an airplane traversed blue fabric, like a zipper pulled slowly and teasingly toward an exotic destination. Anything slicing through the air at six-hundred miles an hour can’t help but seem taunting to something standing passively in the dirt. So I was staring, open-mouthed and seduced, lusting to be carried away.

I’m sure we should have been inside of the library. It was finals week. But we stopped a few yards short and just stared at it instead. The walls dripped with coffee and espresso, fidgeted with energy drinks. Students, loaded on Adderall, regardless of their attention spans, mechanically highlighted words they’d only care about for the next seventy-two hours—until they could drink the definitions away. And the academic motivation surrounding us felt so . . . unconvincing. Aspiring architects, interior designers, and music producers jotted down notes from organic chemistry and European history texts. Future nurses of America balanced spread sheets. I had a hundred calculus problems in my backpack for Christ’s sake. I’m not going to do anything impressive with a calculator—you might as well hand me a saxophone.

We didn’t have the merit to be comfortable with neglecting the library. It’s not as though we excelled at the top of any of our classes. But, still, something about taking the few extra steps through the doors came off as offensive. Another plane soared over us. There seemed to be plenty of them to go around.

“Let’s do that.”

I nudged my friend, pointed to the jet.

He followed my finger, shielded the sun from his eyes.

“What? Fly?”

“Yeah. Fly.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. To wherever the one we get on lands.”

“And how do you figure we do that?”

I shrugged, “The airport is probably a good start.”

He flipped through his college-ruled notebook. The insides were etched and graffitied like the walls of an abandoned train station. Sloppy caricatures of professors surrounded an occasional bullet-note. He took another look at the library.

“Where’d you park?”

To actually give the idea a shot required a sort of overdeveloped optimism that we really had no business having. But we were in college. Everybody in college has something they have no business having: Oxycontin . . . ecstasy . . . herpes . . . Greek letter tattoos. And, remarkably, we had none of these, so we figured we were allowed the optimism thing. It was harmless enough—we just wanted to go somewhere. On a whim. We wanted to casually board a plane bound for some place that was as familiar to us as, say, the mating rituals of Tibetan mountain monkeys. We’d figure out the rest when we landed. I don’t need you to tell me that this idea isn’t earth-shattering. I understand that, but it’s usually the type of endeavor only put to action by sons or daughters of business magnates and real estate tycoons—kids who have swollen pockets just for being born into the right bloodline. And those trips are too predictable: first-rate hotels, unreasonable bar tabs, coke-stained mirrors. We’ve heard those stories ad nauseam, and we didn’t have the money or the self-hatred to stir up a trip like that. We wanted to fly on our abysmal college budget. We wanted to walk up to the ticket counter, slap twenty dollars on the table, and have them look into our eyes with a silent understanding of where we were coming from and why we deserved such a price. They’d swiftly usher us onto a plane bound for Rome, where we would conquer the city armed with only our social prowess, convince the wealthy of our importance, persuade them to let us sleep in the satin-draped beds of their palaces. The wine would flow as we slung impressive life stories across the hand-carved furniture of their sunroom. We’d win over the hearts of the entire family. Perform simple yet astonishing magic tricks for the youth. Prepare eclectic, to-die-for cuisine for the mature. Dance consummately with the daughters, whispering flatteringly into their ears. Naturally, they’d beg us to marry those daughters—a commitment we’d try for a few weeks before growing tired of their neediness and inadequacies in carrying on a conversation about modern art. At the first whiff of complacency, we’d request to be flown back home, or wherever else we felt like going. They’d understand, and thank us for giving their daughters a glimpse of true happiness. We’d shake their hands, offering sagacious parting advice: All the darkness in the world cannot put out the light of a single candle. Except, we’d say it in Latin. Their jaws would hang just enough to catch their falling tears, and we’d float out of their palace on a cloud of prestige, gone forever.

That’s roughly how we figured our first trip would go, before we got the hang of things.

The guy sitting next to me is one of my roommates—Matt. Thanks to some name fad between the years of 1985 and 1987, “Matt” would be the name of nearly half my friends growing up, and far too many kids in every class I’ve taken. It’s annoying and inconvenient, not to mention confusing, so almost every Matt in my generation is accustomed to being called by his last name. Either that or he has a go-to nickname. Roommate Matt’s go-to nickname is “Fumble”—a far too perfect name to just lazily revert to the surname, “Ulinski.”

He’s never carried a football across yard markers in his life, yet “fumble” can single-handedly define him. That elusive football bounces around field turf the same way Matt bounces around the terrain of his life. Just when you think you have a handle on the guy, he slips through your fingers. You can scramble to regain control, go ahead, but the charade will probably just end in a loss of progress. And sure, a fumble might be the single most awkward presentation of human attempt there is, but it’s also the most exciting. And while the guy’s life might seem like a series of lopsided moments clumsily kicked around on a grand stage, there are few better guys out there, and his life will undoubtedly end in a touchdown.

