When I was in high school, my friends and I had a peculiar pastime. Like any teenage delinquent, we liked to cause trouble. We weren’t vandals, we didn’t deal drugs, and we certainly didn’t bully kids in school. No, we liked to scare the living shit out of new parents by “hacking” their baby monitors. We were insufferable little punks who thought we were too good to get caught, and that our little acts of mischief would go unpunished. One night; however, I learned my lesson, and realized that I wasn’t quite as bulletproof as my tremendous adolescent ego made me out to be. Dimitri, Kurt, and I went to the same school, shared many of the same classes, and…

Now, when I think back to the excuses my parents used to make, I feel like an idiot. I remember being twelve years old, standing at the top of the staircase and watching all of the people filing into our basement. Some men wore white masks, some women wore bonnets. But they all had small suitcases, as though there was a bus stop beneath our house. And every one of them looked pale, frightened. My mother would catch me watching from above and send me off to bed. But not before I could ask what was happening. “We’re just going to talk about grown up things, baby.” Her voice was sweet and high pitched. She always sounded happy, regardless of…

I couldn’t take the calls any more. I just couldn’t take knowing. There was nothing I could do to stop them from coming through; I had to put an end to it. It all started this summer, when I was playing with my oldest daughter, Chrissie. My kid absolutely loved toy cars, so I had given her my Matchbox collection, which I’d kept in the attic since my childhood. She was driving some farm animal around on the hood of my most prized possession: a classic fire truck with all its original parts and an unblemished paint job, when she suddenly stopped our caravan halfway to Mount Marshmallow Snowflakes, also known as the white leather sofa in the corner. “Daddy,”…