The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life

by Tara Altebrando

  “What?” I thought I knew what he meant. “You can say it.”

  “I think there’s another best friend—best guy friend—in my future. Probably a lot of them.”

  “Life is long,” I said, and I nodded.

  Patrick said, “If you’re lucky.”

  There was talk then, about taking one joy ride or road trip, before returning the Flying Cloud to its rightful owner. But where to go? We couldn’t decide. It didn’t seem worth the bother. This spot was pretty nice, felt pretty perfect. Especially when Dez popped inside the Flying Cloud with his iPod and started blasting music.

  “I’m sort of dying to know who they gave the Yeti to,” Dez said when he came back out and sat beside me on the sand.

  I just shrugged.

  He elbowed me. “Oh, now all of a sudden you don’t care?”

  “This is better than winning.” I nodded. “We won the moral victory.”

  “You think?” he said.

  “I think,” I said, and marveled at how much had happened since Hayhenge, since the origami sheep in the ER waiting room. “Hey, why were you mad today? At the hospital. When we were talking about Barbone and Fitz?”

  Dez scooped some sand and let it run through his fingers and I realized we never got a chance to play Pictionary with the judges, never got to draw a picture of a duck or a fire hydrant or a moat. He said, “It just seemed like you all thought Barbone was some hero by not messing with the fag.”

  “But you know we don’t feel that way,” I said, maybe a little too knee-jerk before I let the accusation set in.

  “But how do you feel?” he said wearily. “I mean, none of you really messes with me either. I’m handled with kid gloves. Nobody has ever even asked me if I’m gay.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “It’s so like you to miss the point, Mary.” He sighed. “Of course I am. I mean, have you met me? I just mean we’ve never talked about it. Why is that?”

  “I figured you’d talk about it if you wanted to.”

  “I want to!”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

  “I don’t know.” He was wiping sand from his palms now. “Why should I have to? Why doesn’t it just happen naturally? We talk about everyone else’s lame crushes ad nauseam, but never mine.”

  “Who is it?” I pinched his leg through his jeans. “Tell me!”

  “Not now, you idiot.” He swatted my hand away. “But let’s say we open a dialogue.”

  “I love it when you talk diplomat,” I said, and felt pretty sure that Dez could walk right over the bridge and to the city tonight, without a second thought. Then I saw a figure walking down the beach.

  Leticia Farrice.

  “What’s she doing here?” I said. And then I saw what she was carrying, what she had hugged to her chest in front of her.

  The Yeti.

  And Lucas Wells was walking behind her.

  They came to where we were sitting, and Leticia put the Yeti down so that its feet sunk slightly into the sand. He looked for a second like he might make a break for it—maybe dive into the water and swim to the opposite shore—but of course I was probably projecting.

  “Well played,” Leticia said. “Here you go.”

  “But we didn’t turn up for judging,” I said, bewildered.

  “Well, you pulled into the parking lot, so technically you did,” Lucas said. “And I happen to be the Head Judge for Special Points and I awarded you enough of them to win the whole thing.”

  “How’d that go over?” Patrick asked.

  Leticia said, “Honestly, I think they were all too impressed to even try to argue.”

  “It was pretty unbelievable,” Lucas said.

  “Well you were the ones who came up with the marvelous dare,” I said.

  “We only called it that because it rhymed,” Lucas said. “It never occurred to us someone would read that much into it.”

  Dez and I exchanged a look and then we high-fived each other and started laughing. “How did you even find us?” I asked.

  Lucas said, “I just asked myself where I’d go if I’d pulled off something so entirely awesome.”

  “I’ve got to take off,” Leticia said. “But you guys are in charge of the hunt next year. It’s more work than you think it is, so get started early.”

  I had already started. I was going to have a ton of fun messing with the minds of Grace and her classmates come next June. Though it was going to take a while to come up with something like the Flying Cloud and all the requisite clues.

  “I also have this for you,” Lucas said, and he unzipped his backpack and pulled out Mary on the Half Shell.

  “Oh my God.” I rushed forward to hug her—and him, which felt weird and also not weird at all. “Where was she?”

  “It was the strangest thing,” he said. “It was like one minute she wasn’t there and the next she was. Right next to the Yeti in The Pines. Like someone wanted her to be found. Maybe an hour ago.”

  He seemed to be looking over my shoulder and I turned and saw Carson there, looking caught out.

  “It was you?” I said.

  “I can explain,” he said.

  “This ought to be good,” Dez said.

  “Privately,” Carson said, and I wasn’t sure whether I even cared what he had to say because I was so relieved to have Mary back, but I followed him down to the water anyway.

  “What the hell?” I said, still clutching Mary, whose robe was coarse like fine sandpaper.

  He took a deep breath then let it out and said, “Sometimes you just seem a little harsh and sort of, I don’t know, judgmental.”

  I was about to say, “You’re joking, right?” but I bit my tongue and waited.

  “And I knew you were going to make me feel bad about what Winter and I had done and make her feel bad and I guess I just wanted to get back at you somehow. But I didn’t know about the history of the statue and I wanted to come clean earlier but then I knew how it would look.”

