1. Long
2. Boring
3. Confusing

I confess that we occasionally wrote notes to each other and played unusual sibling games to pass the time. We did sit with our brother Andrew, after all.

“Can I borrow your black wool skirt?” Sister called from the closet. I was in the bathroom drying my hair.

“Sure, can I wear your brown shoes?” I hollered back.

“Yeah, no problem…oh, and can I wear…” She sort of drifted off, her voice getting lost in the clothes.

If you don’t have a sister then perhaps you don’t understand that your wardrobe, like, doubles in size whenever you are together. It’s a totally awesome perk of being both sisters and roommates in college.

Twenty minutes later we were dressed, coiffed, made up and ready for our day. We linked arms and walked smoothly into the chapel, meeting up with Andrew on the way. The three of us had made a habit of sitting together in chapel and eating most all of our meals together. “The Club” is what we called ourselves, and we sat at this little two-person round table next to the microwaves. Not everyone was cool enough to be in “The Club” and it was a tight squeeze for those who were.

This particular Wednesday morning, however, when we walked into the chapel, something was different.

“Um, where’s all the chairs?” Sister asked, glancing around.

“That’s…really weird,” Andrew said.

We started to giggle. By this time, it was ten minutes past time for chapel to start and everyone was milling around, trying to figure out where all the chairs went. The school’s president was not looking happy at all. That was kind of funny too.

Suddenly someone burst in the side door of the chapel and yelled, “The chairs are all on the soccer field!” and guys streamed out the door to go pick up stacks and bring them back into the chapel.

Those awful, black plastic, ill-proportioned chairs.

“What the heck…” I said.

Chapel was a total wash that day. Everyone was all abuzz about the whole “chair prank” as it was beginning to be called, but the administration was not happy at all. At the end of chapel, one of the deans stood up and demanded that if anyone knew who had taken the chairs, they should come forward with the information immediately. Andrew, Sister and I looked at each other and crossed our eyes.

Once chapel was dismissed we stood up and grabbed our bags, Sister and I linking arms as we walked out of the chapel. Joey had been noticeably absent. Andrew had a class next hour, so Sister and I walked back to our room, whispering secret sister-like things to each other as we went.

The wind picked up just then (it’s always windy in Iowa, but particularly in the middle of corn country because there aren’t very many trees to stop it) and my newly chopped locks blew in my face all at once. I shook my head and tried to tuck it behind my ears again just as Sister said, “Do you think Joey had anything to do with the chair prank? I didn’t see him there today and…”

“BUT SISTER!” I gushed, “I was wondering the same thing as well!” (She and I have our own vernacular. We speak to each other in Jane Austen’s English – with accents sometimes, I’m ashamed to admit – and most people cannot understand it/us for a good long while.)

“Maybe he’ll be online when we get back to our room and you can ask him,” she said, jabbing me in the ribs.

“What.” I said, piously, “He’s just my friend.”

“I’m not that stupid,” she said, crossing her eyes at me.

I opened the door and we stomped up the stairs to our second-floor room, which had a bird’s eye view of the boys dorm and the circle. Prime spying real estate if you ask me.

“So when we’re done with finals wanna have a Pride and Prejudice marathon?” Sister asked me.

We traditionally watched P&P once a year, with our traditional P&P marathon food (being: a container of iced sugar cookies, one bag of microwave popcorn apiece, and at least one bottle of sparkling grape juice) and we were several years overdue on one of our six hour Jane Austen fests.

“I am so in. Let’s do it the weekend we go to Mom and Dad’s before I move to Des Moines,” I said. I glanced at my computer screen, threw my books on the floor and my inhibitions out the window. “Look, Joey’s on. Want me to ask him about the chairs?”

Sister, by this time, was in the bathroom brushing her teeth for some reason. “Shhhurwwwree,” she mumbled around a mouth of toothpaste.

I took a deep breath and typed, So…we were missing lots of chairs today in chapel. It was really funny.

You were? He responded.

Yeah, where were you? You totally missed it.

I overslept…

“Did he fess up yet?” Sister asked, coming up behind me and resting her chin on my shoulder. She smelled minty fresh and was still holding a string of dental floss in her left hand, a pair of socks was in her right.

“No, he didn’t, I’m still working on it. And what’s up with the socks?”

“I was cold earlier,” She replied smugly.

“You wore socks with stockings underneath your skirt?” I raised my eyebrows at her. “That is like seven fashion sins at the same time.”

“I was cold,” she repeated.

“Well, I guess that’s not as bad as the time it was -20 degrees in January and I wore a pair of flannel pants under my skirt,” I said. “But I cannot believe I didn’t notice you had black wool socks on with that skirt.”

I glanced at her skirt. “Wait, that is MY skirt. You seriously didn’t ask before you wore that.”

“I did too, don’t you remember? And, don’t worry, the socks are mine,” she said, throwing them in the laundry basket.

“Sisters,” I muttered under my breath, glad she hadn’t noticed yet that I was wearing her pink shirt with the flowers and I hadn’t asked this morning either.

Sorry, I typed to Joey, I just realized my Sister stole my skirt without asking.

I couldn’t think of any really good way to be sly about asking him if he was one of the guys involved in the chair prank, so I decided I’d just blame it on Sister. That worked for just about everything else, why not this?

Sister wants me to ask you if you know anything about the chair prank because we think it was hilarious. I stared at what I had written and then pushed Return before I could think about it any more.

“OK,” I yelled at Sister who was digging around in my part of the closet for who knows what, “I asked him.”

She was out of the closet in a flash. “What did he say?” She resumed her chin-on-my-shoulder position and read the chat transcript. “Wait – you had no creativity and had to blame this whole curiosity thing on me?” She bellowed.

