The Camera We Almost Did Not Plug In

I lived with three roommates in a crooked little rental house during my last year of school. The kitchen floor slanted so badly that if you dropped a grape, it rolled under the stove. We had one bathroom, four different work schedules, and a handwritten note on the fridge that said, “If you finish the milk, say it with your chest.”

The hidden camera started as a joke, mostly.

Food kept disappearing at night. Not normal roommate stealing, either. Whole bowls of leftover pasta, half a jar of peanut butter, a bag of shredded cheese. Everyone denied it with convincing outrage. Finally, after a week of arguments, we bought a tiny black camera from the discount shelf at a local electronics shop and hid it between two cookbooks.

The mystery thief turned out to be one of my roommates sleepwalking in an old sweatshirt, eating directly from containers with a fork, then going back to bed. We laughed until we cried, showed her the footage, deleted it, and promised never to bring it up in front of anyone else.

After that, the camera got moved to the front window because someone had been opening car doors on our street. It sat behind a basil plant, pointed at our driveway.

Two weeks later, we packed for a road trip. Nothing fancy. Just the four of us, an old hatchback, a cooler full of oranges and sandwiches, paper maps because our signal was unreliable in the mountains, and a plan to see the ocean before real life swallowed us.

We loaded the car the night before. Blankets, backpacks, a dented camping kettle, too many snacks. We were supposed to leave at 5:30 in the morning.

Around 2:00, I woke up with the worst feeling in my stomach. Not fear exactly. More like the feeling you get when you realize you left a burner on. I lay there trying to talk myself out of it. The house was quiet except for the refrigerator clicking on and somebody snoring through the wall.

Then my phone buzzed once.

It was the camera motion alert.

I almost ignored it. The camera sent alerts for moths, headlights, rain, anything. But that bad feeling got sharper, so I opened the feed.

At first, I saw our driveway in grainy black and white. The basil leaves were blurred in the corner. Then I saw someone crouched beside the front wheel of the car.

I sat up so fast I knocked my water cup over.

By the time I woke everyone, the person was gone. We went outside together in socks and hoodies, all of us trying to act braver than we felt. There was no broken window, nothing missing from the car, no wallet on the seat because we had cleaned everything out.

Then one roommate said, “What’s that puddle?”

There was a dark wet spot under the front of the car. Not huge. Just enough to make the pavement shine under the porch light.

We did not leave at 5:30.

A mechanic looked at it later that morning and told us one of the brake hoses had been cut or sliced badly enough that it could have failed once the brakes heated up. He kept saying, “You’re lucky you saw it before you got on the highway.” He said it three times.

We filed a report, but nothing came of it. The camera had caught a shape, not a face. A hood, gloves, bent shoulders, gone in less than a minute.

The repair took most of the day. We debated canceling the trip, but we were young and stubborn and had already bought groceries. By late afternoon, we were back on the road, quiet in a way we hadn’t been the night before.