesday Before)
Home Movie—08.20.24 (The Tuesday Before That)
Home Movie—08.13.24 (The Tuesday Before That)
Frogs II
Henry’s Shocking Bender
Hothouse Release Party
Then Vernon Walks In
Lesson Thirteen: Spring Cleaning
Home Movie—10.12.2021
Home Movie—06.10.2012
Press Release
The Great Ignoring
A Rat’s Dinner
The Reclaiming
Lesson Fourteen: Spring Break
Search and Destroy
Home Movie—03.03.2013
Backup
Exit Stage Right
Demolition
Lesson Fifteen: Family Walk
Ask Henry How He Knew About Finch and Brutus Sometime
Ask Mother How She Survived the Great Ignoring Sometime
How I Came to Understand Why She Didn’t Just Leave
Ask Milorad if He Knows About Brutus Sometime
Our People IV
Let’s Get to Know Marta!
Let’s Get to Know Milorad!
Let’s Get to Know Gemma!
Marta’s Mashed Potatoes
Brutus’s Cocky Promise
Home movie—Rh.rn. (Right Here. Right Now.)
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_148337550_
For the useful
The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.
—STEPHEN KING
The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
—KARL MARX
You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.
—PEMA CHÖDRÖN
PROLOGUE:
Lesson One
I do not lie to God.
God, in this sense, can be whatever you want it to be—but the one thing God cannot be is a liar or a believer of lies or a perpetuator of lies or an eater of lies or a baker of lies or a bartender of lies. God / the universe can shake up a cocktail and serve it to you, but if you need lies to survive, you must tell your own stories / add your own garnish.
God will watch you from behind the bar.
God will nod and smile as you eat the cherry.
God knows you are imperfect.
You do not.
God forgives you.
You do not.
This is why you lie to God.
And so, Lesson One is easy.
I am imperfect. I forgive myself. I do not lie to God.
I first learned this lesson when I was four years old. I have not strayed. I am humble in the light of the universe—I have earned my place.
My father lies to God. All the time.
Today he said, “God knows, we tried all we could before she went into the System.”
She is my mother.
We is him.
Tried means he didn’t like her the way she was.
The System is how Mother travels now, contained in a tidy capsule.
God knows.
My father should not be the keeper of God’s words. He is a liar and a thief.
God knows.
My father cannot think God’s thoughts. He is a traitor and a brute.
God knows.
God shouldn’t even be allowed in his mouth—my father is a killer.
He made my mother into a fast-moving message. Fed her into a tube.
The message reads, “I am an example of what happens when a coward lies to God.”
My father.
God knows.
Our teacher. Our captor. Our hero.
His Lesson One is: The World and Its Seven Continents: Overview.
My Lesson One is: DO NOT LIE TO GOD.
ACT ONE:
Home Movies / The Americas
Cast in order of appearance:
Jane
Henry
Hungry Birds
Vernon
Mother/Mina
Marta’s Whipped Potatoes
Great-Aunt Lily
Milorad
Gemma
Marta
Brutus the Rat
Finch
Jed
Jefferey
Robert
Todd
Andrew
HOME MOVIES
Today is Sunday, September 22, 2024
Allow me to back up. You will know where we’re going. But you must also know how we got here—to where I know the truth about everything.
Now I know, but last week I didn’t know.
This is how most things occur, yes?
One day we are sure of something and the next day we are not.
Let me show you a home movie from six years ago.
Home Movie—04.12.2018
My brother, Henry, is six years old and is feeding the birds in the back garden. He is surrounded by rosebushes and hunger. He tosses seed out in fear. The birds are tripling in number and the tears on his cheeks are real. Vernon sits on a bench, grinning a bit. He wears suit pants and a pocket watch, a starched white button-down, and he calls me over to him. I am ten.
“Will we watch your brother be attacked to death together?” he asks.
“Why would you say that?” The look on my face is serious. Henry is openly crying now—though he knows better than to call out for help.
“Lighten up, Jane,” Vernon says.
“I have to help him,” I say.
“You know the rules.”
I did know the rules. This was specifically Rule Number Two. Do not interfere with others in a way to aid them in times of fear or sadness. They must learn their own escape.
“I will have a guest tonight,” Vernon says, “a private dinner. I’ve a governess on order to come and eat with you and Henry. She’ll show you a film on the television.”
“I see.”
Henry is now running—not toward us but away. He aims for the fountain at the center of the garden—a near-flat dish dropping water into a larger one, and then another, until it lands in a square pond. The birds follow on foot and by wing until Henry drops the entire bag of seed on the path.
“What film?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he answers.
“Will Mother be joining us?”
I knew this was not a question I was allowed to ask, but Mother was on a big tour and I missed her; plus, Henry was out of earshot and I was feeling brave.
Vernon bristles and cracks his neck.
He answers, “You are so terribly hard to love, Jane.” Then he gets up and slowly walks inside, through the large French doors that lead to the study and closes them behind him.
Henry hears the doors and runs toward me from the fountain.
“Father!” he yells.
I walk toward him and pick him up when we meet. I spin him around by his hands and crying snot flies out of his nose and lands on my arm and I don’t mind because the spinning makes him giggle and squeal with happiness. He is six, after all. Not old enough to understand anything like private dinners or how to learn his own escape.
We have tens of thousands of home movies. Not because Vernon followed us around recording our family antics, but because there are security cameras in certain areas of our large Victorian home: the patio and rose garden, the dining room, the sitting room where the television is, the study where Henry and I take our lessons, and the foyer. We don’t have home movies from any other areas, so this is where I believe the cameras to be.
Before I found the home movies, I wasn’t sure about anything.
After I found the home movies, I am both sure and unsure of a great many new things.
If nothing else, I am at least a step further into the truth of my life, which you’d think I’d know having lived it, but that’s not how things go when one is so terribly hard to love.
Here’s one from nine years before I was born. It is the origin story of me, Jane. It is the origin story of this whole charade—what’s about to unfold. Whatever this is, it starts here.
Home Movie—06.03.1999
Mother and Vernon are madly in love in 1999. She sits on a bench in the rose garden; he kneels next to her, holding her hand in his.
“I do not know another beauty such as yours. Not one bloom in this garden can match it,” Vernon says.
“You flatter me,” she answers.
“I am a man of deep emotion. Do not doubt,” he says.
“Do tell me what you did this week while I was away.”
“I was so excited to tell you yesterday.” Vernon pouts. “But you didn’t seem interested.”
“Oh, love. I’d just come home from Philadelphia. I needed a rest. Marta made me a fattening meal. Have some mercy.”
“Marta’s whipped potatoes,” he says.
“With butter enough for children!” she declares.
Vernon smiles and stands up. He brushes the gravel from the knee of his trousers and sits on the bench next to Mother, who has turned toward him to show attention.
Vernon says, “You know, when we marry, Marta can whip potatoes for all of us—you, me, and the children.”
Mother’s smile envelops her face, then fades.
“I know we’ve only been dating for five months but I can feel it,” Vernon says. “Can’t you?”
“I feel it,” she says. She taps her foot.
He giggles. “Now I crave Marta’s potatoes.”
“I can ask her to make you some if you like,” she says. “Stay and eat with us. Aunt Lily is always happy to see you!”
Vernon chews the inside of his cheek, as he does when thinking or annoyed. “I fear Lily only humors me. She laughs too loudly at my jokes, and I do not know what I did to offend her.”
