The Crusty Underwear Incident

I think I must have been a troublemaker from the beginning. Either that or the pretentious private school I went to growing up unwittingly turned me into one. In truth, it is probably a bit of both.

For the most part, I had good experiences with school as a kid. From the time I was in elementary school until the time I graduated high school, I attended a small private prep school called Berkeley Preparatory Academy. To this day, Berkeley is an uppity institution that claims to be one of the best schools in the state of Florida. The school promises to provide an exceptional educational experience in a safe and wholesome environment. And, during my time there, it made good on its promise. As Berkeley students, we were sheltered from most all of the scary things that can happen at schools these days –hard drugs, violence, people who do not shop exclusively at J. Crew, etc.

The school’s impenetrable bubble was reinforced by extensive rules governing students’ behavior and establishing the proper standards of conduct. And we were not only expected to be well-behaved at all times, we were also expected to be presentable – a feat that was accomplished by requiring adherence to a strict dress code that, in effect, doubled as birth control measure.

The school was staffed with an army of administrators who enforced these rigid rules in large part for the good of the students. But, being a private school, Berkeley was also quite invested in projecting a good image to the public, especially potential donors. In fact, the Berkeley name was so precious that the school had a policy referred to as the “long arm of Berkeley.” The “long arm of Berkeley” was the school’s way of referring to the idea that Berkeley’s jurisdiction over you extended beyond the school’s perimeter. For example, did the cops get called to the harmless, but mildly loud, party you threw while your parents were out of town? Yes. Does that fact arguably have nothing to do with your scholastic endeavors? Yes. Is Berkeley going to expel you anyway because there was a chance that you made the school look really bad? Absolutely.

But, despite the fact that the school took itself entirely too seriously, I have to admit that I liked it there. The school had one undeniable upside. It served as fertile ground for the development of intimate and lifelong friendships. Berkeley started in pre-K and went all the way through high school, which meant that I was with the same kids from the time we were losing our teeth through the time when we were losing our virginities. And, because the school kept each grade fairly small, I saw the same kids all day, everyday. With this degree of constant familiarity, classmates became like siblings and my friends were a huge influence on my development.

Unfortunately for my parents, upon entering Berkeley, I found the perfect group of little perverts to be friends with. And, much to the school’s dismay, we were thick as thieves throughout our entire tenure at the school.

My particular group of friends was a great fit for me. There were five of us and we were all little deviants who, at one point or another, got in fairly serious trouble with the administrators at our school. Our mission was pretty much the same each and every school day: embarrass the shit out of each other in front of as many bystanders, preferably upperclassmen, as much as possible. Whether we accomplished this ultimate goal by unzipping each other’s jumpers (and thereby rendering the victim naked in front of others) or by squirting water on each other’s crotches (to make it look like the victim had peed herself), was of little consequence. Most everything we did was designed to make each other laugh hysterically and, most always, at the expense of someone else.

I was perhaps a bit more devilish than some of my other good friends – a point they will concede to this day, over twenty years later. When I say I was a bit more devilish, what I mean was that I was a little more eager to humiliate one of my good buddies at a moment’s notice. But make no mistake, I was not immune to being the butt of a good joke. Each one of us was fair game at all times. However, while each one of us was vulnerable, there was one outlier friend who managed to always dodge harassment – a girl who, for the purposes of anonymity, I will call Jillian.

Jillian was my closest friend growing up. She is a drop-dead gorgeous redhead with a face full of freckles and, when we were in middle school, she was cute as a button. In addition to being beautiful, Jillian was always incredibly fun. She laughed constantly and often was the reason behind eruptions of laughter among the rest of us. We loved Jillian fiercely and would’ve cut a bitch on her behalf. But, while I could write a book about Jillian’s good qualities, she had one attribute that really got under all of our skins. She was untouchable.

Somehow, Jillian was never the butt of any jokes and she was never the victim of any of our embarrassing antics. She flew under the radar and laughed along with the rest of us, but was somehow spared from being the one we were laughing at. And, in the ninth grade, for the first time, much to my amazement, I noticed this. “How has Jillian gotten away with this?!” I thought. Something had to be done.

