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 I am originally from New York City, and I went to an "academically accelerated" high school with students from all five boroughs. We took extremely difficult tests to get in, so to say that it was a school of geeks would be accurate. The average SAT from my year was 1380. And as we all know, geeks with too much time on their hands is a bad thing.
My junior year I was friends with a lot of seniors -- thanks to my boyfriend -- so I got invited to join in on their Halloween prank. The traditional yearly prank was to paint the quad with a senior logo, a prank that was accepted by the faculty. But this wasn’t good enough for us. The school was in the Bronx, and not a great part of that borough. In the interest of student safety, they had enclosed the whole school and its grounds with a 10’ high fence. I don’t know who came up with the idea for the prank, but my boyfriend and his friends seemed to be the instigators. The original plan was to simply remove the fence. About 50 people would show up at midnight, wire clippers in hand, and everyone would go to a fence post. The idea was to clip your post ties, run to the next section and again everyone would clip the ties. It was a simple plan until someone asked, “What the hell do we do with all that fence?” The fence would be incredibly heavy and awkward, it wouldn't fit in our cars, and we certainly didn’t want to take trains home. Again, I don’t know who thought of the idea, but it was pure genius. If the fence was big enough to surround the schoolgrounds ... well, by God, it was more than large enough to surround the school. Late Sunday night, we snuck onto campus, clipped the post ties as planned, rolled up the sections of fence, and rolled them to the school walls. We propped them up against the school, unrolled them, took new fence ties (bought beforehand at Home Depot), and connected the fence sections, forming a tight and impenetrable barrier directly around the school. It took four hours. Four long hours, but when we were done, the necessary fence sections were cut down and surrounding the school. Once the first sections of the fence were up against the school, some of the pranksters began reinforcing them with metal ties. We made sure to solidly reinforce the section in front of the main doors. It was perfect. The school was sealed in, and as we drove home over the bridge (I lived in Queens), we all gave our version of what we thought would happen the next day. A nap and a shower later, we were all back at school early. We pulled up to the school to see teachers milling around the front door, a police car at the curb, and the normally stoic principle in tears. It was the Monday before Halloween, and no one had told us that today there was a big meeting. We were one of three special academic schools in New York, and that day they were going to give state educators a tour to “show us off.” Eventually they got the fence removed, but not before school was supposed to start. Seems they couldn’t get 50 workers like we did. No one ever confessed. Two weeks later, the fence was back up, but it was two weeks of beautiful smugness. Years later, I went to a wedding for one of the planners. The original gang was there and we took out the back seat of his car and inserted one of those laugh boxes that activates when it gets jiggled. We put the back seat back in and let him drive off a happily married and unsuspecting man ... but that is another story. | ||||||||||||||||
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