Patrick and Dez had walked over to Carson with me. Winter, who’d lagged behind, finally came, too, and everyone said their hey’s and hi’s and how-are-you’s. Carson’s team was rounded out by Mike Bono and Heather Melling, who were both the sort of easy-going, up-for-anything people you’d want on your side during an enterprise like this. And their entire team was, for the record, appropriately dressed, in shorts, sneakers, and T-shirts, like I was. Carson looked totally awesome in a cool slate-gray graphic tee with a picture of a guitar on it (of course he played) and a pair of black cargo shorts. He had Converse on, like Patrick, but his were gray like his shirt, and both laceless and sockless. The sight of the hair on his legs made the hair on my arms stand up for reasons I didn’t want to think about. I got the sense that Carson’s knowledge of the world also included a fair amount of knowledge about the opposite sex. There, for sure, we were not a match.
“This is going to be so much fun,” Jill said, and she pulled me into a black cloud of fruity-smelling curls, then stepped back to show her straight-toothed smile. It was all so sweet that I felt bad for having a thing for her boyfriend. But the thing had predated her and, also, romantic feelings were out of our control. If four years of high school and hormones had taught me anything, it was that.
“Barbone just bragged about taking the Yeti to Georgetown with him,” I blurted.
“And he called me a transvestite,” Dez said, shaking his head.
“Oh, Mary,” Jill said, “don’t let him get to you.”
“That guy is such an asshole,” Carson said, giving me a look that I took to indicate that he’d say more if he could. It was looks like these—looks that had become more frequent during our time together on prom committee while poring over DJ applications and catering menus—that had me convinced that Carson had finally…what was the phrase…woken up to me, and that I was the reason he and Jill were heading for Splitsville. It was possible I was imagining it, but I wasn’t imagining the way my feelings for Carson had started to intensify, the way that everything he said and did seemed to take on more meaning.
Patrick put an arm around me right then and said, “We’ll take him down a few notches today, Mary. Don’t give it another thought.”
And for the first time, I felt strangely guilty about the Carson crush I’d never once mentioned to Patrick.
I also felt guilty about how awkward I felt having Patrick’s arm around me. Though the truth was I’d been feeling weird just being around him ever since prom, which was supposed to have been a great epic night but had turned out to be, instead, an epic fail.
Dez said to the group, “We have got to win this thing. You guys or us, it doesn’t even matter.”
Carson looked at me and said, “We’re gonna try our best, Shooter.”
And I swooned. Because I loved it when he called me that. Outside of my family, who’d dubbed me “Shooter” when I was three years old and had sucked down an oyster shooter at the restaurant bar without batting an eye, no one else ever did.
For the record, I had orchestrated our participation in the hunt. I’d led the charge. In the past few weeks, I’d reminded everybody endlessly that the hunt, while unofficial, was part of senior week.
That we were seniors.
“I’ve always thought it sounded kind of lame,” Patrick had said, when we’d first talked about it at lunch one day, and I’d retorted, “This, from the guy who is organizing a senior show skit about math team cheerleaders doing a cheer based on the quadratic equation?”
“Come on,” he said, “that’s going to be awesome.”
He’d been chewing, then he got an idea. “Hey, how come no one’s made a TV show about a high school math team?”
Winter had said, simply, “You’re joking, right?” Then she’d turned to me and said, “Scav Hunt is like a bad teen comedy. One called something lame like Scav Hunt. I wouldn’t even want to play myself in that movie.”
But I’d laid it on thick, telling them that we were almost done with the slog that was high school and that this was our last chance to do something big together, “something worth remembering.” I wasn’t even sure what I’d meant at the time, but then prom had not lived up to expectations. And now that we were here it was all becoming clear: Keeping the Yeti out of Barbone’s hands would definitely qualify as something big, something worth remembering.
So here we were.
“I almost forgot,” I said, digging into my messenger bag, strung diagonally across my chest even though I hated what that did to my boobs. “The rules! So we’re not disqualified for something stupid.”
I started handing out copies to funny looks and said, “Yes, I made copies.”
“Well, you’re nothing if not motivated,” Patrick said, taking a copy and folding it in half. The others did the same until I looked at them—all just standing there holding the rules—and said, “Well, don’t just stand there…READ!”
OYSTER POINT HIGH
Unofficial Senior Week Scavenger Hunt
RULES OF COMPETITION
1. Forty bucks buys your team entry to the hunt, aka “The Best Night of Your Pathetic Life.”
2. 3–6 peeps per team. A “Sloppy Seconds” rule allows members of teams eliminated after Round 1 (aka “losers”), or people whose performance has been deemed lacking by their original team (aka “big losers”), to jump in bed with another team (aka join said team) for Round 2 as long as that team still has no more than six peeps. If taking advantage of the Sloppy Seconds rule, you may bring one item acquired in Round 1 along as a dowry.
3. The Round 1 list (aka “Afternoon Delight”) will be distributed at 1:00 P.M. in The Pines. Teams must return to The Pines by 6:00 P.M. with a minimum of 1250 points in order to obtain the Round 2 list (aka “Nighttime Is the Right Time”). If you’re late, you’re out. Please. No begging. No bribing. No sexual favors. Don’t embarrass yourselves.
