1080p

The cameras arrived after my first B+ in seventh grade Algebra, “To protect you from your own bad inclinations,” my father scowled down at me as he struggled to get the panoramic device in the wall. “To help you stay focused.” 

The cameras track my movements with mechanical precision – bedroom to bathroom, desk to doorway, every footstep monitored and archived. Each night, I count them like constellations: seventeen blinking red eyes scattered throughout our pristine suburban house. 

I learned early that cameras were cheaper than parenting. The college prep started in eighth grade. Not with tutoring or enrichment classes – no, that would require them to spend 30 insufferable minutes in the car with me each day, would require them to pack a cold dinner for my way there. Instead, they installed cameras to track my study hours; each morning, they’d review the footage over their separate breakfasts – Father with his Bloomberg terminal, Mother with her coffee that reeked of Bailey’s at 7 AM. They’d comment on my productivity, my screen time, my bathroom breaks, never about the shining “0” balance in my lunch account or the acne that’d bloomed overnight, covering my face in a blood red as I picked at my skin. Mother calls it love, her voice soft but unyielding. Father calls it preparation for success, as if constant surveillance is just another extracurricular activity to round out  my college applications. I call it what it is: prison.

But I freed myself and now, I watch them watching me.

People are easy to fool, especially if you’ve spent all your life listening for the sound of their footsteps in the hallway or for the hum of the garage door closing, signaling how many seconds I had to make  myself into a studious son before I heard them turn the lock on my door.

I couldn’t have asked for better mentors. In surveillance–and as I later learned–in betrayal.  

Summer of Junior year, they enrolled me in an introductory computer science course at a local community college, attracted by the shining letters it added to my college application. With its dusty walls and mismatched chairs, the class became a paradise, my only escape and interaction with society. I learned to code like I learned to breathe underwater – silently, desperately, with the knowledge that survival depended on it. Line by line, pixel by pixel, I learned to loop their feeds, to create ghost images of myself color coding AP bio sheets at my desk while I planned my escape, and found myself a place I could actually call home. 

The surveillance feed streamed directly to their phones and was broadcasted like a Great British Bake Off on the 70 inch TV in their bedroom. My father checked on it obsessively during business meetings, my mother glanced at it in between her spa treatments. I spent weeks analyzing the video quality, the frame rates, the timestamps, picking out quirks of each camera: the one above my desk stuttered every 47 seconds, the hallway feed facing my room had a slight blue tinge. I recorded hours of myself studying, sleeping, pacing, building a library of normal teenage behavior.  

I wrote programs in between classes, in the hallways, at lunch: every night, between 2:17 AM and 4:23 AM, the hours when their heavy dose of melatonin would pull them into a deep slumber, I would upload another piece of my digital camouflage. I spliced together footage of me turning pages of textbooks, shifting in my chair, reaching for water. I’d developed the eye of a graphic designer after hours matching the lighting, the shadows, and even subtle changes in my clothing. They were so captivated by the image of their perfect son studying that they never noticed the yogurt cup that sat untouched on my desk for three days straight, or the same Advanced Calculus textbook, perpetually open to page 394. 

Humans are creatures of habit. We see what we want to see. 

Their neglect had taught me well; they’d installed cameras instead of having conversations, tracked my movements instead of asking about my day. The surveillance became their oasis from the horror that is parenting. Each move was calculated months in advance. A Facebook Marketplace account created through a VPN, pictures printed only though public library computers. I withdrew $40 here, $60 there – nothing to trigger their financial alerts. Every morning, I’d complain about calculus just enough to seem normal. I’d let Mom check my physics homework, letting her catch two minor mistakes. I kept my grades high enough to avoid suspicion, low enough to avoid unwanted attention. 

A month before my departure, I started the final phase of my plan: the psychological groundwork. I requested extra SAT prep sessions. Being so pleased with my dedication, they never questioned why I slept so late. Each night, I wove a story of stereotypical teenage rebellion: a hidden can of Celsius, a secretly installed game. These trite acts of defiance would later cover for me as I executed my punctiliously scheduled extraction as a teenager’s desperate escape. 

I waited for the clock to strike 12 on November 2nd, 2016 until I ran. 

I ran. 

The Boston air tore through my lungs with each inhale, but I forced my legs to keep propelling, until I’d reached the 2004 Honda Civic  I’d bought with cash off Facebook Marketplace and stashed in an abandoned lot.

