The Business
By fourth grade, I was making a nice sum by selling cheat sheets at school. I wrote the material on tiny pieces of paper in neat letters – so I also learned the material in the process – and sold them to my classmates, who then could cheat at their own risk. I was very proud of my business, but when the homeroom teacher retired two years later, I confessed to her. She smiled and said she knew all along but didn’t want to crush my "entrepreneurial spirit."
Bedtime
When I was 12 and my siblings were 8 and 10, we convinced our parents that we no longer needed a babysitter when they went out in the evening. They agreed on the condition that we would be in bed by 10 PM. On Friday nights, they left and we naturally stayed up until midnight or later, only quickly tidying up and jumping into bed when we heard the gate open and the car pull in. I was 35 when I found out they knew we were up all along; that’s why they lingered in the garage for a while—to give us time to hide the evidence and get into bed.
The Battery
As a child, I had to go to bed outrageously early, so I secretly read in my room with a flashlight while my parents watched TV. Whenever I heard them leave my door, I always turned it off and never got caught. Later, as an adult, my mother told me they did this on purpose so I would read instead of watching TV. That’s when I realized why they always enthusiastically bought batteries for me.
The Crawlers
As a child, despite my parents’ ban, I loved smuggling frogs and snails home. I carefully set up their habitat in large jam jars, but unfortunately, they always escaped by the next evening. It turned out my father was releasing them back into nature.
The Wafer
At my grandmother’s, there was always a box of delicious wafers on the top shelf of the cupboard, reserved for guests. When my cousins and I stayed over, we regularly stole the box and secretly nibbled its contents at night. Eventually, we decided it wasn’t right to steal it anymore, but the next day grandma was disappointed. It turned out that the wafers were always there so we could sneak some.
The Mouse
I kept a mouse "secretly" in my room for years, but it turned out my mother not only knew about it but even fed it.
The Accident
My cousin stayed over and I blamed the bedwetting on him, but my mother always knew it was me.
The Genius
I thought it was a brilliant and groundbreaking idea to glue the covers of my old atlases onto porn magazines, but it turned out my uncle knew about everything and secretly "flipped through my atlases" too.
Skipping
My parents were divorcing when I started skipping school, and in the end, I skipped more math classes than I attended. It hurt that they were divorcing, but I was glad they weren’t paying attention to my little tricks because of it. Twenty years later, I confessed to them, and they said they knew I was skipping school, but as long as I passed every subject with at least a C, they didn’t care.
Coins
My father always put loose change in the car’s ashtray (the old Ladas had a big ashtray), and I regularly stole from it. I confessed to him at twenty, but it turned out he always knew and didn’t mind that I eased my way with a little ice cream money.
