The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life

by Tara Altebrando

  “No, Mary,” she said, weary in a different way, like sick of me. “I didn’t.”

  I looked over toward the others, wondered if they were exchanging valuable hunt information while we wasted time on my own pursuit. “I think it’s Barbone,” I said. “But he says he didn’t take it either.”

  Jill looked his way, too. “He’s not all bad, you know.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Barbone chose that moment to shotgun a Red Bull then crush the can on a wooden picnic table.

  “I’m just saying,” Jill said, “he has his moments.”

  “I’ll be on the lookout for one of those,” I said.

  “He saw Carson and Winter,” she said, then. “At prom.”

  I was confused for a minute.

  Jill said, “He’s the only one who had the guts to tell me.”

  “I didn’t know anything,” I said, and I felt like explaining more but confessing my longstanding crush on her ex-boyfriend didn’t seem like the best idea.

  “Would you have told me if you did?” Jill asked, and then Leticia said, “Can I have your attention?” and everyone stopped talking. Lucas gave me a raised eyebrows look and then came over and took my empty Red Bull and handed me a new one. “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said, and I took a swig.

  “Okay,” Leticia said. “Here’s where things get interesting. Raise your hand if you shaved Bob’s balls.”

  Barbone and Tom Reilly and Kerri Conlon all raised their hands.

  “Who’s Bob?” I whispered to Lucas.

  “The bull in Matador Park,” he whispered back.

  “Ah,” I said softly. How did none of us know that?

  “Who stole something from Mr. Gatti?” Leticia asked, and I raised my hand, along with Barbone and Kerri. “What was it?” Leticia looked at me.

  “Garbage can,” I said.

  She looked at Barbone, who said, “Birdhouse.”

  Then at Kerri, who said, “Flamingo.”

  “Excellent,” Leticia said. Then Lucas cut in and said, “Speaking of lawn ornaments, who got a Mary on the Half Shell?”

  I waited with bated breath but only Barbone raised a hand. Lucas looked at me and mouthed, “Sorry.”

  “Who has more than two thousand points right now?” Leticia asked. And I scoffed for a moment, because we were already at 3018, but then everyone else’s hands went up, too.

  “We’ve only had one Lloyd Dobler so far,” Leticia said, and Barbone said, “Awesome.”

  Some murmured groans rose up from the group.

  Then Leticia said, “So if anyone wants to give Lloyd Barbone here a run for his money, you better get busy.”

  “Who went to Mohonk?” Leticia asked, and only Barbone, Jill, and I raised our hands.

  “Good work,” Leticia said.

  “Who has more than three thousand points right now?” Leticia asked, and this time only myself, Barbone, and Tom Reilly raised hands.

  “Very impressive,” Leticia said. “Anybody gone skinny-dipping yet? We haven’t gotten any pics.”

  Barbone said, “Not yet, but you’re welcome to come with, Teesh.”

  “No thanks,” Leticia said to him. She turned to the group. “All right. We just really wanted you all to get a sense of your competition going into the final hours of the hunt. Remember, one a.m. on the dot. No exceptions. And don’t forget about Special Points. So good luck and get going.”

  Lucas approached me again and said, sheepishly, “So about Grace?”

  Ugh. So he did like her.

  “What about her?”

  “She’s sort of drunk,” he said, and I said, “She does that.”

  I shook my head. I could hardly do anything about it.

  “I’ll keep an eye on her,” he said, and I said, “Thanks.”

  Barbone found me near the playground on my way out of the park. “How’s Daphne, by the way? Still licking his wounds?”

  “How do you get to be like you?” I snapped, without realizing I was going to. I guess the Red Bull had me all hyped up. “How do you get to be so mean?”

  Barbone said, “Let she who is without sin cast the first stone,” and I said, “What on earth are you talking about?”

  Barbone? Quoting scripture? Please!

  I texted my team: COME SAVE ME.

  Barbone just shook his head at me and I said, “Just give me back the statue, Jake. My aunt bought it in Europe during World War Two and it’s really important to my family. I’ll give you stuff worth the points you’d get for the statue. It’s not about points, I just need it back.”

