100 Things About Me # 43 B

As promised, the second half of the couch story:

The purple couch sat in my parents’ garage for quite some time. Then my dad threatened to throw it away if I didn’t find a home for it. Well, we couldn’t have that, could we?

I happened to have a LOT of free time my senior year. One of the cool things at our school is that when you are a Junior or Senior, you can take college classes for free at the high school. And I did it, for the sole reason that college semesters ended earlier than ours did, so anyone who took college classes would end up with an extra study hall for the last two weeks of each semester. And if you got finished with all the work before that, you would get even longer. So I took two college classes, which happened to fall in the two periods right after lunch, with a study hall after that. Since the second one was a writing class, I breezed through it in a hurry & ended up with a month of free time.

Two friends of mine were in the same class, and got done around the same time I did. And we did a lot of plotting during that study hall. When I mentioned the purple couch to them, they both decided that it needed to come into the senior hallway. Since the only seating we had out there was benches made out of leftover pieces of wood, I thought the couch would be perfect. One of my friends had a pickup, so we took off over to my house and loaded the couch up.

We were very incognito about the whole thing. The truck pulled into a little alcove that no one used and we hauled the couch into the senior hallway. It was a good thing they were guys, because it made all the work go a LOT faster. Plus, I had insisted to them that we wouldn’t be able to do it by ourselves, which only made them want to do it that much more.

After we got the couch situated (against a wall, because of the whole “reclining” feature) where we wanted it, the three of us sat down. Our principal came through and rolled his eyes at us, promising that the couch would stay.

Right at that time, the bell rang to signify the end of that period. And we were bombarded! I think half the senior class piled on top of us! Someone took a picture with my camera, but it was a crappy one, so it didn’t turn out. I was super bummed!

Then after school, the seniors (it’s a small school, only about 120 in my graduating class & that was BIG) signed the couch in varying colors of permanent ink. We got several more confirmations from teachers and other staff people that the couch would stay, but when we got to school the next morning, it was gone. And we were irate! Several of us spent the next few days searching every corner of the school, but to no avail. Our couch was lost.

But Snow week we heard a rumor that the couch had been found. No one had seen it yet, but the rumor was that it was going to make an appearance at the pep rally that Friday. We all waited very patiently for the time to come.

And when it did, we weren’t disappointed! We walked into the gym and saw a couch that was covered in a blanket. Those of us who had seen the couch the first time around knew exactly what it was. And even some of the underclassmen who had been walking through the hallway or heard the story were busy whispering.

The couch finally made its rebut at the beginning of the pep rally. Everyone erupted into cheers as the blanket was ripped away, revealing our purple couch! The Snowball King and Queen candidates did a version of Singled Out and the winners all sat on the couch until the end of the pep rally.

After it was over, we begged and pleaded for the couch to be back in the Senior hallway, but we were shot down. A classmate took it home, and last I heard, it was their couch in their fish house. I don’t know if it still is today, but even if it’s not, that purple vinyl couch will go down as one of the coolest things ever to grace our little Podunk High School.