The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life

by Tara Altebrando

  Very far and very fast.

  Away from Patrick and all this awkwardness.

  Away from Winter and her secret and my own jealousy about it.

  And from high school and Barbone and everything else.

  “Two hundred freaking points,” Dez said, and he high-fived me and I met eyes with Patrick and he seemed somehow more disgusted with me than ever before.

  A few other teams had arrived as we started putting our clothes back on to wet skin. Tom Reilly’s car just kept on going; no point in stopping once the points were already claimed. A few teams we didn’t know cruised by shouting out curses and insults. Only Carson’s team stopped.

  “Are you guys going to hit twelve-fifty?” Carson asked, and it was Winter who said, “Of course we are.”

  “Awesome,” Jill said. “Us, too.”

  Back in the car, Dez was adding up points and said, “We’ve got eleven ninety-four.” Then, “Guys, if we rearrange the hay in the park for sixty points, we’re in the next round.”

  “Really?” I said. The park was just a few minutes away. “Hay bales and we’re done?”

  “With time to spare,” he said, then he nodded and high-fived me again and I didn’t care what Patrick thought. He was the one who was going to have to deal with it.

  7

  WE OYSTER POINTERS HAD MIXED FEELINGS about the “art installation” in the park overlooking the waterfront on Stomp Hill, which was basically a bunch of hay bales that the artist expected us common folk to rearrange for our own amusement. Some, including my father, argued that bales of hay can’t be art and dubbed the artist “some earthy crunchy nut job with too much time on her hands.” Others claimed the nut job was a visionary. Still others argued that just getting people to talk about what art was was sort of the whole point. When I’d decided to actually read what the artist had intended when her statement appeared in The Oyster Pointer—“The project is intended as a translation of the geometrical geography that was, and is, still necessary for productive agricultural labors and will depict the overlap between this original morphology of the cultivated land and an idealized and abstract pattern of the Cartesian knowledge”—I couldn’t help but side with my dad.

  In the last few weeks, the hay bales had—according to The Oyster Pointer, at least—been arranged into the shape of a peace sign, some unfortunately square snowmen, a penis, and more.

  “What about building a stairway-to-heaven-type thing?” Patrick offered as we stood in front of the hay bales, which were arranged in the shape of a phallus again. So some of our classmates had clearly already been there; probably Barbone.

  “Too hard,” Winter said.

  “That’s what she said,” Dez said.

  If you only knew, I thought, careful to not make eye contact with Patrick.

  I knew guys got erections.

  I was perfectly prepared to deal with it. When the right guy and the right erection came along.

  “Think easy,” Winter said then. “Think outlines. Think the sort of crap a four-year-old draws. Butterflies and flowers.”

  “But we could get extra points for being clever,” I said, remembering for the first time the Special Points. “We haven’t even been thinking about special points and how to get some.”

  “Well, I don’t do clever,” Winter said, and Dez said, “Give yourself some credit, Winter. You can be clever.”

  “Name one time when I was clever,” Winter said, and I laughed.

  Even when you were mad at Winter, it was hard to be mad at Winter. She rested her head back on a bale of hay and said, “Let me know when you special people come up with something.”

  “Let’s look at the list,” Patrick said. “Maybe there’s something else we could get points for? Like if it’s a picture of something on the list or something?”

  “See, now that’s brilliant!” I said, too enthusiastically, judging by Patrick’s look, and I took out my list and sat on a hay bale just in time to see Carson’s team pull up and park behind Patrick’s car. One by one, they all got out and strolled over to where we were sitting and trying to be clever.

  “Are you guys done?” Jill asked with hands on her hips, and Dez said, “Do we seem like the types to make a penis to you?”

  Jill laughed. “Not exactly, no!”

  I said, “We were just going to start. Why don’t you come back in fifteen minutes?”

  “Fifteen minutes?” Jill looked at her teammates. “Why don’t we just help you guys then we’ll do our thing?”