4. All items/stunts on the lists can and should be obtained/performed legally. The Yeti takes no responsibility for bail payments, legal fees, destroyed friendships, groundings, rescindment of college admissions or scholarships, lost limbs, locusts, plagues, etc.
5. We encourage you to seek sponsors and freebies whenever possible as we strive to be an equal opportunity event. You can spend your own money if you must but don’t go broke on account of Scav Hunt. That’d be lame.
6. Sabotage, if found out, should be reported to the Yeti, who will decide whether expulsion from the hunt is in order.
7. There is a category of points called Special Points that will be awarded at the discretion of the Head Judge for Special Points. For example, if we say, “Bring us a Derek Jeter jersey,” and you get it at Target, you get the measly 5 points on the list. If, however, Derek Jeter is wearing that jersey, you can appeal to the Head Judge of Special Points and earn anywhere from an extra 2 to 2000 points for being so gosh darn special. Nudity, when not required by item listed, will not yield Special Points. And all Special Points are awarded at judging and not a minute before.
8. The Yeti knows about Google! He’s familiar with the Interwebs, enemy to the spirit of the Scavenger Hunt. Use it sparingly, perhaps to ferret out clues, but count on JPEGS being worth dick. (If we say “Bring us a Breakfast Club movie poster,” and you bring us a printout of a JPEG photo of said poster, you get bubkes.)
9. Keep your phones on and make sure the Yeti has your numbers. Texts will announce updates, clues, and additions to the list. If your battery dies and your charger gets abducted by aliens and both P.C. Richard and RadioShack were already closed and blah-blah-blah…we don’t want to hear it. A phone with a camera and video camera is required to participate if you want your team to stand a chance. All photographic evidence must be texted to the Yeti before relevant deadlines.
10. Final judging starts at 1:00 A.M., and teams not back to The Pines by then will be disqualified. BE ORGANIZED. If it takes us more than five minutes to confirm your points total, we’re outta here. The Yeti has many good qualities
but patience is not one of them.
11. (That’s right, this list goes to eleven!) The victor takes home the Yeti, 300 bucks, and has the honor of running next year’s hunt.
2
NEXT TO THE YETI’S RIDE STOOD LETICIA FARRICE and the rest of last year’s winning team. I didn’t remember all their names but Leticia was pretty much my idol. She had ruled the school as last year’s senior class president—a title Winter had campaigned for this year, with me as her reluctant VP candidate. We’d lost to “The Matts,” aka Matt Sadowski and Matt Horohoe, a loss I had mostly taken in stride because there was a part of me that would have voted for them, too, if I hadn’t felt too dumb not voting for my own ticket. I wasn’t thrilled that losing a vice presidential election made me the also-ran of the Also-Rans. There was certainly no glory in being the Oyster Point High equivalent of Joe Lieberman, especially when Principal Mullin probably didn’t have any idea who he was either.
Leticia had won her election by a landslide and had even successfully negotiated an arrangement with Principal Mullin whereby seniors could leave school for lunch or other free periods, a feat that had secured her legacy forever. I had channeled her when I’d negotiated peace over the prom committee’s Battle of the Prom Song, a fierce showdown that had pitted the pop kids against the hip-hop kids against the indie/alternative kids. When I’d had enough (let’s face it: all three songs were pretty good), I’d suggested, simply, that we have the DJ play all three of them, in a random order to be determined by drawing straws, at the high point of the night. Everyone had seemed content with that and they didn’t know it but they owed it all to Leticia, whose spirit guided me. She had just finished her freshman year at Yale, and here she was, a stone’s throw from me, with the Scavenger Hunt list in hand, to pass on the hunt tradition. I wanted very much this time next year to be one of the seniors who returned like this, victorious, looking exotic and worldly and over it.
Over high school.
Over Barbone.
Over everything.
Leticia blew a whistle quickly and loudly and people started to draw closer to her. “We need your entry fees,” she shouted, and so I got out my wallet and said, “I’ll go.”
Carson reached for his wallet and said, “I’ve got this” to his own team, and I felt even surer that something was up between us, at long last, or had always been.
So we went up to pay, side by side, and Carson said, “Liking the pigtails.”
Without looking at him, I smiled and said, “Thanks,” and I felt like maybe asking him flat out why he hadn’t broken up with Jill yet.
All week at school, since hearing the rumor that a breakup was imminent, I’d been going about my business, waiting for word of it. All week, I’d sort of avoided Carson on account of the horrible awkwardness of my raised expectations but now here we were.
Me with pigtails.
Him liking them.
“Is Winter pissed about something?” he asked and, surprised by the out of context-ness of it, I crinkled my nose and said, “I don’t think so. Why?”
“No reason,” he said, and I realized it was true that Winter was acting sort of subdued around Carson. Maybe she felt as awkward living with this rumor about the impending breakup as I did. Because much as I’d tried not to think about it or talk about it too much, it had been impossible to not fantasize about what life would be like once Carson was free.
To be with me.
“Hey,” said a guy, who I sort of remembered from last year because he’d started a petition in school to start a paper-recycling program—something we still didn’t have and which Earth-hating Mullin didn’t much see the point of.
