Uhhh,...is this confidential? I'll warn you now, this may be tl;dr for you.
In 7th grade, me and 3 girls I was friends with broke into a house. The house was an old farm house that we walked through their property on a daily basis to and from school. We never saw any activity there but the house was full of stuff. So one day we took it upon ourselves to go in. I did it just like in the movies, I grabbed a stick, busted out the window pane, reached through and unlocked the door. We weren't planning on stealing anything or vandalizing anything. But there's always that one person that ruins it for everyone else. She stole a bunch of stuff. We got spooked and ran out of the house at one point down into the woods. I was clever enough to convince the girls that the police might have our descriptions so we probably should switch clothes. They bought it and all took off their clothes to swap. That was awesome. But we did finally get caught. Turns out the people that lived there had been moved to a nursing home and their children lived just down the road and watched out over the property. Police caught up with us, cuffed us and took us all home. I had to do community service for that.
Just a couple months later, on the same farm as the house we broke into, we were shooting off fireworks in the field. Here's a lesson I learned, don't play with fire in a field of dry tall grass. What started as a small, manageable fire, grew into a behemoth blaze that burned roughly an acre. One of my friends started crying and we told him to run and tell somebody to call the fire department. He did. The fire department got there and we told them we saw some older kids running off when we discovered the fire. The fireman asked for our help. We took evergreen branches and beat it out while the fireman did the rest. They gave us some junior firefighter stickers and thanked us for helping save the day. So, no consequences here. In fact, I was a hero.
A year later a buddy and I were playing around down at the concrete business right next to the train tracks. We climbed up on a single train car that was just standing still on the tracks. My buddy figured out how to let the brake off. The train car started rolling and we thought it was hilarious yelling "ALL ABOARD!" as it was slowly moving down the track. It began to pick up speed and we got freaked out and bailed off. We watched as it went another 50-100 yards, hit the track switch, and derailed. It barrel rolled down a big hill making the loudest, most horrific noise you've ever heard. We started running through the woods and popped out at our middle school. When we came out of the woods, the entire football team was standing there looking at us. Needless to say, the police showed up at my house the next day. More community service.
Less than a year after that, me and a girlfriend of mine (one of the girls that was with me when we broke into the house), stole the van of a friend's parents. It was a big 15 passenger van. We knew that our friend and her family were out of town. So we went to their house and took their van out for a joy ride. We had called some other friends and told them to meet us at the shopping center. We went and picked up 5 more people. So we're driving around aimlessly for a couple hours when I felt the need to steal one of those blinking construction signs. They're much bigger up close. Anyway, our joy ride was over and we were taking the van back when my girlfriend backed into a telephone pole. When she did that, it caused her to put the van in drive and then we ran into someone's garage. Again, freaked out, we just abandoned the van and took off running. We all met back up at the church down the road where we used to go smoke cigarettes all the time and we made a pact to never breathe a word of what happened. The next day I walk into to school and someone come right up to me and says, "hey, I heard you stole a van yesterday." Welp. Community service again.
Fast-forward about 2 years and we were all partying out at my friend's house. He had a pool and me and two of my guy friends were skinny dipping with 3 really hot girls. I mean, this was about as good as it gets. We even jumped on the trampoline naked as jaybirds. Drinking, smoking, just having a blast. Well, we go back towards town because the night was winding down and I was hungry. I went into a convenience store and was going to buy something to eat. But I reached for my wallet and remembered that I had left it by the pool at my friend's house. But I was hungry. The store wouldn't miss this 79 cent Slim Jim. So I walked over to where the drinks were and very smoothly and calmly slipped the slim jim into my pants. Little did I know that there was a guy stocking the drinks on the other side and he saw exactly what I did through the glass door. He called the police. I was busted for shoplifting and drinking underage. They put me in cuffs and took me out of the store to the car. This convenience store parking lot was a meeting spot for many of us and there were probably 25 or so of my friends outside that got the biggest kick out of me being arrested. What happened? You guessed it...more community service.
Then about 10 months later (I know it was less than a year because I violated my probation), I was busted in a parking lot with about 48 beers...at the age of 17. The dick cop piled it on too as he gave me possession of tobacco too because I had a can of dip in my pocket. I tried to lie and sell out my girlfriend's brother by saying that she was driving his car and he must have left it in there. But to no avail. Got my license taken for 6 months, more probation, more community service hours.
There were a couple more smaller transgressions sprinkled in throughout the years. But all before the age of 18. Once I hit 18 years old and started anew, my record is pristine. No marks at all so other than this thread and the memories of those involved, none of this ever happened.
I'm fortunate that I grew up in a time when much of this was just "boys will be boys".