I found this description of him to be tasteful, pointed, and laudatory. So I told it to him—hoping to stagger him. Bring a tear to his eye, maybe. His response (rebuttal, more like) was that the resulting touchdown would be for the opposing team. He carelessly dismissed my sentiment, and he’s wrong, but it’s just like Fumble to say something like that. He plays the self-degradation bit perfectly—injecting just the right balance of wit and sarcasm, to the point where it approaches charming.

If there’s a windstorm, Fumble’s climbing the tallest tree nearby. If it’s raining heavily, it’s a safe bet that Fumble is lying down in a creek somewhere. If the chance of arrest is less than 60%, weather regardless, he is going to take off his clothes. This also, in direct correspondence, happens to be the percentage of people on campus who have seen him naked.¹ When he’s drunk—drunk—he passionately requires “epic adventure,” which is usually as simple as us dropping him off in an unfamiliar part of town, and letting him find his way home. He always has souvenirs for the house when he returns from these quests. Giant home-for-sale signs, shopping carts, twenty-foot leather whips, CO2 tanks for a Dr. Pepper soft drink machine,² large tree branches, plastic playground slides, broken parking meters . . . those light-up wire reindeer people put on their front lawns during the holidays.

Fumble. He’s in the passenger seat.

If a flight is about to take off, and it has empty seats, the airline might as well sell those seats for really cheap ($20-$40, perhaps) versus not reaping any profit on them at all. That’s the rationale that supported our optimism. The logic really isn’t too terrible, but it would also mean we lived in a world that rewarded the lazy and ill-prepared. And that’s too good to be true. Following the same principles I should be able to convince my teachers that, since I turn my papers in only seconds before the posted deadline, I deserve a higher score than those that completed the assignment a week before. And not just a slightly higher grade, either. If the early birds got like an 80%, I should get at least a 240%. At least. They’d have to invent a letter for the type of grades I’d be pulling in. Still, for some reason, on this particular day, it felt like our plan was going to work.

San Luis Obispo is a small college town on the California’s Central Coast that revolves around Cal Poly,³ which is apparently one of the top-rated public universities in The West, along with one of the most selective, but just take a short trip downtown or to a fraternity party and you’ll see it’s not too difficult to surround yourself with idiots. Generally though, the people are authentically kind and laid-back and I’d imagine the place is what people from other states picture in their heads when they hear the word “California.” Both students and teachers wear sandals, the girls are tan and blonde, people lie out at the beach or by the pool in-between classes. The size of the community is big enough for you to meet somebody new every weekend, but small enough so if you happen to hook up with that person, everybody knows by the end of tomorrow. Aesthetically, it’s beautiful. Most students take it for granted. Breathtaking coastlines, limitless hiking, Pacific sunsets. People travel from all over the world to see the sights that kids living minutes away shrug off.

All things considered, it’s an incredible town. It’s one of the few places I’ve been where life feels like it’s lived at the right level of seriousness. I have a sense of pride for the area, although I am ashamed of at least two things: 1) there’s virtually no diversity and 2) a lot of people in the town consider this a perk. The only people I knew who despised living in San Luis Obispo were my black friends whom the school somehow coerced into enrolling.

No two places in the town are more than a fifteen minute drive away from each other. Including the airport, which works out well, because if it were any farther we may have never cared to visit. The San Luis Obispo airport doesn’t quite belong in the same conversation as an O’Hare or an LAX—it’s better paired with places like T.G.I. Friday’s and Red Lobster. There’s even an adjacent restaurant called The Spirit of San Luis that shares the same parking lot. Picking somebody up from a flight in this town is nothing like the stressful event it is anywhere else. Nobody is ever circling the perimeter, playing phone-tag with whomever they are trying to pick up, getting chased away by the airport police for stopping in the wrong zone for six seconds, losing themselves in the labyrinth of nebulous airport terminal signs and shuttle-only lanes. In San Luis, you just park in one of the never-enforced meters inside the always-empty parking lot, stick your head out of the window, and yell toward the general vicinity of the baggage claim which, if you end up with a bad parking spot, is thirty steps away. The place is tiny. I once accidentally went to it while trying to go to the grocery store. That doesn’t happen in Atlanta. It has one terminal, which is also the baggage claim, which is also the ticket counter, which is also the gift shop, restrooms, lobby, information desk, coffee house, and employee locker room. We were there, predictably, in fifteen minutes.