Early tomorrow morning, before the sun had risen and before the early birds started their melancholy sounds, my parents would wake and tiptoe to check on their son, not out of concern for my well-being, but to ensure that their biggest investment was shaping up to yield filial returns. They’d push the oak door open to find an immaculate room, bed made and objects meticulously placed just as they’d taught me. Then, once their eyes have adjusted to the darkness, they’ll find me gone. 

People are easy to fool, especially if they’ve spent their whole lives refusing to learn anything about you at all.

Father’s affair emerged first. I was pinpointing his exact schedule using the GPS tracker he’d installed on his own car, a tracker that painted the picture all too well: weekly stops at the Marriott downtown, always for no more than 2.5 hours. Room charges buried in expense reports under “Client Meetings.” His secretary’s Instagram posts from the hotel bar, timed perfectly to match. Like shy teenagers at prom, their digital footprints danced around each other. 

I knew I was onto my mother’s inconsistencies in our home security logs: the garage door opened at 3 AM, just to close almost four hours later. The ATM receipts she forgot to throw away, withdrawals growing with the date. The script I wrote to track her phone’s location revealed countless trips to the Mohegan Sun Casino, endless loops of hope and despair mapped in red GPS coordinates. The evidence explained the faint smell of tobacco that always clung to her clothes, masked poorly by expensive perfume, a diary of nights spent lost in a haze of losing streaks, her fingers restless as she rechecked her dwindling poker chips. She’d wave off my questions about the chips I’d found in the laundry; “Just a business function,” she’d slur, the sharp bite of whiskey on her breath 

Through unmasking them, I finally learned to see myself clearly. All along, the bad inclinations had been theirs, every accusation a thinly-veiled confession. Some nights, I watch old footage: Father teaching me calculus while his phone buzzed with messages he’d delete later; Mother checking my homework while calculating odds on her second phone. My anger slowly gave way to disgust and eventually, a softer feeling–almost pity. They’re so focused on molding my future that they can’t see their own present crumbling. Now, the script was flipped, the tables turned, and their prisoner was now their warden.

On my table, I’d placed two letters, addressed to each of them from their son, my name scribbled in angry red. In Chinese, one painted a loved one’s name on their tombstone red each year. I am dead to them. 

In Father’s letter, he’ll find a printed copy of Mother’s maxed-out credit card statements and my emptied college fund. They sit in the letter like a loaded gun.  

In Mother’s letter, she’ll find printed emails of room charges at Marriott, the jewelry receipts for gifts that never came home, set against a beautiful mosaic of Father’s text messages to his lover. 

The night I’d discovered the full extent of their digital debris, I watched through the cameras as she sat at the kitchen table at 2 AM, shoulders shaking as she calculated interest rates on the back of my Harvard brochure. Father sat on the couch upstairs, deleting texts while pretending to review quarterly reports. I sat in my room, surrounded by a library of their antics, watching both their worlds collapse in 1080p. 

Their prized son, now the architect of their demise.

I drive into an empty parking lot 2 hours south just as the clock strikes 3. I open the glove compartment, the burner laptop I’d bought off the hands of a broke 20-year-old gamer after seeing his listing on Facebook Marketplace. I boot up the laptop to open the live footage of all the 17 cameras scattered in our tiny home. 

So I watch, and I wait, and I wonder: when everything finally falls apart, will the cameras record that too? Will they see themselves as clearly as they’ve tried to see me? Or will we all keep pretending, perfect poses for perfect photos, while the truth sits encrypted in our hard drives? Because in the end, we’re all just watching each other, missing what’s right in front of us. They installed cameras to ensure my success, never realizing they were documenting their own failures. Every surveillance photo of me studying is timestamped alongside their separate betrayals – a perfect split-screen of family dysfunction. There’s a terrible symmetry in our situation: they monitor my every move while I archive their secrets. We’re all prisoners of observation, hiding from our sins while scrutinizing yours.

A lightness–almost giddiness washes over me. As I type the last period into my notes app, I take a minute to savor my hard-won justice. Or vengeance. 

My victory. I copied and pasted the words to the burner FaceBook account I’d set up just for this moment, scrolling down a list of suggested mutuals–my aunts, their colleagues, our neighbors who really believed we were the perfect family. Now they were prisoners of truth. . I hit “post”, savoring the first moments of my new life  as I watch the words exploding across the Timeline. 

What I’d written, you’re reading right now.