Today's story is from another inspirational post (ins-post-ration? Ew, no), this one from reddit:
The story of my own senior prank is below the cut. Enjoy!
Before I was a ninja-in-training, before I was a locksmith's apprentice, before I was the out and proud trans woman you know today, I was just a kid from a broken home who had an absurdly chaotic childhood and a knack for getting into places I shouldn't without getting caught. My life was being pieced back together bit by bit, but unfortunately, most people expected me to adjust to this faster than I reasonably could. This built up a lot of resentment in me for teachers, therapists, judges, lawyers, cops, social workers, parents - pretty much anyone from a class of people who was supposed to have my back, but had repeatedly let me down (or otherwise wronged me) in highly visible and frustrating ways.
But there is one class of people for whom I have always had a bottomless well of sympathy: the wrongfully accused. I've taken so many turns in that barrel (though oddly, very few in the "rightfully accused" one) that I always have one more warm smile, one more long minute, one more slow nod, one more deep sigh, one more kind word, one more big hug. It's the primary reason I oppose the death penalty, inhumane prison conditions, and other overly punitive measures of any kind: because some people will get screwed by the system for something they didn't even do, and their suffering needs to be minimized. As I would get tattooed on my arm in my twenties: a single drop of innocent blood outweighs a guilty heart.
Anyway, high school was a trip, because I was starting to adjust to stability but it came out in really weird ways. My dad had demanded that I get decent grades, and me being the literal and exacting little cuss that I was, I needed a working definition of that so I could know I'd done it. See, he couldn't demand that I "try," even though that's what he wanted, because what I wanted was to get by without trying, and "trying" is a mental state that cannot be measured by others or proven by me. "I know it when I see it" didn't fly with me, because I knew that was totally arbitrary. I was sick of hassles, sick of pointless bullshit, sick of being told that I have to do what I'm told to do merely because I've been told to do it. My dad was usually pretty good at putting life lessons into terms I could understand and internalize over time, and he was patient with me because he knew I wanted to be good but was way too cynical for my age - and smarter & more knowledgeable than most of my teachers (albeit vastly less experienced). But for whatever reason, he just didn't think to say the words, "Homework matters because the ability to do boring things is important for avoiding worse hassles later, and it's a learned skill rather than a matter of mere willpower."
He therefore couldn't think to then repeat those words to me on the weekly for six months or whatever it took for it to sink in.
Anyway, the definition of "decent grades" we agreed on was this: I could get as many Bs as I wanted, but I had to get As - as in plural, as in at least two. Every C had to be balanced out by an A, which meant I had two freebies. Or, I guess, "freecies." Whatever. Ds and Fs were unacceptable. If I ever failed to meet these requirements, the only punishment was that I couldn't use anything for fun if it was something he paid for - like, y'know, electricity. I'd still be able to read all the books I wanted, play outside, even use my bike and rollerblades and other sports equipment - but no video games, no TV, no computer, no driving me to friends' places, and if I walked or biked to friends' places then he'd call their parents and relay those rules to them. Yikes. (This was between 1998 and 2002, so digital grounding wasn't nearly the punishing consequence it is today.)
I want to emphasize here that my dad wasn't strict - none of my siblings had these rules, because none of them completely blew off schoolwork like I did. And I only did that because homework was a nonstop parade of inauthentic activities that struck me as pointless busywork, for concepts I had already mastered in class that day, and I had better things to do with my time. Like, y'know, being a rock star. I did assignments that genuinely piqued my interest with no complaint, and I put love into them: for one creative writing assignment where the only formal requirements were "historical fiction set in Revolutionary France," I wrote a thirty-page story that switched perspective between the young son of a revolutionary and a palace maid of the same age. I described their thoughts and feelings on the same events in alternating chapters, colored by their opposing viewpoints. They met when Versailles was stormed, and they spotted each other looking shell-shocked amid the chaos, and realized that they'd each been swept up in something that had grown larger than themselves and didn't make sense any more. Then they made a daring escape because they were kindred spirits, and helping each other meant they were both traitors who could never go back to how things were. This was in fourth grade, not high school, but you get the idea.
