I have never taken a thing from a shop in my life. Not ever. I mean, I’ve heard that some people in some places might consider the swift swiping of a lipstick from Boots or a nail polish from Target to be some sort of teenage rite of passage, but no, I never did that. I’d have been horrified at the thought.

It’s not that I’m a stickler for honesty in all things; I’m sure I’ve been guilty of a little deception now and then. On the other hand, here I am telling you about my life in lurid detail, so yes, maybe it’s all part of the same thing. Anyway, you can imagine how shocked I was to discover that my rule-following son had inadvertently stolen something from Target last week.

To explain; we’d perused the one-dollar section and found one thing per child, gone through the store and traversed the checkouts in a law-abiding manner, and then gone to the bathroom. Dash waited outside while Mabel and I went into the ladies, holding our bag of purchases and looking again at the one-dollar stuff, because it’s all right there just outside the restrooms.

When we got home, I emptied out our bag to find one extra item: an orange squishy thing with googly eyes, which I most definitely had not purchased for its retail price of one dollar.

“Oops,” quoth Dash, looking abashed. “I put it in there for a minute, but I must have forgotten to take it out again.”

For the past week it has been sitting by the door, ready to be taken back to its shelf in the store; except then I had to hide it in the kitchen because people kept trying to play with it and I was afraid they’d pop it and I really didn’t want to have to go to the customer service desk and try to explain why I wanted to pay them a dollar for this orange piece of deflated flubber.

So by the time we were heading to Target again I couldn’t find it. I was a little worried at the prospect of having stolen something, but I went to the supermarket instead and paid for the two bagels the kids had eaten on our way around last time and I’d accidentally forgotten to account for, and that made me feel a bit better.

This morning, I found the orange squishy thing, shoved down behind the big blue bowl in the corner of the counter, and we swung by Target again on our mission to get “rewards” for this first week of our latest “incentive program.” I furtively slipped it out of my bag and back on to the shelf with all the other cheap and nasty things, feeling guilty and avoiding the line of sight of the security guard.

If un-shoplifting makes me this nervous, it’s probably no surprise I’ve never tried the other sort. Now I just hope the NSA isn’t reading this.