Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.
Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.
There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.
