The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life

by Tara Altebrando

  “You have a goldfish?” Patrick asked.

  A text from the Yeti said: CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT FROM TIFFANY, 25 POINTS, and I wrote it onto the master and said, “Sucks.”

  Winter was typing.

  “What sucks?” Dez said. “Did Eleanor have a Tiffany ornament?”

  My phone lit up again, with Winter saying: YOU SHOULD GO FOR IT!

  Looking askance at her I said, “No but my parents totally have one, but there’s no way I could get it.” Then I started to type: BUT I LIKE CARSON! HELLO! I hit send.

  “No, my sister has one,” Winter said, still holding her phone.

  There were way too many conversations in the car right now, bouncing around like Ping-Pong balls.

  “You’re going to steal your sister’s goldfish?” Patrick asked.

  And, for the record, Winter’s sister was named neither Autumn, nor Summer, nor Spring, but Poppy. She was all of four years old and Winter was basically raising her.

  “I sure as hell am,” Winter said.

  I turned to her with a broad smile, while she typed. “I am so proud of you!”

  “You’re proud that she wants to steal her sister’s goldfish?” Patrick asked.

  “I admire her commitment to the cause to claim the Yeti is all.” I looked out the window to hide the jeez in my eyes. I had never said it out loud to anyone but I got the distinct impression that Patrick didn’t entirely approve of my choice of a female best friend. He had never said it out loud either, but he didn’t have to.

  Winter’s text to me this time said: BUT HE IS STILL WITH JILL. AND AFTER THAT, NO GUARANTEE.

  I looked at her, mystified, then started typing.

  “I’ll buy her a new one.” Winter shook her head in Patrick’s general direction then started ticking off items on her fingers. “So my house has the goldfish, a Ouija board, children’s books, and probably a toy made in the U.S. That’s, like, seventy-five points, I think. Oh, and Pictionary. I can get a Pictionary card.”

  “Excellent,” I said, and sent the text that said, HAPPY TO TAKE MY CHANCES.

  I had to concentrate. “We should pick up a jar or bottle somewhere so when it’s dusk we’re ready to catch fireflies.”

  Winter read my text and shrugged, and I thought about the last time I’d caught fireflies, how I’d been with Patrick. And now that I recalled that night, maybe I should’ve known that a moment like the one in Eleanor’s house was coming, and maybe had been for a long time.

  5

  THERE WERE NO ALIENS OUTSIDE THE FLYING Saucers diner so we had to go in if we were going to take a photograph with an extraterrestrial. Standing in the shade made by the off-kilter spherical building—designed to look like a UFO that crash-landed in the parking lot—I said, “I guess we just walk in acting casual and ask some random person to take our picture, then leave?”

  Patrick shook his head. “But we don’t want to tip anyone off to the fact that the hunt is underway.”

  It was true that if the owners of Flying Saucers saw a parade of kids coming in and taking pictures and leaving, the gig would be up for sure. They’d call the cops and there’d be cruisers out all over town and the whole thing would eventually get shut down before the victor was named. But I didn’t see any way around that. “What else are we supposed to do?” I asked.

  “We could eat something fast,” Dez said. “I’m sort of hungry.”

  I said, “Tick-tock, Dez!”

  “We just have to do it,” Winter said. “We’re wasting time.”

  “But there’s a host who stands right at the front,” Patrick said.

  Clearly, he was trying to be difficult.

  “We’re here all the time, so it’s probably someone who has seen us before,” I said, “so we’ll be like ‘hey, can we grab a booth’ and just saunter by.”

  “All right, Mary,” Patrick said. “Since you seem pretty committed to this plan of yours, I guess we’ll just do it your way.”

  “A little early in the day to get snippy,” Winter said, and I was grateful she said it and not me. When Patrick was in a mood, frankly, no one wanted to be around him. Winter had once put it thusly: “He’s like some tortured superhero. Emotion Man.”

  “We’re going to get in trouble,” Patrick said, and we all turned. “Just stating that for the record.”

  “Duly noted,” Dez said, then he turned to me and smiled and said, “Take us to your leader.”

