Being fifteen is hard enough without the adults in your life acting like petty high school mean girls. You’re trying to navigate school, hormones, and impending adulthood, and the last thing you need is your legal guardian playing keep-away with the tools you need for your education. But that is exactly what happened to one teenager on Reddit who found herself in a standoff with her former guardian over a school-issued Chromebook.
The Original Poster (OP) is a 15-year-old girl who recently moved back in with her dad. She had been living with a legal guardian named Sam, a 26-year-old woman who is apparently about to lose that guardianship status officially. The move-out process already sounded toxic, with OP noting that Sam returned all her belongings stuffed into trash bags. Nothing says “I care about your well-being” quite like treating your possessions like literal garbage.
But Sam didn’t return everything. She held onto OP’s school Chromebook. With the first day of school looming the very next day, the situation went from annoying to critical. OP desperately needed the device to, you know, go to school. The reason Sam was holding it hostage? She had sent a file of her unfinished book manuscript to the laptop and refused to return the hardware until the file was deleted.
Now, why a grown adult is using a teenager’s school computer as personal storage for her Great American Novel is a mystery for another day. The immediate problem was that Sam kept flaking on returning it. Five days prior, Sam promised to charge it and delete the file herself. Fast forward to the day before school and radio silence.
When OP went to retrieve it as they were moving her little sister’s stuff out, Sam wasn’t even there. Instead, OP had to deal with Sam’s 23-year-old partner. This partner immediately got hostile and informed the 15-year-old that she “wouldn’t have it for the first day of school.” But the cherry on top of this nonsense sundae was when the partner declared that withholding stolen school property was a “boundary” they were setting.
I need us all to pause and appreciate the sheer nerve of using weaponized therapy speak to justify stealing from a child. A boundary is telling someone they can’t talk to you a certain way. A boundary is not refusing to give a student their school-mandated supplies because you are lazy and controlling. That is just called being a jerk.
Faced with a hostile adult refusing to give back her property the day before school started, OP made a tough call. She didn’t feel safe arguing. She didn’t want to escalate things with an aggressive 23-year-old. So she did the responsible thing and called the non-emergency police line to help resolve the situation calmly and legally.
Naturally, as soon as the cops were called, Sam magically reappeared. She tried to pressure OP over the phone to just give the partner the password and ID. OP, showing way more maturity than any of the adults in this scenario, refused to give unprecedented access to her school account to a hostile third party. She agreed to delete the file in front of Sam, wait for the police, or wait for Sam to get home.
The police officer arrived and was apparently calm and kind. Sam deleted her precious manuscript in front of everyone, and OP left with the Chromebook without further issue. It was a simple transaction that could have happened days ago if Sam had just acted like an adult.
But of course, the drama didn’t end there. During the ordeal, Sam and her partner tried to blame the 15-year-old for not calling Sam directly. Then, in a twist that would make a soap opera writer blush, Sam claimed she had been in the middle of surgery when it happened and was forced out of it. If she was in active surgery, why on earth were they mad that OP didn’t call her? The math is absolutely not mathing here.
Now these two adults are making vague social media posts about “karma” and “consequences,” trying to paint the teenager as the villain for getting her own property back. Let’s be very clear here. The OP is absolutely NTA. When adults behave like toddlers and refuse to return property that isn’t theirs, sometimes you have to call in the real adults to sort it out. Good for this kid for not letting them bully her out of her education.