My best friend and I read Harriet the Spy obsessively. We took to spying on our friends. Then, she took to spying on me.

My house was very very long, an old English Tudor style with a fragile slate roof.  One afternoon I glanced out my bedroom window. She was crouching out there on the slanted slate roof, which she could only have accessed by climbing up onto a porch, then onto a garage roof, then onto the main roof, and crawling about 80 feet.

Our house had a panel in the wall, really a secret panel, that opened onto a shaft about 30 inches square.  It went from the basement to the first floor. Looked like it might have been a dumbwaiter.

One day my mother was walking by and heard a noise. She opened up the door and there was Scuz, holding on to the wall, with a notebook.

“SHHH. Don’t tell her I’m in here.”

My mother shrugged and shut the panel. She didn’t even tell me about it for about ten years.