The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life (15 page)

Life
was happening.

Was this what things were going to feel like all the time next year? When I was out in the world on my own?

The nature of the game, the hunt, had changed completely now that we were onto the second list, and I could feel it—some kind of shift in my brain and in my body, like my blood had started pumping in the opposite direction. We were no longer going for a minimum; there was no set goal. We needed any and all points, and fast, if we were going to win and take home the Yeti. There could be no wasted time, no opportunity for points lost. It was time to get real, to get serious.

With Carson no longer mine for the taking, the Yeti was all I had; the only way to turn the night around was to win and win big so that I could hold it over Barbone forever.

A text from the Yeti said: SIX TEAMS REMAIN. ALL HAD SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 1269 (LESABRE) AND 1540 (BARBONE!) SO YOU ARE STARTING ROUND 2 NECK AND NECK. GOOD LUCK!

“How did Barbone end up qualifying with more points than we did?” I asked, feeling the fire being stoked in my belly.

“Don’t worry about it, Mary,” Patrick said, sounding a little exasperated.

“I’m telling you he has Mary on the Half Shell,” I said. “And he’s just hiding it out of spite.” I felt sick whenever I thought about Eleanor’s statue, out there in the world without me.

“But he said he didn’t have it?” Patrick asked.

“Yes, and I don’t believe him,” I said.

“But if he had it,” Winter said, “don’t you think he’d want to rub it in your face?”

“Maybe,” I conceded. “All I know is if we don’t get it back, I’m dead.”

“Why?” Carson asked. “What’s the big deal?”

“It’s like a family heirloom,” I said. “My aunt bought it in Italy at the end of World War Two.”

“Oh,” he said, “I bet it’ll turn up.” Then he turned up the radio during the song’s guitar solo and rolled down his window and let out a scream. He rolled the window back up again and smiled, pounding out the drumbeat on the steering wheel.

“Sorry, guys,” he said. “And I’m sorry if it seems really mean but I feel
so freaking awesome
right now.” He seemed to be looking for Winter in his rearview but she was looking firmly out her window.

Patrick sort of laughed and said, “Okay,” like Carson was a mental patient.

Carson turned the music down a little bit and said, “I just mean, this thing with Jill has been weighing on me for weeks now and I was so dreading the actual breaking up but now that it’s out there, I feel like I could just do a cartwheel.”

“Well, if it were on the list,” Patrick said, “I’d say go for it, but otherwise, maybe not.”

“I don’t even know how to
do
a cartwheel,” Carson said, “but you get the idea. I feel…I don’t know…
free
.”

I looked at Winter to see if I could read her face, but she was still staring out that window. But if Carson felt so great being free, that didn’t seem great for Winter if she’d been thinking the two of them would be together now. Was that what was going to happen next? Were Carson and Winter going to become a couple? And how was I going to stand it?

The list,
I said to myself.

Focus.

So I read through the whole thing and didn’t find what I was hoping to find. “There’s nothing about the Flying Cloud,” I said. I didn’t understand.

“There has to be,” Patrick said, flipping pages.

“So you guys went to Mohonk, too?” Carson asked.

“Yeah,” Patrick said.

I was sort of disappointed that ours wasn’t the only team who’d done it but hopeful that Carson had information to share. “Do you know what it means?” I asked. “The clue?”

Carson said, “We assumed there were more clues coming.”

“Us, too,” Patrick said.

“Oh, and I have this.” Carson reached into his back shorts pocket at the next light and took out a folded postcard. “Since I could bring one item with me.” I saw that it had a picture of the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade on it. “It’s seventy-five points.”

“Maybe there will be a text clue?” Winter said while I added up our new total, 1344.

“It has to be,” I said. “Unless it was a wild-goose chase. Or maybe the clue is connected to something here somewhere, but we’re not seeing it?”

“I’m pretty sure we’d see it,” Patrick said. “It’s smarter than we thought it would be, sure, but there is no real genius at work here.”

I wasn’t so sure and thought that maybe there was a trick or some kind of hidden clue we just couldn’t see yet. “What about the fact that the Flying Cloud is an old car. Should we be looking for antique car dealerships or something?”

“Possible,” Patrick said.

