couches and beside the fireplace.
And there was an alarm system, but Missy knew the code to turn it off.
At least she did once.
Or at least she did when she wasn’t high as a kite on Percocet and beer.
You can probably see where this is going.
There were five of us squeezed into Missy’s convertible: Missy and Andrea and Trevor and PJ and me. Ridiculous, I know. I honestly don’t know why Andrea and I were there. I don’t know why PJ was there. It really just should have been Missy and Trevor—or even just Missy, if she was willing to take a few trips.
Even though Missy hadn’t really lived there for two months, the plan was to steal some of her shit, too, so that she could throw a hissy fit and insist that she had had nothing to do with the robbery. We were going to steal a lot of silver and her aunt’s jewelry that we could pawn at a few places in Montreal, and whatever electronics we could fit in the Miata—which, given our brain-dead decision to cram five of us into a car meant for four people, two of whom were clearly supposed to be dwarfs, wasn’t very much.
We went there on a Friday night in October when her aunt and uncle would be at some gala in Burlington for the hospital, where her uncle was a heart surgeon. Her cousins were both away at college, so the house would be empty. We would just drive in, open the front door with Missy’s key, turn off the alarm, and start piling shit into the car. We didn’t even bother to park with the front of the car facing away from the house—you know, in the “getaway” position. We figured the worst that would happen would be Missy’s aunt and uncle not believing her when she said she had nothing to do with the robbery, but we figured they weren’t the type to tell the police they thought their niece was involved.
The alarm system was idiotproof, but we were less than idiots. It was the kind of system that has little boxes on the windows and doors to tell you if one has been opened, and a couple of motion detectors on the ceilings on the first and second floors. When you unlock the door when the system is on, you simply go to a keypad and punch in some numbers, and it turns itself off. You have, like, a minute to punch in the numbers.
The night of the robbery, that minute seemed both like a second and an hour. The keypad was in the front hallway, right beside the switch for the porch and the hall lights, and the minute we open the door and kind of tumble inside, we hear this robotic female voice telling us to deactivate the alarm. At first we’re all laughing because we really are pretty stoned. The voice is straight out of a bad sci-fi drama on Spike. But then it dawns on us that Missy is trying to press the buttons with her gloves on, and she keeps hitting two buttons at once. (Incidentally, we were all wearing gloves. We’d all watched enough TV dramas with cops to know that we didn’t want to have sex on the beds, use the toilets, or leave fingerprints anywhere. We didn’t want to drop a bottle of pills or a cigarette pack anywhere. In hindsight, Missy didn’t need to wear gloves because her fingerprints were supposed to be all over the house because she’d lived there for a while. But, again, nothing about this robbery was very well thought out.) And so she keeps screwing up the code to disarm the system. Then, maybe because she is wearing gloves so her muscle memory is off, she realizes she has forgotten the code. I’m not making that up. She can’t remember the numbers or the order or even the word the numbers would spell if she were to use the letters beside the numbers on the keypad.
And that’s when the madness really began.
In most ways, I didn’t look or act like a rebellious teenager. Slacker? I guess. Underachiever? Could have been my middle name. But, for instance, I didn’t do a lot of insane shit with myhair. Actually, I didn’t do any, unless you count not washing it for days because you’re homeless or stoned. But a lot of
And there was an alarm system, but Missy knew the code to turn it off.
At least she did once.
Or at least she did when she wasn’t high as a kite on Percocet and beer.
You can probably see where this is going.
There were five of us squeezed into Missy’s convertible: Missy and Andrea and Trevor and PJ and me. Ridiculous, I know. I honestly don’t know why Andrea and I were there. I don’t know why PJ was there. It really just should have been Missy and Trevor—or even just Missy, if she was willing to take a few trips.
Even though Missy hadn’t really lived there for two months, the plan was to steal some of her shit, too, so that she could throw a hissy fit and insist that she had had nothing to do with the robbery. We were going to steal a lot of silver and her aunt’s jewelry that we could pawn at a few places in Montreal, and whatever electronics we could fit in the Miata—which, given our brain-dead decision to cram five of us into a car meant for four people, two of whom were clearly supposed to be dwarfs, wasn’t very much.
We went there on a Friday night in October when her aunt and uncle would be at some gala in Burlington for the hospital, where her uncle was a heart surgeon. Her cousins were both away at college, so the house would be empty. We would just drive in, open the front door with Missy’s key, turn off the alarm, and start piling shit into the car. We didn’t even bother to park with the front of the car facing away from the house—you know, in the “getaway” position. We figured the worst that would happen would be Missy’s aunt and uncle not believing her when she said she had nothing to do with the robbery, but we figured they weren’t the type to tell the police they thought their niece was involved.
The alarm system was idiotproof, but we were less than idiots. It was the kind of system that has little boxes on the windows and doors to tell you if one has been opened, and a couple of motion detectors on the ceilings on the first and second floors. When you unlock the door when the system is on, you simply go to a keypad and punch in some numbers, and it turns itself off. You have, like, a minute to punch in the numbers.
The night of the robbery, that minute seemed both like a second and an hour. The keypad was in the front hallway, right beside the switch for the porch and the hall lights, and the minute we open the door and kind of tumble inside, we hear this robotic female voice telling us to deactivate the alarm. At first we’re all laughing because we really are pretty stoned. The voice is straight out of a bad sci-fi drama on Spike. But then it dawns on us that Missy is trying to press the buttons with her gloves on, and she keeps hitting two buttons at once. (Incidentally, we were all wearing gloves. We’d all watched enough TV dramas with cops to know that we didn’t want to have sex on the beds, use the toilets, or leave fingerprints anywhere. We didn’t want to drop a bottle of pills or a cigarette pack anywhere. In hindsight, Missy didn’t need to wear gloves because her fingerprints were supposed to be all over the house because she’d lived there for a while. But, again, nothing about this robbery was very well thought out.) And so she keeps screwing up the code to disarm the system. Then, maybe because she is wearing gloves so her muscle memory is off, she realizes she has forgotten the code. I’m not making that up. She can’t remember the numbers or the order or even the word the numbers would spell if she were to use the letters beside the numbers on the keypad.
And that’s when the madness really began.
In most ways, I didn’t look or act like a rebellious teenager. Slacker? I guess. Underachiever? Could have been my middle name. But, for instance, I didn’t do a lot of insane shit with myhair. Actually, I didn’t do any, unless you count not washing it for days because you’re homeless or stoned. But a lot of
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