  “That’s okay. We can handle it,” I said, feeling myself quickly tiring of this conversation, though I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because Jill was obviously oblivious to everything that was going on in her own boyfriend’s head.

  “What are you going to make?” she asked.

  “We don’t actually know yet,” Patrick said, and I felt a little bit annoyed that he’d admitted it.

  “Well, then, just let us go,” Jill said. “We’ll be really quick.”

  “But we just need to do this and then we’re into the next round,” I said. “So if we want to really have a shot at Barbone, you just need to let us do this. Okay?”

  “But,” Jill said, “we only need to do this and like one other thing to get to the next round, so maybe we should go first so we’ll have time to get the last fifty points.” She looked at her watch and it annoyed me that she was wearing a watch—was that some kind of statement?—and she said, “There’s time.”

  “We were here first,” I said sharply, and it seemed like all of my friends just froze. I knew how it sounded. What was I? Eight years old?

  “We’re all on the same side,” Jill said, and I said, “Well, I mean, we are. But I’m the one who really wants to stick it to Barbone, you know?”

  Not even eight years old! More like five!

  But it was true!

  “Fine,” Jill said. “Be that way. But you still don’t know what you’re making and we’ll be done by the time you figure it out.” She started walking toward the hay bales.

  “Carson,” I said, turning to him, though why I thought he would be the one to help me out I have no idea. “Seriously?”

  He shrugged and said, “We’ll be quick,” then walked past us all and, that quickly, he and Jill and Heather and Mike were rearranging hay bales to take the shape of…

  “What the hell are they making?” I asked. “And why am I the only one who’s annoyed by this?”

  “That’s a really good question,” Patrick said. “Why are you so annoyed?”

  Maybe it was silly to get so worked up about Barbone taking the Yeti to Georgetown, but it suddenly mattered very much that it was my team who won it. Dez and I, at least, had been tolerating Barbone since kindergarten so I felt he was ours to take down. I didn’t say any of that, though—only looked at Winter, who wouldn’t make eye contact—and so we just stood there and within the next few minutes, Carson and Jill’s team had managed to make an igloo. A small igloo, yes. They’d barely used a fraction of the hay bales available, but it was an igloo nonetheless.

  “Why didn’t we think of that?” Dez said, and Patrick said, “Because we’re thinking too hard, trying to be too clever.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Winter said.

  Carson’s team had already snapped a picture and they were all heading for his car.

  “I don’t know, Mary,” Jill said by way of parting, “I thought we were all in this together.”

  “Well,” I said, “we are and we aren’t.” I was trying to lighten the mood but it wasn’t working. “I mean, it is a competition, right?”

  Jill shrugged and said, “That’s fine. Two can play at that game.” She walked off.

  “Come on,” I said to my team. “We’re running out of time.”

  Patrick, Dez, and Winter followed me to the middle of the field, where the igloo had been built, and then Patrick said, “What was that about?” He lifted one of the bales off the igloo.

  “I just think it was bad form fo
r them to cut in front of us.” I tried a bale but could barely get it to budge.

  “But what’s the big deal?” Patrick said. “They’re our friends.”

  I said, “Can we just do this and then talk about it? I mean, I’m sorry, okay?”

  Patrick sighed and wiped some sweat off his forehead. The day had gotten hotter, or maybe it was just us. “What about Stonehenge?” he said.

  “You don’t think someone’s already done it?” I said. “It’s so obvious.”

  He snapped, “Well if it’s so obvious, why didn’t you think of it ten minutes ago?”

  Then Winter, who was making a last-ditch attempt to find inspiration on the list said, “A goldfish?” She got her phone out for reasons I couldn’t even imagine, and set about sending a text.

  Dez said, “But for the goldfish item it specifies it has to be alive.”

  “Well, I tried,” Winter said.

  “It doesn’t really matter what we make,” Dez said. “We should just qualify.”

  My phone buzzed and I went to look at it. The text was from Winter and said: JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE MAD AT ME DON’T TAKE IT OUT ON EVERYBODY ELSE.

  I didn’t even know what to say, so I wrote: I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY.