I was a troubled kid with intellectual gifts who was expected to magically overcome the former by virtue of merely having the latter, and I knew that was my shitty situation. I was falling through the cracks, and so my dad made a deal with me to pull me back from the brink - and it worked: I never got grounded for indecent grades. I got grounded for other things, like when I hit a golf ball with a baseball bat all the way across Fakename Park, and it knocked a hole in the vinyl siding a contractor had just finished installing not one hour before - he hadn't even left the site.
To uphold my end of the deal, I used each class syllabus to calculate how much homework I could safely ignore (assuming I got 95% on everything else: usually tests, class participation, and group projects). Homework was typically 15% of a grade - I don't know why that figure was so popular - but that meant I could blow off pretty much all my homework and still get a comfy (95% of 85 =) 80.75% in the class. Since I got to take electives - i.e. classes I actually gave a shit about - those were my two A grades, and the rest were usually Bs, with the occasional C for whatever reason. Needless to say, teachers hated this behavior, as did my classmates - but I pointed to the syllabus and said I just wanted to be held to the same rules as everyone else. I got lectured on "effort" and "potential" and other bullshit words that were always code for, "We don't approve of your priorities so you have to change them, because all these rules you're cleverly getting around aren't the actual rules - the actual rules are, 'You bend your will to our say-so'." And fuck that.
By the time senior year rolled around, I had it all figured out: first period was gym, where I was a senior leader with a teacher who was in the Pride Club with me, and the other senior leader was one of my close friends who had a crush on me. So the teacher trusted us implicitly, my counterpart always marked me present, and my absence was never recorded or discussed. Then in homeroom, I had my brother JD's swim coach, who had known me all four years - he also knew I was in several extracurriculars and did good work at the last minute, so he said he understood if I had to take care of something else during homeroom; I just had to tell him before the end of the day, and he'd mark me as present. Second period was etymology class with Mrs. B, who had wanted me in her class forever and now I finally had the time - but I was deliberately disruptive (in ways that made her laugh, even if she didn't like them - usually by way of elaborate puns). She knew I had the material down pat and would test well, so she didn't mind when I was absent and gave me the same deal that Coach Homeroom did. Third was study hall, for which seniors got to go to the cafeteria, and we were trusted to mark our own individual attendance. Fourth was lunch: no attendance. Fifth was European History AP with a teacher I actually liked and who challenged me in ways I enjoyed, so I genuinely wanted to show up for that class. Sixth was Guitar (yay!), seventh was Drama II (yay!), and eighth was Concert Choir (yay!), with Choraliers during afternoon flap (yay!) - all classes I truly enjoyed.
After gradually ramping up my first-thru-fourth absences on a weekly basis over six to eight weeks, I had my routine: I'd roll up near the end of fourth period, ignore the order to go to the attendance office, tell Coach Homeroom and Mrs. B that I was there that day but busy with projects, then head to the caf and flip the attendance book back to third to mark myself present for study hall. Ding ding bell, day's half-over and I just showed up. I never got any sort of comeuppance for this - it Just Plain Worked.
I also spent a lot of time at the school during odd hours, what with extracurriculars and my Social Butterfly Calendar, because my parents kept wanting to have conversations where they'd tell me to take my future seriously - so fuck that, I'm too busy being a rock star, and my grades are up, so who cares? Also, I got accepted to the one and only college I applied to, which gave me their highest scholarship (the only one I applied for), and also hired me on to do theoretical physics research for a cool half-grand per semester. In my free-time hall wanderings between social appointments, I figured out how to get into the library when nobody was supposed to be there. So! My senior prank was going to be to sneak in one night and stack a whole bunch of books in the middle of the aisle, Ghostbusters style. I even enlisted a close friend who I could trust to keep a secret (i.e. not DJ) as my lookout and alibi. We planned it all out, and it was super low-effort for the outsized payoff.