“I can take that.” He pointed at my two twenties.
“Oh.” I handed the cash over, and he said, “Which car?”
I pointed and said, “The blue LeSabre.”
“Riding in style,” he said, and I said, “Always” and smiled because he was cute, and seemed funny, and why not. He then made me text “LeSabre” to the phone he held, a phone I could only assume was the official Yeti phone.
“The rest of your team can text me, too, if they all want to get the alerts,” he said, then he moved on to Carson’s entry fee and number while I eyed the Yeti. I wondered how heavy it was, whether I’d be able to take one of each of those two hairy-looking feet in each hand and heft him over my head in a gesture of victory. There was no way to know.
Not yet.
“You’re Mary, right?” said the judge guy, and I turned and right then his name popped into my head. “Yeah, and you’re Lucas Wells?”
He smiled. “Yeah.”
“The recycling guy,” I added.
“That’s what I’ll put on my tombstone, yes,” he said, and I laughed.
Then I had nothing to say and he just said, “Good luck to you,” and I said, “Thanks.”
“You cool?” Carson said as we walked back toward their friends.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said lightly.
“I just mean Barbone and the Yeti-Georgetown thing.” He looked genuinely concerned, his eyes a bit sad.
I said, “Let’s just say I’d feel a whole lot better about it all if he didn’t win the hunt.”
He shook his head. “He’s not smart enough to win the hunt.”
“But we didn’t think he was smart enough to get into Georgetown,” I said. The fact of it still boggled the mind since Barbone had always behaved like he had rocks in his head. Sometimes, like during last week’s senior show, when he’d done a weird reinterpretation of the famous Chris Farley “Van Down by the River” SNL skit—this one about Principal Mullin, living in a trailer down by the river—I swore you could hear them knocking around in there. It was true that Mullin owned an RV, and the principal himself had seemed amused, but he’d been alone in that. Barbone, while laughable at times, was not particularly funny.
“Well, we’ll see what we can do,” Carson said, then he put an arm around my shoulders and squeezed and he smelled so good that I thought I might die.
Leticia blew her whistle again—hard and loud and long this time—and all talking stopped. Engines that were idling switched off. A few short whoops rose up from the parking lot, like bubbles that quickly popped, and my eyes wandered over to our school in the distance, a big brick U on the hill leading out of The Pines. I imagined its bricks bulging from all the memories contained inside of it—like my own memories of long hours of practice in Mr. C’s band room where it always smelled of old spit, and where Patrick and I sometimes played duets after everyone else had gone home; and of the time when the whole school got detention because someone popped the balloons on the bulletin board announcing that one of the teachers had won some big award. I remembered crying in the second floor bathroom the day I’d heard that Jason White had asked Maria Ward, and not me, to the junior prom; I remembered consoling Winter in a far corner of the library the one time she had ever had her heart broken, all the way back in sophomore year. I remembered Dez’s reprise of his Daphne costume this past Halloween, when the rest of us had filled out the Scooby-Doo crew in a show of solidarity. (I’d made a pretty good Velma without much effort.) When you piled in all the memories—and those were just mine!—it seemed a wonder the whole place didn’t just explode.
Leticia produced a megaphone and said, “Welcome to the ninth annual, completely unofficial, uncondoned Senior Week Scavenger Hunt.”
Whistles and “yeah baby”s rose up—there was a stray, drunken sounding “You are so hot”—and I started feeling jittery, started shaking a leg. I looked over at Patrick and his eyes were alight. He was excited, and I was relieved. I was afraid he’d be bringing all of his sounds-dumb baggage into the day’s festivities, but he seemed genuinely up for the hunt now, which would make life better for all of us.
“In my hands,” Leticia Farrice continued, “I hold the first list!”
More whooping it up.
“I wish my name was Leticia Farrice,” Winter said, and I studied Letic
ia’s super-white teeth and brown skin and wondered for the first time what ethnicity—or ethnicities—deserved credit for creating this glorious human specimen, wondered how Leticia’s parents looked at their baby girl and knew she’d be just glamorous enough to pull off a name like that.
Le-TEESH-a! Fa-REES!
As opposed to a name like, well, Mary May Gilhooley.
I looked at my best girlfriend sideways and elbowed her. “Winter Watson is a pretty great name.”
Carson had drifted forward from his own car to better hear what Leticia was saying and he snapped a finger in front of my face and said, “Pay attention, Shooter.”
He was totally flirting, which I admit I probably would have thought was bad form if it wasn’t me he was flirting with. Jill was right there.
“Yeah, Shooter,” Patrick said, sort of obnoxiously. He’d never much liked my nickname, though he’d never been able to give me a good reason why except that I already had a name—a good one, he said—and that he didn’t really like oysters at all and didn’t much see the point of a food that you barely ate before swallowing, slime and all.
Either way, they were both right to snap me out of it.
It was important to pay attention.
But then Leticia put the megaphone aside and said something to her friends, then took up the megaphone again and said, “Okay, sorry. Just give us a minute.” So I kept an eye on her, but also set about assessing current threat levels.
The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life Page 2