Last night was one of the best nights I've had in a long time. I keep telling myself not to blow it off as just something that teenagers and friends do every once in a while.

Class got out quite early, almost by two and a half hours, and there was lots of time to kill before the urge to sleep would hit and I would have to go to bed. Mom came and got me after I stood outside in the pseudo-cold for a half hour, and dropped me off at the card shop on her way home.

Yeah, the card shop, where all the little boys (and girl) go on Friday nights and Sunday's to play Magic and laugh at each other and have a good time. Where I've spent quite a few weekend days just whiling away the time with my favorite bunch of guys, the D&D and DDR group. We're all a little crazy, but that's okay, because it's most of the time the good kind of crazy that everyone can appreciate.

Everyone I know always acts surprised when I show up unannounced, like it's a big thing when a girl walks in that door intending to either play or just hang out and act like a boy for a night. I guess it is, too, since usually I am the only one without a penis there (unless one of the little kids that hangs around is actually female, and we can't tell because s/he is too ashamed to admit it).

The whole shebang was over too quickly for me, I had wanted to hang out and have fun for a while longer, so I phoned my mother to tell her I'd be home around midnight and to please go to bed and not wait up for me again.

Five of us decided we would hang out for a while, and walked to various houses to drop off things (or people) and by the time we walked to my house it was just me and the boys.

And by the boys I mean the two very specific ones that I happen to spend so much time with because they're better than all the girls I know, because they do not freak out when you hug them or touch them or make inappropriate comments about sex, and they listen when I talk to them and tell me what they think, even if I don't want to hear what it is they have to say, and it is usually good that I listen and take the advice they give.

It's not as though we haven't hung out around my house until all hours of the morning talking and laughing and being silly, making my neighbors yell at us or think we're some strange homeless kids who sometimes wander into the neighborhood, but last night was different, somehow. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, unless you would count the fact that we were huddled under a blanket for a lot of the time, or shaking heads, or cuddling while lying on the cold cement sidewalk and shivering. There was really, nothing different at all to make last night stand out from all the other nights.

Except that it was last night.