  He looked at me dead on and I noticed, for the first time, that his eyes were blue. “Listen, Mary. I didn’t know the statue was brought back from Europe during World War Two. But I’ll tell you one thing: if I had something like that in my family and I knew how valuable it was, I sure as hell wouldn’t take it for some stupid scavenger hunt.”

  And that, of all things, shut me up. Because was that how low I’d sunk? I’d done something so awful that not even Jake Barbone would do it?

  He left me there to deal with myself.

  Standing outside and waiting for my team to pick me up, I listened as Kerri told Tom about how her team had gone to some inflatable rat outside the Crowne Plaza and put an ax and a two-by-four in front of him. “I don’t get it,” Tom said.

  Neither did I.

  “The rat’s picketing or something. And you’re supposed to ‘put him to work,’ so we made him a carpenter, or whatever.”

  I caught the end of a sentence that Matt was saying to Leticia that ended with the words “Robert’s Cove,” which I knew to be a dilapidated mansion on the waterfront.

  Crowne Plaza.

  Robert’s Cove.

  Carson’s car rounded the corner then, windows open and bassline booming loudly, but got stuck at the red light at the corner. And as I looked deeply at that red light—saw the way it was composed not just of one light but of many—I thought, Let she who is without sin…and remembered something.

  Fifth grade. End of the year. We had yearbooks. And Barbone wrote in mine: You’re the prettiest girl in the fifth grade. Then a graduation party. Mine. My backyard. Our mothers talking while holding amber beer bottles, and his mother saying how maybe Jake and I would get married one day and my mother putting a fake smile on her face and me, not liking the idea—not liking him—and feeling weird about what he’d written. Then him, coming over and asking me if I wanted to play shuffleboard on the driveway. Me saying, “It’s my house, Jake. If I wanted to play shuffleboard I’d play shuffleboard.” And him saying, “You don’t have to be mean about it,” and me saying, “And you don’t have to be so ugly.”

  Carson’s car was in front of me and I reached out to pull the shiny handle on the back door, almost needing to steady myself. Maybe Barbone was a sort of monster. But maybe I was, too.

  “So?” Patrick said.

  Carson asked, “What’d you find out?”

  “Someone said something about Robert’s Cove,” I offered.

  “That old mansion on the water?” Winter said.

  “What did they say?” Carson asked, turning from the driver’s seat.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Somebody Google it and see if that helps.”

  “On it,” Winter said.

  “Put the union rat to work has to do with some inflatable rat in front of the Crowne Plaza outside town and making him look like he has a job of some kind?”

  “Jeez,” Patrick said. “Who figured that one out?”

  “Kerri Conlon,” I said. “They made the rat into a carpenter with an ax and a two-by-four.”

  “Any ideas for what job we could give him?” Carson said, but no one had any.

  Winter said, “Robert’s Cove is that old mansion on the cliff near the park. It’s supposedly haunted. And there’s like a cutout of a ghost or something on the stairs.”

  “Photo of a local ghost,” I said.

  �
�Yeah,” Patrick said. “It’s one of the higher point values left. Eighty.”

  “Should we go?” I asked

  “That place gives me the creeps,” Winter said.

  “All right, then, so we’ll skip it,” Patrick said, and everyone looked at him. “I’m being facetious.”

  “Oh,” Winter said.

  “Let’s do it,” I said. We had exactly two and a half hours left to the hunt. It was going to go by faster than I wanted it to and not fast enough at all.

  “I’m staying in the car,” Winter said.

  “Ghosts love cars,” Patrick said, then he started making woo-woo ghosty sounds.

  “Quit it,” Winter said.

  “What else did you find out?” Carson wanted to know.

  I completed my report: “Only Barbone’s and Jill’s teams have been to Mohonk. Or at least that’s all I can confirm. They pretty much all shaved the bull’s balls in Matador Park. Apparently the bull is Bob.”

  “Aw, crap,” Carson said. “I knew that.”

  “Oh, and Barbone did the Lloyd Dobler thing so if nobody else does, he gets those points.”