  I headed for the front doors, feeling a tinge of nausea in my gut. Because it was possible we would get in trouble, but we weren’t going to win if we were worried about…what, exactly? Losing our diner rights? They couldn’t exactly call the cops and arrest us for trespassing. It was a diner. And if we couldn’t do this—something so dumb, really—even at the risk of outing the hunt, well then it was true that we were the lamest scav hunt team ever, which maybe seemed inevitable since we were the good kids, or so everybody always said.

  But I wasn’t that good. Not if you really knew me. Like if you read my mind. Or looked at my web browser history. Or saw straight into my heart the way Patrick sometimes seemed to.

  Inside, the diner was maybe half full and I scanned the room for aliens that would photograph well. The host was on the phone at the front podium and nodded acknowledgment, and I whispered, “We’ll grab a booth?” and pointed. He nodded and took four menus off his stack and handed them to me and I said, “Thanks.”

  So far, so good.

  I headed for the diner’s most photogenic alien, a classic green creature with a pointy head and domelike eyes, painted on the wall near the restrooms, and found a couple at a booth who looked sort of cool, so I went right to them and the girl said, “Oh, we already ordered.”

  Confused for a second I said, “Oh, I don’t work here,” then asked, “Can you take our picture by that alien?”

  They exchanged a look and a smile, and I said, “Like really quickly.” I turned to my friends and said: “Guys, line up.”

  So they did, and I handed my phone to the guy, who seemed friendlier than the girl, and he held it up and said “smile” and then, “You might want to check it.”

  It was fine. Nothing special but it was us. And an alien.

  Thirty points. For a total of 617.

  “Thanks,” I said, and my friends were already on their way back toward the door. I felt sort of revved up and strangely guilty, probably on account of my good girl shackles, and hoped that the guilt, at least, would go away the second we got past the host, who was still on the phone. I put the menus back on his stack and said, “Something came up!” and we bolted out the door and blew past Kerri Conlon’s team of Amazons—who were heading into the diner all too leisurely, if you asked me—and hopped in the car.

  Dez said, “Did you see how confused he was?” and laughed, but I felt sort of bad about it. Then we drove out of the parking lot and down the road about fifty feet to the strip mall on the other side of the street, where Carson’s car sat in front of the sporting goods store.

  “I’ll do sporting goods,” I said, not sure the others had even noticed his car. “Who’s with me?”

  Dez said, “I’ll come.”

  So Dez and I went one way and Patrick and Winter headed for Party Burg, and as soon as we got inside I walked right up to the desk and asked, “Do you sell those foam finger things that say number one?”

  The clerk, a middle-aged Indian man, looked up and said, “In the back. Fan section.”

  “There’s a ‘fan section,’” Dez said, wide-eyed and smiling. “This is going to be good.”

  We walked deep into the store, past whole aisles of basketballs and soccer balls and hockey sticks and then a big lineup of exercise equipment, like elliptical machines and treadmills and stationary bikes and Pilates machines. All the while I was looking for Carson.

  “Is this the tenth circle of hell?” Dez asked, and I just laughed.

  Finally, on the far side of a handful of racks of New York sports team jerseys, I saw a sign on the wa
ll that said FOR THE FANS and headed for it. Dez split off to a different FOR THE FANS aisle as I combed my chosen aisle. He soon appeared around the corner wearing a hat that had beer can holders and tubes running down to the face and also wagging a #1 foam finger on his right hand.

  “Go, Mary! Go, Mary!” he chanted, then he said, “Who am I?” And continued his “Go Mary!”s.

  “Quit it,” I said, and Dez took off the hat with his free hand and put it on the nearest shelf and said, “I’m Patrick. Get it?”

  “Don’t be mean,” I said.

  “I’m not the one being mean,” he said. There was an implication there that I did not like at all.

  “You think I’m mean to him?”

  This was the most I had ever spoken to Dez about Patrick for sure. Mostly we talk about school and music and television and movies and getting the hell out of Oyster Point. He shrugged and looked simultaneously like he was uncomfortable and enjoying having me on the hook.