The day before we had scheduled our prank, I rolled up near the end of lunch like normal, and my partner and I reviewed and confirmed our plans for that night. Then, exactly one minute before the bell rang, I heard a familiar voice shout, "THUUUUNNNN-DERRRR-BAAAALLLL!" Or some similar thinly-veiled code phrase, I don't actually remember - but before he'd even finished yelling the signal, the air was about 40% tennis balls by volume.
My fellow gifted-track student, KB, had just played his senior prank.
My partner and I just watched the chaos in awe. It seemed like everybody but us had tennis balls, and they were just constantly flying all over the place, having reached the critical mass where anyone could throw one anywhere and then pick up another one right away to immediately throw again. All four building security guards made a move to contain the situation, but there were four of them, and there was simply no way to do anything effective. Then, right as the tennis ball fight reached fever pitch, the bell rang and everyone left for class. Welcome to the caf, population: ball pit.
Word got 'round quick that KB, in his capacity as the athletic director's student assistant (and therefore with access to the athletic director's keys), had discovered an athletic supply shed that was not closely monitored. After end-of-year inventory was done - just that past Friday, as it happened - he went and stole about a thousand tennis balls, and handed them out a few at a time over the course of this week: three or four to everyone in this lunch period. He also gave them instructions that there'd be a signal one minute before the bell rang, then sixty seconds of absolute madness, then everyone scatters when the bell rings. My partner and I hadn't been in on it because we always ditched.
Just after that bit of scuttlebutt made the rounds, the next bit to come was that KB was in seriously deep shit: our faculty and staff really did not like senior pranks, and always tried to make examples of those who pulled them when they could, in order to hopefully stave off the inevitable escalation that emerges from each graduating class' desire to outdo the others and be remembered. So, because he had abused his position for the purpose of mischief, KB - who had been in classes with me for four years and was often the only one to laugh at my outlandish hi-lo-brow humor - was getting about fourteen copies of The Book thrown at him. He was threatened not only with: no prom, no walk, and no paper diploma; but also: no graduation, expulsion, Fs across the board, and fucking criminal charges.
I don't know how much crow KB had to eat to get out of that jam, but I do know that he picked up all those tennis balls by himself, and nobody was allowed to help him. I met up with him at the end of the day to check in. He was pretty tight-lipped about the deal he'd made, but in high spirits because he'd had his fun and Got Out of Jail Free with a simple mea culpa that was probably more boring for his supervisors to watch than it was for him to actually do.
I said I just remembered I had to be somewhere, and ran my ass off to find my partner at his normal after-school hangout. I called the whole thing off.
"What?! Why?"
"Because KB was just busted for misusing keys to the building, and so if anything else weird happens, they're gonna look at him first!"
"That's perfect - he'll take the fall, and we'll get away Scot free."
"No! He barely talked them down from destroying his future! What do you think they'll do to him if we go through with this? It'll probably be worse!"
"So? That's not our problem." I began to see the issue with my choice of partner: total in-group loyalty can only come with zero out-group empathy. I needed to switch up my strategy.
"Look, the whole point was that it was going to be a mysterious happening! Staff gets in, books are stacked, no signs of forced entry, nothing to go on. Like, Unsolved Mysteries style. Admin gets a justice boner, then finds no usable evidence to get back to anyone, and now they're blue-balled because they have nothing to show for their work and no one to punish. Without the 'impenetrable mystery' angle, it's not even an interesting prank - it's just books in a stack, and who cares? With KB on the chopping block, they're just gonna assume it was him with zero mystery whatsoever. The plan isn't too dangerous to pull of, it's just completely pointless now that the mystery's been spoiled."
"Oh, shit. You're right. I hadn't thought of it that way."
Of course he hadn't. He was motivated by sheer love of chaos. Hell, so was I - Chaotic Good, remember? But my emphasis just shifted radically from the Chaotic aspect to the Good aspect.
Because if there's one thing I can't abide, it's someone being wrongfully accused.
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