I’m sitting on Damian’s bed with various household items with which one can prank one’s friends.
I’ve got clear gelatin, plastic wrap, clear fishing line, shaving cream, 14 balloons of varying sizes, a pack of bottle rockets, thanks to my ability to hammer out something a little extra in my settlement with the bellhop, and a few other assorted items.
Step three is completed when I’ve managed to set up at least five different pranks around Damian’s hotel room.
I’m going somewhere with this. Trust me.
Step four is cleaning everything up, double-checking to make sure none of the pranks are too readily visible to someone who doesn’t know they’re there, and packing my leftover items back into the plastic garbage sack I got from the bellhop. It’s what he was keeping the bottle rockets in.
Step five is to dump everything back in my room and head back downstairs, where the bellhop should be waiting for my signal to allow Damian back into his room.
Step six is the giving of the signal itself, and step seven is to head back to my room and wait for Damian to give me a call.
From there, well, the rest is going to depend on Damian.
I’m back in my room after a surprisingly smooth run of things. Damian should already be back in his, and I can’t imagine it’ll be much longer before my phone starts to—and there it goes.
“Hello,” I answer.
“You’re really going to have to do better than that,” he says.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“I found your little pranks,” he says. “If you’re going to try to come at me with that shit, you’re going to have to do a much better job of covering your work. By the way, thanks for making me dig the gelatin out of the toilet bowl. That never gets old.”
“How many did you find?” I ask.
“All of them,” he says.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“Because you suck at hiding them,” he says. “If someone figures it out beforehand, it’s not a very good prank. I hate to be so critical, but as your mentor and spiritual guide, I feel it’s my duty to…”
He must be doing better; he’s gotten back to referring to himself as my mentor and spiritual guide and all sorts of other positively irritating nonsense that tells me there’s still a chance he comes through the rest of the day with a smile on his face.
“…last time I had someone mess with my shower head,” he says, “they used this clear gel stuff that slowly made every drop of water on me harden into what looked like snot lines all over my body and in my hair—that was a hell of a prank. I didn’t see that one coming.”
“Whatever,” I tell him, “so how many have you found?”
“Five,” he says.
Shit, he is good.
What he doesn’t know is that I had a couple of extra minutes and so I managed to slip in a little something extra.
I’m just waiting to find out what step eight is going to be.
“What made you do that?” he asks.
“I thought it might help pull you out of your funk,” I tell him.
I’ve dealt with tragedy before, though nothing quite as bleak as what Damian’s been through. What I’ve found is that sometimes it can seem impossible to pull one’s self out of that thought spiral, but snapping out of it can be as simple as having something introduced into the equation that you weren’t expecting.
When I was a kid, my favorite grandmother died. After my parents told me, they gave me space when I needed space and comfort when I needed comfort. The problem was that as time went on, I wasn’t letting myself work through it.
One day, though, after school I came home to find the house deserted, though I could hear a lot of strange noises coming from the backyard.
When I got out there, my parents had set up a miniature carnival in the backyard complete with games, prizes, my parents dressed up as clowns, and all my friends sitting around a big table.