April Fooled
Some families spend weeks preparing a grand Thanksgiving feast — complete with elaborate and tacky, turkey themed table décor, and great-great-great grandma’s secret green bean casserole recipe (the secret is that it’s more cream than green bean). Other families start dusting off the Christmas decorations November 30th, lining up the caroler figurines who look like they’ve been frozen mid-ghost sighting, and telling their kids an old, fat man whose diet is 90% cookies is watching their every move, so they better be good and eat their vegetables.
But the holiday that really gets my family’s long johns in a wedgie is April Fool’s Day. Yeah, you read that right, we wear long johns. For those of you lucky enough to not grow up in Montana with a 7-month long winter, and don’t know what long johns are… kindly eff off.
This all started because my dad can never have a good time unless he’s orchestrated some elaborate scheme to either entertain himself or somebody else. And this goes way back — once when he was in middle school, it was a beautiful sunny day and he couldn’t stand to be stuck in class. So, he convinced his friends it would be a better idea to skip school, hitchhike to one of the boy’s parentless houses and play outside for the rest of the day. Wouldn’t you know it, the car that pulled over to pick them up was his own mother.
You would think that failure at such an early age would snuff out this burning need to scheme, but no. Not the man who would later buy hay bales and rent chickens for a barnyard themed college dorm party. And my mother is not off the hook either. Once while we were out to eat, she spent her entire meal putting bread rolls into the other patron’s hats and coats while they were up at the buffet. However, her poker face needs serious work, so she’s usually just an accessory to my dad’s crimes.
In the same vein of the iconic children’s book, When You Give A Mouse A Cookie — when you give pranksters permission to torment people for an entire day, you’re going to have some traumatic stories because of it. You’ll hear all about some of those traumatic stories. But I’m pleased to tell you upfront, this ends with a story of revenge.
My AFPTSD (April Fool’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) began when I was in 4th grade. Up until this point my younger brother and I had been subjected to silly horseplay, such as my parents putting tons of salt in our school lunch PBJs (so I guess the real prank was starving your children?), or the classic rubber-band-on-the-kitchen-sink-sprayer (you turn the sink on, the sprayer gets water in your face, you feel shame). Those were just the gateway pranks to much bigger things to come.
I had just gotten home from a taxing day of spelling bees, three recesses and “social studies” to find my parents sitting at our kitchen table. They’ve been waiting for me, and they don’t look happy.
“Bethany, please take a seat.”
My stomach drops as I spy a piece of paper labeled REPORT CARD lying between my mom and dad.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, wide eyed.
“We got your report card in the mail, and we are not pleased.”
They push the piece of paper towards me. Here’s where I might need to remind you that middle school report cards don’t have the standard A/B/C/D/F’s — no, no they use the ambiguous symbols E/S/N (excellent, satisfactory, and needs to improve) to coddle us. What might later be a C-, could technically fall in the Satisfactory category. So, come high school and suddenly a straight S student is on the cusp of failing? This could be why my high school had a lot of dropouts. Either that, or drugs… I chose to blame the E/S/Ns.
Anyways, I set my Lisa Frank binder aside to get a better look at my REPORT CARD. I took it in… definitely a lot of Ss, and no, can it be? Is that an N? My vision blurs as tears avalanche down my face. There are a FEW Ns. There are no Es. This has to be a mistake?!
“Read what Mr. Anderson wrote about you in the comment section,” my dad instructed.
“Um, ‘Bethany is a distracted student. She is clearly more interested in talking to her friends,’ NO I’M NOT! ‘Being a class clown,’ WHAT? ‘And flirting with boys than she is with her education.’ I DON’T EVEN LIKE THE BOYS IN MY CLASS!”
The truth is I was kinda a flirt, and I was definitely a Chatty Cathy. But I was also a big fat NERD. So while I was feeling extremely exposed, I was also confused. I quickly pivoted back to the “grades” (I hate that I even have to call the E/S/Ns “grades” when they’re really just Erroneous/ Shams/ Need to improve — oh, I guess the N can stay).
“SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG, I GET 100 ON ALL OF MY MATH TESTS AND I’M ONE OF THE FASTEST READERS IN FOURTH GRADE, REMEMBER I WON BATTLE OF THE BOOKS?!”
I’m sobbing already because I know what’s coming. And sure enough, it does.
“No TV for at least a month,” my mom says.
My world ends. This is before cell phones, or tablets, or AIM. All that is important to me is watching Shirley Temple movies over and over again. It is my everything, it is my fourth-grade purpose in life. I put my head in my hands, and cry and cry and cry. How could this be happening to me?
“Bethany, can you also please read what this says right here?” asks my dad.
I lift my head weakly, my voice cracks as I clarify, “the date?”
APRIL 1, 2001.
Feeling starts to come back into my extremities as I realize what my parents have just done. They both have smiles bigger, and scarier than Kristen Wiig’s Gilly from Saturday Night Live. My once disgruntled father has 180’d into an animated man child, screaming “APRIL FOOLS!”
He starts going into detail about how he waltzed into the principal’s office that day, got a copy of my real REPORT CARD, whited out the actual details and made up all of that slander about me (the flirt thing was just a lucky guess).
At this point you might be laughing at my expense, and I can’t blame you. It was INSANELY clever. Why would I expect my REPORT CARD to be tampered with? Besides my birth certificate it was one of the most important documents I had in my life. Mostly because you could bring it to the local toy store, and they’d give you 10% off for good grades (you know what they say, gotta get those straight E’s for the newest Beanie Baby!).
