Writing Prompt #2: Best Prank Ever

The fifteen or so seventh-grade girls only haphazardly watched Interview with a Vampire. It was 1996 and they were way more interested in Brad Renfro or Jared Leto than Tom Cruise. Besides, it was kind-of boring. Alaina’s birthday sleepover was proving to be much more fun by pulling pranks on people or making sickeningly sweet sundaes. These more interesting pastimes resulted in the chaotic manner for watching the video, and only the few girls who were really into the storyline stayed undistracted. Thus when the movie finally ended (finally), the more adventurous girls rejoiced in an opportunity to spice up the slumber party by playing light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board. And of course since the game never works, they quickly abandoned it for Ouija. Now until this point, the pranks had been mostly age-appropriate juvenilities: bras worn as hats, stealing the ice cream scoop, et cetera. But Alaina led two other mischievous rascals to help develop a much better plan – one that would combine all the activities of the birthday party until that point. One scoundrel proceeded to dominate the Ouija board’s planchette to form a rigged message, another rogue mixed strawberry syrup and red food coloring in a glass of water, and a third troublemaker replaced an identical glass of water with the blood-like mixture on the sly. By the time the pointer had indicated to LOOK IN AVIVA’S CUP no one was anywhere near it and every girl was playing Ouija, as though none had never left the room. Of course Aviva was one of the girls who had been really into the movie and she had already relayed the story of how she had gotten her blood drawn earlier that day, so her extremely genuine screams set off the other ‘fraidy cats who truly believed that was indeed Aviva’s blood in her water glass. When the birthday girl and her two cronies fell to the floor laughing, the jig was up and they had to confess to their deviousness. But never before the slumber party of ’96 had the timing and the mark been so perfectly matched, and never will they again.