I walked into my room and what I saw made me drop my bags to the floor. Nothing was the way it should be; my whole room was completely rearranged to madness.

A couple of weeks ago, my friends put me, and my paranoia to the test. It all started on a Saturday morning after a sleepover. I had left my house at around 10:45 am to get a haircut, leaving my friends, sophomore Cooper McIntosh and sophomore Treven Hipwell alone in my room for 40 minutes. When I returned, I interrupted what seemed to be some mischief in the making.

What I came back to was a 14-part elaborate sticky note scavenger hunt led by numerous hints and inside jokes written on sticky notes, the final prize being a half demolished fan stuffed into my sofa. (An inside joke. Mr. Fan deserves it.) However, a note on the fan read, “Congrats Juns, you have found your prize. (There is something else waiting.)”

That single note sent chills down my spine in fear of what else was waiting; Was it in my room right now? How big is this prank? I had no idea what was in store for me.

My parents are divorced, so every week I switch whose house I stay at. I had done multiple full-room searches before I had to go to my dad’s house for the week. Unable to search anymore, my fears only got worse with my friends teasing me with extremely vague hints posted on a burner Instagram account owned by Hipwell; some of which include “When Jon returned, nothing was the way it should be” and “The world is spinning.”

Hipwell said that I had no idea what was coming. “It was like a big slap in the face, but he didn’t know he had been slapped yet.”

It wasn’t until Thursday, about a week after the scavenger hunt, that I learned the true size of what seemed to be this minute prank. McIntosh let me ask a question concerning the secret. I asked him if it was just the two friends in on the prank. He stared at me for a moment. Was it three people? He kept staring, so I continued counting until he stopped me at five. There were five people in my room on that day. This only got me more excited to finally get back to my mother’s house to continue my search for the final secret. I was promised that on Sunday, we would all get together and they would reveal it to me.

That promised day, I started receiving calls from my friends asking me when I would be home, so they know when to leave. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I excitedly carried my bags up my extremely steep stairs, awaiting being able to call my friends over and learn the truth. Then it hit me; my entire room had been rearranged. I immediately dropped all bags I was carrying to the floor in shock. Suddenly, McIntosh and sophomore Ethan Mercer came out of my closet and yelled, “TAXES!”(an inside joke) at me, Hipwell and sophomore Callen Zurn came out from other parts of my room.

My bedroom has three wings like a T-shape, the main bedroom wing being the largest compared to the two smaller wings. The first of the two small wings was taken up completely by my bed, the second wing had everything else that had been in my room shoved into it as well as toothpicks littered onto the floor to look like a stickman dabbing. The spectacle of it all, however, was the bedroom wing, which was completely empty except for the scene of three fans standing up in an interrogation manner over every single one of my Rubik’s cubes mixed up on the floor. When speaking to McIntosh about it, he said, “My idea was that we were going to get more fans… we were going to fill your bedrooms with as many fans as possible, and also we were going to get a table and chairs and make it look like they were playing cards.”

I am very grateful to have a group of friends who would go to such lengths to share a laugh. “Who in the world thinks ‘Hey, let’s rearrange his room?’” Zurn said. “Who thinks that is a good prank and have it turn out so hilarious?”

They ended up helping me arrange the furniture back, but we decided on changing the layout of my room from what it was originally. My friends and I all agree that we hope this prank will give birth to more creative ideas and retaliation pranks in the future.