The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life

by Tara Altebrando

  “That hardly seems an honorable motive,” he said.

  “Who said anything about honor?” I asked.

  He held my gaze. “But why do you even care what they think, any of them?”

  “Because I’m human!”

  But it wasn’t even about proving it to Barbone or Mullin anymore. It was about proving it to myself. Because I wasn’t going to go very far in life if I wasn’t willing to take chances, even stupid ones, sometimes. And if I didn’t start owning my own fate now, when would I? Besides, we hadn’t come this far to not even bother trying.

  “It’s a good idea,” I said, and it was true I was maybe still convincing myself. “It’ll win it for us, I just know it.”

  We just stood there, the night pulsing around us. And it all felt very dramatic and finite, some kind of turning point in our friendship, like a new beginning or an end. “I love you, too, you know,” I said, feeling teary then. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You’re not going to lose me, Mary,” he said sadly. “Where would I go?”

  And so there we were, two stick figures so very close together and so far apart.

  “Please don’t go home,” I said. “Not now. I need you here.”

  “You don’t, actually,” he said. “You can do it just as easily without me.”

  “But I want you here,” I said. “I want to remember this night for the rest of my life and I want to remember you in it, with me all the way.”

  A car was coming down the street and we both turned. It was Jill.

  “You really want to do this?” he asked.

  “More than anything I’ve ever wanted to do before,” I said, and it was the exact kind of statement that Patrick would usually challenge, like by saying, “More than you wanted to go to Georgetown?” or “More than you want to stop global warming?” But he didn’t say any of those things. He said, “Well, then I guess we better get moving.”

  17

  “WHAT’S SO IMPORTANT THAT IT CAN’T WAIT?” Jill said. “And why are we here?”

  She and Patrick and I were standing beside Carson’s car, curbside, while her car idled nearby with Mike and Heather still in it.

  “You know the clues about the Flying Cloud?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Principal Mullin’s trailer.” I pointed. “That’s it.”

  Jill turned.

  “And Barbone figured it out and took a picture of it and sent it in and he probably has enough points to win the whole thing. But we came up with this plan. We go to Mullin and act like we’re ratting out the hunt, but meanwhile the rest of us—you—are driving away with the Flying Cloud.”

  Jill actually guffawed. “You want to steal it?”

  “Borrow,” I said. “If we literally show the judges the Flying Cloud, they’d have to give us a ton of Special Points.”

  Jill just looked into the car, where Winter sat entirely still in the backseat, and sighed. “You know,” Jill said to her, “I used to like you.”

  I felt a sort of head-to-toe sting, like a bee had somehow stung my central nervous system. I couldn’t imagine how Winter felt, but I looked at her, urged her with my eyes.

  “It was a shitty thing I did,” she said after a moment. “I know I can’t take it back, but I’m sorry.”

  “I used to want to be like you,” Jill said to her. “Because I thought you were sort of above all the bullshit at school and that you just seemed real or something. But I don’t know.” She shook her head and I noticed again how pretty she was, how soft her features were.

  “I’m really, really sorry,” Winter said.

  “Why should I help you all?” Jill asked, but it wasn’t exactly a question. “I mean, honestly, right now, I’d rather Barbone win than him.” She was looking at Carson but it was Dez who said, “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do!” she said.

  “I deserve that,” Carson said.

  Jill let out a “Ha” and said, “Oh, I’m glad you approve of my feelings.”

  I had a feeling we were going to be here awhile.

  “You do deserve it,” Dez said to Carson, then he turned to Jill. “But Barbone, Jill. I mean, come on. Barbone! You know how much he’s tortured me. Seriously, if you don’t want to help with the Flying Cloud, at least just take all our stuff and you can win it that way.”

  I wanted to object, but it was a good idea.

  “Isn’t that cheating?” Jill asked, and looked at me.

  “Probably.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know that I’d hate for what Carson did—what Carson and Winter did—to ruin this night, when we don’t even know how much of this any of us is even going to remember twenty or fifty years from now. I mean, I might not even be able to remember your last name when I’m old and gray and you might forget mine, too. You might forget all about Carson and Winter, or at the very least look back and wonder why you were so mad about it because you didn’t even like him near as much as you’ll like the next person you meet or the one after that or the one after that.”

  I was running out of air.

  “But I think if we took Principal Mullin’s Airstream trailer for a joyride and won the hunt, we’d remember that for sure.”

  “I don’t know,” Jill said, and she looked over at the Flying Cloud and a smile started to tug at her features. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “So what are you saying?” I asked. “Because time’s running out.”

  “I’m saying that you”—she looked at Carson—“are a prick.” She looked at Winter—“And you better watch out for the next girl he’s got his eye on.” She looked at Dez and then at me, “And you guys are going to owe me big-time.”

  I nodded and said, “We need your dad’s truck.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Jill said. “I get that I’m being used.”

  “It’s not like that!”

  “I know,” Jill said. “I’m kidding. Mostly.”

  “But will he just let you take it?” I asked.

