During the high school years everyone was extremely bored until they discovered parties. I remember Rachel and I would just call each other on the phone and watch tv. We wouldn't even say anything until the commercial breaks, and sometimes not even then. Class was boring, life was boring, so naturally when all other options had been exhausted - you just started calling people.
So Lisa and I filled our time with errand running and general running around waiting for phone calls which could potentially lead to doing something other than being bored. However, sometimes there were planner action items that needed to get done which occasionally prevented us from taking calls. During these times when we were unable to answer - once a person had tried one of us, they would try the other if the first one didn't answer. We found this annoying or funny depending on the day, and we would jointly make decisions to answer or not answer our phones.
One day on a no calls afternoon, Lisa received several calls from Omar - which of course went unanswered. We ran our errands for the day, back and forth from Kinkos to Lisa's. I can't even tell you how many countless hours I've put in at Kinkos just watching Lisa finish various projects. When she decided to laminate her projects, I went ahead and did mine too. Lisa is definitely a large contributor to several As I received on my stupid high school projects.
At any rate, at some point Omar decided that he was displeased by the lack of returned phone calls. As a result he decided to exact the best prank ever played with Elaine, a friend whose phone calls had also gone unanswered by Lisa that afternoon.
Later, when evening had rolled around, and Lisa and I decided to leave her house again. I'm sure we'd probably munched on cheez its and had enough diet coke for it to be considered dinner, and decided to go to Roasters for coffee. We got into her Isuzu Rodeo, and pulled out of the driveway. We were mostly out and almost pulling onto the street, when we saw something like this in the driveway where her car, only seconds earlier, had been parked:
The animal was completely indecipherable, but one thing was certain - it was most definitely dead. "What IS that?!?!" was probably said close to a million times along with "I DON'T KNOWWW!!" Still undecided on what this creature could be, we resigned ourselves to the fact that nothing could be done any longer. Perhaps it had been a cat that got caught in the engine? Cats are known to nap in or under cars in cold weather. All we knew was that it made us sad, and we didn't want to touch it. Shaken and disturbed, we decided to go on with our plan to get coffee.
At Roasters we began to tell people of this horrid incident, and when news of it reached two certain people - it was met with only smirks of blatant satisfaction. Why were Omar and Elaine so pleased at our misfortune?? I'll tell you why. They'd carried out the most innovative and disgusting form of revenge ever. They had actally created this mystery dead animal, and had been watching us discover its "remains" from the alley.
In their planning phase, they had decided the objective was to get our attention. But how? What could they do to ensure returned phone calls and simultaneously gross us out? A solution emerged out of the darkness, and took form as a dead animal. Logistics then began to be formulated.
For lack of wanting to actually kill an animal or touch roadkill, they had come up with a brilliant alternative. They de-stuffed one of Elaine's plush stuffed animals and filled it with ground beef, egg shells and various other things that would create a crunch noise. They also removed the plastic eyes or anything else that would trigger us to think it was fake. Then they placed it on the driveway, and covered it with red syrup to create the blood. All that was left to be done was to watch us pull out of the driveway from a safe distance so they could hysterically laugh.
At that point, all I could think was "bastards."
It was disturbing, disgusting and horrible - but I had to give them credit. At least it was innovative and original.
The evening came and went, and the next day Lisa told her parents and began to start a clean-up effort. Lisa and her dad went outside, and discovered something very odd. The creature was missing. They looked low and high, and could find it nowhere. It had vanished.
Later that afternoon, Lisa's mom was approached by their elderly neighbor; one of two twin sisters living next door. She quietly said "I found a poor little creature that died on your driveway. I think he had fallen from a tree. I nestled him in a shoebox, and said a little prayer before putting him in our dumpster."
Lisa's mom, who was now well informed of the prank, did everything she could to not laugh. This poor elderly woman of deteriorating mental capacity thought that it was real, and had even given it a burial. Rather than trying to explain a genuinely bizarre teenage prank, Lisa's mom just said "Thank you. Thank you so much, how sweet of you." and called it a day.
When she reported this back to Lisa and I, we laughed until we cried...but not before we returned a lot of phone calls.
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