2013ProseA2

First Place – Eva Goldfarb
Second Place – Sawyer Michaelson
Third Place – Nechama Yardley

 

First Place – Sydney Fine
Second Place – Gabriel Daitzchman
Third Place – Hannah Bernstein

Jackie and I had always been pranksters.
It was 10:30 on a bright September morning, two weeks after school had started.
It was a bit chilly, and the leaves had started turning a reddish-orange, but it was still warm enough for a T-shirt without bringing a jacket along.
Jackie had picked me up at my house at 7:30. He came around at 7, but I was still sound asleep, and it wasn’t until the third time he played “American Idiot” on his iPod at full volume that I came around. Jackie’s what you’d call an early bird, and I have no idea how he wakes up at 6:30 with no assistance, while I still look like a dead body at 9.
The only problem with Jackie’s schedule is that he tends to get tired around 8, so if he comes over to watch the Red Wings and the Ducks, I have to watch alone for the entire third period.
But anyway, we were on our way to school when Jackie came to the idea that we should put a tack on the teacher’s chair.
Now, I’d seen that in the books I read in third grade, but now we were seventh graders, more expected from us, because we were older. In situations like that, it doesn’t help to go to a K-8 school, because everyone who works there has known you for eight years and counting.
But I still, with some hesitance, said yes, so we started working on our game plan. We looked over our schedules, which we hadn’t seen since the first day, to see what classes we had together.

Name	Henry Brooks	Jackie Garrison
Period 1	Geography 7 Patricia White	Phy Ed 7 Andrew Holmes
Period 2	Advanced Math 7 Samuel Gordon	Chem. Lab Bruce Johnson
Period 3	Biology Tim O’Brien	Biology Tim O’Brien
Period 4	Phy Ed 7 Andrew Holmes	Poetry Samantha McDonald
Period 5	Lunch Group Kim Piper	Lunch Group Kim Piper
Period 6	English Literature 7 Gerald Meyers	Math 7 Jimmy Hayes
Period 7	Mini Law School Connor Dixon	Mini Law School Claire Henson
Period 8	Chem. Lab Bruce Johnson	Geography 7 Patricia White

We thought that we had it in Period 7, but for Mini Law we had different teachers, and Geography 7 was at opposite ends of the day. But then we saw the perfect moment in third period.
We walked to the office, to the bulletin board, once we got into the school, and took three tacks off the clipboard — a green one, red one and clear one — and Jackie shoved them all in his pocket. Then we went our separate ways, to our own classes. I was so excited to pull the prank that I forgot to turn in my homework in geography and math, and I heard from Jackie he got hit in the face with a soccer ball twice.
But finally the second period bell rang, and we headed to biology. I met up with him in the hallway outside of the lab, and we walked upstairs to biology.
I monitored him as he crept up to the chair, while Mr. O’Brien was in the bathroom before class. He gave me a thumbs-up and hurried back to the seat next to mine. When Mr. O’Brien came back, we thought, Oh boy, this is gonna be great.
Mr. O’Brien was carrying two bags of cow eyes. Right, today was dissection day; we’d been waiting for it since the first day.
But now, the second he sat down, cow eyeballs would splatter everyone within distance. Jackie and I moved three rows back, and Mr. O’Brien didn’t notice. Good. Operation Owee was about to take place.
Mr. O’Brien walked up to his desk, still holding the cow eyeballs, and Jackie and I looked at each other, each wearing a huge grin. He sat down, and we braced for impact.
Nothing happened. What went wrong? Everything was set up perfectly!
He started talking about parts of the eye, except we weren’t paying attention. We were stressing about how he didn’t hit the ceiling in pain. We didn’t like Mr. O’Brien very much, and not following orders made us dislike him even more. Just once it would be nice to have him in our grasp.
He talked for about five more minutes about what the parts of the eye do, and then he stood up and started drawing a diagram on the whiteboard. We had a really hard time holding in our laughter.
Mr. O’Brien had a fluorescent green tack stuck in between his butt-cheeks, and he didn’t even notice. Some of the class was pointing and giggling, and he sighed, and the movement inside apparently moved his butt-cheeks because they wound up swallowing the tack whole. Jackie and I had spit spraying from our mouths now, and the girl in front of me, Kristen Jennings, had to ask me to stop twice, before I controlled it.
After about 10 minutes, the tack popped out, and Jackie and I were roaring now. Mr. O’Brien at this point saw a tack lying on his chair, and he asked who did it.
But apparently Jackie’s and my innocent faces aren’t good enough, so we received one month of detention each.
Then we did the dissection, and because Jackie and I had no idea how to do it, we just cut it into fourths and accepted the F.
A week later, we had a test on parts of the eye, but the only parts Jackie and I knew were the pupil and vitreous humor, because we caught the end of his speech.
So now Jackie and I were failing biology, had detention, and were grounded for two weeks by our parents. Oh well.
Maybe we’ll have more success in lunch group when we put worms in the spaghetti.