  “No.” Jill shrugged. “They’ll ground me for sure. But it’ll be worth it. And they usually get sick of having me moping around all the time after a few weeks anyway. I am a highly skilled moper. Let me go tell Heather and Mike.”

  So we all put our heads together to hash out details of the plan.

  “You think it’ll work?” Winter asked me as we sprung into action a few minutes later.

  “I honestly have no idea,” I said, and it felt good, the thrill of not knowing.

  We moved all of Jill’s team’s loot into Carson’s car since she was going to have to leave her car at home and he suggested he take it all to The Pines, to put it in Patrick’s car, so there’d be more room for passengers. That seemed a sort of unnecessary step to me, but he seemed pretty determined and it was true we’d have a hard time all fitting. Of course, we wouldn’t need to if we had the Flying Cloud with us but as Patrick had said, it was a pretty big if.

  I offered to go with Jill, Mike, and Heather to get her father’s truck while Winter, Dez, and Patrick kept an eye on the Flying Cloud. Heather and Mike seemed happy to have me and happy to be along for the ride, having a final adventure of the night. I wondered why everything on my team had felt so complicated, but I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

  A few houses down from Jill’s, she stopped the car and told us to get out and wait on the corner out of sight, then said, “Wish me luck.” She drove the rest of the way and pulled into her house’s driveway. Heather and Mike and I watched as she disappeared inside, and saw a light go on in the kitchen.

  Heather said, “You’re seriously crazy, you know.”

  “Certifiable,” Mike said.

  “Well then what are you two doing going along with me?” I asked, and they both smiled and shrugged.

  Superfast, Jill was outside again, then starting up the truck, and backing down the driveway. She almost took out the mailbox by the road on her way out but didn’t. Heather and I then squeezed into the cab and Mike hoppe
d in the back and Jill drove back to Mullin’s.

  It was all happening so smoothly, so quickly, that it seemed inevitable something was about to go wrong. And yet, as we all gathered near the hedges in front of Mullin’s house, there seemed to be nothing in our way.

  “We ready to do this?” I asked, and it felt like that imaginary bee that had stung me had left my whole body buzzing.

  “Ready,” Dez said.

  Then Patrick said, “So say we all,” and he smiled with excitement and I felt sure things were going to be okay again for all of us, that maybe they already were.

  Winter and I headed up the path to Mullin’s house with Patrick and Dez behind us and rang the bell. Jill, Mike, Heather, and designated driver Carson—who had more experience driving trucks than any of us—were waiting just beyond the shrubs for the signal to back the truck into the driveway, which would be a light turned on in the downstairs bathroom, whose window faced the driveway. Then turned off again, then on again.

  “You know your part?” I elbowed Winter.

  “I think I won’t have to try too hard,” Winter said.

  The door opened.

  “Hello,” Mullin said, looking a touch confused. “Can I help you?”

  “Can we come in?” Winter asked. “It’s important.”

  “Do I know you?” he asked me, and I was about to say a simple, “No, but I go to your school,” but he said, “Oh, right. Georgetown.”

  “Right,” I said, and my face felt hot. “Please can we come in?”

  “At…”—he turned to look at a wall clock—“twelve thirty on a Saturday night?”

  “Principal Mullin,” Patrick said, sounding all grown up. “It’s about a rather urgent matter.”

  “Well come on, then,” Mullin said, stepping back to let the four of us in. “If you must.”

  Inside, Winter and the boys sat with the principal in his living room and I excused myself to the bathroom as Winter started babbling. She was good at babbling. This was the perfect role for her and she stole the scene, just being herself. I heard her telling the principal about the hunt and how Dez’s dad told them it was going on because all these kids were in Home Depot buying random things. And how we were just hanging out in the park after a movie, minding our own business when Dave Fitzgerald got into a fight with Dez and broke his wrist.

  “Wait,” Mullin said. “Dave Fitzgerald did that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dez said.

  I stopped, and waited, breath bated, for some big reaction from Mullin, like maybe a declaration he’d expel Fitz on Monday, but none came.

  “Anyway,” Winter said, but I couldn’t afford to listen anymore. I found the bathroom, turned on the light and the fan, then turned the light off, then on again, and closed the door without going in.

  I went down the hall to the kitchen and started looking for keys in drawers or on hooks in cabinets, but there were none.

  I opened the door that led to the garage and saw some keys on the wall there, and saw two on an Airstream keychain. Snatching them, I went back to the kitchen, passed the keys out the window to Mike, who’d been told to wait right there. I went back down the hall, opened the bathroom door, flushed the toilet, and rejoined the others in the living room.

  “Anyway,” Patrick was saying, “we just thought we should let you know.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Mullin said. “I’ll take this all under advisement.”

  I looked around at my friends and we all nodded and I said, “Well, then I guess we’ll be on our way.”

  Mullin went to get up to show us the door but Patrick said, “No need to get up, sir.”

  Mullin’s attention was already back on the television. A baseball game on the West Coast. Bottom of the 13th. “Oh, right,” he said, waving us off. “Great. Thanks.”