  “Ugh!” Patrick groaned. “Barbone? Doing Lloyd Dobler? It’s just wrong on so many levels.”

  “We can still do it,” Winter said, and I had an image of Patrick standing in front of the judges, with some melodramatic song blaring from a boom box over his head, his trench coat flapping in the wind. Say Anything was another movie we’d watched together, Patrick and I, and the I gave her my heart; she gave me a pen line was suddenly resonating like never before. I didn’t think I could bear the boom box scene with Patrick in it.

  “We don’t have time,” I said. “It’s not a guarantee of points.”

  “You don’t think I’d make a better Lloyd Dobler than Jake Barbone?”

  “I’m just saying, there’s no guarantee.”

  “Fine, Mary.”

  “Don’t do that,” I snapped. “I hate when you do that.”

  “When I do what?”

  “When you talk to me like I’m a child you’re placating,” I said.

  “When have I ever done that?”

  I felt like there were a million times, but of course couldn’t think of one right then.

  “Is a bug up your ass on the list?” Carson said, pointing to our master copy. “Because I think we have a few right here in the car.”

  A sort of shocked silence fell over us before Patrick said, “Must be nice to be you.”

  “As a matter of fact it is!” Carson said, then there was another long silence, and I spotted the carton of six red velvet cupcakes [30] my team had gotten in my absence, on the backseat beside me. They were bit worse for wear, sort of smudged against the clear plastic of the case. I pressed my face against the car window in sympathy.

  “What else did you find out, Mary?” Carson said finally.

  “I don’t know.” I pulled away from the window and noted a smudge on it left by my face before adding the cupcakes to the total for 3048.

  “That may have been it,” I said, then I added, “Nobody admitted to having Eleanor’s statue.”

  “That’s it?” Patrick said. “Robert’s Cove and union rat?”

  “And that everyone has more than two thousand but only us and Barbone and Tom Reilly have more than three thousand and that only Barbone and Jill have been to Mohonk. And that Bob is the bull. That’s a lot!” I stiffened. “Like you could have done better!”

  “Probably!”

  “Well, what have you all been doing that’s so great?” I snapped. “Did you figure out the Flying Cloud clue?” I saw the tent still in its bag. “Did you even pitch the tent?”

  “I had to climb into a Dumpster for those cupcakes,” Winter said.

  Carson made a sharp turn and I said, “What are you doing?”

  “We’re going to my house,” he answered. “We’re going to hard-boil an egg and cook a singular piece of spaghetti and stage Gumhenge and make a martini and get naked and wet and hope that everyone’s attitudes improve after that.”

  “You know what would improve my attitude?” Patrick said, and Carson said, “What?”

  And then Patrick took the Pooh doll off the dashboard and threw it out the window.

  “Patrick!” I shouted. “That was forty points!”

  So we were back to 3008.

  “What the hell!” Winter said.

  “Whatever makes you feel better, dude,” Carson said.

  And I turned and watched Pooh roll across the street and land in the lane of oncoming traffic, where a car ran over him like he wasn’t even there.

  14

  CARSON’S HOUSE WAS THE NICEST OF ANYONE’S we knew. It was newer, bigger, and had better stuff—everything from the flat panels on the walls right down to the toilet paper and the contents of the fridge. Over the years we’d come here as a group a lot—after band practice, mostly—and raided the endless stash of awesome snacks and cool sodas, then retired either to the pool or the rec room downstairs—there was a pool table!—to play dumb games, like the Name Game or Truth or Dare.

  Winter had wisely grabbed two swimsuits from her house and tossed them into the bag of loot we’d compiled there and now offered one to me, so we could at least get in the pool without having to get our underwear soaked again. It wasn’t the sort of swimsuit I’d ever wear myself, though—too pink, too polka-dotty—and once I put it on I felt all sorts of self-conscious.

  Barbone had had a crush on me once. How could I have forgotten that?

  I was about to get naked in close proximity to Patrick and Carson. How had I, good girl extraordinaire, gotten myself into this situation?

