“Ugh, let’s push her bed out into the hall,” I said.

“Let’s go one further and put it outside,” she said.

“Too much work to take it up and down stairs,” I said. “If we’re going to go to all that trouble, we might as well put it on the roof.”

See, the house had a flat, commercial-style roof, and our bedroom windows happened to open right out onto it. Convenient for sunbathing, and also as a stupid-sister-bed-repository. We disassembled her bed, carried the pieces through the window, then reassembled it on the roof, bedsheets and blankets and all.

It was totally worth the months-long grounding, didn’t have much of a social life anyway.

a) traded the contents of their bedroom bookshelf with their kitchen pantry

b) planted a small garden under their kitchen table (plastic flowers, real dirt, including a tiny white picket fence)

c) decorated their living room with dollar store Hello Kitty banners

d) left cheaply-bought underpants scattered all about

e) photographed ourselves doing these things and other things like jumping on their bed

f) developed the photographs and stuck them wherever relevant (the jumping-bed one was placed over their bed, the planting-garden one in the kitchen)

g) for one photo we had put on some of their clothes (off their laundry line – I thought going into their dressers was crossing a line) and posed like in their wedding photo; this one we framed and placed beside their wedding photo.

They were gone for the weekend and the whole time I was texting them hints like, “You sure have a lot of books! They’re very heavy!” and “Your kitchen has lots of vegetables, it needs more flowers…”

I still think that was pretty epic.

Unfortunately that was the high point of the prank war. Soon enough they tried to turn it on me, but it ended very, very badly.

(We all went out and got drunk, me especially, so as a group they walked me back to my apartment. I gave X my keys, who passed them on to Y, who went ahead and let himself into my place. He switched things around like putting the TV remote in the silverware drawer. However, the big thing I noticed when we got there was that he’d moved my bed, and I panicked. I totally thought someone had broken in and was trying to send some sort of message, and even after learning it was just a prank I could not stop sobbing, and I felt out of sorts for ages afterward. Maybe I overreacted, and maybe I can dish but can’t take, but even now, years later, I think that’s the kind of prank that’s just not too funny when played on a young woman living by herself in a foreign country.)