Dez Parrot ’15 has mostly kept to himself since he came to Andover as a new Upper. His shy personality and unusually loud voice have made it hard for him to make many friends. His proctors frequently urged him to get out, going so far as to put him on “anti-restriction.” Still, Parrot enjoyed the life of a hermit—that is, until he first saw the girl of his dreams, Sweet Pea ’15. Parrot knew they could be two peas in a pod and quickly jockeyed for her affection and attention. After several hours of intense, unreciprocated eye contact in Silent Study, Parrot was unable to win her over. Thus, Parrot resolved to stick to the mainstream method and write Pea a Valentine’s Day card. Little did Parrot know that this well-meaning action would have disastrous consequences. After envisioning his perfect card, Parrot sprinted to Staples to buy scratch-and-sniff stickers, 50 shades of pink paper and a bobblehead Obama. He had all he needed to construct the ultimate Valentine’s Day card for Pea. “She is the one and only girl I have met here. I wanted her to know that I would cover a grenade for her,” he confided in Features. Upon finishing this mastery of love, he sealed it with a peck, waltzed over to the G.W. Mailroom and placed it in her mailbox. Unfortunately, Parrot did not account for his grandmother’s reaction to his grand gesture. After he called home to talk to his mom, his grandmother picked up the phone and immediately told him that his letter “would cause broken hearts throughout the community.” Lately, grandmothers around the world have been trying to ensure that every student has an equal opportunity to receive love. When Features asked G-moms what Parrot could do to get her approval (for once), she responded, “I can only endorse this behavior if he writes a unique card, complete with an original Shakespearean Love Sonnet, to EVERY SINGLE STUDENT IN THE ENTIRE SCHOOL!!!” For an entire week, Parrot painstakingly and meticulously created Valentine’s Day cards. Using crushed up candy hearts as chalk, Parrot signed each heart that he had cut out with his name and a cute phrase, then put on his signature stickers he bought on sale at CVS. In an exclusive Features interview, Parrot commented sourly, “The new rules to promote equality bring back horrible memories of paper cuts and getting my fingers glued together in the second grade when everyone was required to make a Valentine for each and every person in class.” Upon receiving one of Parrot’s anonymous cards, some people like Ms. Romanov, Parrot’s teacher, were quite touched. Romanov commented, “I eem veery tooched by the message Parrot wrote: ‘Quit Stalin and be my Valentine.’ Alzough I will have to turn heem in for plagiarism since I have seen dis on the Interweb, and it was not correctly cited, but he has clearly learned something in my class!” However, those who did not know Parrot (most of the population) were a bit terrified when they received his cards. The “wanted” posters of Parrot’s face around school have caused many students to walk around with cans of pepper spray and BB guns. Since then, Parrot has been laying low and waiting for things to calm down, either because of the uproar over the cards or because Pea’s boyfriend, the Captain of the Snowball Fighting team, is out to get him.