  Winter, who had been changing in the adjoining bathroom, appeared at the door and my phone, resting on the bed, buzzed. A text from the Yeti said, IF YOU’RE STUMPED AND NEED HELP GETTING OVER THE HUMP, THERE IS AN ITEM ON LIST TWO THAT MAY HELP YOU FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO.

  “UGH!” I moaned. “The clues are only getting me more confused now.”

  Carson’s voice rose up from the main hall. “We don’t have all night!”

  We bundled up our clothes in a pile on the bed and walked out to meet our fate. Carson was at the bottom of the stairs in a swimsuit and tee and led us out to the yard where Patrick was sitting on the diving board with his legs dangling over. Just like that he slipped into the water with a splash that felt too loud. The yard’s far edges were lit by golden gas lamp–style torches and cushy patio furniture sat just beside the pool under tea lights with dragonfly cutouts strung from the branch of one weeping willow to a shadowy oak. Even the stone path under my bare feet felt posh.

  “All right,” Carson said. “I thought we needed to just take a break from the driving around and sniping and just chill and, you know, purge the bugs up our asses.” He made a big sweep with his arm. “Everybody in the pool.”

  “You’re not worried about the bugs coming out of our asses and clogging the filter?” Patrick asked, while I studied the pool’s stone edges, the way its figure-eight shape seemed so perfect, so elegant.

  “If that should happen,” Carson said, “we’ll deal.”

  “Fine by me,” Winter said, her swimsuit black and sleek and super flattering and somehow totally right for Carson’s backyard. She went over to the diving board and did a near-perfect dive, resurfacing slick like a seal, like she was already some expert trainer at SeaWorld.

  “Your turn, Mary,” Carson said, and I saw myself as if on-screen, in some lame horror movie, where some malicious predator hid behind one of Carson’s yard’s fancy trees. I cast myself as the girl who was scared of everything, like skinny-dipping and sex and good-byes and ending up alone, but who would eventually, dumbly, follow some mysterious sound into the house or the trees only to be rewarded with a hand over the mouth, a slash of a knife across the throat, or a wallop on the head. Or maybe the movie’s hero—would it be Carson or Patrick?—would suddenly be there, ready to save me.

  Polka-dot swimsuit or not, this was not
that movie. I wouldn’t let it be. Because in another movie I was a girl, with a friend named Dez, and we were eight years old and going for our dolphin badges—treading water for five minutes and then going off the high board. In the pinnacle scene, three of the girls in class had already chickened out and when it was my turn to jump, I was thinking of chickening out, too. But then Dez had turned to the boy next to him—a boy whose name I wouldn’t have been able to remember for a million dollars—and said, “No way Mary’s chickening out.” And that had given me the push I’d needed to get up there and jump.

  I ran and jumped off the pool’s edge, seeing no need for fanfare, and the water felt warm—needlessly warm—and I almost missed the shock of it, the shock of cold I’d been expecting. Was there such a thing as life being too cushy?

  When I resurfaced, Patrick was waving his swimsuit in the air like a flag and I ducked from the spray of it, and he said, “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  “Ladies,” Carson said, with a smile that seemed a little too cocky, a little too amused, but Winter was already taking straps down off her shoulders so I sunk back down into the water and did the same and soon we’d both put our suits on the pool’s edge.

  “Okay,” Carson said, and he snapped a picture of us then put his phone on a lounge chair and jumped in and slipped his own trunks off and hoisted them up onto the diving board while treading water. “Somebody’s got to get a picture with me in it,” he said.

  But I wasn’t getting out, not yet, not when it had taken so much mental energy to get in in the first place. Patrick pulled his swim trunks down off the pool’s edge, slipped them on underwater, and climbed out, dried his hands on his T-shirt, then took another picture on the phone. “We’re good,” he said, and Winter and I reached for swimsuits and slipped them into the water and slipped them back on and Carson did the same and we all got out to dry off. But we’d forgotten to bring out towels.

  “I’ll go grab some,” Carson said.

  “I’ve got to pee really badly,” Winter said, shaking one of her legs, so they both disappeared through the sliding glass doors of the deck, leaving Patrick and me alone, wet and a little bit cold. After a moment of standing on the deck, dripping, I said, “What’s taking them so long?”