The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life

by Tara Altebrando

  “I know!” I shook my head. “I really am grateful to her for that. I wish I could thank her personally. I wish I’d known.”

  “That would have made her happy,” my mother said, then added, “Actually I’m not sure anything would have ever made Eleanor happy.” She laughed, and I laughed, too.

  She shook her head then. “I honestly can’t even begin to explain how angry I am about the statue.”

  “I going to get it back,” I said, though I realized it wasn’t looking good. “Or at least I’m going to try. I’ll ask around at school next week. I’ll talk to the people who ran the hunt. I’ll do everything I can!”

  My phone buzzed. It was from the Yeti and said: WE ARE HEAR WAITING ALL STATIONERY. ITS NEARING YOU’RE DEADLINE TO SHOW US THAT PRINCIPAL NAMESAKE.

  “What now?” my mother said.

  “A clue,” I said, and I read it again.

  So the Yeti and Grace had that in common.

  Hear. Here.

  Stationary. Stationery.

  Your. You’re.

  Principle. Principal.

  “Oh my god,” I said.

  The school principal is your pal.

  Principal namesake.

  Barbone. Mullin. Trailer by the river.

  “I just figured out the biggest clue,” I said, and my mother sighed and got up to leave the room and lingered for a moment in the doorway. “Well, you should at least have a look around the house so this wasn’t a complete waste of time,” she said.

  It took a minute for the meaning of the words to sink in. “For real?”

  “For real,” she said. “I’ve never really liked Jake Barbone. But there are conditions.”

  “Which are?”

  “Eleanor’s house. It needs to be cleared out for real—every last knickknack—before you leave for school, and I expect you to help every weekend and to not complain about it.”

  “Done,” I said. I wanted to hug her. And not for being the kind of mother who was going to let me go back out, but for being the kind who made me come home in the first place.

  “All right, then, go. And don’t do anything dumb.”

  “I’m not sure I can guarantee that,” I said, because I had a feeling about what we were about to do.

  “Well, don’t do anything dangerous.”

  “Promise.” I nodded. “Can I take the car?”

  “Don’t push your luck,” she said.

  Okay, so transportation was going to be a problem, but I took out the list and read through it again, item by item, and then started rushing around the house, collecting the silhouette of my profile done in Disney a bunch of years back [40], a tape dispenser [30], and a 3x5 index card [5], before remembering the piggy bank shaped like an elephant in Grace’s room [45]. I knocked on my sister’s door and then walked in to find her in bed, watching TV and drinking Gatorade.

  “Can I borrow this?” I lifted her elephant bank off her shelf.

  Grace sat up in bed then all but shouted, “She’s letting you go back?”

  I nodded.

  “Unbelievable.” Grace shook her head. “You get away with murder.”

  “Oh, give me a break,” I said. “If I’d been out at the senior scavenger hunt as a junior and ended up too drunk to get myself home, I’d be grounded for a year. What’s your punishment?”

  “My punishment is that my head is still attached to my body,” she said. “And I have to work extra shifts at the restaurant every Friday and Saturday night until I earn their trust back.”

  “You were really drunk,” I said.

  “I know,” Grace said. “And I’m already hungover.”

  I held up the bank again, for emphasis.

  “Fine, take it. Go off and have fun while I sit here and suffer.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I will.”

  I went down the hall for the Advil in the bathroom then went back into Grace’s room and tossed the rattling pill bottle across the room and onto the bed. “Thanks,” she said, and I called out, “Least I can do,” as I rushed down the hall.

  Downstairs, I texted Winter: MEET ME AT MULLIN’S HOUSE!

  I stopped in the kitchen and packed all the stuff up into a backpack, and decided that asking my mother for a Tiffany Christmas ornament would really be pushing it, and that it wasn’t worth the points.

  4169 would have to do. For now.

  “I’m taking my bike,” I said, and my mother said, “Go.” She sipped her wine. “Before I change my mind.”