  “It looks pretty bad,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not perfect,” he said, and I said, “Well neither am I, but still.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry, okay?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said, but I knew something had changed that wouldn’t change back.

  We took a bunch of pictures, then, of us with the Yeti on the beach. And the Yeti and Mary on the Half Shell together.

  And the Yeti and Mary in the Flying Cloud.

  And then each of us leaning against the Flying Cloud.

  I made sure that there were some of Winter and me—not joined at the hip, but close—and then some of all four of us, the original Also-Rans, and then a picture with just me and Patrick and the Yeti. I thought for a minute—hard—about taking a picture of Winter and Carson, but somehow, it didn’t seem necessary, or even right. I had a feeling that they weren’t even going to get together in any real way.

  It didn’t matter.

  Carson wasn’t the one for me. He wasn’t even the one for right now. My life would hopefully have its great love story but this wasn’t it. It would happen in D.C. in the next four years or it would happen in Africa, if I ever got there, or in Sienna or, for all I knew, Kentucky or Timbuktu.

  Life was long.

  And people only really had great love affairs in high school in the movies. And maybe during world wars. But this was not a movie and not a war, even if it sometimes felt that way. It was only high school and it was almost over with anyway.

  “So why’d he do it?” Winter asked me, in a quiet moment.

  “He said he knew I was going to make you feel bad for cheating, and that he was going to give it back, but then it sort of escalated.”

  Winter nodded. “That’s pretty lame.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and I felt bad for her that her great romance wasn’t so great either, then I nudged her. “I think this would have been a pretty okay teen comedy in the end.”

  “Comedy?” Winter laughed. “More like
tragedy!”

  “Tragedy is comedy,” I said. “Didn’t someone famous say that once?”

  “Um.” Winter laughed. “Like I’d know.”

  “I think you wouldn’t have minded playing yourself in this movie, though.” I nudged her.

  “I don’t know,” Winter said. “I had to do nudity and Dumpster dive. And the pay’s crap.”

  Then she said, “Hey, you never wrote the first paragraph of a novel about Oyster Point High.”

  “No,” I said. “I never did.” But I had a feeling I could now, if I had to, and that it might even be a funny, happy novel, and not one about a school better left at the bottom of the ocean.

  It was time. Patrick got in to drive Jill’s dad’s truck this time and everyone else got into the Airstream and that didn’t seem right so I hopped out and went to ride with Patrick.

  “Hey, you,” he said, when I got in.

  “You looked lonely,” I said.

  “Always,” he said.

  So we drove, and the sky above us was so black it was almost blue again, and with the windows down you could hear the stereo from the Flying Cloud blasting, There goes Tokyo! Go! Go! Godzilla!

  “We need to make a stop,” I said, and I pulled Mary out of my bag and held her up.

  “Gotcha,” Patrick said, and he drove on, with what felt like new purpose.

  When we stopped out front of Eleanor’s house, I got out and some of the others were hanging out of the Flying Cloud, saying “What’s going on?”

  “Returning Mary to her rightful place,” I said, and I went to work on the weeds, clearing the path between the garden’s edge and the statue’s stone perch. I’d come back tomorrow to finish the job, but for now it was much improved. I took Mary and sat her back down on the stone and made the sign of the cross and tried to pray, but it was hard with the Blue Öyster Cult singing, History shows again and again how nature points up the folly of man/Godzilla!

  Barbone would be in school on Monday. The last week of school. And he’d have something to say about Dez, the Yeti, the Flying Cloud, all of it. And then he’d be at Georgetown in a few months and I might bump into him on the streets one day. I’d try to hold my head high and accept that Georgetown was his fate and mine was mine.

  And Lucas’s, too, which was sort of fun to think about. He’d texted me after he’d gone home, saying: SEE YOU SOON?

  Something didn’t feel quite right about just leaving Mary there all alone, though.

  “Hey, guys?” I called out to the Flying Cloud. A few faces came to the window again. “What do you say we give the Yeti a new home right here?” I nodded toward the grotto.

  “Yeti on the Half Shell?” Dez asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Mary needs a friend.”

  “Sure,” Dez said. “Why not?”

  So they passed the Yeti through the window—it was heavier than I expected—and I put it in Eleanor’s garden and stepped back. It looked just right, like it might stop running after all.

  I saluted the Yeti and gave Mary a pat on the head and got back into the truck with Patrick. Then we set out to find out whether Mullin had even missed the Flying Cloud, whether we’d be arrested or expelled, and whether any of us cared.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If I ever do a scavenger hunt again, I want these fine people on my team:

  Sara Zarr, who would try to talk me out of shaving my eyebrows.

  Siobhan Vivian, who would hand me the razor.

  David Dunton at Harvey Klinger Agency, who would gamely act as if I looked great without eyebrows.

  Nick, who would tell me that I did not.

  Bob, who would lend me an eyebrow pencil.

  Julie Strauss-Gabel, who would suggest that I re-do the pencil-eyebrows a few times, to get them just right.

  And Liza Kaplan, who would quietly ride shotgun through all this eyebrow nonsense and somehow get us enough points to qualify.

  Copious special points to Ellie, and to the makers of the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt lists of years past, for providing inspiration.

  Table of Contents

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  Acknowledgments