The autumn night sky over Park Ridge is stunning. Especially on clear, chilly October nights when you stand in the middle of the playground of West Ridge Elementary School. You look up, and the whole cosmos is there, and you want to throw your head back and scream and try to fill all the empty space between the stars with your voice. You would, but you know it'd be as relieving as it always was, which is not at all, since all you can think about is why you're there.

You'd go up there with your best friend in high school and lament about the girl you liked but never knew how to express it. He liked her the year before -- you had his sympathy. You'd pick him up and cruise over in your car with the roof and the windows open and get out and walk to the middle of the field and yell. He would nod knowingly. You'd walk to the jungle gym -- the very foreign jungle gym, since it wasn't there when you were in elementary school; there used to be a big slide and a merry-go-round instead of the wood-and-worn-out-tires stuff and the weird geodesic dome thing -- and you'd swing from the frozen steel bars and wonder how to approach her. Neither of you had the answer, at least not anything new; just the usual: Walk up and say "Hi." Say you like her. Say anything. Call. Write a letter. Nothing helpful. He'd smoke his Players. You'd get back in the car, sigh, shake your head, and drive home. Nothing helpful at all.

Until the musical. Fate smiling on you as it was, the three of you -- you, him, and her -- were in the musical. You had a lead. He had a bit part and worked tech. She was in the chorus. You found yourself screaming in the playground every night as the performances drew near, because at the same time, looming almost as ominously on the calendar ahead was: The Prom. Even if you had been doing musicals for the last century, the thought of asking her to go with you would still have given you Stage Fright from the Depths of Hell. Two hours of entrance cues, lines, lyrics, and choreography was child's play compared to "Would you go to the Prom with me?" without your legs giving out from under you. So, of course, you didn't say it.

And, the night before the last performance, while you were musing about cue cards and leg braces, your best friend came to you with the news. John had asked her. Yes, John, the guy with a secondary lead. John, the perplexingly overweight guy who never showered and always wore a baseball cap. John, whose personality was as strong as his body odor. The difficult thing about this was that if John were the only one who asked her, she just might go with him.

So you looked at your friend like Batman looks at Robin. You jumped in the Toyota, and then you did the coolest thing you ever did in your entire life.

With the windows and sunroof open and the stereo blasting Miami Vice, you burned along every main road, back road, side road and dirt road you knew. When all searching failed, you wound up at the Diner. You pulled into the parking lot, drove by the entrance . . . and there she was. He killed the tape while you leaned out the window and called her name. She walked over.

"So . . . I hear John asked you to the Prom."

"Well . . . yeah . . . "

You cocked your head and raised an eyebrow. "You want a way out of it?"

"Well . . . what do you mean?"

You looked her straight in the eyes, and for one unparallelled moment, you felt no fear.

"Go with me."

She said she'd think about it.

At the last performance, you saw her on stage, but she disappeared as soon as it was over. So you hopped in the car with your best friend and drove to the cast party, figuring maybe she'd be there. She wasn't. You were walking to the front door when John walked in.

"Hey," he said. "Congratulations."

You stared blankly at him and blinked a couple of times.

He walked up to you and shook your hand. He smiled. "You stole my Prom date."

You managed to raise your eyebrows and say "Oh."

He kept smiling and shook his head. "You know, when I asked her out, she didn't even tell me you'd asked her first. She just told me at the musical."

And now you smiled like a maniac. That little sneak. She lied. How great.

And so you called her the next night and said, "So, d'you still want to go?" And she said yes.

You got the Miami Vice tux and the corsage. You picked her up at her house and like an idiot played a tape of Toccata and Fugue in D minor in the car on the way to the house where you'd wait for the limo you split with two of your friends. Six sets of parents took pictures with twelve cameras, always from where you weren't looking, and your eyes were covered with sunspots by the time somebody's brother had finished blow-drying your cummerbund that had fallen into a puddle when you got out of the car. But that was okay. And the limo, if cramped, was stylish.

You sat at your table in the hotel ballroom and ate the disguised cafeteria food. You stood against the wall for the photographer -- you had no idea how to hold her hand, so she held yours. You still looked great.

When the limo dropped you off, you waved goodbye to the other couples. Neither of you was doing anything after. You got in the car and, to the far less ominous strains of Vivaldi, drove to her house. You parked in her driveway.

She turned and looked at you. "So, that's it?" she said.

"Yeah," you replied, with an exhausted smile, "that's it."

She got out and went into her house.

And you went home.

And to this day, you still drive up to West Ridge and walk to the middle of the playground and throw your head back and look at the sky. Now, you just sigh and watch your breath condense and drift off between the stars. And you know you will never forgive yourself. Because you never kissed her goodnight.

And you know that that very incompleteness makes it all more perfect than it could ever have otherwise been, because it never had an ending. And you don't scream at the stars anymore, because somewhere, hanging up there like a suspended chord, is the end of one night.

If you know what that's like, you know why I paid for all this space in the classifieds. 555-2422.