I’m originally from Toronto, and they were building an extension to the Toronto subway. A new station would be close to our house. There was plenty of construction involved in the new station, and it was fun to watch from wherever we could.
But work occurred during the business day, with weekends off. And the construction walls and fencing around the site were not the most secure. And it was in a neighbourhood of kids aged from 9 to 12.
You can guess what happened. We explored in the site. We snuck in through a break in the fence, and headed underground. Nobody saw us, but we saw plenty down there. There were always lights on. Rumour had it that a kid had taken his bike down, and ridden through the tunnel to the next station under construction, but there was nothing to confirm that. Still, the break in the fence was large enough to get a bike in, so who knows?
And all the time, our parents thought we were playing ball in the park. I never told them about exploring the subway when it was under construction. Looking back, it was incredibly dangerous—we had no hard hats, no safety glasses, no steel-toed boots—but we got away with it, and nobody was the wiser.
My mom was a teacher in my high school. It was a closed campus school, so student parking lots were watched carefully to assure no one went off campus to eat lunch.
I occasionally took my Mom’s car from the teacher’s lot and went out to lunch with friends. That lot wasn’t guarded, so we were always able to pull it off. Years later I asked her about it, and she had no idea we’d been doing it.
One day it occurred to me that the business end of a tweezers looked just like the prongs of an electrical plug. So I stuck a tweezers into a wall socket. For some reason, it didn’t shock me, but the tweezers did rapidly become red-hot. I was frightened enough that I might have left it in without telling anybody and burned our house down, but fortunately I fetched an oven mitt and pulled it back out. I never told anyone, which is a good thing, because I’d have been in a world of trouble if I had.
A woman that I worked with years ago told me that when she was little, and her mom would do something that really made her mad, she would sneak into her mom’s closet and bite tiny holes in her clothing. I thought this was seriously clever for a little kid, and kind of the perfect revenge.
My gf noticed little holes in the top/back of a t-shirt I was wearing yesterday. She asked if moths could be responsible. I told her many of my shirts are like that, but moths are not to blame.
She guessed for a bit but couldn’t figure out the reason. She finally gave up and I told her.
I take Rocco to work with me every day. If he gets bored or wants a treat, he’ll fly over to the back of my chair and take little bites out of my shirt, just like @ThelmaLou’s friend did to her mom’s clothes.
One summer my buddy Jimmy and I sprayed 4-letter words in bold 5 foot tall letters across the west wall of our elementary school. A neighbor spotted us and called my stepdad. He never liked me much, and gleefully told Mom. Mom and stepdad called me in for interrogation.
I admitted our guilt, but we’d used spray bottles full of water. It looked dark gray on the tan school bricks. The Arizona sun evaporated our graffiti within minutes.
Mom laughed, stepdad did not.
When I was in 8th grade, there was this dude named Rob. Rob’s house was cool because his parents did not drink, but had had a big party and were left with a cabinet full of liquor that they didn’t monitor. So one day a group of five or six of us deviants skipped school, and went over to Rob’s house and got wasted. Being 13-year-old kids, we were dumb and noisy, and eventually one of the neighbors called the police.
When the cops knocked on the door, three of us had recovered enough to make a run for it. We ran out into the backyard and hopped the fence into a neighbor’s yard, then made our way out to the next street. The first thing we saw was another cop car coming towards us. So we hopped another fence into someone’s yard, and another, and made our way back towards the school, Ferris-Bueller-style.1
We didn’t have long to wait until the end of the school day, so we hunkered down in some random backyard behind the school, and waited for the final bell to ring. Once it did, we hopped the fence to the school, blended in with the crowd, and went home as if nothing had happened.
The members of our band that weren’t able to make an escape got in huge trouble, but never ratted out the rest of us.
1. This was a couple of years before Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out. We did it first!
One of my brothers swiped some of Mom’s cigarettes, and took them out to the woods to try to blow smoke rings (Dad smoked a pipe, and would sometimes do that to amuse us). He didn’t succeed. He was maybe 10 at the time.
