My friend Nick decided to throw his girlfriend, Kati, a surprise graduation party since she opted not to walk. Pretty sweet and romantic, right?
Being a boy and being optimistic, he gave a week's notice to the shindig and it was on the same night of another friend's party. Naturally, Sam and I helped as much as we could with the decorations and the food stuff. Yet, what we were coming to realize as we waited an hour in: not that many people were going. There were four of us there to set up, then two people came. Facebook showed an estimated sixteen coming, and we had not even half of that. Facebook rules, naturally prepared us for that (I think the ratio is three to every sixteen), but we were starting to worry, Sam especially.
The closer it came to Nick and Kati coming, Sam panicked and made us turn off the lights and made the boys stop killing Nazi Zombies on the television. We were just six people sitting in a dark room. We didn't know each other that well and we were a little appalled by the turn out.. We were like this for about an hour.
We spent the time trying to come up with a way to make up for the lack of numbers (maybe we should order more food and make the delivery guy stay! Maybe we should make it look like they were robbed!), but nothing really stuck and we were coming up with way too many ideas to agree on. We just ended up crowding around the stairs to the doorway, silently waiting as they came in, and yelling an indistinct noise rather loudly at her. In perfect form, Kati was commenting on a pair of shoes that belonged neither to Nick or her, and she was truly scared when we all yelled at her because of this accidental, ingenious set up.
The surprise went pretty well actually. She had the natural reaction of tracking back to all the hints and clues, who knew, and then she ended up walking around trying to clean everything quickly. Sam had a similar reaction to her surprise party. But Kati seemed pleased.
I guess, though, that the amount of people yelling at her, was the right amount. She was truly scared at the moment and surprised by the randomness of it all. I think we underestimated the power of the surprise and, possibly, fear. Those shoes, incidentally, really did the trick.
