"Elizabeth -- but it's not that simple."

“It’s not that simple.”

She narrowed her eyes and set down her milkshake with such **** that it splashed onto the table. I wasn’t getting let off the hook any longer. I looked at the floor, and quietly confessed:

“Elizabeth.”

A flood of unwelcome images paraded through my brain. Images of Elizabeth snuggling up to me for our photo together, images of us slow dancing beneath the twinkle lights of the ballroom, images of that night; of steam on windows…

Stephanie shook me back into the moment, cheering:

“Well, there you go! That’s great!”

“No, it’s not great! Don’t you and Elizabeth talk anymore? Things are already weird between her and me. It’s already gonna be hard enough watching her leave at the end of summer. If I take her to prom, she’s gonna feel even more like my girlfriend. No, we’re keeping things casual. I don’t know who I’m asking to go with me, but it’s not Elizabeth.”

Stephanie deflated. We went back to eating and dropped the subject.

The next day, some guy named Josh Peterson asked Elizabeth to prom and she said yes. Josh was tall, friendly, and, if the army of girls always chasing after him were any indication, preposterously good-looking.

Good, I told myself. That just makes everything easier.

I went home, closed the door to my room, and, to my unabashed horror, started crying.

It felt like someone was wringing my insides like a damp rag, squeezing the tears out of me. I slept maybe twenty minutes the whole night. Woke up feeling hung-over despite having nothing to drink. I didn’t bother shaving or even combing my hair before I left for school. I threw on a baggy old t-shirt with a picture of Galactus on it.

Whatever.

During lunch, I purposefully avoided my best friends. Instead, I caught up with some of the guys I knew from AV club. They were good guys. We’d had some fun times together.

I skipped my usual run with Amy and went for a stroll by myself. Bought an issue of Playboy. Went home and jacked off to the centerfold. Turned on my Nintendo 64 and finally unlocked the invincibility cheat in Goldeneye. Felt like a champ. I’d been working on that for like two years.

Around eleven o’clock at night, Amy and Corrine knocked on my door. They looked gorgeous, as always. Unbelievably sexy without even trying. Put the centerfold I’d bought a few hours earlier to shame.

“Hey guys, how’s it going?”

The two beauties exchanged a look, and then Corrine gave me a hug, squashing her ridiculous breasts against me. She met my eyes:

“You really need to ask somebody to prom.”