Somehow the parents found out about it and ragged him quite badly. Funnily enough, that brother is the only one of the 4 of us who ever started smoking (quite a bit later of course).
Me: not much, really. My FATHER got away with something, when I was a kid: When I was about 4, Dad had taken us kids to Mass while Mom stayed home (she went to a different one that day). At one point, I noticed that one of my brothers was not with us. I asked Dad where bro had gone. “He’s at Communion”.
I had no clue what Communion was, so I decided to go look for him… at the car… which was parked a block away, across a busy street.
I made it to the car, no brother. Went back to the church, and got thumped by a car crossing back to the church. My next memory was of sitting on the steps, with my father and some other people gathered around.
I clearly was not hurt, and apparently Dad never told Mom.
When I was 18 or 19, I was chatting with Mom about something and said “… that time I got hit by a car”. Her eyes bugged out and she demanded an explanation. Then she called Dad upstairs and chewed him out!
I did that, but got caught, so did not share it here, but since you asked (ok, well, you didn’t)…
My mom took us shopping all the time, and when I was about 6 or 7, I fell for one of the oldest grocery store strategies - candy at the checkout aisle. I really wanted those Tic-Tacs, but mom said no, several times. But, I REALLY wanted them. So, when she was dealing with the grocery purchase, I snuck them into my pocket and took them home. A while later, mom comes into my room for something and sees me bouncing on my bed and enjoying those Tic-Tacs that she did not purchase. My punishment: she took me back to the store with my prize and asked to speak to the manager (no, her name is not Karen), and made me give them back to the man. Mortifying. So, never have I stole again.
Another one of mine where I got caught. My buddy in middle school and I would hang-out after school. Mom was at work and dad was in another city, and that wet bar was enticing. Probably a lot of peer pressure from both of us led to sampling just about every bottle. Man, we got sick, and my friend puked (outside). Well, later that evening his angry mother called my mother to discuss what we were doing. The smell of liquor on both our breath gave us away, I guess. To this day I cannot stand the taste of brandy.
Tic-Tacs? You a master criminal, for sure. Let’s see: a record album, comic books, a baseball bat that I stuffed down a pantleg, a bottle of liquor, and probably other stuff that I can’t remember. I didn’t take candy, because that was the one thing they always watched carefully anytime a kid was near it. Y’know, I guess I was a juvie. Oh, and I also forged my mother’s signature on my report card when I got a failing grade in junior high.
I did a bunch of graffiti.
Never got caught by Daddy or
PTB or police.
My art teacher recognized a clever design I had. Sort of my signature I foolishly used in class and on a couple of brick walls(they were abandoned for those who worry about business owners having to clean it off, I particularly chose these places so my artwork would not be painted over so quickly).
Mr. Ashley busted me out about it, said some were good and how illegal is was and if stayed on this road it would lead to bad things. Stop it or he’d call my Daddy.
Anyway you grow older, fences are harder to climb, train tracks are dangerous, you have other interests. You move away to college
Never got really caught. I grew up to be a mural artist. My walls are still in the town I went to school in.
Alas, my graffiti is all gone, tumbled brick walls, the trains moved on.
I decided to make homemade mouse poison. Probably inspired by Loony Tunes or Tom and Jerry cartoons where the characters mixed up some poison, I made a homemade brew of (I think) mercurochrome, rubbing alcohol, and hair spray. I dunked pieces of cheese and bread into it and put them under our laundry sink. My mom couldn’t figure out where those chunks of crud came from and swept them up and threw them away. I never admitted that I put them there, and I’m thankful that she got to them before our dog found them.
Friend and I were exploring a construction site near his house and decided that shooting things with a BB gun would be fun. We probably did a lot of damage, and AFAIK, nobody said anything to anyone about it until this moment 40 years later.
… 
Let’s see: a record album, comic books, a baseball bat that I stuffed down a pantleg, a bottle of liquor, and probably other stuff that I can’t remember. I didn’t take candy, because that was the one thing they always watched carefully anytime a kid was near it. Y’know, I guess I was a juvie. Oh, and I also forged my mother’s signature on my report card when I got a failing grade in junior high.