“Sorry, you’re an easy target,” I replied. “Plus you steal my stuff. And wear socks with stockings in March.”

Joey still hadn’t replied.

Our four eyes stared at my monitor, willing Joey to type a response.

“Maybe he died over there,” Sister suggested.

“Yeah, that’s likely,” I agreed.

We stared some more. Still no response.

“Looks like you made him mad,” I jibed.

Then we noticed the little icon that let us know that he was typing. We held our breath.

Yeah, I might know something about those chairs…, he replied.

We squealed. We were such girls.

“I was right, I was right!” Sister crowed.

My interest in Joey was immediately piqued. Before the days of X I had always been a prankster…if there was any kind of mischief being made, you could have guaranteed that I was in the middle of it. But it had been several years since I had pulled a prank on anyone.

(I think the last decent prank had been that fish head I managed to sweet-talk out of the guy at the HyVee meat counter…and that Kelli and I had buried in a Goldfish crackers bag. We set outside Mark Miller’s door to get him back for the ten live goldfish he’d taped all over ours. Kelli and I had been roommates when I was going to Iowa State University, where I spent the two years prior to going to the Bible college, and I tell you what…Iowa State was not safe with the two of us on campus. Especially when we were roommates.)

“Well…should we go to lunch?” Sister asked me, snapping me out of my memory of pranks and dead fish.

“Might as well. Let me just tell Joey I’m leaving,” I said. I typed, We’re going to lunch now. Talk to you later.

We walked over to the cafeteria arm in arm, as per usual, whispering about Joey’s prank and trying to figure out how in the world they had pulled it off. All those chairs must have taken hours to move. We couldn’t figure it out, though, and Sister insisted that I try to wheedle the method out of Joey as soon as possible. I told her I’d do what I could.

Grabbing our trays, we went through the line and tried to find something that looked appetizing. Our choices were very limited.

I heard Sister say, “OH! Hi. OK, so that was the most awesome thing ever,” to someone. I glanced up and saw her talking to Joey. Clearly she was complimenting him for the chair prank. And I wasn’t sure he really knew who she was, he looked kind of confused. Then, suddenly, he put two and two together and realized she was my sister. (Poor Joey has never been good at remembering names or the relationship of different people to one another.)

“Thanks,” he said. He looked relieved that Sister wasn’t just some random freshman that had figured out he was responsible for the chair prank.

“Are you in trouble yet?” I asked him, pulling my tray up alongside his.

“Ask me later today. I’m pretty sure So-And-So ratted on us,” he said. He coughed a little. His eyes looked a little red and droopy, maybe he was coming down with something?

“Well, you have to tell me all about it later,” I said.

“Will do,” he replied. Then he smiled at me, the kind of smile that filled up all the barren places in my heart and scared me to death, all in one fell swoop. I turned and sat down at the table where Sister and Andrew were already sitting. Sister was whispering feverishly to Andrew, filling him on what we’d learned about Joey and the chairs.

I shook my head to clear the cobwebs of confusion and started to eat my dorm-food lunch. It wasn’t very delicious.

By the end of the afternoon, I had squeezed almost all the information out of Joey and had a fairly accurate perception of what went down the night before.

He and his roommate were the ringleaders. They had gotten a group of fifteen guys together and had sworn them to utmost secrecy. (Eight had bailed so only seven of them wound up making mischief.) Joey had popped the screen off their dorm room (Major Violation #1 – removing a screen from your window) and the guys had sneaked across campus to the Convocation Building at 12:00 sharp (Major Violation #2 – breaking curfew). Joey had climbed up the outside of the building and into the crawlspace on the roof where he opened the door he had propped open with a stick the afternoon before (Major Violation #3 – breaking and entering).

The guys were divided into several groups. One was on the roof with a walkie-talkie and when Security drove by he’d radio down to the guys who were in the chapel area. They were stacking chairs four to five high (Major Violation #4 – misappropriation of school property), and then another group of guys would run the chairs across the street to the soccer field, which was normally locked…but somehow they had the combination (Major Violation #5 – breaking and entering).

Sometime around 3:00 a.m. the guy on the roof, which was not Joey by this point, saw Security pull into the Convocation Building to do a routine check and thought they were busted for sure. So the guys dove for cover and waited it out as the Security officer walked right by them and didn’t even notice (Major Violation #6 – disrespect for God-given authority). They scrapped the mission shortly thereafter, thinking they were busted, and rushed back to their dorm rooms, where they all overslept and missed the reaction from their fellow students and the president of the school, who was supposed to preach in chapel that day (Major Violation #7 – disrespect for God-given authority).

It bears mentioning that for one Major Violation a student is very likely to be expelled. Somehow, Joey and his co-pranksters had managed to rack up seven Major Violations apiece…two weeks before the end of the semester. (They had pretty much covered all the Major Violation options in one shot, too, except for maybe kissing and seeing movies.)

I related this story to Sister who was quite amazed by Joey’s perspicuity in relating such an elaborate prank. She and I were also dying to find out what, exactly, was going to happen to the seven pranksters who were, at this very moment, sitting in the Dean’s office waiting for judgment to fall. They had definitely been ratted on.

An hour later, my cell phone buzzed on the desk beside me. It was Joey.

“Hi,” he rasped. The cough from earlier sounded like it was turning into a full-fledged cold. He’d probably picked it up running chairs into the soccer field last night.

“Hey, are you expelled?” I asked.

“Nah, they went easy on us. $50 fine each and we have to scrub the mats and all the chairs in the chapel tonight.”

I was so relieved that he hadn’t been expelled.

To be continued…