D. Pierson - The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

What we have on the kitchen counter five minutes later makes it pretty clear we’ve never gotten revenge on anybody. Half a dozen eggs leftover from two weeks ago when my dad made breakfast for a woman who stayed over on a Saturday night. Processed, individually wrapped yellow cheese slices because I feel like I remember seeing or reading about a prank involving cheese slices somewhere, but maybe it was an art project, not a prank. Some rope from the garage, just in case we have to rappel up or down something. Neither of us knows how to rappel, in fact I’ve always counted myself lucky that our school doesn’t have that rope-climbing thing as part of PE like you see in movies. But rappelling seems like something you do as part of getting really excellent revenge. We could also use the rope to hang somebody in effigy, if we decide to go that way. But again, that’s straying into art-project territory.

It also seems like a good time to spray-paint somebody’s house or car, but we don’t have any spray paint. We have a can of wood-staining stuff from the time my dad painted our deck. It’s not even technically paint, and it’s heavy as hell. Also, we have some flashlights.

“It looks like we’re going to make an omelet,” Eric says, “rappel in through somebody’s window, and serve it to them.”

“You read my mind,” I say. Eric laughs.

We go out the door without much of a plan and everything in a paper grocery bag, becoming two of a ton of kids out tonight with some rotten eggs and bad intentions but probably the only ones with a can of Home Depot store brand chestnut wood stain.

My brother and his friends could be any number of places. They could be hanging out at one of their houses or at somebody else’s house. They could be hot-boxing my brother’s car in the Sonic parking lot. They could be speeding around in the car after hot-boxing it. They could be hopping out on middle-schoolers and threatening them with plastic pirate swords to make them give up their candy. Cathy could be flashing her boobs at eight-year-olds dressed up like Yu-Gi-Oh characters. And if they aren’t doing these things right now they probably will be later. But we know they’re not at my house so we decide to go to Alan’s house, because it’s the only one of his friends’ houses I know the address of.

It would take us a year to walk. Eric suggests we take the bus.

“He lives on Desert Wind Drive,” I say. “It’s over by the—”

“I know where it is,” Eric says.

I don’t ever take the bus. It’s not the city bus, it’s this little shuttle they added to our suburb a couple years ago, I guess to ferry around little old ladies and take kids who can’t drive yet to and from the movie theater. When it came out they had this big logo design contest. Tony DiAvalo submitted this winking cartoon bus he was sure was gonna win, but when it didn’t he told everybody the city should be glad they didn’t pick his design because the whole thing had been a goof and his cartoon was filled with hidden joints and subliminal gang symbols.

“Is your brother going to kick our ass?” Eric says as we wait for the shuttle.

“As long as we don’t get caught, they’ll probably just chalk it up to it being Halloween. Random prank.”

“What prank ARE we going to do?” Eric asks.

I don’t know and I tell him we’ll figure it out on the bus, which has just pulled up with the winning logo, a boxy little cartoon bird flying in the direction the bus is going, painted on the side. We climb up. It’s free so we don’t have to put in any money or anything.

When we’re climbing on, Eric says, “Hey, Eulalio.”

“What’s goin’ on, man?” says the bus driver, whom I guess is Eulalio.

“You know the bus driver?” I ask as we make our way to the back of the bus, past a couple girls our age dressed as sexy Native Americans, and an old man in jogging clothes.

“Yeah, I take the bus a lot,” Eric says.

We take seats at the back of the bus. I’m extra careful with the bag to make sure the can of wood stain doesn’t roll over and crush the eggs. The cheese and rope are a buffer. “I mean, besides just egging his house… what can we do?”

“I don’t know,” Eric says. “I’ve been thinking about it…. If we tied an egg to the rope…”

“Right…” I say.

“Or if we tied the can with some rope…”

“Okay…”

“And then the cheese… The flashlight could…”

“Hmm.”

“To be honest,” Eric says, “I’m just combining all the things we have in my head like some Rube Goldberg contraption.”

“Okay, well, the contraption you keep thinking of… what does it do?”

“Make omelets.”

“Shit.” It’s the eggs and the cheese. The effect of those two items together makes everything around them seem breakfast-y. And “start your day off right” is not the message we’re hoping this prank will send.

“We could stain the eggs brown,” Eric says. “When he goes to clean them up he’ll think he’s been egged with some weird sort of animal’s egg as opposed to just a regular chicken’s egg.”

“I don’t think he’s going to think that.”

“You’re right.”

We hate to settle for a conventional egging, even though winging eggs at the side of some dude’s house would be a first for both of us. Like, with TimeBlaze , we are hoping to reinvent the scifi/fantasy saga as the world knows it, and with this prank, we are hoping to change pranking forever. Even if no one knows about it and we did just decide to do it with the materials we had on hand, I would be really disappointed if we settled for your typical pitch-eggs-at-stucco-and-bolt, and I’m pretty sure Eric would too. At that point we might as well just be my brother and his friends; in fact, they’d probably come up with something better than that if only because they’re meaner than us and willing to go further.

The bus makes a right into Alan’s subdivision, The Cliffs At Tapatillo Point. “I mean, if all else fails,” I say, “there’s no shame in just egging his house.”

“Right,” Eric says. “Or his car.”

Eric signals Eulalio and we get out on the corner of Mountain Terrace and Desert Wind Drive. It’s getting later so fewer little kids are out. Knots of older kids are up and down the street with trick-or-treat bags, not quite our age but close. They’re rowdier and pushier than the little kids and their costumes are shittier and they don’t have parents straggling along behind them. I feel like there’s a window after you get too old to trick-or-treat supervised by a parent where you can do it with your friends by yourselves and as long as you push and swear enough and don’t try too hard, you can keep getting free candy for a few years. I had a couple years like that in middle school with my friends Ethan and Chung Hoon. One year we were the Monty Python lumberjacks and the next year we were chess pieces. Chung Hoon moved away after that and Ethan went to a different high school. Actually, we did try pretty hard, but we definitely pushed one another and swore, too.

Alan’s house is at the end of the cul-de-sac. My brother’s car isn’t here but Alan’s is parked out front, covered in stickers from bands, newer stickers starting to cover old ones of bands Alan’s decided he doesn’t like anymore.

I get these knots in my stomach when there’s even the remote possibility of getting in trouble. I’ve gotten them since I was a kid. It’s not really a guilty feeling, it’s more a fear that I’m going to get caught and somebody’s going to tell my parents. I get them less since my mom moved away. I have one as we walk up to Alan’s house, but it doesn’t make me want to stop. It almost makes me want to keep going with whatever it is we’re going to do, which will almost certainly be stupid.