Your Best Back-to-School Transformation Story

Now that it is firmly in September, I assume all children are back in school. I don’t envy them, though I do envy how transformative returning to the hallowed halls of high school can feel. When you’re a child, you can totally reinvent yourself and return to class anew. I definitely went punk the summer of 7th grade and never turned back. And now I need to know: what’s your best back-to-school transformation story? Did you try to go goth and failed miserably? Did you learn a new skill as to become “the magic kid”? Tell us in the comments below.

And now, I know you’re just dying to read the best of the best from last week. It’s a good one. Here are the greatest pranks you guys have ever pulled, and I don’t trust a single one of you:

Mireille is sensational, like a She-Hulk, good:

This one time, I had to fart but I held it in. Then I told my brother to pull my finger and when he did, I PUNCHED HIM IN THE JUNK!

eatthecheesenicholson2, nothing ever happens on Wednesdays. That should’ve been their first clue.:

I’m guessing y’all wont find this as hilarious as I still find it. Anyway, back in high school, some friends and I broke into the school late one Monday night and plastered the walls with flyers saying “It’s Happening Wednesday.” There was so much hype for Wednesday. Obviously nothing happened Wednesday.

yannos, this is also my prank:

I once pranked the world into believing that I’d been keeping my shit together this entire time and that everything is going to be okay.

Sipowitz, this is a good prank. More commenters need to prank other comments. Lord knows y’all do it to us everyday:

On a kinja blog post (can’t remember if it was Lifehacker, the Skillet, or what) the writer asked about readers’ favorite cooking “hacks” so I said that microwaving an egg still in its shell for 5 minutes will get you a perfect hard boiled egg. In reality the egg will explode in your microwave and you’ll have a good hour of cleaning it, not to mention the smell. The writer starred or commented on my post, bringing it to the forefront.

I think I came clean and told people not to do it. Maybe? Hard to remember, was a long time ago and I’ve drank an Olympic sized swimming pool’s worth of bourbon since then.

salviati, you gone and fucked up!:

The best prank that I didn’t pull came to me at about 12:15 am January 1st 2000, when I realized that what I should have done 15 minutes earlier was find the circuit breaker box at the party I was at and thrown the main breaker. A missed opportunity.

SadieMae, you’re a monster:

When my sister and brother-in-law got married, she (stupidly) left me a key to her house while they honeymooned so I could bring in the mail, water the plants, etc. I did a few obvious pranks (like Saran Wrap on the toilet) to throw them off the scent.

Then I rigged their bedroom fan so that when the light switch was turned on, the fan would instantly go to high speed. And then I put as much glitter (not the tiny pieces but the confetti ones that are maybe 1/4 inch across) on the top of the fan blades as I could possibly fit there – little hills of glitter – placing it very, very carefully so that it wouldn’t drift down over the edges of the blades. It took about a half hour to get it all up there and then carefully check the bed and the floor to be sure no stray bits had fallen down.

And the prank turned out WAY better than even I thought it would. See, my sister told me later that when they came home, tired from their flight back from Hawaii, she stretched out on the bed without turning the light on. My brother-in-law went to take a shower, then covered himself, head to toe, with a special ointment he used for his eczema. He walked into the bedroom naked – letting the ointment soak in before putting his pajamas on – and then flipped the light switch on. Glitter not only exploded all over the room but stuck to pretty much every inch of the ointment too, so that my brother-in-law was basically a very startled, confused, human-shaped glitter ball.

Apparently it took forever to get the glitter off him, the bed, the tables, etc. And when they sold the house three years later, she said they were still finding bits of glitter stuck to their feet from where it was embedded in the carpet. It’s been 15 years, and we’re all very close, but I’m still not sure they’ve quiiiite forgiven me for this prank. Worth it, though.

No thanks, OttoVonBizMarkie:

When I was 12 my parents went out for the night and left me and my 6-year old brother with a babysitter. She was very nice, maybe early 20s, and we’d had her before so we were quite happy. I think her name was Lauren. My parents weren’t coming back that night so they’d made up the guest bedroom for Lauren to stay the night.

Well, around bedtime, my brother and I were messing around in the basement and I spy this enormous spider in the corner. I mean ENORMOUS. It was probably a tarantula (we live in California and we see them sometimes) but it was the biggest tarantula I’ve seen in my life. With it’s legs spread out it was easily the size of a dinner plate. My dad still thinks it was a Goliath birdeater that came in a shipment of bananas or something.

Anyway, I hate spiders, but the only person I know who hates them more than me is Lauren. I should mention at this point that I was madly in love with Lauren and, being 12, I figured scaring the shit out of her was the best way to express my affection. So, I muster up my courage and manage to sweep it into a an empty shoe box with a broom. Then I take the box upstairs to the guest room (Lauren is busy watching TV) and I dump this Lovecraftian horror under the sheets and quickly remake the bed as tightly as I can to try to keep it from escaping.

Immediately my brother, who I’ve sworn to secrecy at this point, and I tell her we’re tired and we’re going to bed. Not 10 minutes later we hear a scream that probably warranted a 911 call and we rush to the room. Incredibly the spider is exactly where I left it and Lauren is huddled in the corner. Somehow the spider has not moved a muscle, and in a moment of lucidity I start laughing and tell Lauren I can’t believe she fell for our prank and actually thought the spider was real. She has some choice words for me that my parents would not have approved of and then proceeds to grab the very much real spider by the thorax. At this point I’m wondering if the thing is dead, but upon being grabbed the fucker squirms and pounces directly onto the front of her sweater. She screams bloody murder and starts running around shaking the sweater, but despite probably weighing half a pound the spider clings tight for what felt like a full minute until she finally just grabs it with her hand and fling it into the toilet.

But it doesn’t end there. She flushes the toilet and, I shit you not, the spider just spreads its legs out around the hole and refuses to go down. It withstands multiple flushes (a Toto toilet, so you know it’s for real) and is clearly not interested in finding its way to the ocean. That said, it appears to be stuck in the toilet as the bowl is too smooth for it to escape. Lauren then calls my parents explaining the situation, adding that the spider bit her and there’s no way she’s staying the night (the spider did in fact bite her when she grabbed it, though she hadn’t noticed right away due to the adrenaline). My dad tells her that tarantulas (his working theory before seeing it) aren’t venomous, but they’ll be right over.

Anyway my parents are less than thrilled that we ruined their night but they come home to deal with it. My dad, who feels the same way about spiders as most people do about cats (passive indifference tinged with slight affection) just slides it onto a piece of cardboard and tosses it outside. I bought Lauren a belly-button ring (yes, hers was pierced) as reparations, but she never came back. I like to think that the spider is still out there, watching over us in gratitude for sparing its life. Or plotting vengeance for ruining its night, idk.

Relive your harrowing adolescence for everyone else’s enjoyment below, please. Thanks!