I needed to inform my friends of my shocking realization ASAP. So, the next day at school, during our lunch hour, I waited until Jillian went to the bathroom. As soon as she left, I broke the news with total seriousness. “You guys, we REALLY need to get Jillian. Do you realize we have NEVER gotten her?! How did we let this happen?? How have we not realized this before now?!” I said wide-eyed. “We MUST do something!” I continued dramatically, as only a thirteen year-old girl can.

My friends were equally horrified and soon we were all on the same page. Jillian’s avoiding being the victim of our friendly harassment was unacceptable and could not stand. Furthermore, unzipping her jumper in front of the junior year boys would not do. We needed a prank of epic proportions – prank Valhalla. And, I just so happened to have a prank that I had wanted to put into motion for a while.

This prank was definitely big enough to pay Jillian back for the fact that her pride had gone untarnished for years. My friends scooted in closer as I explained my proposed plan as quickly as possible. Just before Jillian returned from the bathroom, we unanimously agreed to make my proposal a reality. And, the next day at school, the plan, and Jillian for that matter, was going to go down big time.

My epic prank required some front-end preparations, so that night I waited patiently until my parents went to sleep. I snuck downstairs after the coast was clear and headed into the laundry room. Back behind the boxes of Christmas decorations was an old laundry hamper. Inside the hamper was a collection of my father’s old Hanes underwear. To this day, I have no idea why my parents were saving my dad’s old underwear. I think it was their intention to use them as cleaning rags (as they had been washed), but I am still not sure.

I opened the hamper as quietly as possible and snatched out exactly five pairs of the underpants. Then, I snuck into the kitchen and got to work. “Ketchup, chunky peanut butter, A-1 sauce,” I catalogued. “That should do it.” I quickly mixed the magical ingredients together until they made a lumpy paste that was the perfect color brown and just the right consistency. I grabbed the spatula from the second drawer and spread dollops of the mixture onto each pair of underwear. After I finished artificially soiling the fifth pair, I laid out each pair side-by-side on the kitchen counter to give them one final once over. “Perfect. These look even more realistic than if I had pooped all over them myself” I whispered. I could not have been more pleased.

The next day at school we put our plan into action. It was all going to go down during our lunch period. Jillian, along with half of the other students in the high school, got out of her last class before lunch a good fifteen minutes after the rest of us did. We were going to use this fifteen-minute period to “decorate” the entire outside of Jillian’s locker with the crusty underwear I had so masterfully created the night before. Jillian would then get out of class and arrive at her locker only to see it covered in and desecrated by five pairs of poopy pants. And, while she would stare mouth open at her locker, all the upper classmen walking by would see the underwear also and stare mouths open at her. Jillian would be associated with soiled underwear for the remainder of our time in high school and the other four of us would laugh forever. It would be nothing short of amazing.

Everything started out perfectly and, as we strategically placed the underwear all over the outside of Jillian’s locker, our shit eating grins could not have been bigger. And there was good reason to smile – Jillian would have been completely mortified if she saw the fruits of our labors.

But, as fate would have it, Jillian never actually saw what we had done. As it turns out, there were a few incredibly tragic details I had failed to take into account when I devised our master plan the day before.

What we did not factor into our plan was the possibility that Jillian’s Spanish teacher would punish her class that day and make them stay in class for an extra ten minutes. We also did not foresee that, in this time, a group of eleventh grade boys might figure out that the poop on the underwear was not real feces and then start kicking the underwear all over the school for fun. Additionally, we failed to predict that there could possibly be not one, but four, families of prospective students touring the campus that afternoon who would happen to witness the students playing hacky sack with the soiled underpants. Finally, we definitely did not envision our school principal being forced to walk around the otherwise pristine campus picking up the dirty underpants with a long skinny stick and ultimately disposing of them in a big orange Home Depot bucket. I failed to account for these contingencies the day before. And, unfortunately, they all happened.

