The Time the High School Prom King Asked Me Out… at Age 23

Evan Antonelli was beautiful at 18, and he was going to stay that way. You could already tell. Some scholar athlete goldenboys fade into pale, beefy shadows of their former selves, losing their jawlines and waistlines somewhere in college, but this one’s good looks were permanent. The sharp cheekbones; the intense, close-set eyes; the mop of curly dark hair that bounced with weightless shampoo-commercial magnificence when he jogged forward for a layup.

Evan was the basketball team captain, and the prom king. He was also effortlessly nice, in the way that people are when they’ve always been beloved by everyone.

Evan was so high on the social totem pole that he actually floated above it, like a god, totally unconcerned with the petty dramas of the masses far below. He didn’t so much walk the hallways as float through them, bestowing jokes and smiles and high-fives on friends who received them like blessings.

I was not among the blessed.

As a freshman transfer student at a small town public high school, my single most impressive accomplishment was to achieve permanent loser status by the third week of September. And when I say “loser,” I don’t mean it in the teen movie, one-decent-makeover-away-from-prom-queen-candidacy kind of way. I was That Weirdo: embarrassingly dorky, socially awkward to the point of standoffishness, and conspicuously bookish in a way that made me a go-to target for the sort of girls who liked to start fistfights in the bathroom and put gum in your hair.

To say that I had a crush on Evan wouldn’t be accurate. I couldn’t crush on Evan. I wouldn’t dare. It would have been like having a crush on the sun; just as hopeless, just as pointless, and just as dangerous if I’d made the mistake of staring too long. I was already finding chewed-up gum mashed into my locker and my hair on a regular basis. If someone caught me crushing above my station, I would probably be murdered.

Ultimately, I found ways to make high school bearable. I made friends with the few people who didn’t find me off-putting, I had a torrid teen romance with one of those guys who spent every lunch period playing “Magic: The Gathering”, and I eventually reached a sort of enlightened state in which I just didn’t care anymore who hated me and why. And after college, I moved to New York, coming back to my hometown only for holidays or to visit my parents; no more dwelling on the disappointments of my high-school social life.

I even (reluctantly) accepted a Facebook friend request from one of the girls who’d once tried to punch me in the face in a public bathroom.

It was during one of those visits home, in a crowded bar on Christmas night, that my best friend leaned across a table and said, “Dude, Evan Antonelli has been staring at you for a solid fifteen minutes.”

She pointed. I looked. Across the room, Evan saw me looking, and smiled, and broke away from his group of friends to stride purposefully toward our table.

He said, “Wow. Kat. You look great.”

My friend, who had always been well-liked in high school and who was clearly unaware that my whole evening had just exploded in a magic glittering cloud of total teenage wish fulfillment, looked at me over his head and mouthed, “Annoying.”

I mouthed nothing back, because EVAN ANTONELLI KNEW MY NAME.

What happened then? I couldn’t even tell you. In my memory, the rest of the night isn’t a night, so much as a bizarre rose-colored, role-reversal montage set to a soundtrack of late-1990s R&B hits by Boyz II Men. Here is Evan Antonelli asking me questions about my life and telling me I should think about moving to California, because he lives there now and it’s awesome. Here is Evan Antonelli awkwardly asking if he can buy me a drink, when I have a full one in my hand.

Here is Evan Antonelli managing to stand next to me all night long despite my friends’ varied and diligent attempts to elbow him away, and following me out of the bar at midnight, asking, “Are you in town for awhile? Can I call you?”

I told him we were in the phone book.

I felt very, very cool about this.

I told my best that I was having a moment, for crying out loud, and would she please stop giving me the stink eye.

Somewhere, lost in the sands of time, my fifteen year-old self quietly peed her pants and fainted.

Evan called to ask me out the next day — on my parents’ house phone, which only further cemented the sense that I’d somehow traveled back in time to have the high school romance of my dreams. My mother passed me the handset as though she were handing me a basket full of precious jewels, mouthing the words, “Evan Antonelli.”

This was it.

It was happening.

It might have been a few years behind schedule, but I was going to prom with The Most Popular Boy in School.

And then? Reader, I married him.

… Just kidding. Actually, we never had a second date. Even as we drove off into the night with my teenage self screaming like a psychotic fangirl in the background, it was pretty clear that Evan and I weren’t going to ride into the sunset, together, forever. Instead, something strange happened: I looked at Evan Antonelli, and I no longer saw the teen god who’d never noticed me at school. I didn’t see a god at all.

Instead, I saw the truth: He was a charming, handsome, intelligent guy who’d had the good luck to develop those qualities early on, and the good sense not to lose them.

Late that night, he walked me back to my parents’ house, the two of us leaving footprints in the freshly-fallen snow. We took our time, but it’s a small town; Evan seemed stunned when we made it from his childhood home to mine in less than ten minutes.

“I can’t believe you lived so close by, and we never talked,” he said.

I guffawed.

“Are you kidding? Of course we never talked. People like you didn’t talk to people like me.”

He shook his head.

“You’re too hung up on all that high school stuff. It never mattered.”

“You only think that because nobody ever tried to literally flush you down a toilet,” I said.

I guess it was at least a little bit charming, because that was when he kissed me.

All told, my little fling with Evan Antonelli consisted of four drinks, a few friendly text messages, and one chaste but memorable winter kiss in the halo glow of a streetlight. I did wonder afterward if he was right, if I really was too hung up on our respective high school statuses, still a little bit blinded by his lingering, radiant, untouchable-prom-king aura.

But he was wrong about one thing: That stuff did matter. It doesn’t now, but it did then. I rarely think about high school, because I have a wonderful life (not to mention a handsome husband) that makes those years feel like some stupid, barely-remembered bad dream. But the girl who had to live those years, I remember her. A girl with oily hair she didn’t know how to take care of, who quoted Ren & Stimpy when she got nervous, who fought to fight back tears when she saw what someone had written about her on the wall of the girls’ locker room. A girl who knew high school would have to end before things ever really got better, when the end of high school still seemed so terribly far away.

That girl’s feelings mattered. I would never tell her otherwise. And this story, which she would never have believed if she’d heard it back then: this story belongs to her.