The Cutest Couple

My group of friends in high school were varied, both in personality type and upbringing, and, through the years, our numbers fluctuated from as low as eight to as high as thirty, so we were never short of entertainment. Like any large group, we didn't always get along, but, when it was something really important, we would all come together. And what's more important than an award recognizing the cutest couple?

At the end of every school year, our friend Rachel, who was known to throw the best parties and prepare the most entertaining events, would hand out a ballot of roughly thirty to forty awards that we would vote on, ranging from "best smile" and "funniest" to "most likely to become a serial killer" and "dead by twenty."

Normally we never took the awards too seriously, because it was all in good fun. But in this particular year, there was a controversy over the cutest couple. The controversy was caused by the fact that there was only one couple, at that particular moment in time, and that couple insisted that the award be included in the year-end dinner wherein the awards would be presented.

In order to counteract the fact that they would be winning by default, my friend Jess and I decided to take action. Our theory was that, since the other couple wasn't so much "cute" as they were "gropey" and "all over each other" and "mildly nauseating," it wouldn't be too difficult to become cuter than they were.

Jess and I went around our group of friends and informed them that the two of us would like to be voted cutest couple, and, while a few of them were shocked, asking how long we had secretly been dating, others were just happy for any alternative and quickly jotted down our names. When asked what made us cuter than any other couple, we would point out our no-touching policy (unless we had both been provided with mittens -- and even then...) and how they would never have to ask us to stop blocking their lockers with our public love-making.

By the end of the day we had been assured roughly ninety-percent of the vote, with the only people opposing us being the other couple and a few of her closer friends. We had this in the bag!

When the day of the awards arrived, Jess asked Rachel if she had counted all of the votes, and Rachel assured her that we had won by a landslide, so we were sitting pretty at dinner, hastily trying to prepare a speech that would both exemplify how adorable we were as a couple and inform the group that we planned to break up as soon as our speech was finished.

So there we are, thirty-five of us gathered along a row of six tables pushed together at the local Boston Pizza, Rachel standing at the head of the tables projecting her voice so everyone could hear whatever award she was presenting next, and the entirety of the wait staff watching us from the kitchen wondering what the hell was going on. Jess and I were anxious for our moment of glory to arrive, while the other couple had no idea that their fifteen minutes had ended before they had begun.

Then the worst thing in the world happened. Proof that all love in the universe had been lost, any sense of justice any of us had had was gone within seconds. The cutest couple was awarded to the least cute couple at the table.

A string of expletives exploded from Jess's mouth as we strained our brains to understand the bamboozlement that we'd just experienced. For a moment I wondered if we had been robbed of recognition due to the fact that we weren't a genuine couple, but I assumed that the falsity of our romance would be canceled-out by the abnormal lack of cute that the other couple exemplified. Jess muttered out a second string of expletives, which were actually the same ones but in a different order.

She and I had to sit there and watch as the other couple gleefully stole what was ours, as they lorded it over us like they were all that. They weren't all that. We were certain that they must have paid Rachel off in order to get that award, and we're still bitter to this day. It was just like that whole Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan thing. Exactly like that.

We learned later that, while we had received the most votes, and the other couple had received a grand total of three, that they had been awarded the award because they would have been mad if they hadn't. Well, Dee would have been mad if they hadn't won, as she was a part of said couple.

We're mad, Rachel. We're mad that we were robbed, and we want our award.