Unjustly Put to Bed

You cannot go to bed when it looks like this outside, it is wrong and borderline criminal. 

My parents didn't put us to bed after we were about 8 years old. As long as we were quiet, they didn't seem to care. Sometimes, when it was arbitrarily late or early and then my mom would come out in her robe, squinting sleep out of her eyes and say, “What are you doing up? Go. To. Sleep.” and then shut off the computer or TV and try to hit me with something. 

One night in the summer, when it doesn't get dark until about 10, my parents went out over night and left us with a mean and stinky old lady. They misinformed her that we would be in bed by 8:00 p.m. Bless her poor addled mind, she took that as gospel. So at 8:00 on the nose she told us to get in bed and be quiet. We told her that was more of a guideline than a rule, and it was summer, and it was still light outside, and we never went to bed this early. She still made us get into our rooms. After the complaining, I decided just to walk out and go back to the computer, what was she going to do? If you guessed hit me in the head with a cane, you win. With my pride and head wounded I went back to my room and tried to lay down in bed but other kids were outside  playing and it was so light outside. 

Beyond defiance and sulking, my only weapon was insulting her. My sister and I opened the door to our bedrooms and yelled mean things at the crazy old lady and then slammed the door hard. She told us that would stop or she would stop us. That just made it more fun to yell about how her hair was yellow and she was stinky and mean. 

She did follow through on the 'she will stop it' threat with a little more cane time and then a trick I had never seen before. She took a short piece of rope and made a loop out of it and put it over our doorknob. Then she threaded a broom handle through the loop and spun it until the loop cinched tight and the broom handle was tight across the door making it impossible to open from our side. It seemed that besides being mean and odoriferous she was wise in the ways of mobile home incarceration. It was checkmate, she had won, we laid down our arms and the rest of our bodies in somnolent surrender. 

Cane whacks and imprisonment notwithstanding, my parents were somehow still mad at us for being mean to the babysitter. We were punished and the babysitter never came back, but my mom learned the broom handle door locking trick and used it herself in the future.