Patrick just looked out the window and shook his head.
My phone buzzed and it was Dez: DID U MAKE IT?
I wrote back, YES. AND WE GOT FITZ DQ’D.
AWSE! Dez wrote.
I sent, HOW ARE YOU?
BORED, he said. WTNG 4 MRI.
He was clearly texting with one hand.
Then he asked: SKINNY-DIPPING?
I took a minute to think of my reply and opted for: AFRAID SO.
Dez wrote back: PATRICK MUST BE !!!!! Then: BARBONE DQ’D?
NO, I wrote back. SORRY. Then I wrote: BUT THERE IS BIG NEWS. CARSON AND JILL SPLITSVILLE. HE’S WITH US NOW.
Dez only wrote: !
And I wrote: HE LIKES WINTER. SHOOT ME.
Then: ALSO JILL SEEMS PISSED ABOUT SOMETHING. SAID TO WINTER ‘I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.’ WHAT DID SHE DO?
NO IDEA, Dez wrote and somehow it looked like a lie, even though I knew it wasn’t possible for type to look one way or another.
Carson said, “Crap,” and pulled the car over to the curb and turned off the music with a quick slap of a button on the dash.
We’d arrived at Rizzo’s, where a long red-and-gold awning stretched from the front door to the curb. Tom Reilly’s team had already gotten there and Tom himself was on the roof—presumably having climbed the fire escape on the side of the building—where a creepy-looking scarecrow-type gondolier stood in a long and slender boat. It looked more like the kind of guy who’d escort you across the River Styx than one who’d take you on a leisurely tour of Venetian canals, but points were points. Tom had climbed into the boat and was posing for his teammate’s cell-phone camera.
“How did they get here so fast?” I said, infuriated. They’d beaten us to the bell at Fort Wayne, too, and were possibly shaping up to be our main competition.
“No idea,” Carson said.
“Well, that was a bust,” Patrick said. “So what do we do next?”
“Mr. Gatti lives pretty close to here,” Carson said as he looked at a copy of the list. “Just past the train tracks.”
Mr. Gatti was the theater director at school. Also a science teacher, but only freshman courses so none of us had had him as an actual teacher in years. There was crossover, naturally, between the band kids and the theater kids and Carson was both, having just that year played the lead in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
“But what could we possibly steal?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Carson said. “But we should go look, at least. He’s got all sorts of crazy lawn ornaments and stuff.”
“Okay, drive,” I said, and we were off again and I watched Tom and the gondolier fade into the distance. “How did they get there so fast?” I asked again, and Patrick said only, “Let it go, Mary.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to Venice,” Winter said. “But not if the gondoliers look like that.”
Carson laughed and said, “Don’t worry.” He smiled at her in the rearview mirror. “They don’t.”
“All right,” I said. “We need to be multitasking even if we’re going to Gatti’s. Who wants to write the opening paragraph of a novel about school?”
“You should be the one to do that,” Winter said, and I said, “Okay,” because I felt like I’d been doing it in my head all night anyway: They were the best of times. They were the worst of times.
“Excellent,” Carson said, and there was a part of me that resented how entirely normal and content he sounded. Had he even noticed that I liked him? Did the fact that Winter and I were best friends make him think twice at all?
I said, “‘Put the union rat to work.’ What does that mean?”
“No idea,” Patrick said.
“Who’s Susan Witherton?” I asked.
“She’s that real estate agent whose face is plastered all over town,” Carson said. “She has an office near Stop & Shop, I think?”
“Awesome,” I said. “But what time do places like that close?”
“Yeah, it’s probably too late,” Carson said. “Sometimes they leave little business cards in dispensers outside, though, I think. For when they’re not there and people walk by?”
“Doesn’t sound promising,” Winter said.
“What about a condom?” I said, without realizing how awkward the question would sound coming from me, someone who’d never laid eyes on an actual condom outside of a sex ed class I’d taken years ago.
“I have one,” Carson said, and at the next red light, he pulled out his wallet, slipped out a condom, and held it up and out toward the backseat.
