No! Mittens! Please don’t hurt my dear Mittens!”
“Chill bro, it’s not that deep. April Fools!”
In a world where the most deadly day of the year is not Black Friday or the Fourth of July and society no longer lives in fear of shopping mobs or fireworks, people have instead grown fearful of pranks and jokes. Perhaps the most destructive example of this holiday-turned-slaughter-fest is at Claremont High School, where the simple art of playing pranks has been taken to a new level. Sophomore Nathan Zhang recounts a particularly memorable experience.
“One time, my friends decided to prank me on April Fools by siphoning out all the gas from my car and replacing it with Extra Virgin Olive Oil,” Zhang said.
As president of the Nuts and Bolts club at CHS, it only took Zhang a short while to figure out why his car would not start. But by that point, it was already too late. The friction on his engine had become too much, and he was forced to let his car break down at the Shell gas station on Foothill Boulevard.
“They charged me for taking up space, for cleaning out the Extra Virgin Olive Oil, and for sending me back on my way with a tank worth a carton of eggs,” Zhang said. “In the end, their prank ended up totaling my bank account–and then some! I won’t be able to afford college!”
But Zhang is hardly alone in his struggles. In fact, students across all grade levels have had some sort of traumatic April Fools’ experience, whether it is a prank gone wrong or a bit taken too far. According to an anonymous confidant inside of the CHS counselor’s office, StopIt reports have been found to spike exponentially come April, with friends turning on friends and new beef forming on the spot.
“We’ve had reports of defamation, kidnappings, and bribery,” the confidant said. “Not even teachers are innocent…there have been numerous incidents of staff holding students’ grades and success over their heads, either as revenge, blackmail, or for doing the dirty work when it comes to pranking. We’ve been trying to keep it on the down-low, but Mr. Barcelona has a complete personality overwrite every April 1! It’s quite jarring to see…”
On top of this, new factions are being formed on campus as friendships are broken and tentative bonds of trust are made. A common slogan circulating on CHS student Instagram pages has been ‘Quid-Pro-Quo’–a double entendre stemming from the Latin phrase meaning “this for that”. In short, the phrase has been transformed to mean “I won’t prank you if you don’t prank me”, or, “if you prank me I will prank you back”. Many of these new factions have been using this slogan to attract new members–particularly freshmen, who have been the victims of many April Fools’ pranks. One freshman, who wished to remain anonymous out of fear of being revenge-pranked, recounted an offer extended to him by one of the largest freshmen protection agencies on campus.
“At first I was skeptical about joining ‘Senior-Underclassmen Saviors’ or ‘SUS’,” the freshman said. “It was a bit suspicious. And so I declined their invitation, and now they’re after me. They took my cat–my Mittens! This has gone too far, I say, too far! I miss the days when my biggest worries were about Freshman Biology and the MYP mandate…not whether some psychotic prank cult would steal my cat!”
From piles of student debt to outright catnapping, April Fools’ has gone too far. We at the Wolfpacket hope that the students, staff, and faculty of Claremont High School are able to return to their senses before things get even worse. If you do not hear from us, you know why.