  16

  IT HAD BEEN A WHILE SINCE I’D RIDDEN MY BIKE. Like I basically hadn’t touched it since I got my driver’s license. But riding a bike was like riding a bike and soon I was heading down my street and around the corner and past my elementary school and then my middle school. I took the right on Albourne Avenue, where there was that great hill to go down. For a second I thought about taking my hands off the handlebar and doing it like I used to do when I was a kid—all free-falling—but then thought better of it and held on extra tight. I’d been given a second chance at this night and I didn’t want to do anything stupid to mess it up.

  I wasn’t far from Mullin’s house now but my legs hurt. I’d gotten lazy, being driven around by friends and driving whenever my parents would let me. I was arguably out of shape and I resolved to bike more this summer, and to see how bike-friendly D.C. would be. I wouldn’t have a car there, wouldn’t need one, but a bike could be fun. Already I could see myself biking past the White House and the Capitol and exploring all the embassies scattered around Foggy Bottom. Maybe even biking somewhere to meet Lucas? Like maybe Arlington, where I’d show him Eleanor’s grave and tell him about how the grateful nation speech had reduced me to a puddle.

  I’d gotten a text but I ignored it until I had arrived at my destination and there it was, right in front of me.

  In Principal Mullin’s driveway.

  A Flying Cloud.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  The text from Winter said: OK. WHY????

  I texted her back: MULLIN’S RV IS A FLYING CLOUD.

  It was silver and shiny under the light that hung just above the garage door—like a big, bulbous beer can without a label. I tried to picture Mullin driving it, down the coast to Florida or out west toward the Grand Canyon. I imagined him in plaid shorts and some kind of hunting hat, running out of gas on some deserted stretch of land.

  For a second I was sort of disappointed that all those clues had led us here, to Mullin’s. But it also seemed, somehow, fitting.

  Winter wrote: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Then, ON OUR WAY.

  I pushed my bike down the road a bit to the nearby bus stop and sat and waited. I was pretty well hidden, so when, a few minutes later, Jake Barbone’s car announced its arrival with loud music blaring through open windows, I was able to stay out of sight.

  Superfast, I texted Winter to say: WAIT FOR ME TO TEXT YOU. BARBONE HERE NOW. AM HIDING. I left my bike in the bus shelter and snuck into the neighboring yard and watched from behind a line of trees as they got out of the car.

  “Dude,” Smitty said to Barbone. “You were totally right.”

  “Told you,” Barbone said. “Mullin road-tripped to playoffs in this thing and got so drunk he had to sleep in it in the field parking lot.”

  “Ugh,” Allison said. “I’ll never forget it.”

  “What a pathetic bastard,” Barbone said.

  That, at least, we agreed upon.

  I couldn’t believe it had come down to this. Of all the teams I thought would figure this one out, Barbone’s wasn’t one of them. But then I’d hardly imagined Barbone to be the kind of guy who would tell Jill about Carson’s stepping out on her, either. I didn’t know him any better than he knew me.

  “So what do we do, just take a picture?” Smitty asked.

  “Yup!” Barbone said. “Everybody huddle together and say cheese.”

  “Cheese!” the girls said.

  “Hey, should we ask Mullin to pose?” Barbone asked.
“For special points?”

  “He’d shut down the hunt, man,” Smitty said.

  “Please,” Barbone said. “He totally knows it’s happening. He wished me good luck on Friday.”

  Allison said, “But he’d probably get fired or something if the picture ever leaked out.”

  “Probably,” Barbone said, then: “Dudes! Hundred bucks says we’re the only people who got this one. I mean, Tom Reilly and those guys? They didn’t even make it to Mohonk so don’t even have all the clues to fit together. Kerri Conlon? No way they’re even bothering with the brainteaser stuff. The Matts? Probably stoned.”

  “What about Glee Club?” Chrissie asked, and I braced myself.

  Barbone laughed and said, “They’re so out of their league it’s pathetic. Glee Club was born to lose.”

  “Let’s roll,” he said then. “How many points do we have again?”

