After the candy and condoms from the penis piñata had been cleared out, Francesco stepped out from behind the bar. Everyone gathered around him.

Francesco spoke in Italian—fast, nervous, shaky—but I didn’t need any translation when he got down on one knee. The way he looked in Neil’s eyes when he popped the question, the way Neil held his hand over his chest as he watched, and the way he uttered one of the few words in Italian I knew—sì—I was overwhelmed. We all were.

Everyone pulled out their phones to take pictures. I would have pulled mine out, too, but the camera was hardly any good. I was using an old Android Jahan had given me earlier that day. After the last call with my parents, I decided to lose my American number and get an Italian one. I didn’t share that number with anyone from back home.

As Jahan and Neil and Francesco, all their friends, their family, snapped photos and cheered, something came over me. I was so damn happy for Neil and Francesco. I thought maybe someday, I could find happiness, too.

Later, I found Neil in the crowd. He slung an arm around my neck and I went in for a full hug, like we were best friends or something. Neil stumbled forward; he was more than a little bit drunk. I held him up. High on the proposal, on the energy of the moment, I said, “Auguri”—the Swiss Army knife of Italian words, which has many different uses, but in this case, congratulations. He smiled.

“You’ve been studying,” Neil said.

“I have,” I said, and I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation, this close to Neil, this soon after he had just been proposed to.

It must have felt that way for Neil, too. “Thanks, man,” he said. “I expect to see you at the wedding, you know.”

I pulled back from the hug, my face dumbstruck. I was hung up on the fact that Neil, the hot tutor of my dreams, had invited me to his wedding. And I wasn’t the least bit heartbroken. It didn’t ruin the fantasy at all. There was no fantasy. Friendship, I realized, is better than fantasy.

I was riding higher and higher. The strings of light around the rooftop glowed warmly. More people began to fill the space and dance. Love was in the air.

Glow sticks were in the air, too. Jahan had gone downstairs and came back with a whole box of them. He’d crack a bundle of glow sticks and shake vigorously before he tossed them, lighting up the sky like fireworks.

I caught a glow stick and ambled my way downstairs to the bathroom. I was sober, but I felt drunker than I’d ever been.

The basement had to be negative eight million degrees Celsius—Celsius!—but I still felt warm and boozy inside. Even with the long line at the bathroom, my priority was not to relieve my bladder but to create a glow stick bracelet by poking the end of the glow stick into the little plastic fastener thingy. Even in my relatively sober state, I was hard-core struggling to fasten the glow stick around my wrist.