April Fools

No doubt you saw the same thing across many blogs yesterday – positive pregnancy tests, announced engagements, ultrasound pictures, etc.

Bart and I are boring (or nice – take your pick), and we did nothing to celebrate. In fact, most of my life, April Fools Day has gone by with only a slight nod.

My freshman year, however, was not one of those years.

Heather and I were roommates, and Priscilla and Sherry lived next door. Heather and Sherry went running a lot of mornings together and to avoid banging on the door in the early hours of the morning, Heather would give Sherry her room key each night and in the morning, Sherry would let herself in, wake Heather up and they’d be off.

You can see where this is going, right? Right.

I’m not a particularly deep sleeper and in the middle of the night, I woke up and realized my bed was being slowly pulled out from the wall. I sat up, leaned over and saw Sherry and Priscilla crouched on the floor. I laid back down, pretending to be asleep, and felt them saran-wrap me to the bed, then push the bed back against the wall. As soon as they left, I wiggled out, grabbed the scissors, cut off the saran-wrap and went back to sleep.

My greatest regret is that I didn’t wait until they stood back up to continue wrapping and then sit straight up and scream at the top of my lungs. They would have surely screamed too and it would have probably woken up the whole floor. Hindsight and all that.

In the morning, we went to open our door and tons of newspaper fell into the room. They had made a garbage bag covering of the door and filled it with crumped newspaper. Heather and I were not the type to wake up hours before class to get ready – we were more the get up at the last possible minute and probably dash to campus – so it was pretty rushed to get it all cleaned up and get to class on time.

That afternoon, I came back to my room after class and was doing some homework (or, more likely, instant messaging like crazy, but for the sake of posterity, let’s say it was homework). Heather came back to the room and just as she came in, I stood up to go to the bathroom.

As I passed her in the doorway, I realized she’d been crying. If you knew Heather, you’d know this was a big deal. She is NOT a cryer.

When I came back from the bathroom, I asked her if everything was okay and, without a word, she handed me a letter.

Heather was on a full-ride scholarship and the letter told her that “due to events beyond the scholarship committee’s control, they would have to revoke her scholarship at the end of the semester.”

I asked her when it had come and she said she’d just gotten it from her mailbox and at that moment I started to panic too. I was on the same scholarship Heather was and her grades were better than mine. If they were taking away hers, they might rip mine out from under me too.

The bottom of the letter said that, if she had any questions, she ought to call them at a specified number.

Right then, Sherry came in and Heather poured out the whole story.

“I’m going to call my mom,” Heather said.

Sherry quickly convinced her that she ought to find out any additional information by calling the number and it went through to a friend of our’s dorm voicemail which said “If this is Heather, APRIL FOOLS!!!!!!!!”

Heather was MAD! Sherry and Priscilla kept saying that it was just meant to be funny, but they didn’t seem to realize that both Heather and I (especially Heather) had nearly had heart attacks. One does not joke around about money.

It turned out that Sherry and Priscilla had gone to the scholarship office and asked for a letterhead envelope and the guy at the desk and immediately offered it to them and then asked if they wanted two.

And Sherry had made her own letterhead on the computer to print the letter on. And then just mailed it to Heather.

Really, it was a brilliant trick, it was just so cold-hearted that we didn’t forgive them for a long long time.