Psych!
On this day seventeen years ago, my father’s company transferred him to a satellite office in Peru.
Okay, not really, but check it out.
After my parents “broke the bad news to me at the breakfast table,” I stomped into school in a righteous “rage” and nearly broke down “sobbing” in homeroom — I didn’t want to move! I liked it in New Jersey! I didn’t want to make new friends! I didn’t want to start at a new school! I didn’t want to learn Spanish! How could my parents do this to me? I ranted and raved about my stupid jerky dad and his stupid jerky job and the stupid jerky Peruvians for nearly half an hour, and my classmates looked at each other all “dude, she’s losing it” and tried to calm me down with gingerly observed platitudes like “I hear Peru is very…not horrible” and “we’ll throw you a really good going-away party — in English!” I managed not to have a total meltdown until Pip, almost in tears herself, patted my shoulder and whispered sadly, “Maybe you’ll get to have a llama.” I tried as hard as I could to bellow in a tone of offended outrage, “Llama? We don’t need no stinkin’ llama!” but I couldn’t get the words out because I’d started giggling hysterically, and Woods saw me double over, thought I’d started crying hysterically, and yelled out, “She’s having a conniption SOMEBODY GET A TEACHER!” and I fell out of my chair onto the floor, tears running down my face, and Red ran to the door and screamed down the hallway so loudly that teachers on smoke breaks all over the state of New Jersey felt the backs of their necks tingle, “MRS. SUTTON MRS. SUTTON COME QUICK SARAH BUNTING’S HAVING A SEIZURE AND MOVING TO PERU,” and Mrs. Sutton stubbed out her Parliament menthol and booked down the hall from the teachers’ lounge to find the entire homeroom standing over me as I writhed on the floor all “HA HA HAAAAAAA HA HA…er, I mean ‘BOO HOO HOOOOOO sniffle hiccup BOO HOOOOOO HOO'” and she shouted over the din, “What the HELL is going on in here?” which shut everyone up ’cause a teacher used a curse word, and I struggled into a sitting position and wiped my face as Troop explained to Mrs. Sutton that my dad had gotten transferred to Peru and I felt sort of fragile about the whole thing, and Mrs. Sutton put her hands on her hips, stalked over to the calendar hanging beside the blackboard, circled the first of April with a flourish of red marker, and asked, “Would any of you ladies care to tell me TODAY’S DATE?” As the daybreak of understanding reddened the hills of my classmates’ minds, Mrs. Sutton snapped, “Nobody. Is moving. To Peru. For the love of LITTLE APPLES.” To me: “Get up, funny girl.” To Red: “You shriek like that again, somebody had BETTER be dead in here.” I got up. Mrs. Sutton stomped out and slammed the door. Nobody spoke to me for the rest of the day.
Heh.
I’ve never come up with another April Fool’s prank as good, or as successful, as that one. Once, in college, I planned to tell a boyfriend that I’d gotten pregnant when I actually hadn’t, but when I sat him down and told him all “tearfully” that we needed to talk, he looked so terror-stricken that I couldn’t go through with it. The next year, I thought I’d try pretending I hated Ernie for the day and seeing how long it took her to figure it out, but it didn’t work; she barged right up to the lunch table and smacked her tray down and announced that the mushrooms in the salad bar tasted like farts and she wouldn’t stand for it anymore, and without thinking I grumbled, “You think the mushrooms are bad — this provolone tastes like car upholstery. Here, try it,” and then we launched into a mock-BBC special report entitled When Most Of Your Meal Probably Touched Someone’s Bum At Some Point and I forgot all about April Fool’s Day. And then there’s the time that I quit my ulcerative job at The CD-ROM Place on April 1st, and my boss chuckled indulgently all “‘letter of resignation,’ that’s a good one” and refused to believe me until he got a call from human resources after lunch, at which time he clomped into my office and demanded, “You couldn’t have told me yourself?” “I tried! You didn’t believe me!” “Of course I didn’t believe you, it’s April Fool’s Day!” Then, at my goodbye party, he went around telling everyone that I’d quit because he didn’t believe me when I tried to quit. Yeah…tell me about it. God, that guy drove me batty. If I’d really pulled an April Fool’s prank on him, I’d have made it a mother.
