The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life (20 page)

“Wish me luck,” I said, and I stepped out into the night.

PEOPLE MOSTLY WENT TO RAINEY PARK, UNDER
the bridge, to make out. I’d come here with David Fielder once during our brief junior-year romance and then never again with smooching on the agenda. But we had all come here just to hang out a lot of times over the years and to look at the city, whose skyline you could just about see off to the south. Tonight it twinkled like a promise in a clear black sky. This was where we’d come earlier this year, after our last big band championship, which we’d lost. It was the place where Dez, who’d had some beers that night, though no one could quite figure out where, said that he wanted, more than anything, to walk over the bridge. To just leave Oyster Point and go to college in the city, where maybe people were different. But he also said that he was afraid that if he set out to cross the bridge, he might not make it to the other end without giving in to the temptation to just jump and be done with it.

“I’m gonna do it,” he’d said, standing at the foot of the pedestrian path across the bridge. “I’m gonna walk over it and see what happens and if I jump then whatever, right?”

And we’d all pulled him back and he’d sobered up and that had been that.

We
had
to win. Not for me, but for Dez.

Of course Barbone was there. They’d hardly send Chrissie or Allison or Smitty. But for some reason, the sight of him standing there in the park, without any of the members of his posse, caught me off guard. He was the enemy, and here he was, laughing and yapping. It made me feel a little bit angry and a little bit pathetic at the same time that I despised him so much, and that he seemed to see me as nothing but a nuisance.

Tom Reilly was there, and Kerri Conlon, and Matt Horohoe was representing The Matts. Last but not least, Jill was there, flipping her curls around by Tom.

I should’ve walked right over to her and apologized for being a jerk at the hay bales. She was my friend. She’d been there that night with Dez, had helped keep him off the bridge. But I felt complicit in Winter’s behavior, guilty. Not because Winter was one of my best friends, but because I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t have done the same thing if given the chance.

Leticia Farrice and Lucas and the other two judges walked into the park then, with a case of Red Bull, and that brought the total of people there to ten. Something about it felt like a scene from a movie but not a teen movie. More of a heist movie, with an unlikely mix of people being assembled for some complicated bank robbery or hijacking.

The Oyster Point Ten.

Lucas said, “Hey, I was hoping you’d be here,” and handed me a Red Bull.

“Why?” I asked. “Did you find her?”

“No,” he said. “Sorry. How’s it going?”

“Good,” I said, a little bit startled by how comfortable he seemed around me and me him. We barely knew each other.
“I mean, the hunt is going good. But I am so screwed if I don’t find that statue.”

“It’ll turn up,” he said. “We’ll find it.”

I nodded and hoped he was right.

You would think that a bunch of teenagers who’d been through all of high school—and in most cases grade school—together, and so had survived puberty and sex ed and the SATs and, well, everything together, would have some kind of stronger, invisible bond, but I felt nothing but awkwardness around most of these people and couldn’t imagine ever wanting to show up for a reunion—not in five years, ten, or twenty—not even if it did mean the chance to confess my old crush to Carson.

I was going to head for Jill, but she was talking to Tom, which reminded me that Jill had had a whole other life before Carson, before us. Tom seemed pretty focused on her right now, so maybe there was something to that, and maybe that would somehow let Winter off the hook. If Jill was so quick to move on then would it be okay if Carson did, too?

“So how are you guys doing?” Kerri Conlon asked me, and I turned. We’d had a bunch of classes together over the years, but I couldn’t be sure we’d ever spoken one-on-one and now that made me sad.

“Pretty good, I think,” I said, trying to remember my goals as laid out by my team. “Did you guys leave town at all?”

“No,” Kerri said. “Were we supposed to?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “Just making sure.”

Kerri said, “We’re mostly focusing on getting stuff and doing stuff, and not spending too much time on all the stuff that’s more mysterious or whatever.”

“Good strategy,” I said, sipping my drink, which was
somehow almost already half gone. “Us, too. What about a Mary on the Half Shell?” I asked, because why not.

Kerri shook her head. “I don’t even know what that
is
.”

It had to be Barbone. He knew we had the statue. He’d been pissed about the Home Depot thing. It was the only thing that made sense. Unless it really was Jill. And let’s face it, I’d been sort of an asshole.