I just stared at the shiny square, sort of stunned.
“What do you want me to do with it?” I said, and Carson laughed and tossed it into the backseat. Winter squirmed away and the little square just sat there on the seat between us like a dead bug, neither of us willing to touch it. Still, I added 15 points to our total. For 1359.
“You ladies have issues,” Patrick said, shaking his head.
As if he wasn’t a virgin, too!
But what on earth was Carson doing with a condom? In his wallet? Had he and Jill done it? Had they done it in the week since the rumor had started? Or was the condom intended for something—someone—else? Like, for Winter? Tonight?
The very thought of it—of Winter and Carson, together, kissing or anything more, made me feel sick. And so humiliated, too. All that time we’d spent together working on prom, he and I. All the inside jokes and “Shooters,” none of it meant anything and now my brain was stuck on a loop, unable to move past the question of: How could I have been so horribly wrong about Carson and Patrick and everything?
We drove in silence for a moment and Patrick said, “So what’s the deal? I thought you and Jill were solid.”
I clenched my fists and waited.
After a pause, Carson said, “It’s been coming for a long time.”
“Yeah, you said that,” Patrick said skeptically. “You could’ve fooled me.”
“It’s hard to explain,” Carson said, and his eyes met Winter’s for a quick, nervous instant in the rearview. “It just didn’t seem like we were going to stay together once we went away, so what’s the point of being together now?”
“I guess,” Patrick said. “Or maybe you could argue that you should be together now since it’s your only chance, and why not.”
I felt certain Patrick wasn’t talking about Carson and Jill anymore.
“I don’t know,” Carson said. “I guess my heart just wasn’t in it. And I mean, this is our last summer here and our last summer before college. It doesn’t feel right to waste it with someone you’re not crazy about.”
Carson looked at Winter again then, in the rearview mirror, and Winter looked out the window. She sure did like looking out that window.
“She sure seems crazy about you,” Patrick said to Carson, as if that were enough—as if one person’s feelings could be big enough to count for two.
Had anyone ever written a book or a good magazine article about how to be friends with a guy who wanted to be more than friends? Because that’s what I needed. And he needed an article, too, one that told him to stop making me feel guilty. It wasn’t like I wanted to hurt his feelings!
The Marriott was coming up fast on the right side of the road so I shouted, “Soap from a hotel!”
Carson jerked us into the parking lot and cut a diagonal line across it then stopped near the hotel entrance and put the car in park.
“I’ll go,” I said.
Wasting time deciding stuff like that was just that, wasting time. Plus, the car, while luxurious, had started to feel claustrophobic, too small to contain everything that was going on. Weirdness between Patrick and me. Between Winter and me. And, unless I was imagining it, between Winter and Carson.
“This may sound strange,” I said, when I got to the front desk.
“But you’d like a bar of soap?” the woman said.
After a split second’s surprise, I said, “Yes. Yes, I would.” Then felt the need to
add, “It’s all in good fun. Nothing crazy or illegal or anything.”
“Sure,” the woman said. “I gotcha.”
She called housekeeping and then returned to whatever it was she was doing and I just waited. The lobby was empty except for two men, sitting and talking loudly in a lounge, where a grand piano sat eerily quietly. A woman behind the small bar was reading a romance novel, and I had a hard time imagining a more boring place to tend bar. I wanted to run up to her and ask her how she’d ended up here, and how I might avoid such a boring fate myself, and then I secretly hoped she was writing the Great American Novel and just tending bar here to pay the bills, or putting herself through school in astrophysics. Or something. Anything! Because what if this was the best night of my pathetic life? What if things didn’t get better after high school but worse?
My phone buzzed and I figured it was the Yeti, but it was only Dez. It said: HOW ARE YOU HOLDING UP?
I sat and wrote: BARELY.
Dez said: TELL HIM HOW YOU FEEL? SO YOU’LL KNOW FOR SURE?
Not even two hours ago, I was sure Carson and I were heading toward some romantic confrontation. What if I was somehow misinterpreting everything? What if telling him how I felt could change the course of events?