  “Are you two texting each other?” Patrick asked.

  “Of course not,” we both said.

  I looked at the igloo and thought about Stonehenge and tried to think of other famous structures, then had an idea. “What if we take the top off the igloo and make the whole thing a little bit taller and crooked, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We can have one of us pose like we’re holding it up.”

  “It’ll never look enough like the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” Patrick said. “It’ll just look like a silo or something. How about the front wall of a castle? Like with a gate and a turreted sort of tower on each side.”

  “It doesn’t really matter what we make!” Dez shouted this time, but Patrick and I were locked in this, I’m not even sure why.

  “I can’t picture it,” I said.

  “I’ll just show you,” Patrick said. “Trust me, it’ll be good. We’ll tell the Yeti we’ve built him a castle.”

  “Awesome,” Dez said. “Let’s do it.”

  “We don’t have enough manpower,” I said. “Let’s just do Stonehenge. We can make it small.”

  “Fine,” Patrick said.

  “Let’s just get on with it,” Winter said.

  “Yes, for the love of god,” Dez wailed.

  The bales were awkward and heavy. We had to work in teams of two, so we decided to do so in one girl–one guy pairs. Patrick was paired with me and when we were far enough away and when Winter and Dez started talking, Patrick said, “Did you tell her?”

  I lied and said, “No, I didn’t tell her.”

  “Well, what was that about then?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Girl stuff.”

  “Give me a break, Mary.” Then he was about to say something else but my phone buzzed.

  It was from the Yeti and said: APOLOGIES FOR THE DELAY. THE YETI IS RATHER BUSY: 21 13 12 1 21 20.

  “Who is it now?” Patrick said with annoyance.

  “The Yeti,” I said. “Something in code. To build on Godzilla and Winston Churchill.”

  “Well, we should finish this first,” he said. “So we’re in for sure.”

  Hayhenge, as Patrick started calling it, was starting to take shape. And we were lucky to have Dez on our team because he was sort of petite and easily hoisted on Patrick’s shoulders to help shift bales into position. We were almost done when Barbone’s car rumbled onto the park road.

  “Ugh,” Dez groaned.

  “Are we almost done here, guys?” Winter asked with some dread in her voice, and Patrick said. “Almost.”

  Barbone approached with a “What the hell is that? Some weird shrine to gayness?”

  “It’s Stonehenge,” Dez said, then he added, “Douche bag.” It was said in a whisper, near Winter’s ear, but I heard it. And if I heard it, that meant…

  “What did you say, choirboy?” Fitz asked.

  There was a weary edge to Dez’s voice when he turned and said, “I said, douche bag.”

  I watched as Fitz started to turn an angry sort of red in the face.

  Then, in case it wasn’t clear, Dez said, “I called Jake Barbone a douche bag.”

  “Oh, man,” said Fitz, looking at Barbone. “You’re not gonna take that shit lying down, are you?”

  “Whatever, man.” Barbone got this dumb grin on his face and he said, “Me and Daphne here, we go way back. Don’t we, Daph?”

  “That we do,” Dez said, and I just wanted Barbone to go away. Or to die. It wasn’t a nice way to feel, hating someone as much as I hated him, but there was no way around it.

  Barbone gave Dez a funny look, then he turned to his friends again. “See, I don’t even know how you get to be the kind of person that talks like that. ‘That we do!’ But you know what I do know?”

  “What?” asked Fitz. Allison and Chrissie were smiling dumbly into space.

  We had one last hay bale to position to make Hayhenge complete, and it required that Dez climb up on a sort of makeshift step stool we’d built out of hay once we’d realized Patrick couldn’t hold Dez for that long and still be useful to us.

  “I know,” Barbone said slowly, “that you don’t mess with fags because you get in more trouble than when you mess with regular guys.”

  “Don’t call me a fag, douche bag.” Dez was high up on the hay bales now. “And while we’re at it, how about you stop calling me Daphne.”