I decided to walk over to her and get it over with. “I’m sorry,” I said, “about the hay thing.”

“I just don’t get you sometimes,” she said.

“Join the club,” I muttered.

“Did those guys tell you what they did? About prom?” She had this look of defiance, of being wronged, in her eyes that gave her a different sort of confidence.

I just nodded.

“The whole thing is unbelievable to me,” she said. “What did you even say when they told you?”

“What’s there to say?” I said. “I said it was a shitty thing to do.”

“I can’t believe you let him join your team,” she said.

“I didn’t know what he’d done when he joined us,” I said. “But even if I had, I mean…I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. He’s our friend.”

“Is he really?” she asked.

“Of course he is,” I said. We were at an impasse. The drawing of this conversation would have a line drawn smack down the middle.

“Please tell me the truth.” I sounded weary. “Did you take the Mary statue? Because I was a jerk to you?”

“No, Mary,” she said, weary in a different way, like sick of me. “I didn’t.”

I looked over toward the others, wondered if they were
exchanging valuable hunt information while we wasted time on my own pursuit. “I think it’s Barbone,” I said. “But he says he didn’t take it either.”

Jill looked his way, too. “He’s not all bad, you know.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Barbone chose that moment to shotgun a Red Bull then crush the can on a wooden picnic table.

“I’m just saying,” Jill said, “he has his moments.”

“I’ll be on the lookout for one of those,” I said.

“He saw Carson and Winter,” she said, then. “At prom.”

I was confused for a minute.

Jill said, “He’s the only one who had the guts to tell me.”

“I didn’t know anything,” I said, and I felt like explaining more but confessing my longstanding crush on her ex-boyfriend didn’t seem like the best idea.

“Would you have told me if you did?” Jill asked, and then Leticia said, “Can I have your attention?” and everyone stopped talking. Lucas gave me a raised eyebrows look and then came over and took my empty Red Bull and handed me a new one. “Thanks,” I said.

“No problem,” he said, and I took a swig.

“Okay,” Leticia said. “Here’s where things get interesting. Raise your hand if you shaved Bob’s balls.”

Barbone and Tom Reilly and Kerri Conlon all raised their hands.

“Who’s Bob?”
I whispered to Lucas.

“The bull in Matador Park,”
he whispered back.

“Ah,” I said softly. How did none of us
know
that?

“Who stole something from Mr. Gatti?” Leticia asked, and I raised my hand, along with Barbone and Kerri. “What was it?” Leticia looked at me.

“Garbage can,” I said.

She looked at Barbone, who said, “Birdhouse.”

Then at Kerri, who said, “Flamingo.”

“Excellent,” Leticia said. Then Lucas cut in and said, “Speaking of lawn ornaments, who got a Mary on the Half Shell?”

I waited with bated breath but only Barbone raised a hand. Lucas looked at me and mouthed, “Sorry.”

“Who has more than two thousand points right now?” Leticia asked. And I scoffed for a moment, because we were already at 3018, but then everyone else’s hands went up, too.

“We’ve only had one Lloyd Dobler so far,” Leticia said, and Barbone said, “Awesome.”

Some murmured groans rose up from the group.

Then Leticia said, “So if anyone wants to give Lloyd Barbone here a run for his money, you better get busy.”

“Who went to Mohonk?” Leticia asked, and only Barbone, Jill, and I raised our hands.

“Good work,” Leticia said.

“Who has more than
three thousand
points right now?” Leticia asked, and this time only myself, Barbone, and Tom Reilly raised hands.

“Very impressive,” Leticia said. “Anybody gone skinny-dipping yet? We haven’t gotten any pics.”

Barbone said, “Not yet, but you’re welcome to come with, Teesh.”

“No thanks,” Leticia said to him. She turned to the group. “All right. We just really wanted you all to get a sense of your competition going into the final hours of the hunt. Remember, one a.m. on the dot. No exceptions. And don’t forget about Special Points. So good luck and get going.”

Lucas approached me again and said, sheepishly, “So about Grace?”

Ugh. So he
did
like her.

“What about her?”

“She’s sort of drunk,” he said, and I said, “She does that.”