  “Maybe mean isn’t the right word,” he said. “Maybe…insensitive?”

  I shot him a look.

  He said, “I heard.”

  “Heard what?” How long had Dez been out in the hall at Eleanor’s? “Heard me remind Patrick that we’re just friends?”

  “He’s madly in love with you,” Dez said, and I didn’t want to believe it—that what I took for deep friendship, Patrick had, all this time, thought was something else—so I said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Dez raised his eyebrows in a what-can-I-tell-ya? sort of way.

  “Come on,” I said, shoving my left hand into the foam finger and poking Dez with it. “We need clothes for the Yeti, then we’re outta here.”

  I headed back to the clothing section we’d passed when we’d come in—there was no way Carson was in this store, unless he was actually hiding from us—and Dez was right on my heels, saying, “So that’s all you’re going to say about it?”

  Finding the children’s clothes I grabbed a random hoodie in size 5T then walked back to the cashier, thinking I’d pay cash and just save the receipt and return the stuff tomorrow.

  “I don’t know what else to say. I just don’t feel that way about him.” I was suddenly a little annoyed at having to explain myself. Which was probably why I blurted, “I like someone else anyway.”

  “You do?” Dez asked. “Do tell!”

  “Carson,” I said, and Dez said, “Oh, don’t join that club, honey. Please.”

  Which was not the sort of response I was expecting, and it made me even a little bit more annoyed. I said, “What would you know about it anyway? I mean, relationship advice? Really?”

  Which wasn’t supposed to be as mean as it sounded, but it sure sounded mean. Because Dez had never actually dated anyone. Not that I knew of, at least.

  Dez seemed unfazed, though, and said only, “Just don’t get your heart broken.”

  Which didn’t make sense, really, because I was ostensibly breaking Patrick’s heart, and Carson was about to break Jill’s. And anyway what if I couldn’t help it? What if hearts sometimes had to get broken? What if that was just the way of the world?

  I paid and we stopped at the car, which was unlocked, and put the bag (85 points, which brought us up to 702) in the front seat, and soon we were rushing through the aisles of Party Burg—“I mean, even Party Burb would have been better,” I said, and Dez laughed—looking for Patrick and Winter, and since Carson’s car was still in the lot I was looking for him and his team, too. Right as Dez and I split up, I found Patrick down an aisle full of Tiki torches and summer party supplies. He was wearing a grass skirt and looking through a bin of off-season sale items, probably hoping for a Halloween witch.

  I said, “Aloha!” and he said, “Aloha,” and he looked happy right then, and I hoped the whole incident at Eleanor’s would just get bundled up with the incident at prom and drift away from us throughout the day, like a small iceberg. More than anything, I wanted to hit some kind of rewind button on our relationship, and go back to some point before today, before prom, before anything went wrong. The thought that all this stuff was coming up now—when Patrick and I were so close to having to move away and drift apart anyway—was just too depressing. What kind of last summer would this last summer be if we weren’t back to being thick as thieves?

  He said, “I decided I’m going to give you some time to let the idea sink in a bit. Then we can talk more later.”

  The arrogance! I thought. As if I didn’t know my own heart.

  But for the sake of peace, for the sake of the hunt, I said, “Fine. We’ll talk later.”

  He nodded and I said, “What else do we need?”

  He looked at his list. “Winter’s getting Tigger so if you could maybe try to for a piña colada scratch ’n’ sniff, that’d be excellent. And we have no idea what a Hello Kitty Cat means exactly, but maybe we should get some Hello Kitty stuff in case we come across a cat later?”

  So I took off in search of stickers and Hello Kitty and heard Patrick say, “Carson and those guys are here, by the way,” and felt a sort of skip in my heart, until I rounded a corner and saw a wall of Dora and Diego decorations and then Carson and Winter, talking close, and I saw the way she looked at him and bit her lip and pulled a strand of hair from the back of her neck forward and twirled it on a finger—things I knew were signs she was crushing—before she turned and walked away from him, away from me. I stepped back around the corner and found myself face-to-face with the weirdly misshapen head of Ariel, the Little Mermaid, and her sidekick, Flounder, such a strangely happy-looking fish. I thought about prom and all the backstabbing I’d witnessed in the four years leading up to it. And how until I’d seen her twirling her hair a minute ago, until I’d replayed that partner-swapping slow dance in my head, noting the way Winter had looked maybe a bit too happy in Carson’s arms, it had never occurred to me that my best friend might be holding a knife behind me.

