Oreo Surprise
On April 1, 2002, when I was in 7th grade, a friend of mine tricked me into eating a toothpaste-filled Oreo. To be honest, it didn’t take much scheming on his part. My supreme love of those cream-filled babies, combined with the triple whammy of a stuffed nose, naïveté, and NyQuil-induced intoxication prevented my usually killer sense of perception from detecting the minty paste. Needless to say, it was awful (although it did resemble—in a very disgusting way—a mushy York peppermint patty). The worst part of it all was that my stuffy nose rendered me rather incapable of taste, so I didn’t realize what I was eating until I swallowed and felt the gross chalkiness and chocolate cookie residue in my mouth.
Ironically, the trick turned out to be one of those elementary school he-only-pushed-you-because-he-likes-you kind of things, and said boy and I proceeded to have a nice hand-holding-during-recess relationship later that year.
Still, I never accepted an Oreo from him ever again.
– Hilary Nakasone (SFS ’11)
Playing with the boys
When I was younger, I enjoyed playing tricks on my sister. She usually caught on pretty quickly, leaving me feeling somewhat deflated. However, one success when I had when I was 7 and she was 5 made it all worth it. We were brushing our teeth one typical school morning when I told her that I needed to confide in her about something very important.
“Kirsten, I used to be a boy,” I said.
She stared at me, the toothpaste dripping out of her open mouth.
“Really?” she said in a hushed tone.
“Really,” I dead-panned. “My name was Michael.”
She paused, her brow furrowed, before answering, “Have you told Mom and Dad?”
“Well, do you think I should?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she responded.
“Well, let’s just keep it between us for now,” I said.
“Ok, don’t worry, I won’t tell,” she said, not sure whether to be shocked or happy that her older sister had just related her deepest, darkest secret.
– Chelsea Paige (SFS ’09)
Too Cool, Running
I went to a boarding school where tradition permeated pretty much everything. One that people always talked about was the “chapel run,” which amounted to stripping naked (except for your blazer) and running wildly through campus to the chapel. One night at the end of my first year, I was awoken in the middle of the night by my housemate.
“Dude, it’s the chapel run!” he shrieked. “Meet you downstairs in 10.”
So, I groggily got up, stripped naked, threw on a blazer, and crept downstairs … where I found the rest of the house clothed and laughing at me and “junior.”
– Justin Scott (COL ’10)
Literary Additions
In high school, one of my friends had a weird and stalkerish crush on an upperclassman girl. I decided it would be funny to paste a label inside the front cover of his English book that read “I want to fuck,” and then the girl’s first and last name. A few weeks later, two of my friends cornered me in the hallway and told me that the English teacher had found the label while checking for annotations, found out that I was responsible, and that I was in huge trouble with the school. I looked around the corner and, sure enough, the English teacher, the dean, and the guidance counselor were deep in conversation. I’d have to go to the serious discipline committee, my permanent record stained. Then they told me it was a joke—the teacher hadn’t seen the egregious label. I was safe for another day.
– George D’Angelo (MSB ’12)
