The Neighbor Who Stole My Electricity
I did not confront her that night. I want to be honest about the whole thing, because a lot of people on my street later heard a version where I came out swinging, and that is not what happened, and the difference is the whole point of this story. What I did was go to work, run my forklift for ten hours, and think. And on my way home the next morning, tired to the bone, I stopped at the big-box store out by the highway and I bought two things. A little battery security camera, the kind you stick up with a screw and it talks to your phone, and a smart plug, the kind that goes into an outlet and measures exactly how much electricity runs through it and keeps a log with the date and the time and the cost.
I put the smart plug into that garage outlet and screwed the weatherproof cover back over it so you could not tell anything was different. And I put the little camera up under the eave of the garage, pointed down at the outlet and the strip of driveway beside it, tucked back where you would not notice it unless you were looking. Then I went inside and slept.
I want to tell you I felt clever. I did not. I felt sick. Because here is the thing about being the quiet guy who works nights: I had spent eleven years being careful not to be the weird man at the end of the court, and now I was climbing a ladder at seven in the morning to hide a camera on my own garage, and some part of me already knew how that would look if anybody saw it before they understood why.
I went to work that night like always. And in the morning, when I got home and lay down and opened the app on my phone, there it was.
Two forty-seven in the morning. The pearl white SUV, backed up close to my garage in the dark. A long orange extension cord run from the charge port on the SUV, across the ten feet of grass, to the weatherproof cover on my garage. And Vanessa, in a robe and slippers, opening my cover, plugging in the cord, and walking back to her house without once looking over her shoulder, because why would she. The house next door belonged to the quiet man who worked nights. He was never home to see.
The smart plug had logged it too. It was cleaner than the video, in a way. A neat little row of numbers on my phone. Started 2:47 a.m. Ran seven hours and forty minutes. Pulled forty-one kilowatt hours. That one night, off my meter, cost me a little over six dollars. Every single night.