The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life

THE

THE

TARA ALTEBRANDO

D
UTTON
B
OOKS

A
N IMPRINT OF
P
ENGUIN
G
ROUP
(USA) I
NC
.

FOR VIOLET MAE

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Acknowledgments

IT WAS EXACTLY TWELVE FORTY-FIVE WHEN WE
pulled into The Pines—the old tree-dotted parking lot behind the football field. The sky was a sort of extreme blue that seemed just right.

I felt extreme, too.

Extremely excited.

Extremely nervous.

I wasn’t remotely
blue
, no, but I could hardly expect the sky to change color for me. If it did, I thought red might do.

Or maybe violet, because it sounded like
violent
.

And
violate
.

I wasn’t actually planning on violating any laws or people—or getting violent either—but I felt sort of all over the place, emotionally.

Stormy.

Unpredictable.

Besides, I just couldn’t think of a color that sounded like, well,
psyched.

Beyond belief.

Other teams’ cars were parked in a sort of semicircle, fanned out from a center car—which I assumed belonged to one of last
year’s winners on account of the fact that it had an orange construction cone strapped to the roof and the infamous Scavenger Hunt Yeti—a four-foot garden statue of the Abominable Snowman—perched on the hood. He looked sort of pissed off, the Yeti, which made sense considering he was tonight’s prize and had no say whatsoever over his own fate. I felt a moment of kinship with him as Patrick brought the car to a soft halt near a pine tree that had burst through the lot’s cracked asphalt. For most of my life, and especially recently, I’d been feeling like I had no say in my own fate either. Like things were just happening—prom, senior week, graduation, summer, college—no matter what I did. It was enough to make
me
feel like retreating into some wooded or snowy clime, where only the most determined photographers or Mary-hunters might find me.

But here I was, and here was the Yeti with me. He certainly had the right stance for the occasion: one foot ahead of the other, as if at the starting line of a race, ready to run for his life.

I wondered,
Am I ready?

Patrick offered up a more easily answered question: “Where should I park?”

“As close as you can get without getting blocked in,” I said from the backseat, and Winter and Dez simultaneously pointed to a good spot. There was only one way in or out of The Pines, where an old chain typically hung between two rusty posts, and once we had the list in our hands we wouldn’t want to waste even a second getting the hell out of there.

Patrick pulled his blue Buick LeSabre right up into the semicircle, then made a quick decision to turn the car around and
back
in before he turned off the engine.

“Excellent,” I said, and when I stepped out of the car, the frantic chirping of birds in the pines surrounding us
sounded almost like applause. It was like even they knew something exciting was happening. I imagined one of them looking at the LeSabre and saying, “My money’s on that lot right there.” Another one would nod its beaked head in agreement and say, “They’ve got pluck.”

For no reason I could think of, the birds in my head sounded educated—vaguely British—but Patrick had a different take.

“Very Hitchcockian,” he said, and I thought of the rainy afternoon a few years ago when he’d sat me down and made me watch
The Birds
, how I’d had black-and-white dreams about getting my eyes pecked out for days. “It’s like they’re waiting for the carnage,” he added.

I just didn’t see it that way. Not yet, anyway.

“Flip-flops?”
I said, when Winter stepped out of the passenger seat. “You wore
flip-flops
? And a
dress
?” It was a sporty sundress cut just above the knee. But still.

Winter looked down at herself as if she weren’t sure. “Yeah, so?”

“Sooooo,” I said. “We’re going to be racing. Other people. The clock. And you’re going to be racing in a dress. And in shoes that are…”—I studied their rubbery pink platform, their sparkly little thongy thing—“…barely shoes!”

“I could run a marathon in these puppies,” Winter said. “Not to worry. Besides, if you haven’t noticed, we have a
car
.”

“Calm down, ladies,” Dez said, climbing out of the backseat himself, in attire more suitable to a night out clubbing than scavenger hunting—black skinny jeans, tight black shirt with a faux tuxedo print on the front, and Doc Marten boots. Winter’s clothes I might have been able to influence,
had I been there when Patrick had picked her up. But Dez was Dez and was not one to be influenced or ever, horrors, made over. I’d known him since before I could remember and, in our parents’ circles anyway, he was still known as the boy who’d dressed up for Halloween as Daphne from
Scooby-Doo!
when we were in kindergarten. The story, considered a local scandal, had made national headlines—Dez had a scrapbook!—a fact that I’d always found ludicrous but telling about Oyster Point and where my friends and I fit in. Even before we’d learned how to read, we’d been misunderstood.

