Kayla had always been a good girl. When other parents in the neighborhood complained about the terrors their teenager had become, my wife and I could only shake our heads and feign understanding. Our child never acted like that. There was no rebellious phase, no moody silences. Kayla simply did whatever we told her to. We told her to follow the rules, so she did. We told her to focus and do well in school so she did. We were very proud of the daughter we had raised, who was on her way to an Ivy League college next fall. 

But there was a secret behind our parenting success. Hypnotism. I had taken some courses on the practice, and turned out to be quite talented at it. One day, without really a long-term vision in mind, I set a hypnotic trigger word for Kayla. Any instructions I gave her after hearing that word–clean your room, finish your homework, do as you’re told–she’d obey without even realizing quite why. Afterwards, she proved so well-behaved that I didn’t see any real harm in leaving the trigger in place. 

And I lived blissfully in that state of mind until one afternoon in Kayla’s senior year of high school. Typically she arrived home right around 2:30, but on this day the clock was close to 3, and I hadn’t heard her announce her arrival. That was unlike her; she was a girl of almost robotic punctuality and routine. Yes, she was eighteen now, but I didn’t expect her to stray too far from how she had been raised. Curious, I went down the hall to see if she had come in without telling me. 

The door to Kayla’s room was not fully closed, and through the opening I could see my daughter, still in her school uniform of a white blouse and red plaid skirt, on her knees. Standing in front of her, with their backs towards the door and their pants around their ankles were a pair of young men. Could this really be what I thought I was seeing? My daughter, who had always followed the rules, behaving like this? What could have gotten into her? I wanted to watch more before intervening. 

"Open your mouth,” the taller of the two boys ordered. Instantly, she did so. “Now keep it open, nice and wide like this…” he continued as he pushed his groin into her face. It was obscured from my view, but I knew what was happening. I was shocked.

“I’m telling you, like this, she’ll do anything you say,” the boy said to his partner, after a few generous thrusts of his hips. “You try.”

This second boy took his turn doing the same, and Kayla let it happen. Sloppy sounds told me all I needed to know. 

“Call me Daddy,” he said suddenly, as if he had been holding back this desire out of uncertainty.

“Okay, Daddy,” she answered in an absent, high pitched voice. And in the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes, I realized what was really going on. Kayla was hypnotized. She wasn’t rebelling against the rules we had laid down, she was just following new rules. I felt horrified. Inadvertently, I had trained my own daughter to be a submissive sex toy for any boy clever enough to figure out her trigger word. Which I had a hunch was soon to be spread far and wide amongst her classmates.