From the far end of the high school campus, we watched in horror as our brilliant plan unraveled before our very eyes. We panicked. “Fuck (we had started cursing a few years earlier)! Shit! We need to hide!” The four of us sprinted to the girls’ bathroom on the elementary side of the school’s campus. “What do we do?” “Did you see Ms. Morrison?!” “Fuck!” “Can they figure out it was us?!” “How could they figure out it was us?!” “They’ll definitely know it was us!” We were talking over each other at light speed. “What do we do?” The question lingered frozen in the air.

Over the course of the next ten minutes, we debated whether the administrators would be able to trace the underwear back to us. The school was going to want to know who brought the crusty underpants onto campus to begin with, so we knew the eleventh grade boys who played with the underwear would not be the ones getting into trouble. We also knew that the administrators would interrogate all of the students who potentially witnessed the whole incident. And, worst of all, we knew that a handful of our well-behaved classmates had seen us with the underwear in the first place. “Fuck. They’ll totally tell on us,” one of us pointed out. “Well, maybe we won’t be expelled if we turn ourselves in” another friend offered. We stood there dazed, knowing that we had no choice but to admit our guilt.

The next hour saw all of us – except Jillian, of course – in the principal’s office attempting to explain the whole crusty underwear incident. Well, we did not try to explain it so much as we tried to earn brownie points by taking responsibility for it and pretending that we were incredibly remorseful. After explaining to us in grueling detail why were such despicable young women, the principal, miraculously, took mercy on us. She actually thanked us for our apology and our only punishment was that she would be sending a letter to each of our parents alerting them to our horrid transgressions (and likely advising them to seek therapy for each of us).

That afternoon, after school was over, we congregated in the school parking lot waiting for our parents to pick us up. We felt about as good as walking underwear stains ourselves and we were all experiencing the same impulse: crawl underground and hide from the rest of the student body for the remainder of high school.

Of course there was one of us who was, as always, not embarrassed at all. That asshole Jillian. While we stood stone faced and humiliated, she was smiling like the cat who swallowed the canary. Despite the fact that she was supposed to be the target that day, the joke ended up being on the four of us. Now the administrators, the eleventh grade boys, and all of our classmates associated us, not Jillian, with soiled underwear. This was an ending so tragic, so horrible, so unbelievably mortifying that none of us saw it coming nor could anyone make this shit up (pun not intended).

Over the course of the next few days, we maintained vigils at our respective mailboxes. Like a gift from God, though, the letters never came. Apparently, the principal did not know quite how to describe what we had done. I can only imagine being her. “Ummm…Dear parents, I am writing to inform you that your child brought men’s underwear covered in fake feces to school last week. You should know this…ummm…because it is horrendously disgusting. Please punish your child appropriately.”

Because the principal opted out of notifying our parents, for many years, most of our parents were none the wiser. When I was in college, though, I finally told my mom – assuming she would think the story was funny, of course. Unfortunately, my assumption was incorrect and my recounting of the tale was not her proudest parenting moment. I guess no one wants to be the mom of the kid who steals her dad’s underwear, covers it in fake poop, and then happily totes it to school the next day.

As for Jillian, unlike the rest of us, she did not have to worry about intercepting any sort of letter from the school. And somehow, she remained untouchable throughout the remainder of high school. In fact, she was the only one of us who managed to dodge being suspended or placed on probation for other harmless but improper behaviors during our final years at Berkeley. To this day, I do not know how she never got into trouble. It was certainly not for a lack of making trouble.

These days, I am far less of a troublemaker. Some of this is maturity and some of it is the fact that, as an adult, you just don’t have the same opportunities to fuck with your friends that you do as a kid. Oftentimes, I really miss the girls I grew up with and all of the fun we used to have. It was a time like no other and it provided me with an endless repository of great memories. And, despite its horrible and grossly unfair ending, the crusty underwear story ranks among my favorite of these memories. It reminds me of how weird we all were, how mischievous we were, and the lengths we would go to humiliate each other. Most of all, it makes me realize how lucky I was to have this little group of misfits to call best friends during my formative years.