SENIOR PRANK
By Tom Fillion
Every
year as graduation day neared, members of the senior class tried to leave an
indelible mark of their time at the school, euphemistically dubbed, The Senior
Prank. The day selected was close enough
to the last day of school for the perpetrators to enjoy their brief moment of
fame, yet short enough for them to escape retribution that might jeopardize
their graduation. Usually, the Senior Prank bordered on bad taste and
vandalism, i.e., stealing a golf cart driven by the overweight assistant
principal with bad knees, Superglueing the locks in all classroom doors, and
planting the courtyard with panties supposedly worn by a young physical
education teacher, Coach Kitty, who was
dismissed for shedding hers with various male students. Each pair of panties had her name on it.
The
most memorable was neither in particularly bad taste nor in the felony category
and was orchestrated by a senior who was lazy, unmotivated, and basically
considered an unremarkable dumb-ass by most teachers who had to endure him
taking up space and air in their classrooms. That furnished him the perfect
cover for pulling off the most outstanding and technically complicated Senior
Prank in recent decades. I had the dubious honor of his presence, as a senior,
taking Algebra 1 in a make or break chance for him to graduate with all the
minimal requirements of the day. I was
in the enviable position of when I asked him to get his head up off the desk to
uncloak the variable X in one of its many disguises he should have answered
with, “How high, sir?” I barely got a
murmur out of him. With that much effort
I wouldn’t see him, Henry Mortimer, all six foot three of wrinkled, sleepy,
droopy clothing again for two or three days.
The
day of the Senior Prank was like Senior Skip Day – not on the school or
district calendar but looked forward to with the same anticipation as
Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Spring Break.
True to form, Henry Mortimer wasn’t even on campus the morning the most
audacious Senior Prank was discovered by the early arrival of the custodial
crew. They were the ones who would have
to clean spray painted walls, call for district locksmiths to repair locks
sealed with Superglue, put out an APB on a missing golf cart, or remove
hundreds of panties with the same instruments they used for picking up
discarded Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup wrappers after high school students had
eaten their most nutritious meal of the day.
The
sun rose that morning to the same surprise as the high school custodial
staff. The eastern sky was spectacularly
attired in Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors. Nothing would have distracted from
Nature’s early morning masterpiece except an event as rarefied as Henry
Mortimer’s Senior Prank that called for an immediate rewriting and revision of
the senior class’s yearbook pages of notables most likely to succeed in causing
a high school community to come to a standstill in awe and inspiration.
“You
have to come see this.”
“See
what?”
“Follow
me.”
My
colleague and fellow coach led the way to the courtyard outside the main
office. The administrative staff
surrounded the flagpole. Dr. Bunkerhill, the wrinkle factory who was our
principal, pointed into the firmament.
Her hand shook and, if she could have, she would have headed to her car
for an early morning cigarette break.
Other administrators cupped their hands and looked skyward.
A
crowd of students gathered. As more
buses, cheese wagons, arrived, the students forfeited their free breakfasts to
come and stare and rejoice at the unheralded Henry Mortimer’s masterpiece. The size of the crowd swelled and soon
rivaled the one that assembled with local dignitaries to honor a recent
graduate who died in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“How
can we get that down?” the principal demanded.
The
custodial staff shrugged in unison. They didn’t have a ladder long enough to
reach that high. None of them were
willing that time of the morning to shimmy up the flagpole covered with silver
and shards of rust. More importantly, how had the culprit in the middle of the
night managed to attach the mammoth sex toy, a dildo, to the top of the
flagpole? Theories abounded but each hypothesis proved faulty and was
abandoned. Pole vaulters were questioned
as a last resort - to no avail. The
dildo remained aloft until a ladder of sufficient length and a SWAT team of
qualified tradesmen with sufficient safety training arrived from the district
maintenance office. Meanwhile transfer
documents were prepared for select members of the administrative staff unless
the perpetrator or perpetrators of the Senior Prank were identified and
appropriately disciplined. That meant
one thing after the principal huddled with a cigarette in her hermetically-sealed
car parked in her private parking space.
A reward or bounty was the obvious investigative tool. There is no code of silence in high
school. There is no high school omerta.