  “With the three hundred for this, we’ve got 4820,” Smitty said.

  They got back into their car and the engine started and I ducked farther into the trees out of sight as they passed, feeling like I’d been kicked in the gut.

  4820 to our 4169.

  Which would be 4469 in a second, once we took a picture of the Flying Cloud, but still. That was 350 points!

  COAST IS CLEAR, I texted Winter. Then I pulled my bike back out of the shrubs and thought, It can not go down like this.

  I was not born to lose.

  So we just take a picture? Smitty had asked.

  And I got to thinking about that: Just a picture? Or more?

  I heard a car come onto the street then and turned. Carson parked a few houses down and he and the others got out and walked up the block on foot. Except for Dez, who ran to me, and I to him. We embraced, though we had to be careful, with his wrist all bandaged up.

  “So, so happy you’re here,” I said, and he said, “Right back atya, babe.”

  “So that’s the Flying Cloud,” Carson said.

  I said, “Barbone has three hundred and fifty more points than us.”

  “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuudge,” Dez groaned.

  Then Patrick held out last year’s yearbook to me—open to a two-page photo collage where there was a small picture of Mullin standing beside the Flying Cloud. And I had a flash of an image in my head, a split-second fantasy of us winning. And winning big. And of us all celebrating our victory…inside the Flying Cloud.

  So no, not just a picture.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “Because we don’t have time to catch up on points any other way and we can’t count on stuff like Mr. Gatti’s trash can being the biggest thing or on Pictionary or Lloyd Dobler. We need to do something big. Something unexpected. Something that will totally get us Special Points. And a lot of them.”

  “We’re all ears,” Winter said.

  “Spit it out,” Carson said.

  I took a deep breath and let it out. “We have to take the Flying Cloud to The Pines.”

  “What?!” Patrick said.

  “No way,” Winter said.

  “You’re crazy,” Carson said.

  “It’s the only way,” I said.

  Dez nodded, and a smile spread across his face. “It says show us the Flying Cloud.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “So let’s do it for real. No picture this time. We bring it to them. For all we know, that’s the ‘marvelous dare’ of that clue.”

  Patrick said, “It’s just not possible, Mary.”

  Winter turned to me and winced. “I think he may be right.”

  “Barbone was just here,” I said, and my voice was shaky. “And he was already acting like they’d won the whole thing, and he said that we’d never win it because we were out of our league. He said we were born to lose.”

  Dez and Winter were shaking their heads.

  “I don’t know about you guys,” I said. “But I, personally, have never felt more like a winner.”

  There was a long pause then and I wasn’t sure which way it was going to go but then Winter said, “Well, we should at least talk it through.”

  “We’ll need the keys,” I said, right away.

  “This is crazy,” Patrick said, but I was choosing to ignore him.

  “We might not actually need to get in it,” I said. “But the hitch probably has a lock, right?”

  “But the car needs the other end of the hitch.” Winter shook her head. “We’re doomed.”

  “Not necessarily,” Dez said, slowly.

  “How do you figure?” Carson said.

  “Mary,” Dez said. “Go take a picture of the hitch and lock, if there is one. Serial number if you can get it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I took off toward a line of hedges that ran on the far side of the driveway and started to inch up the driveway toward the Flying Cloud. When it appeared no alarm would go off, no lights or dogs or sirens, I started taking giant steps until I was right up against the Airstream. I reached up to open the door but it was, of course, locked. Peeking out the front edge toward the house and seeing no new activity, I went to the hitch and took a picture of the lock there with my phone. Then I crawled under it and found the serial number on the lock and typed it into a memo on my phone. I got up again and hurried back to my friends then showed them the picture.

  Carson said, “I have no idea what I’m even looking at.”

  “It’s hard to see,” I said, “but there’s a padlock with a keyhole and it like holds this pole in there so that you can’t hitch it to anything.” I turned to Dez and said, “What’s the big idea?”

  “Back to the car,” he said. “The last thing we want to do is get caught before we even do anything.”