The automatic glass doors opened like the gates of heaven, and the PA system took form of evangelical trumpets. We tightened our robes, straightened our crowns, and walked up to the departure screens to look at the directory of conquerable cities: Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City.

This isn’t the beginning of an extensive, exotic list (including anything Italian). No, this was the entire list of destinations. But as it goes, you play with the hand you’re dealt. It seemed we would be forced to make one of these cities our Rome. There was a flight for Phoenix that was leaving in thirty-six minutes. Good enough. We walked up to the ticket counter and threw down our twenty dollars with conviction, demanding to board. Or else.

Really, we timidly approached the ticket counter like two toddlers debating their first ever leap off of a diving board and waited until a concerned female attendant asked us if we were lost.

“It looks like there’s a flight for Phoenix coming up pretty soon here.”

“Yeah . . . there is . . .”

She didn’t know where we were going with it, which was perfect, because neither did we.

“Is there any room on the plane?”

“Yeah, there’s plenty of room.”

“So are those seats really, really cheap? Since nobody wants them?”

“Well they’re . . .” (patronizingly types on the computer) “Three hundred and twenty-four dollars.”

“That’s more than twenty dollars.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

Silence . . .

“Shouldn’t it be cheaper? I mean, that plane is going to leave with a lot of wasted space. Wouldn’t it make sense if we just paid you like twenty or thirty dollars and then you let us go on the plane? Sure, its only twenty bucks, but its twenty bucks you wouldn’t have otherwise. Right? Makes sense?”

“I guess that kind of makes sense. But we don’t set the prices here. We have no control over it.”

“Well do you ever see really cheap flights? Is there a way to beat the system?”

“Not really . . . it’s pretty expensive to fly out of these small airports . . .”

I looked at her nametag. She shared her name with some month. It was probably a springtime month—most names are—but the fact that she didn’t have the answers we were looking for made me think of the cold, rude winter. December. No. Not December. December carries presents. She didn’t. She was definitely January. January-ass bitch.

“ . . . unless you could get your hands on a buddy pass.”

A buddy pass? You’ve been holding out on us, January? A buddy pass is exactly the kind of friendly-named mystery we came here to solve. I don’t understand why you even considered toying with our emotions. As soon as you saw us walk through those deceivingly angelic doors you should have realized why we were here and got busy preparing an organized and extensive presentation on the buddy pass and its relevance to our newfound aspirations. Now please, Jan, go on . . . do go on.

As she summarized the capacities of a buddy pass, the months steadily peeled off of the calendar of her moniker. She was approaching summer, and approaching it fast. She was easily late March. Easily. She explained that, every so often, employees of the airline got a couple of buddy passes, which they were able to give to a friend, making that friend’s travel arrangements simultaneously more and less stressful. Less stressful because they would only have to pay a minimal fare ($25 – $30) per leg of the trip. More stressful because they would only be able to get on the flights if there was standby room, inviting the possibility of hours and hours of waiting. The other stipulation is that buddy pass travelers weren’t granted access to an untethered selection of destinations. They could only fly to destinations within the airline’s routes. Since this particular branch was a western subsidiary, places like Orlando or Boston were out of reach. But I figured a fifty dollar round trip to Cabo San Lucas would help me forget all about the East Coast.

March’s best advice on getting these cheap flights was to find a friend in the airline that could relay the benefits. Of course, Fumble and I were convinced we already had.

“How about we be your buddies. We’ll take you out to dinner.”

“I don’t think my boyfriend would like that very much.”

“Does your boyfriend like dinner? He’s invited, too. Your friend is our friend. It will be a blast. We’ll just be a good ol’ fashioned group of buddies painting the town red.”

She was smiling. She was considering. She was malleable.

“Do employees always use these buddy passes?”

“Well they all have expiration dates. And not everybody gets rid of their passes before they expire.”

“And how good are you at making sure your passes don’t expire?”

“Pretty good, mostly. But it does seem like I have more than usual lying around . . .”

Insert your best puppy face here. This is where you look desperate. This is where you try as hard as you can to remember the look on your dog’s face last time you were eating Thanksgiving dinner above him, but not with him. Try your hardest to mimic that face. Make her throw that drumstick off of the table. Give. Damn it, March. Give.

“It’s funny you say that, because we seem to not have very many at all lying around . . .”

She’s blushing.

“. . . and we give great massages.”

She’s BLUSHING. Pout your lips, dough your eyes, cross your fingers, and make sure it’s very obvious how much you want her to notice your efforts. Hold this position until it’s pathetic—until she has no choice but to feel sorry for you. Hold this position until it pulls the desired words out from the depths of her deliberation, and gives them some air to breathe.

“I guess I don’t see the harm in letting you guys be my buddies.”

There they are. Lady, you have no idea how July you are right now.