“A
twenty dollar reward will be paid to the student or students who successfully
identify those involved in the Senior Prank,” was announced throughout the
school.
Officer
Jimmy, our school resource officer at the time, who was Puerto Rican and
British and bore a resemblance to both nations, except for his avowed use and
opinion on the superiority of female undergarments, soon had some significant
leads to follow up on. It was only a
matter of time before the perpetrator(s) were foisted upon their own
petards.
Henry
Mortimer slept soundly at a table in the corner of my classroom. It was several
days after the Senior Prank had entered the historical event category. Officer
Jimmy had exhausted all leads pursuant to case number ******. Principal Bunkerhill anticipated a transfer
to the inner city pastureland of a Title 1 school. Her career was in effect put into an early
retirement trajectory until Officer Jimmy opened the door of my classroom and
pointed to the sad sack of a senior, Henry Mortimer, dressed in a crumpled
shirt and jeans, and smelling of cut bait from a night of fishing. He was foolhardy enough to grace us with his
presence on the senior class’s last day.
It
took a few drops of his Algebra 1 book that he rarely opened to rouse him from
his torpor so that he could follow the stalwart officer who had the presence
and demeanor of a Scotland Yard detective as he closed the case of the Senior
Prank. I was informed a few hours later
that the twenty dollar bounty was paid out because Henry Mortimer readily
confessed to masterminding the entire plan although he deferred from explaining
how he did it. Why he choose to be
close-mouthed wasn’t readily apparent. Of course, it put his immediate future
in jeopardy because in addition to being banned from the graduation ceremony,
school district policy dictated that all seniors convicted of disciplinary
infractions be required to take their final exams. That meant I would have to be the Grim Reaper
of Graduation calling Henry Mortimer’s parents to inform them that they had
sent out graduation notices for their prized offspring - in error. There was no way he would ever pass the exam
and, in fact, he didn’t. Algebra 1 was the only one he failed, and miserably, but
he did show up to my classroom with a Big Gulp and a straw in one hand, a can
of WD 40 and crescent wrench in the other, and a confidence that belied the predicament
he was in. Did he know something I
didn’t know?
Yes,
he had kept it secret until that point and it was worth its weight in gold and
graduation notices.
“So
how did you do it?”
He
placed the Big Gulp on the corner of my desk.
“Can
we discuss the exam grade first?”
“You
failed. You know next to nothing about
Algebra. You have to work really hard to
know so little.”
He
was unfazed by my dire pronouncement and proceeded willy-nilly to explain how
he single-handedly placed the dildo on top of the flagpole and prevented the
Stars and Stripes from flying that day until the SWAT team of maintenance
tradesmen from the district headquarters had surveyed the problem, checked with
their supervisors, and reclaimed the flagpole for its proper function.
“I
did it with these.”
I
wondered what the purpose of the can of WD 40 and the crescent wrench were for.
“What?!”
A
can of WD 40 and a crescent wrench had caused such a hullaballoo? I needed further explanation.
“I
was throwing a Frisbee with some friends in the courtyard a few months ago and
it landed in the bushes near the flagpole. That’s when I got the idea.”
“Okay. I’m still not seeing the connection between
the Frisbee and you placing the sex toy on top of the flagpole.”
He took a sip from his Big Gulp.
“When
I picked up the Frisbee I noticed the tops of two bolts covered up by
dirt. I cleaned off the dirt with my
hand and found out the flagpole had a hinge on one side and the two bolts on
the other side. The nuts on the two
bolts were the only thing securing the flagpole. If I could get them off, the flagpole would
come down on the hinge side. So every day since then my friends and I have been
throwing the Frisbee out there as close to the flagpole as possible. Every day I’ve been spraying the two nuts and
bolts and the hinge on the flagpole. It took me all of five minutes to drop the
flagpole, strap on the dildo, and push it back up.”
When
graduation day arrived Henry Mortimer wasn’t there, but the principal did call
his name as a graduate, and he received a thunderous ovation in abstentia from
his classmates, thanks to the exam grade that somehow I misplaced.
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@dream_mechanic
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Tom Fillion is the author of two novels, The Dream Mechanic, and Giuseppe’s Award, short stories, and poems.