I don't know if anyone in the readership has applied for government subsidized housing, but let's just say what you save in rent they make up for in paperwork. The application for The World's Most Perfect Apartment Building, Complete With a Balcony and Can You Believe This is Government Housing was quite literally thirty pages long. My college application was shorter. Way shorter. I accepted it from the receptionist and spent the next half hour, reading, filling out forms and John Hancock-ing my way within inches of carpel tunnel. Once I finished filling it out, I returned it to the receptionist and inquired as to how long the waiting list was. She started to answer, but stopped midsentence when she caught my date of birth on page one of The Application from Hell. "You're eighteen. You don't qualify." That bitch.

You'd think I'd have remembered this quirk in Alabama law (age of majority is nineteen, unlike every other state in the union and most foreign countries) after a fruitless afternoon of apartment searching with Daphne G. As I recall, the afternoon ended in a quite serious marriage proposal on my part because the only people who seemed interested in renting to us wouldn't do it because of our ages. Unless we were married. No wonder there are so many bad teen marriages in this state. (Age of consent for marriage in Alabama is 14. Age of consent for sex is 16. What's wrong with this picture?)

Daphne and I were as serious as two flitting second-semester high school seniors can be. We went back to school that afternoon and broke the news to everyone. When I say everyone, I mean that I can count on one hand the number of people we actually told. The high school gossip mill took it over from there. By the next day, everyone had heard the good news. Disbelief and shock ensued.

The other newspaper editors took me to Wendy's for an intervention one day at lunch. They grilled me ceaselessly about the whole affair. Was I going to make Daphne stop smoking before the wedding? How long had we been dating? Weren't we a little young to be getting married? What the hell was wrong with us?

What they didn't know (at the time) was that the two of us were carefully planning the world's greatest sham marriage. We had all our ducks in a row. We set a date: July 26, 9:00pm, the day after her eighteenth birthday. The Big Vagina, Daph's then-best friend, volunteered her back yard for the ceremony. We read in some wedding etiquette book that night weddings were the new thing. Said book was published before either of us were born, which is how we knew it was good advice.

We spent the better part of an entire evening completing a wedding registry at a nationally known home furnishings chain, the better to milk the scam. It was all about money (tuition discount, apartment dealie), so why not throw in necessities (and hell, a few luxuries) for the lovely couple's new domicile? We paid special attention to the parts of the etiquette books that outlined how long we had to stay together to be able to keep the wedding gifts without any guilt about not returning them during the inevitable divorce.

So what happened? Where are my wedding ring and my beautiful sham wife? Fair questions, those. After we got engaged, Daphne decided she wouldn't be attending College University after all. Also, we got really busy that semester with the government team's trip to Washington, D.C. We were spending so much time together (literally eighty hours a week for the better part of that year) that we just got sick of looking at each other. We were cool about it, though, like good friends are. We sublimated our rage through our hate for other people we knew. ("God. That library lady is such a stuck-up bitch, telling us where we can and can't sit. Someone needs to buy her a vibrator before I lobotomize her using nothing but this pencil.")

At some point we came to a mutual understanding that the wedding was off. Daphne was no longer best friends with the Big Vagina. In fact, they pretty much hated each other at that point, so we had no place to throw the wedding. We weren't even living in the same town, so it really didn't make sense economically anymore. I just added it to my mental list of flights of fancy gone too far. We talked about staging a messy public breakup, complete with screaming and shit-throwing, but we couldn't get through rehearsals with straight faces, so we gave up. The rumor mill had died down by that point, so it's not like there was any pressure to perform.

Sadly, there seemed to be more interest in our engagement after we'd broken it off. Everyone was asking about us: teachers, freshmen, my mom. The best practical (or in this case impractical) jokes are the ones that haunt you after they should be long dead. Even after I came out, people still asked when the wedding was. Secretly, though, everyone (including the two of us) was relieved when it was all over. They all thought it would've ended badly, which was probably true.

One of the best conversations I ever had with Schmitz was the one where she asked about the status of our relationship. "Whatever happened with yours and Laura's wedding?" she asked. "Well," I said, "it was fun while it lasted." I could hear her smiling with relief through the phone. "That's a good way of looking at it," she said. And she was right, just like always.

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