  “What did you mean?” I asked Dez, when he appeared holding some Tigger napkins. “When you said, ‘Don’t join that club’?”

  Dez seemed to squirm a little and for a second he studied the wall of Rapunzels to his right, as if she could save him by letting down her hair and pulling him up into some lofty tower. He said, “I just mean a lot of people like Carson. And if Patrick knew you were one of them…”

  “A lot of people like who?” I asked, and he sighed and said, “You wouldn’t be asking if you hadn’t already figured it out.”

  So she did like him, and she had kept it from me. She’d let me go on and on about how I liked him for years and had never said a word?

  “Did you see the Yeti’s text?” Winter said, coming into view at the end of the aisle, and since I hadn’t, I took out my phone. I was thinking was how nervy she had been in the car, trying to discourage my own crush to make way for hers.

  The text said: BONUS FAST-ROUND ITEM: SEND US A PICTURE OF A BIRD, ANY BIRD, WITHIN THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES. TWENTY POINTS.

  “Not worth it,” Dez said. “Unless there’s a pigeon in the parking lot.”

  “Or Tweety Bird?” I said. “Here in the store?”

  We all headed off in different directions to look for Tweety Bird, and I bumped right into Carson near some stickers and took one of the same sheets of scratch ’n’ sniff cocktails he was holding off the display. “Hey there,” I said, feeling that nervous giddiness as I looked at those fierce eyes of his, those hands, the way the guitar T-shirt hugged his chest.

  “Hey yourself,” he said, and it felt flirty. But he’d looked flirty with Winter, too. Was there something a little bit flirty about everything he did?

  “How’s it going?” I said, suddenly at a loss for anything he and I could actually talk about, anything other than secrets. Did he know that Winter liked him? What would happen if I told him? Besides her killing me. Was that what they’d been talking about?

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess.”

  But he looked distressed and I imagined, for a second, that it was from
the pressure of Winter’s unwanted advances. If he was going to break up with Jill to be with me, the last thing he needed was my best girlfriend crushing on him. I thought about saying something, like “So that’s weird about Winter, huh?” or “Don’t worry about Winter, I’ll handle it,” but here, in Party Burg, with everyone else just an aisle or two away, it didn’t seem wise; and maybe there was a part of me that was still scared of sticking my neck out.

  I didn’t know for sure that he liked me.

  Even an hour ago, I’d felt certain our paths were about to collide in a big, romantic way, but now…? The story I’d written in my head about how this was all going to go down didn’t seem to be lining up with reality. Winter at the very least—Patrick, too—had thrown away my script. How was I to know Carson wouldn’t, too?

  When Patrick appeared and said, “I sent a picture of Tweety Bird and grabbed some Hello Kitty stickers in case you hadn’t found them,” I was grateful for an escape from the paralysis of the moment. I headed his way, but then Carson said, “Mary?” and I turned.

  “Do you think cheating is ever justifiable?”

  At first this seemed entirely out of the blue to me but then it started to make sense. But I didn’t want him to cheat on Jill. I wanted him to break up with her. And cheating was one thing I felt really strong about.

  Really anti.

  “I don’t think it’s justifiable,” I said. “No.”

  I wanted to scream, Just break up with her, you idiot! I said, “Cheaters are cowards.”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding quickly. “That’s what I figured you’d say.” Then he walked off and I met Patrick and the others at the registers and I worked to hide my confusion. What on earth was Carson thinking? That we’d have an affair? It was ludicrous.

  Dez counted points while the cashier rang up our items, including thirty Silly Bandz and a pack of M&M’s we grabbed by the register. “One forty,” he said. “Which brings us to eight forty-two.”

  “Awesome,” I said, ticking things off on our list. “Crap! Balloons for balloon animals.”