The next year, still coasting on the high from the REPORT CARD high jinks, my dad asks my brother, Sam, if he has fed the dog yet.
“No, because you usually do.”
“Well not anymore, it’s time for you to start taking some responsibility around here.”
Sam, who is two years younger than me, and much sweeter, much more obedient, and I’m trying to find a different way to say the favorite child, gets up from his breakfast and starts calling our dog’s name.
Ten minutes later, after doing multiple laps up and down the stairs, Sam tearfully returns to the kitchen.
“I can’t find Irish!”
“Well…. Did you check outside?” my dad asked.
My brother runs for the door with the urgency of well… The urgency of a boy who has already had to deal with the death of three family dogs at this point in his life. But that’s a different story.
Then the screaming starts.
Brace yourself because you’re not going to believe this next line. My father had put our dog on the roof.
“APRIL FOOLS!”
Peak annoyance was when I was a freshman in High School. This might shock you at first, not because of the prank but because I owned and drove a car as a freshman in High School. That’s right, in Montana you get your learner’s permit at 14 and your full blown, legit, legal, has your picture on it license at 15. I’m guessing it’s because the state assumes you’ve been driving a tractor since the age of 10 — and they are not wrong.
So, I had just come out of ballet class (I know, now you’re really confused — kids who drive tractors and are ballerinas?! It’s a weird place), and my car is gone. I’m happy to tell you that at this point in my life I have started to wise up on April 1st. It took seconds for me to realize what was happening here, so I got out my cell phone (FINALLY! Something else for my parents to take away from me when I acted like a little shit) and immediately called my dad.
“Dad, my car is gone, and I know you took it.”
“What? Bethany I’m at work and I’m busy”
He was one of the few doctors in our hometown, so while that was probably true — I wasn’t going to give up that easily.
“Dad, where is my car?”
“If your car is missing — you should probably call the police.”
Oh no he didn’t. Could he really have gotten the local law enforcement involved? I mean they did seem really excited when I called, clearly they were sick of dealing with cows who escaped from their fields and were loose on main street. After they asked me to describe my vehicle, and what had “happened,” they chuckled and told me, “You better call your father back, he has something to say to you.”
The cell phone barely rang once before, “APRIL FOOLS!”
But I promised you a tale of revenge. Everyone has a breaking point, and excuse me if mine is a counterfeit report card, a dog on the roof and having to report a fake crime to the PD.
I mentioned the tidbit about my dad’s profession, he’s a doctor. And yet one of his biggest horrors in life is human feces. More famously known as: POOP. It’s not necessarily an abnormal aversion, but the key to taking down any enemy is playing their weaknesses. And it just so happens my father is extremely ~dramatic~ when it comes to his weaknesses. For example, he tells people he is allergic to bees. It’s not true. But it’s less embarrassing for them to think that is the reason he is screaming at the top of his lungs when a bee is within 6 feet of him. And the mere whisper of a human defecating sends him into full body convulsions.
It was the year after the car incident and my family was in Cabo San Lucas for Spring Break. For Christmas my dad got him and I scuba diving certification lessons, you know so we could really explore the bodies of water in our land-locked state that are literally filled by MELTED SNOW. Now that I live in NYC, whenever I meet someone new, they usually say, “I’ve never met someone from Montana!” And just to add to my quirkiness I like to say, “And I’m scuba certified!” This leaves people wondering if they’re remembering correctly where the hell Montana is, giving me time to change out of my heels into cowboy boots to make sure they’re not let down by their encounter with a Montanan.
It was the day of our first open water dive with a scuba instructor, A.K.A. the first time we weren’t exploring the depths of a public swimming pool. We were PUMPED. Everything went great, we saw tons of fishies and even an octopus. They don’t have any of those in Montana! And thank god, because if grizzly bears had 8 legs, the human race would be long gone by now.
If you’ve ever been in the ocean or a pool, you know the one little hang up is going to the bathroom. Sure, if it’s number 1, you just go. Don’t look at me like that, we’ve all peed in the pool. If anything to fact check that rumor about the mysterious chemical that reacts with urine to make the water turn red. But if it’s number 2, you probably are going to be holding it for a while.
As my family sat down to dinner that night, I put my Shirley Temple VHS acting school to the test.
“Dad, I gotta confess something that happened during our dive today.”
“OK?”
“I had to go to the bathroom.”
We had to return to the same scuba school the very next morning to complete our certification. We would have to show our faces to these people again.
“I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. So, I went number 2 in the scuba school’s wetsuit.”
“WHAT?”
“I’m thinking they won’t know it was me, they’ll blame it on one of the other students?”
*gags* “WAIT, YOU WASHED IT OUT RIGHT!?”
“No, I was too embarrassed. I just threw it on the pile with the others!”
*dry heaves* “YOU’RE THE ONLY CHILD ON THE TRIP, YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE IN THE SMALL WETSUIT! YOU TOOK A SHIT *gags* IN THE WETSUIT *gags* ARE YOU SERIOUS? Oh my god, oh my god, we can’t go back. That’s it, we’re not going back. All that studying scuba for nothing! I hope you’re proud of yourself. *gasping for air* Oh my god, should I call tomorrow and apologize? Do we have to change hotels? You know what, how long would it take for you guys to pack if I found a flight that leaves tonight?”
“APRIL FOOLS!”
And thus, the student becomes the prankster.