“I’ll Google,” I said, but the results were underwhelming. There seemed to be some classic car auction in a different Oyster Point, this one in Virginia, but none in ours.

“Who’s Bob?” Patrick asked. “And how would anyone shave his balls?”

“No idea,” Winter said. “And gross.”

“Why are balls gross?” Patrick asked, with some edge, but no one answered and I just felt mortified and looked out my window. We were in front of a gas station, a few blocks away from Rizzo’s.

“Dude,” Carson said finally. “Come on.” He smiled over at Patrick. “They’re pretty gross.”

Patrick just looked out the window and shook his head.

My phone buzzed and it was Dez: DID U MAKE IT?

I wrote back, YES. AND WE GOT FITZ DQ’D.

AWSE! Dez wrote.

I sent, HOW ARE YOU?

BORED, he said. WTNG 4 MRI.

He was clearly texting with one hand.

Then he asked: SKINNY-DIPPING?

I took a minute to think of my reply and opted for: AFRAID SO.

Dez wrote back: PATRICK MUST BE !!!!! Then: BARBONE DQ’D?

NO, I wrote back. SORRY. Then I wrote: BUT THERE IS BIG NEWS. CARSON AND JILL SPLITSVILLE. HE’S WITH US NOW.

Dez only wrote: !

And I wrote: HE LIKES WINTER. SHOOT ME.

Then: ALSO JILL SEEMS PISSED ABOUT SOMETHING. SAID TO WINTER ‘I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.’ WHAT DID SHE DO?

NO IDEA, Dez wrote and somehow it
looked
like a lie, even though I knew it wasn’t possible for type to look one way or another.

Carson said, “Crap,” and pulled the car over to the curb and turned off the music with a quick slap of a button on the dash.

We’d arrived at Rizzo’s, where a long red-and-gold awning stretched from the front door to the curb. Tom Reilly’s team had already gotten there and Tom himself was on the roof—presumably having climbed the fire escape on the side of the building—where a creepy-looking scarecrow-type gondolier stood in a long and slender boat. It looked more like the kind of guy who’d escort you across the River Styx than one who’d take you on a leisurely tour of Venetian canals, but points were points. Tom had climbed into the boat and was posing for his teammate’s cell-phone camera.

“How did they get here so fast?” I said, infuriated. They’d beaten us to the bell at Fort Wayne, too, and were possibly shaping up to be our main competition.

“No idea,” Carson said.

“Well, that was a bust,” Patrick said. “So what do we do next?”

“Mr. Gatti lives pretty close to here,” Carson said as he looked at a copy of the list. “Just past the train tracks.”

Mr. Gatti was the theater director at school. Also a science teacher, but only freshman courses so none of us had had him as an actual teacher in years. There was crossover, naturally, between the band kids and the theater kids and Carson was both, having just that year played the lead in
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
.

“But what could we possibly steal?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Carson said. “But we should go look, at least. He’s got all sorts of crazy lawn ornaments and stuff.”

“Okay, drive,” I said, and we were off again and I watched Tom and the gondolier fade into the distance. “How did they
get there so fast?” I asked again, and Patrick said only, “Let it go, Mary.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to Venice,” Winter said. “But not if the gondoliers look like that.”

Carson laughed and said, “Don’t worry.” He smiled at her in the rearview mirror. “They don’t.”

“All right,” I said. “We need to be multitasking even if we’re going to Gatti’s. Who wants to write the opening paragraph of a novel about school?”

“You should be the one to do that,” Winter said, and I said, “Okay,” because I felt like I’d been doing it in my head all night anyway:
They were the best of times. They were the worst of times.

“Excellent,” Carson said, and there was a part of me that resented how entirely normal and content he sounded. Had he even
noticed
that I liked him? Did the fact that Winter and I were best friends make him think twice at all?

I said, “‘Put the union rat to work.’ What does that mean?”

“No idea,” Patrick said.

“Who’s Susan Witherton?” I asked.

“She’s that real estate agent whose face is plastered all over town,” Carson said. “She has an office near Stop & Shop, I think?”

“Awesome,” I said. “But what time do places like that close?”

“Yeah, it’s probably too late,” Carson said. “Sometimes they leave little business cards in dispensers outside, though, I think. For when they’re not there and people walk by?”