When Patrick got out of the car and I saw
his
scavenger hunt attire, I laughed and said, “Why don’t we just quit right now?” He wore loud plaid shorts—held up with rainbow suspenders that had white-gloved hands for clasps—and his favorite T-shirt, which read simply
SO SAY WE ALL
and was a reference to a show I’d forgotten the name of. The shirt was, alas, tucked in.

“Oh, Patrick,” I said.

“What,” he said. “You don’t like my ensemble?”

“Patrick, Patrick, Patrick.” I smiled and noted the white sweat socks that climbed from his yellow Converse high-tops up to his knees, and wished that my best guy friend—we’d been nearly inseparable since we’d met freshman year—would try at least a little bit harder to hide his more geeky qualities on occasions like this. He was so intimidatingly smart that most people, even jerks, mostly left him alone—he’d probably tutored half of them by now—but I couldn’t help but think he was inviting needless ridicule today. And he always took that sort of thing hard even though he pretended not to.

“Ridiculous day, ridiculous clothes,” he declared, and he
smiled broadly. The curls of his unkempt black hair shook. I smiled and said, “Mission accomplished.”

I had this thought:
God, I’m going to miss him.

Surveying my team—my best friends way above and beyond any others—I shook my head and said, slowly, “We are one motley-ass crew.”

Dez responded by putting an arm around Winter’s shoulders and smiling overmuch as if for a photo and I said, “I’d make you all go home and change if there was time.”

But there wasn’t time and anyway Dez said, “Chill the ef out, Mary,” and Winter said, “Seriously,” and rolled her eyes. Patrick snapped his suspenders and winked.

Point taken.

We were lucky to be here on time at all—and that was my fault. I could not and would not tell my parents what I was doing today. Last year the hunt had ended badly—with a few seniors arrested and others suspended—and my mom, especially, had taken note. So I had had brunch at The Oyster Hut, the restaurant my parents ran down by the water; we ate there as a family every Saturday morning and any departure from that plan without a solid excuse would arouse suspicion. Patrick had picked up Winter—whose mom thought she was going to the mall then a movie then sleeping at my house—and then Dez, whose parents, like Patrick’s, knew exactly what was going on today, before stopping by the restaurant to get me.

I’d tried so hard all through brunch to not seem anxious, eager, anything—repeating in my head
I am just going to the movies and sleeping over at Winter’s,
again and again, trying to make a fake truth real. I needed my parents to believe it, and for Grace—my younger sister, a junior who luckily thought I wasn’t cool enough to do the hunt anyway—to buy
it, too. I had never lied to my parents about my whereabouts before and to say that it made for a tense brunch was an understatement. It was only after I’d escaped and arrived at The Pines that I finally felt all that tension leave my body and allowed nervous excitement of a different kind in.

This was my day, my night.

Our
night.

Maybe the odds were against us winning, but we were going to have a hell of a time trying.

“Who invited Glee Club?”

I turned. It was Jake Barbone—
of course
—and there was no point in telling him, again, that we weren’t in Glee Club. That, in fact, our school didn’t even
have
a Glee Club. Dez and Winter were into drama. Winter and I were on the school paper. I did mock trial, and Patrick and I were in band and on the math team.

Yes, the math team.

So I knew how pathetic it would sound to clarify the Glee Club point. Anyway, the joke was old.

“Ha-ha-ha,” Dez said, dripping with sarcasm.

“Yeah,” Patrick said. “Real original.”

“Look, guys,” Barbone said to the back of some heads on the other side of his car, and they all turned.

If it were actually possible to put together a team of bigger (there is no better word) assholes I wasn’t sure how one would go about doing it without having to advertise globally: A
RROGANT, PRIVILEGED, MAN
/
BOY
/
JOCKS SOUGHT FOR EXCITING NEW VENTURE
. O
NLY CANDIDATES WITH OBVIOUS LOW SELF-ESTEEM AND FOUR+ YEARS OF EXPERIENCE HARASSING THEIR PEERS NEED APPLY. TROPHY GIRLFRIENDS WITHOUT MINDS OF THEIR OWN A PLUS
.

“Oh, man,” Dave Fitzpatrick, aka “Fitz,” said, then he laughed. “Check out those
suspenders
!”

He shook his head and I felt a sort of sadness in my gut about how I couldn’t protect Patrick, much as I wanted to. I felt some relief in the fact that he was going to Harvard come fall, provided some scholarship money came through, and I just knew it would. I imagined everyone there was geeky and hoped that Patrick would somehow ascend their ranks, be crowned their king.