Once, two of my cousins and I spent a lazy, summer afternoon sprawled out on the big double bed in one of the spare rooms upstairs. As our parents shared grown-up conversation on the sun porch, we girls delighted ourselves with a tablet of Mad Libs, filling in every profane and shameful word we had ever heard uttered, had ever seen scrawled on the walls of public restrooms.

Then, one of us dared suggest that Grandma might find our dirty work. Faced with the possibility that our grandmother might find us out, might discover the filth her three sweet, blonde granddaughters had created, we found ourselves not ashamed, not frightened, but exhilarated. Suddenly we had just the excitement we had craved all afternoon: a mission, an undercover operation through which we would remove the secret documents from the house and destroy them without arousing adult suspicion.

Of course, all this would have been as simple as slipping the tablet into a pocket and walking straight past the sun porch and out the back door. But not nearly as fun. No, not nearly as fun. We three decided that each page must be disposed of separately, and we set to work tearing out the pages and crumpling them into tight little wads. The pile on the bed was now at least four times larger than the tablet had been.

Now what? Listening to the muted voices of our elders floating up from the first floor, we decided that to take the evidence downstairs was too risky. We would have to hide the wadded up Mad Libs somewhere on the second floor and remove them from the house later. In a singular motion, we three dove for the closet and threw open the doors.

And there, mounted on the back wall of the closet, was a strange little trapdoor. We did not hesitate to open it and take turns sticking our heads in the hole and calling out our names to listen to the echoes fall into the blackness below. What was this? Why was there a trapdoor at the back of the closet? We didn't know. We knew only that the chute went down. Giggling, my cousins and I tossed the incriminating paper wads into the hole in the wall.

It is always more fulfilling, when with a group of peers, to do daring things first and to consider the consequences later. Only after the last page had fallen into the mysterious void in the center of Grandma's house did we look at each other and ask, "Where does that thing go?"

We raced to the bottom of the stairs and stood panting at the doorway to the sun porch. The adults glanced up mildly from their cold drinks; we were a momentary interruption in their conversations, only.

Yes, girls?

Giggles. Um…did you guys know that there's a hole in the wall upstairs? More giggles. The thrill of almost giving ourselves away.

Oh...you mean the laundry chute?

The what? Snorts of laughter suppressed by tiny fists.

The laundry chute.

Where does it GO?

The basement. You put your dirty clothes in the chute, and they fall into the hamper in the basement, next to the washing machine...

Shrieks of glee. We fell over ourselves as we half pushed, half pulled each other towards the basement stairs to retrieve our crumpled pages.