I shook my head. I could hardly do anything about it.

“I’ll keep an eye on her,” he said, and I said, “Thanks.”

Barbone found me near the playground on my way out of the park. “How’s Daphne, by the way? Still licking his wounds?”

“How do you get to be like you?” I snapped, without realizing I was going to. I guess the Red Bull had me all hyped up. “How do you get to be so
mean
?”

Barbone said, “Let she who is without sin cast the first stone,” and I said, “What on earth are you talking about?”

Barbone? Quoting scripture? Please!

I texted my team: COME SAVE ME.

Barbone just shook his head at me and I said, “Just give me back the statue, Jake. My aunt bought it in Europe during World War Two and it’s really important to my family. I’ll give you stuff worth the points you’d get for the statue. It’s not about points, I just need it back.”

He looked at me dead on and I noticed, for the first time, that his eyes were blue. “Listen, Mary. I didn’t know the statue was brought back from Europe during World War Two. But I’ll tell you one thing: if I had something like that in my family and I knew how valuable it was, I sure as hell wouldn’t take it for some stupid scavenger hunt.”

And that, of all things, shut me up. Because was that how low I’d sunk? I’d done something so awful that not even
Jake Barbone
would do it?

He left me there to deal with myself.

Standing outside and waiting for my team to pick me up, I listened as Kerri told Tom about how her team had gone to
some inflatable rat outside the Crowne Plaza and put an ax and a two-by-four in front of him. “I don’t get it,” Tom said.

Neither did I.

“The rat’s picketing or something. And you’re supposed to ‘put him to work,’ so we made him a carpenter, or whatever.”

I caught the end of a sentence that Matt was saying to Leticia that ended with the words “Robert’s Cove,” which I knew to be a dilapidated mansion on the waterfront.

Crowne Plaza.

Robert’s Cove.

Carson’s car rounded the corner then, windows open and bassline booming loudly, but got stuck at the red light at the corner. And as I looked deeply at that red light—saw the way it was composed not just of one light but of many—I thought,
Let she who is without sin
…and remembered something.

Fifth grade. End of the year. We had yearbooks. And Barbone wrote in mine:
You’re the prettiest girl in the fifth grade
. Then a graduation party. Mine. My backyard. Our mothers talking while holding amber beer bottles, and his mother saying how maybe Jake and I would get married one day and my mother putting a fake smile on her face and me, not liking the idea—not liking him—and feeling weird about what he’d written. Then him, coming over and asking me if I wanted to play shuffleboard on the driveway. Me saying, “It’s my house, Jake. If I wanted to play shuffleboard I’d play shuffleboard.” And him saying, “You don’t have to be mean about it,” and me saying, “And you don’t have to be so ugly.”

Carson’s car was in front of me and I reached out to pull the shiny handle on the back door, almost needing to steady myself. Maybe Barbone was a sort of monster. But maybe I was, too.

“So?” Patrick said.

Carson asked, “What’d you find out?”

“Someone said something about Robert’s Cove,” I offered.

“That old mansion on the water?” Winter said.

“What did they say?” Carson asked, turning from the driver’s seat.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Somebody Google it and see if that helps.”

“On it,” Winter said.

“Put the union rat to work has to do with some inflatable rat in front of the Crowne Plaza outside town and making him look like he has a job of some kind?”

“Jeez,” Patrick said. “Who figured that one out?”

“Kerri Conlon,” I said. “They made the rat into a carpenter with an ax and a two-by-four.”

“Any ideas for what job we could give him?” Carson said, but no one had any.

Winter said, “Robert’s Cove is that old mansion on the cliff near the park. It’s supposedly haunted. And there’s like a cutout of a ghost or something on the stairs.”

“Photo of a local ghost,” I said.

“Yeah,” Patrick said. “It’s one of the higher point values left. Eighty.”

“Should we go?” I asked

“That place gives me the creeps,” Winter said.

“All right, then, so we’ll skip it,” Patrick said, and everyone looked at him. “I’m being facetious.”

“Oh,” Winter said.

“Let’s do it,” I said. We had exactly two and a half hours left to the hunt. It was going to go by faster than I wanted it to and not fast enough at all.