By nature of circumstance, college students are forced — for the first time in their lives, for many of them — to become serious spenders. I should clarify: serious spenders, rather than serious spenders. They must retire from free-ride public schools and low-wage part-time jobs, the biweekly paychecks which they spend in one day online shopping and paying too-high upcharges for DoorDash or other food delivery services; now, they have tuition and textbooks and Lyft rates — plus tip — going to their volunteer or shadow positions, and they’re lucky if they have the time to supplement this hemorrhagic spending with a student job or federal work study.
And so, the serious spenders become serious spenders. Or, like me and my friends, they spend $50 going to a Sky Zone one town over and bouncing for two hours in the Glow Zone with grippy socks. Some of us stay serious spenders, if only on Friday nights.
It was one of those plans that shouldn’t have made it out of the group chat. We all expected it to somehow dissipate between its digital inception and miraculous fruition. Even as we snapped digi pics on the Towson shuttle and connected to Sky Zone via Lyft — more serious spending — the reality of being 18- and 19-year-olds humiliating ourselves with age-regressing childhood rituals didn’t set in until the Sky Zone employees were shackling us with orange-and-white striped wristbands. It really set in when we donned our unflattering neon green Glow Zone T-shirts, which we were forced to buy for $8 a piece.
Development depends on cycles. Just as kindergarteners are helplessly motivated by stickers on their tests if they do well, so too are seniors in high school — or at least in my experience. It’s only the bleak and dreadful years between middle school and early high school when humans act like stickers are beneath them. That is to say, as we waited for the clock to strike 8 p.m. so we could enter the Glow Zone, there were two groups front-lining the staircase: elementary schoolers, and my friend group.
Truth be told — even if this is a back-stabbing, self-sabotaging truth — I write with more bravado than I exist. Everything I have written is the truth; perhaps, however, it would be more accurate to say that it is a truth belonging to my friends, who really did dart off ahead of the elementary schoolers when the clock struck 8 p.m. Meanwhile, like an elderly jogger warming up for a marathon, I took a much more reserved start as I set off to modestly bounce in my rule-following, solitary square of trampoline.
What they say about joy being contagious is true. I’m certain that, even among biological-terrorist-like children and foam pits so bottomless and unclean that only God knows what could be buried in there — future headlines will tell of foam-pit mass graves being discovered, I’m sure — among all of this — joy is the primary contagion spreading in trampoline parks across America.
Soon enough, I was more like my friends who were more like the elementary schoolers. I lost all inhibition — enough of it, at least — to hop from square to square, bunny-like in a way that would make me cringe if I reviewed the security camera footage. Playing tag with my friends and leaping through obstacle courses, my body the morning after is a museum of nights well lived: somehow skinned elbows, even though I wore long sleeves; parts of my musculature sore that make me question, What could I have possibly been using that for? And, as I rise from bed, a slight vertigo as if I had just disembarked from a lengthy journey at sea, even if it’s only false vestiges, like phantom pain.
Just as most parents of a certain age get tired at 8 p.m., after only 40 minutes had passed, many of us concluded it would be okay if we left right then, even if we wouldn’t be getting our money’s worth. There was just one problem: Someone lost their phone. When this was flagged to the rest of the group, we all remembered two things: one friend telling the other, “Don’t take that in there, you’re going to lose it,” and the foam pit beneath the King of the Hill game, trampoline-park version.
We whiled away the minutes until close, when the Sky Zone employees told us we could stay after to empty the pit and search for the phone. But “whiled away” isn’t quite right, as it implies a sort of bored listlessness, when truly the missing phone was like a much-needed command: to never wish for time to pass faster, to enjoy the moment, to get lost in pretend and pretend you’re not getting old, or getting boring. Then again, perhaps it was just a lost phone in the foam pit that we needed to wait to find.
You can choose what you believe the phone was; I choose that it was a reminder, particularly one for the necessity of childlike pretend. I don’t care what the anthropological roots of Halloween are because I want to use it for the comparison I’m about to draw. I say Halloween is an outlet for pretend — as soon as you age out of this tradition, then it’s necessary to find another one, particularly a healthy one, lest the world be filled with adults pretending by hiding affairs and lying to spouses, or any other rotten form of pretend.
My friends and I pretend by going to Sky Zone on Friday nights, by spending $50 once because what will it really hurt if I pirate a textbook online instead of lawfully renting a used copy? We pretend by taking a lift to Loyola University Maryland to connect to a Blue Jay Shuttle and telling Crystal the Lyft driver that we’re students there because what’s the harm in white lies like these?
Pretending, truly, is what makes the world go round. I pretend that it’s pretending that does this, not any other astronomical, gravitational, physics-related forces. I pretend that there’s a famous line from a famous poem that fits this famous value: Pretend, pretend against the dying of the light! (I pretend that this ends with an exclamation point.)
Riley Strait is a freshman from Olathe, Kan. studying Writing Seminars and English. His column, "In Medias Res," translates from Latin to "into the middle of things," shares narratives that bury occasional insights within fluff that often leave the reader wondering, "Did I ask?"