“Doesn’t sound promising,” Winter said.

“What about a condom?” I said, without realizing how awkward the question would sound coming from me, someone who’d never laid eyes on an actual condom outside of a sex ed class I’d taken years ago.

“I have one,” Carson said, and at the next red light, he pulled out his wallet, slipped out a condom, and held it up and out toward the backseat.

I just stared at the shiny square, sort of stunned.

“What do you want
me
to do with it?” I said, and Carson laughed and tossed it into the backseat. Winter squirmed away and the little square just sat there on the seat between us like a dead bug, neither of us willing to touch it. Still, I added 15 points to our total. For 1359.

“You ladies have issues,” Patrick said, shaking his head.

As if he wasn’t a virgin, too!

But what on earth was Carson doing with a condom?
In his wallet?
Had he and Jill done it? Had they done it in the week since the rumor had started? Or was the condom intended for something—
someone
—else? Like, for Winter? Tonight?

The very thought of it—of Winter and Carson, together, kissing or anything more, made me feel sick. And
so humiliated
, too. All that time we’d spent together working on prom, he and I. All the inside jokes and “Shooters,” none of it meant anything and now my brain was stuck on a loop, unable to move past the question of: How could I have been so horribly wrong about Carson and Patrick and
everything
?

We drove in silence for a moment and Patrick said, “So what’s the deal? I thought you and Jill were solid.”

I clenched my fists and waited.

After a pause, Carson said, “It’s been coming for a long time.”

“Yeah, you said that,” Patrick said skeptically. “You could’ve fooled me.”

“It’s hard to explain,” Carson said, and his eyes met Winter’s for a quick, nervous instant in the rearview. “It just
didn’t seem like we were going to stay together once we went away, so what’s the point of being together now?”

“I guess,” Patrick said. “Or maybe you could argue that you should be together now since it’s your only chance, and why not.”

I felt certain Patrick wasn’t talking about Carson and Jill anymore.

“I don’t know,” Carson said. “I guess my heart just wasn’t in it. And I mean, this is our last summer here and our last summer before college. It doesn’t feel right to waste it with someone you’re not crazy about.”

Carson looked at Winter again then, in the rearview mirror, and Winter looked out the window. She sure did like looking out that window.

“She sure seems crazy about you,” Patrick said to Carson, as if that were enough—as if one person’s feelings could be big enough to count for two.

Had anyone ever written a book or a good magazine article about how to be friends with a guy who wanted to be more than friends? Because that’s what I needed. And he needed an article, too, one that told him to stop making me feel guilty. It wasn’t like I wanted to hurt his feelings!

The Marriott was coming up fast on the right side of the road so I shouted, “Soap from a hotel!”

Carson jerked us into the parking lot and cut a diagonal line across it then stopped near the hotel entrance and put the car in park.

“I’ll go,” I said.

Wasting time deciding stuff like that was just that, wasting time. Plus, the car, while luxurious, had started to feel claustrophobic, too small to contain everything that was going on. Weirdness between Patrick and me. Between Winter
and me. And, unless I was imagining it, between Winter and Carson.

“This may sound strange,” I said, when I got to the front desk.

“But you’d like a bar of soap?” the woman said.

After a split second’s surprise, I said, “Yes. Yes, I would.” Then felt the need to add, “It’s all in good fun. Nothing crazy or illegal or anything.”

“Sure,” the woman said. “I gotcha.”

She called housekeeping and then returned to whatever it was she was doing and I just waited. The lobby was empty except for two men, sitting and talking loudly in a lounge, where a grand piano sat eerily quietly. A woman behind the small bar was reading a romance novel, and I had a hard time imagining a more boring place to tend bar. I wanted to run up to her and ask her how she’d ended up here, and how I might avoid such a boring fate myself, and then I secretly hoped she was writing the Great American Novel and just tending bar here to pay the bills, or putting herself through school in astrophysics. Or something. Anything! Because what if this
was
the best night of my pathetic life? What if things didn’t get better after high school but worse?

My phone buzzed and I figured it was the Yeti, but it was only Dez. It said: HOW ARE YOU HOLDING UP?

I sat and wrote: BARELY.

Dez said: TELL HIM HOW YOU FEEL? SO YOU’LL KNOW FOR SURE?