I was stoned when my parents came home today. I don't live with them anymore, so I've developed a few bad habits when it comes to being discreet about smoking. After frantically hiding my piece and stash, I tried to assume a relaxed position on the couch, my laptop in front of me. After an uneventful greeting and a brief discussion of their work-day, my parents sat down at the dinner table and had a quiet meal. I stayed on the couch and read a few nodes.
Once they had finished their meals, my parents joined me in the living room. I hardly noticed their migration; I was lost in the stories of Eduardo Macpherson, a character created (I'm assuming) by sam512. Intrigued by my silence (I'm usually quite a loud person), my parents asked me what I was doing on the computer.
"Reading," I said, unassumingly.
"Reading what?" They pondered.
"Nothing in particular," I replied, honestly.
I then contemplated introducing my parents to Everything2. I concluded that this was probably a bad idea. If they knew I had an account on this site, they would read some of the stuff I've written. I would rather they not do this. But what if they already had? What if they had accounts of their own? My dad does spend an awful lot of time in front of the computer....
I started to panic. Anxiously, I looked through the list of Other Users. What would my father call himself on this site? Which persona would he assume? Would he be the deviantly witty coder known only as Swap? Perhaps he was gentle BookReader in disguise. Maybe Dimview? raincomplex? E2D2?!?!
Maybe he was ALL of them, maybe the entire site was just an elaborate scheme to make me reveal my deepest and darkest secrets so my parents could sneakily control every aspect of my life! This is it, I thought. The game is up. The hidden cameras are about to come out. I'm about to be disowned by my parents for being a drug addict. Fuck my life, fuck my life, FUCK MY LIFE!
"What's wrong?" My mother is sitting across the room, reading the May edition of JAMA. She seems to have noticed my anxiety.
"It's nothing, I'm just a bit st-...sleepy." I rub my eyes and walk out of the room. I looked back at the living room before turning the corner into the foyer, and for a split second, I could've sworn my parents looked at each other knowingly and smiled.