RA Stories: “Sparks”…Everywhere!

One night around 11:30, I was sitting at my computer finishing a paper when I heard what sounded like gunshots coming from across the property. Wondering where the noise had come from, I went out to the gazebo in the outside center courtyard of our residence hall where all the smokers go for their nighttime nicotine fixes. I asked a couple of them if they heard anything, and one of them said someone had lit off some firecrackers in the hallway of the second floor of building 3. A quick call to that building’s RA confirmed the fact, and from what she told me, I knew I was going to get a laugh out of what was up there. When I got to the room where the firecrackers had been placed, I found a rather large collection of spent fireworks lying in the hallway outside a particular fraternity member’s apartment. On his door, someone had written “shave my beaver…Pikes suck” in permanent marker!

But that wasn’t the funniest part. When I got back down to the courtyard, I happened to run into the guy whose door had been the object of this “assault.” He was obviously drunk, and other residents said he was downstairs when the fireworks went off—so he hadn’t yet seen any of the stuff on his door. He was sharing a cigarette with his girlfriend, and when he finally awakened to the fact that this all happened to HIS door, he asked me what the pranksters had written. When I finally told him, his reaction was instant. In a fit of anger, he threw his cigarette down and ran off to go see the damage. What he didn’t realize was that he had thrown the cigarette behind him—and right at his girlfriend’s face! All we saw were the sparks from the cigarette as she tried to bat it out of her face. My friend and I laughed all the way back to my room as I got ready to write the evening’s incident report.