Due to the latest round of heavy budget cuts, all classes on The University of Memphis campus have been canceled and will now be held in various high schools across the city.
What? You forgot what day it is?
That’s right, it’s April Fool’s Day.
For some it’s a day without limits, a reason to lie and a justification for meanness. For others, it’s a day of being the object of those antics.
“April Fool’s Day was always the perfect day to come up with our own drama,” said Kimberly Abernathy, a student at Methodist Hospital School of Nursing. “It’s the perfect excuse to be bad.”
Abernathy did just that the day she convinced her junior high school friends she had a brother with no arms and no legs.
Her friend and co-conspirator told all their classmates that Abernathy’s brother was a star basketball player and to ask her about it.
“That’s not funny,” Abernathy, who has only sisters, said to the girls when they asked about her talented brother.
“My brother has no arms and no legs,” she said to them with tears in her eyes. “Of course, we embellished a little on his medical problems.”
The girls felt so bad for her that they told their church pastor about poor little Kimberly and her limbless brother.
“They collected a $500 offering for my brother, who didn’t even exist,” Abernathy said.
She never saw that one coming.
“That’s probably one of the worst things I’ve ever done,” she said. “But we didn’t keep the money.”
To many, the humor in some pranks is questionable.
“Once I had a boyfriend call me and say he was seeing someone else,” said Adewunmi Thomas, sophomore accounting major.
“You don’t know what to believe on April Fool’s Day. I was crying. I wanted to kill him.”
Her boyfriend waited three hours to call her and remind her what day it was.
“I was mad, but the make-up was cool,” she said.
Abiola Osibanjo said she would never forget a phone call she answered one April 1.
“Someone called my house and told me my dad was in an accident,” said Osibanjo, a Southwest Tennessee Community College nursing student. “I was panicking. I almost passed out.”
Osibanjo said those five minutes felt like five hours.
“I was like, ‘Who is going to pay for my college education?’” she said.
She found out later her father was in on the joke.
“I’m going to get him this year,” she said.
On a lighter note, Tanisha Davis remembers sitting down to lunch one day in high school, picking up her blue Fruitopia drink to wash down her meal and getting a mouthful of mouthwash instead.
“I spit it out all over the table,” Davis said. “It was so nasty. It made my stomach hurt for the rest of the day.”
Everyone was snickering, she said, and then the whole table said in unison, “April Fool’s Day!”