But I’ve never pulled any really good pranks, the kind that involve feces and/or fire — just small-time stuff. Microscopic-time stuff, in fact. Sign and Red and I let a Ring-Ding get all rancid and ant-y and mailed it to a teacher we hated one time, but after we mailed it, Sign mentioned that the police could probably find our fingerprints on the padded envelope, and Red scoffed that Hated Teacher wouldn’t bother calling the police, but I said no, Sign’s right, he totally would, he’s petty and that’s one of the reasons we hate him in the first place, and Sign demanded that Red drive back to the mailbox so we could fish it out, and they got in an argument over who should try to squeeze into the mailbox and get the Ring-Ding-velope — “You go, you’re smaller!” “You go, you’re thinner!” — but neither of them would fit into the hutch anyway, so we measured arms to see who had the longest one, and I did, but I couldn’t reach the Ring-Ding either, so we wrote a polite note in anonymous block printing that read, “Dear Mailperson, Please throw away the envelope addressed to Hated Teacher, we changed our minds. Thanks. Love, Definitely Not Red, Sign, Or Sarah, No Sirree. Wait. Okay…okay, forget it. Bye,” and dropped it in face-up and went home and waited to get arrested for mail harassment, so that doesn’t count. And neither does the time we left Sarge on the shoulder of Route 10 during a Chinese fire drill, because we didn’t mean to, although he’s gotten a lot of mileage out of acting like we did. (Dude, for the last time — we thought you’d gotten in the other car.)
No, I’ve never even left cheese slices to molder behind a radiator. I’ve never pennied anyone into a dorm room (although to tell you the truth I’ve never quite understood how that would work anyway), or stuck a hose under a door, or placed a flaming bag of poo on a front stoop and ding-dong-ditched it. I’ve never glued anyone’s stuff to a desk. I’ve never gaslighted anyone. I’ve never moved an entire bedroom, including the sleeping occupant, outdoors in the middle of the night like the campers did in Meatballs. I can only aspire to the elaborate pranks outlined in the Loompanics line of revenge books by George Hayduke. Barfing into a Tupperware container, saving it in the freezer, then reheating it, calling it “goulash,” and serving it to a nemesis over rice? That’s bold. Disgusting, and evidence of serious mental instability, but bold. I’ve subscribed ex-boyfriends to Tiger Beat and the International Male catalog, and I’ve slowed down to pick my brother up from a tennis lesson and then hit the gas as soon as he grabbed the door handle, but that’s about as bold as I get.
I’d never do anything truly scandalous. I mean, there’s a line, and on one side of the line is scaring the crizzap out of my friends with a crazy story about how a whole family got pushed down the basement staircase long ago and the blood stain (read: spilled red paint) at the bottom of the steps means that THAT FAMILY HAUNTS THE HOUSE TO THIS DAY ooo eeeeeee ooo heh heh just kidding, and then on the other side of the line is sending a stripper to your friend at work…oh, wait. I actually did that to the headmistress of my high school. Does it still count if the recipient of the stripper shrieks, hides behind a coat rack in her office, and threatens not only to expel you but also to call the high schools your parents went to and get them expelled retroactively if you don’t order the stripper to keep everything on including his fedora, and also that she’s not your friend (especially not after the pelvic thrusts)? Yeah, I guess it does. How about threatening to give Little Joe to Wing Chun over a period of several months and then, the next time she came to visit, opening the door, thrusting Little Joe into her arms, slamming the door, and refusing to let her in for, like, ten minutes — if Little Joe got dug his claws into my boob and wouldn’t let me hand him to Wing Chun, it’s not a prank, right? It’s just an aborted prank. See? I suck at these. And how did I of all people get to the age of twenty-nine without ever owning fake vomit?
Well, I’ll have to work on that. Oh, and by the way, this is the last Tomato Nation column ever. I got a book deal and I don’t have time to write it anymore, so…thanks for everything. See you around.
No, seriously! No more Tomato Nation! All done! Tomato Nation go bye-bye!
Okay, not really.
Heh.
April 1, 2002
