The scream was so loud I thought the building was on fire. I dropped my controller and scrambled off the sofa.
“Get in here! Now!”
I sprinted into the hallway to find Mike doing a victory lap around the kitchen island, his arms raised in triumph like he had just scored the winning goal in the World Cup.
“My roommate started screaming, ‘We’re rich! We’re rich!’“.
He was running around the apartment with a manic energy that suggested life-changing news. My mind immediately went to the lottery. An inheritance. A forgotten Bitcoin wallet from 2011.
“Rich?” I gasped, the adrenaline hitting me. “How rich? Quit-our-jobs rich?”
“Better!” he yelled. “Free money rich!”
My fingers flew to my phone. I started looking up luxury vacations. I had a tab open for a water villa in Bora Bora before he even finished his sentence. I was mentally drafting my resignation email. I was picking out the color of my future Lamborghini.
“Where are we going?” I shouted. “Paris? Tokyo? The moon?”
He stopped running and held up a crumpled, lint-covered piece of green paper with the reverence of a priest holding a holy relic.
“‘I found a twenty-dollar bill in my winter coat pocket!’” he clarified, smoothing out the wrinkled face of Andrew Jackson.
I stared at the bill. I stared at him. The water villa in Bora Bora dissolved into mist. The Lamborghini turned back into my 2012 Honda Civic.
“Twenty dollars?” I whispered. “Mike, that’s not ‘rich.’ That’s… lunch.”
“It’s found money, dude!” he insisted, eyes wide. “It didn’t exist five minutes ago. We are twenty dollars wealthier than we were this morning. We have to stimulate the economy!”
He was right. The disappointment faded, replaced by a different kind of hunger. We didn’t have “buy an island” money, but we definitely had “order the appetizers” money.
We went to Taco Bell.
We walked in like high rollers. We didn’t look at the prices. We ordered the combos. We ordered the sides. We got the large sodas. We feasted on a banquet of beef, cheese, and tortillas, laughing at our earlier delusion while dipping cinnamon twists into icing.
We weren’t millionaires. We were still broke millennials living in a drafty apartment. But as we sat there in a booth, surrounded by wrappers, high on sodium and friendship, it was still the best night ever.