I was contemplating how to reply when Carson appeared by my side, and for a half a second I hoped he’d come in to tell me there’d been some big misunderstanding, that he’d only been talking to Winter about me, that she’d misinterpreted things.
“What’s up?” he said.
“They’re bringing it,” I said,
“Awesome,” he said. “I’ve got to run to the loo.”
He went toward signs for restrooms and I realized how different it was to be around him now. Now that he was available. It really was now or never, do or die, and I felt certain there was a passage in that romance novel the bartender chick was reading about a moment just like this one, when the timid heroine decides to take her romantic fate into her own hands.
But he liked Winter.
This was no romance novel.
I told Dez: I DON’T SEE THE POINT.
A woman wearing a red Marriot uniform appeared in the lobby and handed a bar of soap to the woman at the desk, who nodded to me, so I walked over and got it and said, “Thank you so much.”
Dez said: GOING FOR MRI!
I waited for Carson, thinking I’m going to do it, No, I can’t, over and over on a loop and then he was back and the moment passed and we walked in silence back to the car, which he had left idling in a handicapped spot out front.
Real classy, I thought, for reasons I couldn’t explain.
And it’s a bathroom, for the record. Not a loo.
“We’re idiots,” Patrick said as we got back into the car. “Carson, your parents probably have a drawer full of hotel soaps at home and we’re probably hitting your house for skinny-dipping.”
“I wouldn’t say a drawer full,” Carson said.
“They’re practically never on American soil,” Patrick said, and I knew it was true but something about Patrick’s saying it, and so flippantly like that, felt weird. Possibly because Carson’s parents had just missed the entire production of Joseph.
“Well, it only took a few minutes to get it firsthand,” Winter said lightly.
“Sure,” Carson said. “And they might not even have any.”
“Carson” Patrick said, obviously not picking up the vibe I was picking up, or was he? Was he trying to be hurtful to Carson? Pointing out his parents’ jet-setting ways? “Are your parents, or are they not, currently spending two weeks in the South of France?”
“All right, already,” Carson said. “So they travel a lot. And yes, they happen to be away, so we can skinny-dip in my pool. And we can boil and decorate an egg there, and cook a piece of spaghetti. What else?”
“We need to stage Gumhenge,” I said, adding ten points for the soap to our total, now 1369. “But we need to buy gum first. And do surgery on Barbie.”
“We don’t have a Barbie yet,” Winter noted.
“So we’ll need to get one,” I said. “Is there booze? Like for a martini or Piña Colada?”
“Probably,” Carson said, and I said, “Awesome.”
Carson said, “There must be more, too. Keep looking.” He nodded at the list in Patrick’s hands.
“Hotel soap,” Patrick said, shaking his head and smiling. “I’m telling you.”
We pulled out of the parking lot and Carson said, “So. Gatti’s house?”
“Yes,” I said.
Carson nodded at the list in Patrick’s hand. “Anything else on the way?”
He drove out toward the train station and I thought about the list—all those objects and tasks floating around in my mind’s eye. It was enough to drive a person crazy if you let it. All the points, all the strategizing. And the way your brain was drawn to some things, but not others. Like I had no interest in a French spatula or fettling knife, whatever they were. I’d written off some of the pranks and stunts, too—like shaving Bob’s balls, since we had no idea who Bob was; and “Save water, drink beer, go Wunderbar,” since we had no idea what that meant either—but realized that was a dangerous way of thinking. You had to be open to everything, hold the whole list—both lists—in your head at once and look for opportunities everywhere.
As we passed under the train station, where graffiti clung to cement, I said, “What about ‘tag the town red?’”
Patrick snorted. “We’re not really graffiti types.”
I said, “Says who?”
“Mary,” Patrick said sternly.
“What,” I said. “I’m just saying that just because we have never to date spray painted a name on a public structure of some kind doesn’t mean we’re not capable of doing it.”