  When we were all back in the car, Dez said, “Okay. Send that stuff to me and I’ll text my dad.”

  “Brilliant,” I said.

  So I texted him and he texted his dad and we all waited and his phone buzzed and he reported back. “My dad says he sold Mullin the lock. That you absolutely need the key. And that it’s possible there’s another lock in the same set at the store and that it would have the same key, but he’s not actually at the store because he had to come to the hospital because of this.” He held up his wrist.

  Patrick said, “Well, we’re hardly going to break into Mullin’s house. Especially with him home.”

  “No,” I said, thinking back to that day in the office with Mullin, to him having no idea who I was, and an idea started to form. “It’s better that he’s home.”

  “Why?” Dez asked.

  “You tell me,” I said as the plan started to solidify. “What would the world’s lamest scavenger hunt team do?”

  After a moment, Dez said: “I don’t know. Would they knock on his door and ask him for his trailer?”

  I smiled. “Something like that, yes!”

  “You are a criminal mastermind,” Dez said, and I loved him for figuring out what I was thinking.

  “I don’t get it,” Winter said.

  I explained: “We go up to Mullin’s door and tell him about the hunt. Like we’re ratting everybody else out. We play it all straight and earnest, like he should call the cops or something. And while we do one of us slips away and tries to find the keys.”

  “But what if he does call the cops?” Patrick asked.

  “He won’t. He wished Barbone good luck on Friday. He already knows about the hunt and hasn’t done anything.”

  Winter said, “But even if we find the key and unlock it, we still need to hitch it to something.”

  Could we rent a truck from Home Depot?

  There wasn’t time.

  There wasn’t time to buy a hitch and hook it up to Carson’s SUV either.

  There was only one solution.

  “I hate to have to say it.” The air around us felt full, a water balloon ready to explode. “We need Jill. We need Jill’s dad’s truck.”

  “Let me think about this,” Carson said, sounding panicked.

  “There’s nothing to think about,” I said. “W
e need help. There’s no way the four of us can pull this off. So we need to find Jill and those guys and talk them into joining forces.”

  “There has to be another way,” Winter said wearily.

  “I’m all ears if there’s another way,” I said, and Dez said, “She’s right. It’s the only way.”

  “I’m texting Jill,” I said.

  “And saying what?” Carson asked.

  “Saying we all need to meet up and talk,” I said.

  “There’s no way I’m dealing with her right now,” he said.

  “That’s the spirit,” Patrick said wryly.

  “I don’t know what your issue is tonight,” Carson said.

  “Oh, my issue is in no way limited to tonight,” Patrick said.

  “What exactly did I do to you?” Carson asked.

  “You didn’t do anything to me,” Patrick said. “But man up, Carson. The way you think you can solve everything with money and the way you go from girl to girl and how they let you”—he threw a look at Winter—“it just boggles the mind.”

  “Oh, get off your high horse.” Carson’s hands were on the steering wheel, gripping it tight. “Like pining for the same girl for your whole life makes you somehow a better person, more noble or something? Snap out of it. She doesn’t like you.”

  “Carson!” Winter shouted.

  Patrick got out of the car. “I’m done with this.”

  I got out and went after him, saying to Dez, “Get her here. And fast.”

  “But, Mary!” Winter said.

  “You’re going to have to face her sooner or later,” I said, and walked off.

  “Patrick!” I called out, and jogged to catch up with him. “Come on! How are you even going to get home from here?”

  He stopped and turned and his face was all red from anger and something else and I said, “Please. We’re so close.”

  “To what?” He shook his head. “To stealing Mullin’s trailer? Who cares, Mary?”

  “I do,” I said. My voice didn’t echo exactly, but it seemed to travel and resonate in the night.

  “But why?” He put his hands on his hips and waited.

  I looked around, like the words might be out there for me to pluck from the air. “Because I want to live a little, I don’t know! I can’t go through my whole life feeling like some second-class citizen or also-ran. And I want to see the looks on all of their faces when we drive back to The Pines with the Flying Cloud trailing behind us.”