Day Seventy - Severina

And how creative did I get? Well, quite so, I suppose, insofar as I developed a method of stealing where I got away with it scot-free amlost all of the time. But not always : I was caught stealing twice, and almost got caught at least a couple of other times. So, instead of me stealing from home, I started to shoplift. And sometimes.. yeah, sometimes the rush of it was just far too great for me to stop. 

The first time I got caught stealing was very early on my shoplifting career. This big supermarket in the city carried a lot of Transformers toys, and one time I went there for whatever reason and found out just how easy it was to open a box and slip one into my pocket. So, I might have done that maybe three or four times, and naturally I got so cocky that I legit thought I'd never get caught... and naturally, that damned hubris would prove to be my undoing. One afternoon I was doing my usual song and dance around the toy aisle, trying to decide just which one would be luckyenough to go home with me that day. I grabbed the box - and which one it housed I can no longer recall - slowly and carefully opened it, took out the toy in a way that I thought would make a professional burglar proud, and dropped it inside my pocket. I put the box back on the shelf, and by jove - it all but looked untouched and untampered. I turned around to make my way out of the supermarket, I felt a hand grabbing me by the arm, a firm, strong hand that let me understand at once that I had been caught and was in fact going nowhere, and some security guy leaned down and told me I was going with him.

So he took me to this tiny room, adjacent to the main security room where all the monitors were, and they sat down and maybe showed me footage of me pocekting the toy, but they grilled me good. I was in a panic, to be sure, and in my mind I was sure that either one of two things would happen : I'd either get arrested, and sent to some horror-filled juvenile prison until I came of age, or they'd call home, and talk to my grandmother or to my mother,  who would probably bail me out, but then give me a deserved hiding when we got home. And the likeliest of any of those situations actually happening was the second option - as they asked me all sorts of questions, they asked me what my home phone number was, and me being afr too naive too come up with a fake one, gave them the real number. I believe I was weeping tears of true sorrow by then, and whether they never managed to get someone at my house to pick, or whether they actually never made the call and just pretended they did, but after a while they just let me go with a stern warning.

I learned my lesson, right? Did I bollocks, a few years later they caught me stealing again...