Even as I said it, though, I wasn’t convinced, and that fact made me sad. Maybe we were too good to win the hunt. Maybe to win you had to take the sort of risks we weren’t capable of taking? But what were we—what was I—so afraid of?
A text from the Yeti read: FIELD REPORTS PUT CARSON WILLIS AT THE MARRIOT AND BARBONE IN MATADOR PARK.
“Wait,” I said. “Someone saw us. How’d we miss them?”
“I guess we just did,” Winter said, but I took the time to look behind us to see if anyone was following us. Like maybe one of the other teams or the judges? There was something about being seen and reported on that made it all the more exciting. It was really happening. This was it. Not Round 1, but Round 2. The one we needed to win in order to, well, win.
“I’m not capable,” Patrick said, “of spray painting a public structure. And anyway, why is it tag the town red and not paint the town red. I mean, are you even sure that’s what it means?”
“I did it once,” Carson said, “but it was different. I was just adding my own graffiti to more graffiti. In Dublin. Near Windmill Lane Studios. Where U2 first recorded their stuff. The whole alley is covered.”
Out of habit, my brain crammed an entire fantasy—about a trip to Ireland with Carson, about woolly sweaters and countryside drives and cows and hills and pubs—into a mere second.
“So the odds of you getting caught or expelled from school were pretty slim, then?” Patrick said, sort of obnoxiously and for my benefit.
“Yeah, but I could’ve been arrested maybe?” Carson shrugged. “I don’t know. But I could be convinced is what I’m saying.”
“Me, too,” Winter said. “But it would depend on what I was writing.”
“You’re all unbelievable,” Patrick said. “Graffiti? Really?”
I said, “We could write ‘Dez Rules’ or something.”
“Yeah,” Patrick said. “Because no one would figure out it was us. And that wouldn’t get Dez in trouble.”
“Okay, so we could write the Also-Rans or something. Jeez”—I tried to sound light—“not my best idea, but still.”
“How many points is it?” Carson asked.
“Not nearly enough,” Patrick said as I consulted the
list again.
“One hundred,” I said.
“That’s a lot,” Carson said.
“Yes,” Patrick said, “but when you factor in the time it takes to buy the paint and to do it and the risk of getting caught and arrested, it’s not that many. Not when you can”—he consulted his own list—“get the same amount for skinny-dipping.”
“Here we go with the skinny-dipping again,” I said, throwing my hands in the air.
“Didn’t you guys already do that at the Shalimar?” Carson asked.
“Pretty much,” I said.
“But not officially,” Patrick said.
“Anyway,” I said, to sum up my thoughts on our overall strategy moving forward, “you have to remember we need the most points to win; we’re not after a minimum anymore. So anything worth as many points as tagging the town red has to be considered.”
My phone buzzed. It wasn’t Dez, but Grace: HEARD ABOUT DEZ. IS HE OKAY?
I wrote back: GOING FOR MRI.
Then Grace wrote: ANY SIGN OF MARY?
I couldn’t bring myself to answer.
Mr. Gatti’s house was a small, beige, shingled cottage a few blocks from the train station, with a big front yard full of flamingos and gnomes and birdhouses and pinwheels. Carson stopped the car right out front.
“What looks big?” I asked.
“I don’t like the idea of this at all,” Patrick said, and though I wasn’t going to admit it, I felt the same way. Then again, we could return anything we took, and they were only lawn ornaments. What was the big deal?
“The flamingo is big,” I said, pushing away fear. “And that birdhouse is big, too, if you bring the whole pole.”
“Sounds messy,” Carson said, then my eyes fell upon something very large by the side of the house.
“Over there!” I pointed. “Trash can.”
“We can’t take the man’s trash can,” Patrick said.
“Why not?” I asked. “We’ll bring it back.”
“I’ll go,” Carson said, and he got out of the car and said, “Come on, Pat. Live a little,” and Patrick seemed about to say something obnoxious—he had this look in his eye when he looked at Carson—but then much to my surprise, he got out of the car and headed across Gatti’s lawn.
The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life Page 12