There comes a time in every highschool senior's life when they decide they just HAVE to miss a day of school and go off and be a shenanigan.  Well, I suppose this could happen quite often, but it is the infamous "senior skip day" to which I am referring.  Its a day of total rebellion - kids skip - and teachers, well,  plan for them to skip.  The day embodies the essence of teenage independance.  Though parents and teachers alike are well aware of this long standing tradition, we highschool students still feel wind through our hair as we cruise away from home at 7 a.m. in a new light, as we travel not to school, a place of boredom and routine, but to our designated place of scadalous recreation.  Scandalous being a day at the local zoo, a theme park, or in my particular case, a weekend trip from a small western Pennsylvannian town to the booming metropolis of St. Louis.  Huge fans of the band, The Shins all through highschool, my best friend and I planned to get tickets to their show being held in that fair city on the weekend of our senior skip day.  It was a Friday before a three day weekend, perfect for our very first road trip, basically across the country.  It was to be a day of total bliss and driving.  Just driving.  Yes, we planned to spend our entire senior skip day driving through America in order to reach the city where our favorite band was playing, get a room in a lousy motel, sip our poorly made coffee, and explore the freedoms known to all those who live on their own.  

However, our amazing idea, and impeccable planning skills turned out to be shortcoming.  Trying to save money on our epic adventure, we picked up extra hours at work, bargained for use of a high mile-per-gallon vehical, and searched for THE cheapest tickets.  We indeed find some very cheap tickets to the show, not too much lower than other vendors sold for, but saving a buck or two each made us feel on top of the world.  We spent the weeks leading up to senior skip day planning on how to decorate our very own shirts for the grand event.  Study hall was no longer a time to study, but a time to work feverishly trying to come up with the very best slogan that portayed our undying and unnatural love for the band, and where we had driven from, while incorporating the reason for our appearance.  In short, we wanted to get caught on cameras or be noticed by the band amidst thousands of people.  Then, the week of senior skip day, the week we were setting off on the adventure of a lifetime, the very week our lives were to become exciting and eventful...we had a minor problem.  We never recieved our tickets.  The person we had bought tickets from, well, never sent them.  We had bought and payed for them online, yet those two tickets had also been sold to other people.  The picture we had viewed online, as we later realized, was of an old concert.  We had been schooled in the life lesson of careful and cautious online shopping.  Whoever was behind our massive scam had stolen our hard earned money.  Money we had slaved over by making subway sandwiches for hours and scrubbing the soiled dishes of folks living in the local nursing home.  They had scammed us for our tickets, and in turn stolen our senior skip day that would serve as our senior trip. 

The two of us, sad and loney chics were devastated.  How could our plan have fallen through?  We couldn't admit defeat to our locker mates, who we'd been bragging and argueing to about our state of the art endeavor to travel the country to see a band they pretty much hated.  Three boys who thrived on the concept and actions of tormenting two clueless girls with jokes and mocking could have cared less about our senior skip day plans, yet we could not and would not let on that we now faced failure.  The search for more tickets continued, fruitlessly, and our mouths began to ramble less and less of our upcoming adventure.  Staying low on the radar we avoided all talk of senior skip day, bands, concerts, and road trips.  And on that Friday, we were NOT in school, and as far as anyone was concerned, we were not in town either.  Much to our surprise, on Tuesday, as we arrived at school planning to pretend we'd had the most amazing senior skip day/trip ever, we were shocked to see none of our fellow seniors.  OK, so that is an exaggeration.  The occasional bookworm who was going strong and within reach of four year perfect attendance was spotted running to class well before the bell rang, ensuring that a tardy wouldn't tarnish his record.  But other than that, the halls were bare of soon to be graduates.  Senior skip day had been moved. The class had decided as a senior prank to move senior skip day and throw off the teachers completely.  Unfortunately, in effort to conceal our subject to (as we now realize to be) our inevidable internet scam, we had missed the memo.  So there we sat, all eight periods of that day, senior skip day, in class sulking over our lost money, missed concert, and lost dignity.