  We went outside and walked calmly down the now-empty drive and down the street to where the Flying Cloud was hitched to Jill’s dad’s truck. When we were close, we took off into a run, with laughter chasing us then catching up and overtaking us. Mike was in the truck with Carson—whose car we were abandoning there—and Jill and Heather were in the Flying Cloud so the rest of us climbed up and in. We were all sort of winded and quiet until Patrick started laughing and said, “We are in some serious trouble now.”

  Carson took a wide turn and we all swayed and grabbed onto things and then settled into seats and couches. It was all so organized in there—not an inch was wasted—that it made me feel even more scattered, more all over the map, and I liked it, that feeling of not being so neat all the time. Then my eyes fell on a photograph—of Mullin and a woman, perhaps a wife or girlfriend, smiling in front of a waterfall. I’d never thought much about the fact that Mullin was “single” but whoever she was must have left him or died and I had a thought about life being messy, no matter who you were.

  I felt tears forming—I couldn’t believe we’d actually pulled it off—and thought that yes, this was worth risking being grounded all summer.

  This was worth whatever punishment was coming from Mullin, though I had a feeling he wasn’t going to do much of anything.

  What was there left to do, really, with so few days left to the school year? And what could he do to me—to any of us—that really mattered in the grand scheme of things?

  Jill was looking at her watch as the Flying Cloud took another floaty turn. “We’re not going to make it.”

  “We have to,” I said, but as soon as I said it I realized I wasn’t sure it was true. Not anymore. I said, “Or maybe we don’t.”

  Because we’d already won, hadn’t we?

  I sure felt we had.

  And what did it matter, the official title? The Yeti? The stamp of approval from Barbone? Who really cared what any of those guys thought anyway? The thought of having to see them all again actually ruined the mood.

  But we were almost there.

  So close.

  I could see the entrance to The Pines—the shadowy trees, and the dim glow of the lights of school beyond it. Carson was heading there at full tilt.

  HOLD UP, said the text I sent to Carson, and the Flying Cloud stopped and everyone said, “What’s going on?” and then Carson and Mike came over to the trailer door and I hung out of it and I pointed to The Pines and said, “Look at it over there.”

  Loud music blared and a few tipsy girls were shouting and dancing on cars.

  I said, “I couldn’t think of any place I would rather be less.”

  “You want to just give up?” Jill asked. “Now?”

  “It’s not giving up,” I said, shaking my head. “We do what we came to do and show them the Flying Cloud but we don’t stop. We do a drive-by—a victory lap—and we take this trailer and hit the road and see where we land.”

  “Works for me,” Dez said, then he pulled as many of us as he could into a hug and said, “You turned out to be the best scav hunt team ever.”

  Patrick said, “Let’s get this show on the road,” and we all laughed.

  So Carson got back into the truck and drove us into The Pines and it all seemed to happen in slow motion, then.

  I saw the heads start to turn our way, one by one, like some kind of stadium wave.

  And then jaws started dropping and mouths starting moving and saying this:

  Holy.

  Shit.

  And then the look on Barbone’s face, the look of defeat and disappointment, and maybe something else, too, though it was hard to say what it was. Was he maybe even a little bit impressed?

  And then our circle of the lot was complete, and I saw Leticia Farrice and the Yeti and Lucas Wells—smiling and nodding at me—and I waved a small wave and we headed back out into the night.

  I plopped down on one of the small benchlike sofas, between Patrick and Dez—Winter and Mike and Heather had settled at the kitchen table—and everything felt right.

  We parked the trailer by the beach end of Rainey Park where there was a small stretch of sand down by the river.

  “I don
’t want things to always be so weird between us,” I said to Patrick, when we sat down apart from the others on the sand, with the lights from inside the Flying Cloud illuminating the scene.

  “They won’t be,” he said. “I promise. I will get over it. Over you, I mean.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because there are plenty of girls out there who’d kill to be with you.”

  “Mary, stop,” he said.

  “No, it’s—”

  “Just stop, okay?” He sounded serious that time.

  “Okay,” I said, then really fast—before he could even interrupt—I said, “You’ll find some Harvard hottie and you’ll never think about me that way again.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Patrick said, and I just nodded.

  “What do you think you’ll remember most about all this?” I asked him. “About high school?”

  I knew now that I’d remember Patrick’s bubble-fro in front of the Shalimar, and Dez singing “The Rose” on the way to Mohonk, and the look on Winter’s face when we stole Poppy’s Pillow Pet from right under her sleeping head. I’d remember all of it any time I ever saw an umlaut or heard the Blue Öyster Cult on the radio and I’d sing along to “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and mean it.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Because the stuff I want to remember most is stuff I’m not leaving behind, if that makes any sense.”

  It didn’t. “Not really.”

  “I won’t have to remember you, for example, because you’re still going to be a part of my life. A different part, for sure, but we’ll e-mail and see each other on break and during summers.” He thought some more. “I’ll miss band, I guess, and probably other stuff that I don’t even know I’m going to miss until I go away and realize I do.”

  Carson was laughing loudly at something Winter was doing and I said, “What about Carson?”

  “Yeah,” Patrick said reluctantly. “I’m going to miss Carson. I mean, I love the guy, warts and all. But I don’t know…”