“Unintentionally, I was a rat. I was the reason why two people got out. [There’s] nothing I can do about it, but it’s something I am going to have to live with from now on.”
This sentiment, from Senior Assassins participant Arjun Deshmukh, reflects the emotional intensity the game has generated among many East seniors.
The rules are simple. Once you receive your target through an ominous email, try to tag them with a spoon of your choice to get them disqualified from the game. In return, you now have to hunt down your former target’s target and so on, until you (hopefully) are the last one standing.
The fun began April 18 and has continued well into May. You may have seen seniors chasing each other throughout the student parking lot or waiting to ambush their friends outside trailers. “Run for it!” was a common phrase in the first few days of action, followed by sprints through traffic or school grounds.
In the beginning, momentum was fast, with seniors waking up at six in the morning to stake out targets’ houses and participants getting out by the double digits.
“I had a really rough time with Senior Assassins. I got out [the] first day. It happened by me trying to run after someone else, but I can’t run, so I just got caught, and someone who had a torn ACL outran me,” Sofia Georgallis said. “I was really sad for a couple hours, but honestly, I [didn’t] want to be on edge anymore. I’m kind of happy that I got out, even though it was really embarrassing.”
As time went on, many of the assassinations became borderline cruel. Hopes were crushed, friendships were strained and tensions were high.
“It hurt, oh my god, I let my guard down for one second, and then immediately [got] tagged,” Sabrina Shelby said, after getting tagged by a friend. “The whole day I was on edge, and then the second I [think] I’m safe, I get tagged in my car. Such bull—-.”
After the first two days when almost half of all participants were eliminated from the pool by cutthroat competitors, seniors began to step up their games. This included staking out in front of homes in the morning, in cars after school, and memorizing class schedules. As of now, a little over a month into the competition, there are a half dozen seniors left, an exponential shrink leaving just one to walk away with the over-$200 prize.
Seniors have Lenore Bronson and Dillon McCafferty to thank for organizing this end-of-the-year event and running the Instagram account @echseniorassassin23 to keep students updated on the status of their peers and the lengths they were willing to go to in order to get a step closer to victory.
When Bronson heard from student body president Julianne Reynolds earlier in the year that student council was planning on running the event and beginning it during the last week of school, she spoke with friends and offered to both run the competition and to hold it sooner, anticipating that competition would take weeks. Now toward the end of the event, Bronson reflects positively.
“Generally, I feel like it’s been really fun and unproblematic…[as] kind of [a] nice distraction toward the end of the school year,” Bronson said. “The Instagram has been a lot to manage…but I feel like it’s really fun and people have been really interactive with it, and I feel like that’s the whole point of Senior Assassins, is that everyone is…involved.”
This feeling was shared by other Senior Assassins participants, regardless of original issues of the game restarting.
“I do think that it was really well organized, they did a great job of collecting all the money, and information was very clear,” Shelby said. “I mean, there was one mistake, and then it was immediately fixed!”
In a school trying to raise school spirit, East seniors organized some fun and chaos to take some stress away from thoughts of the future.
“Overall, it was really fun and a good experience,” Georgallis said. “It was really funny to see everyone running around the school in ski masks.”
Photos courtesy of @echseniorassassin23
