The first house we ever toilet-papered belonged to somebody we didn’t know at all. My friends and I had chosen the house for being a safe-but-not-too-far distance from my house, very distant from the Hidden Valley security guard shacks, somewhat secluded from other houses, but close to a variety of trees and shrubs and fences—places we could hide if we needed to.
We did a terrible job that first time—a few throws over a tree and the rest wadded up and tossed around the lawn before we ran away giggling—but the experience filled me with adrenaline.
My house had become a popular house for sleepovers, because my mom would let us “sneak” out as much as we wanted. With my core group of friends—Catlin, Anabelle, Lauren, and Lauren—I would walk around the empty golf courses that were off-limits during the day. We would lie on the impossibly fine-cut grass and talk about secret stuff, because that time of night in an off-limits place was made for secrets.
It was my mom who had first mentioned toilet-papering.
“You guys have never toilet-papered a house?” she had said. “Ever? How weird.”
That first night, my friends and I left through the sliding glass door in my bedroom, my mom whispering behind us, “Don’t get caught! I’ll leave a light on for you guys.”
After that, I became obsessed with toilet-papering houses. Strangers’ houses, houses of people I vaguely knew, houses I wished I lived in, houses I used to live in that were now occupied by other tenants, the house of the teacher I had never had class with but who I heard was mean, the house of the people who’d refused to buy Save the Rainforest T-shirts from me the year before when I was trying to win a Cat in the Hat hat by outselling my classmates.
Read it here.