Confessions of a Good Girl
By: Tina L. Smith
Tags: Nonfiction, Friends, Practical Jokes, Humor, This Happened To Me

HUMOR

Confessions of a Good Girl

I feel better already

Photo by Alireza Dolati on Unsplash

I was always a good girl in my youth. I listened to my parents, went to church several times a week, contributed to and volunteered for charities, and turned in every bit of money I ever found on the ground. Even today, I make it a practice to never take money or bounty from vending machines. If the machine drops two bags of Famous Amos cookies, I take the one I paid for and leave the other for someone else. I have a code: If I didn’t pay for it, it’s not mine.

Living honestly is important to me.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t participated in mischief. Mischief, it turns out, is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

It starts small

Always. Stuffing youthful cheeks with vegetables at the kitchen table and excusing yourself to spit them out in the toilet. Taking a flashlight to bed to read after lights-out time.

Putting bags of frozen food on the back of the TV set so parents don’t know you stayed up watching shows while they were out. (This actually worked; my sibs and I were caught once when our dad felt the back of the TV and discovered that it was piping hot at 11 p.m., an hour past our bedtime. After that…frozen peas on the TV while we watched, then thrown back into the freezer as we heard the car pull up and dived into our beds.)

Then escalates

Pretty soon, you’re talking and cutting up through church and making up a sermon and falsifying notes in the car on the way to Baptist school Monday morning.

And swapping test papers in Bible class — yes [gasp!], nearly ubiquitous cheating with fellow seventh-graders every time Mr. Ritchey left the room. Which begs the question, why would a teacher leave spirited13-year-olds during a test? It’s like he WANTED us to cheat!

Just as all those chapel speakers warned us, deception is insidious, and pretty soon you’ve grown comfortable with dishonesty.

And then when you’re older, you tell the Windsor border guards that you’re crossing over from Detroit to play bingo when you’re actually headed to the comedy club. Why? Because we could. Also, you really have to know Windsor to understand the humor. The Canadian border city was known in those days for three things: bingo, bars with a lower drinking age, and strip clubs. We never went to any of those.

When dishonesty becomes amusement

But you know you’ve reached a new stage when you embark on a life that celebrates guile.

Yes, I’m talking about practical jokes.

In young adulthood, my two best friends, Sherry and Lynette, and I mastered the art of practical jokes.

Message in a bottle

One of our most epic jokes took shape when one of Sherry’s coworkers, Bob, asked her to drop a message-in-a-bottle into the ocean while she was on a cruise.

We waited two months, demonstrating great patience and cunning. Then, painstakingly, we went to the library, mocked up official letterhead (it was the ‘80s…much more challenging than it would be now), and created a letter from the Jacques Cousteau Society. The letter contained elaborate details about the crew’s Caribbean voyage to observe marine life, their attachment to a particular whale, and how, tragically, Bob’s bottle had lodged in the whale’s throat, causing him to choke and die.

We even arranged for another friend to mail the letter from the society’s headquarters town so it would have the proper postmark. No detail was too small for us. Poor Bob. He actually believed he’d killed a whale for almost a day!

Jack and jilt

On another occasion, I called my friend Kevin’s buddy, Brad, while I was visiting my sister in Texas, where Brad lived. It seems that the two of them had a habit of picking up girls and using each other’s names while in college. So Brad would say he was Kevin; Kevin would say he was Brad. They even gave out each other’s phone numbers.

I called from a noisy pay phone at a corner store and told him I was at the bus station. And that I’d “done it!” I’d left home and come to live with him, just as he told me I could! Poor Brad was mystified, even as I begged him to come pick me up. I sprinkled in just enough details to give him the notion that I’d actually had a fling with Kevin.

Soon Brad was sweating, swearing, and apologizing. “Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh my god. I’m not him! I’m so sorry!” he said, blurting out a convoluted explanation. “It wasn’t me. You met my friend Kevin. It’s a joke!”

“Well, I don’t think it’s very funny!” I retorted, my voice shaking with nerves, which worked well for the gag. “Are you gonna pick me up or not?!?”

He was on his way out the door when I finally told him that Kevin had put me up to the call. He was relieved, then angry, then completely amused. I met him a few years later at Kevin’s wedding, and we laughed like fools.

I really should watch my back; even thirty-some years later, sworn revenge could come at any time.

Redemption

I’ve mended my ways, you’ll be glad to know. Nowadays, my idea of a good deception involves transposing numbers when I’m asked my weight or fudging my flossing habits to the dental hygienist.

But, man…what I wouldn’t give to sneak a visit to Windsor to “play bingo” with Lynette and Sherry.