  It was Fitz who shoved the bale under Dez. It wobbled and he lost his balance and fell back away from us, to the other side of Hayhenge, where he landed on the ground hard with a thud.

  The next sound was Dez’s scream.

  Barbone said, “What the hell, Fitz?” and Fitz held up a hand expecting a high five but was denied.

  I rushed to Dez’s side.

  “Shit,” Dez kept saying, “shit shit shit.”

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s hurt?”

  “My wrist,” he said. “It’s bad.” He was cradling it with his other hand.

  “Not cool, dude,” Barbone said to Fitz. “I just said we weren’t going to mess with the fag,” and they headed off toward more hay bales with the girls trailing behind them like mutes.

  “Can you move your fingers?” I asked Dez, because that seemed somehow important, and he could, but he could not move the wrist without screaming.

  “What are we going to do?” Winter asked, and I said, “Dez. We need to get you in the car, okay?”

  I helped him up and he winced but he could walk, of course, so he got over to the car and into the backseat without too much trouble.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” he said once we’d all gotten back in. And he fanned a hand over his face to cover tears. The injured wrist lay on his lap and was already starting to purple.

  Patrick said, “I think our next stop is going to have to be the hospital.”

  I was about to argue—we could ice it, wrap it up tight, so that we could get back to The Pines to qualify for the second list—but then Dez moaned, “Holy mother of God.”

  Almost like a reflex, I turned to the backseat shelf, and saw that Mary was no longer there. “Where’s Mary?” I asked, in a panic.

  Winter looked around by her head, then by her feet, and said, “The trunk?”

  I shook my head. “No. I put her up here.”

  Winter said, “Yeah, you’re right. She was definitely back there before. When we were at Flying Saucers for sure.”

  “I honestly don’t believe this,” I said. “Someone took it.”

  “But who,” Patrick said.

  “I don’t know!” I said. And then I did know. “It was Jill,” I said. “She said ‘two can play at that game’ like it was some kind of threat.”

  Patrick sort of laughed. “Well, you were being pretty obnoxious.”

  “They were
the ones who wanted to cut in front of us!” I honestly didn’t get why they didn’t get it.

  “It’s just wasn’t that big of a deal, Mare,” Winter said.

  “What about stealing Mary?” I asked. “Is that a big deal?”

  “Well it seems pretty obvious,” Patrick said, “that she is trying to prove a point. And I’m sure she’ll give it back.”

  “I think the bigger deal is that my wrist is broken!” Dez shouted.

  The Yeti’s text said: FORTY-FIVE MINUTES TIL CHECK-IN, SCAV HUNTERS! MAKE IT COUNT!

  The radio was on and Patrick switched it off but Dez managed, “No, leave it. I like this song and it’s a good distraction from all your pathetic bickering.”

  The song was that hit-you-in-the-gut anthem “Beds Are Burning,” by Midnight Oil, one of those random songs that the DJs on WOPR felt the need to play at least five times a day. Even though the song was really old, I knew all the words and had downloaded it and I felt certain that when I heard it in ten or twenty years, it would magically transport me back to a feeling, to a moment. I did not want it to be this moment.

  The time has come to say fair’s fair.

  The car felt eerily quiet even with the music blasting. What was there to say? Why did people like Barbone and Fitz even exist?

  To pay the rent. To pay our share.

  Why did Dez have to go and bait Barbone?

  How can we dance when our earth is turning?

  What did that even mean?

  How do we sleep while our beds are burning?

  I felt sick about the way I’d behaved with Jill—an also-ran like me, though she didn’t even know it yet—and about Carson and Winter, whispering sweet nothings in front of Dora and Diego—¡Ayúdame!—and about the fact that after all that work we’d forgotten to take a picture of Hayhenge.

  Without Mary we were down to 1094, and out of the running.

  I was screwed.

  Not just today, but in life—where people like Barbone got into better colleges and got better jobs and cars and Yetis, and girls like Winter got guys like Carson. Good girls like me, even reluctant ones, went nowhere fast—I was living proof!—and now Dez wasn’t the only one crying.