Joey DeLong

It was October of 2014, the air was getting chillier by the day, leaves were changing color and falling to the ground.  Fall was officially here, and Halloween was on its way.  Everyone at Hidden Valley Middle School was pumped, except for a few.  Halloween was the same boring holiday every year, where kids dress up as their favorite superhero or Disney princess.  To the eighth graders on bus 43, trick-or-treating wasn’t very exciting… until a seventh grader began sitting in the eighth grade seats.

            Bus seats in middle school are sacred, you have to earn your way to the back of the bus.  From sixth to eighth grade, you slowly make your way, seat by seat, to the back.  Only the eighth graders sat in the back unless you were invited by an eighth grader, which rarely happened.  But there was a seventh grader, sitting in the back acting like he had every right to sit there.  As you can imagine no one was happy with him, and we were ready to take care of it.

            Halloween was coming, and is full of pranks, so we figured we’d pull a prank on this gutsy seventh grader.  But what would we do?  We had tried everything to make the seventh grader go away.  We offered him candy, and tried to block him from getting into back of the bus, (he was a football player, by the way.)  What else was left?  Only the oldest trick in the book… Toilet paper.  It was brilliant!  Every eighth grader loved the idea and immediately joined in.  Since the kid rode our bus, we knew where he lived, so we went trick-or-treating, then began our beautiful plan.

            Everyone had brought toilet paper so we would have enough.  We started at my house and discussed how tonight would go down.  We ran two blocks down to our victim’s house and observed it and all of it’s features.  To our disappointment, there was no car in the drive way for us to wrap, so we just went with everything else.  First, we wrapped all of their trees, then we wrapped some around their house’s columns.  After wrapping everything in the yard, it was time for the finale.  We each grabbed a roll, and chucked it over their house, rang their door bell, and ran.  The seventh grader never sat in the back again.

            Looking back on that night, I feel proud of myself for taking care of my problem.  Plus I had fun while I was at it.  I’d even do it again.