The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life (21 page)

“I’m staying in the car,” Winter said.

“Ghosts love cars,” Patrick said, then he started making
woo-woo
ghosty sounds.

“Quit it,” Winter said.

“What else did you find out?” Carson wanted to know.

I completed my report: “Only Barbone’s and Jill’s teams have been to Mohonk. Or at least that’s all I can confirm. They pretty much all shaved the bull’s balls in Matador Park. Apparently the bull is Bob.”

“Aw, crap,” Carson said. “I
knew
that.”

“Oh, and Barbone did the Lloyd Dobler thing so if nobody else does, he gets those points.”

“Ugh!” Patrick groaned. “
Barbone
? Doing Lloyd Dobler? It’s just wrong on so many levels.”

“We can still do it,” Winter said, and I had an image of Patrick standing in front of the judges, with some melodramatic song blaring from a boom box over his head, his trench coat flapping in the wind.
Say Anything
was another movie we’d watched together, Patrick and I, and the
I gave her my heart; she gave me a pen
line was suddenly resonating like never before. I didn’t think I could bear the boom box scene with Patrick in it.

“We don’t have time,” I said. “It’s not a guarantee of points.”

“You don’t think I’d make a better Lloyd Dobler than Jake Barbone?”

“I’m just saying, there’s no guarantee.”

“Fine, Mary.”

“Don’t do that,” I snapped. “I hate when you do that.”

“When I do what?”

“When you talk to me like I’m a child you’re placating,” I said.

“When have I ever done that?”

I felt like there were a million times, but of course couldn’t think of one right then.

“Is a bug up your ass on the list?” Carson said, pointing to our master copy. “Because I think we have a few right here in the car.”

A sort of shocked silence fell over us before Patrick said, “Must be nice to be you.”

“As a matter of fact it is!” Carson said, then there was another long silence, and I spotted the carton of six red velvet cupcakes [30] my team had gotten in my absence, on the backseat beside me. They were bit worse for wear, sort of smudged against the clear plastic of the case. I pressed my face against the car window in sympathy.

“What else did you find out, Mary?” Carson said finally.

“I don’t know.” I pulled away from the window and noted a smudge on it left by my face before adding the cupcakes to the total for 3048.

“That may have been it,” I said, then I added, “Nobody admitted to having Eleanor’s statue.”

“That’s it?” Patrick said. “Robert’s Cove and union rat?”

“And that everyone has more than two thousand but only us and Barbone and Tom Reilly have more than three thousand and that only Barbone and Jill have been to Mohonk. And that Bob is the bull. That’s a lot!” I stiffened. “Like you could have done better!”

“Probably!”

“Well, what have you all been doing that’s so great?” I snapped. “Did you figure out the Flying Cloud clue?” I saw the tent still in its bag. “Did you even pitch the tent?”

“I had to climb into a Dumpster for those cupcakes,” Winter said.

Carson made a sharp turn and I said, “What are you doing?”

“We’re going to my house,” he answered. “We’re going to hard-boil an egg and cook a singular piece of spaghetti and stage Gumhenge and make a martini and get naked and wet and hope that everyone’s attitudes improve after that.”

“You know what would improve my attitude?” Patrick said, and Carson said, “What?”

And then Patrick took the Pooh doll off the dashboard and threw it out the window.

“Patrick!” I shouted. “That was forty points!”

So we were back to 3008.

“What the hell!” Winter said.

“Whatever makes you feel better, dude,” Carson said.

And I turned and watched Pooh roll across the street and land in the lane of oncoming traffic, where a car ran over him like he wasn’t even there.

CARSON’S HOUSE WAS THE NICEST OF ANYONE’S
we knew. It was newer, bigger, and had better stuff—everything from the flat panels on the walls right down to the toilet paper and the contents of the fridge. Over the years we’d come here as a group a lot—after band practice, mostly—and raided the endless stash of awesome snacks and cool sodas, then retired either to the pool or the rec room downstairs—there was a pool table!—to play dumb games, like the Name Game or Truth or Dare.

Winter had wisely grabbed two swimsuits from her house and tossed them into the bag of loot we’d compiled there and now offered one to me, so we could at least get in the pool without having to get our underwear soaked again. It wasn’t the sort of swimsuit I’d ever wear myself, though—too pink, too polka-dotty—and once I put it on I felt all sorts of self-conscious.

Barbone had had a crush on me once. How could I have forgotten that?

I was about to get naked in close proximity to Patrick
and
Carson. How had I, good girl extraordinaire, gotten myself into this situation?

Winter, who had been changing in the adjoining bathroom, appeared at the door and my phone, resting on the bed, buzzed. A text from the Yeti said, IF YOU’RE STUMPED AND NEED HELP GETTING OVER THE HUMP, THERE IS AN ITEM ON LIST TWO THAT MAY HELP YOU FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO.

“UGH!” I moaned. “The clues are only getting me more confused now.”

Carson’s voice rose up from the main hall. “We don’t have all night!”

We bundled up our clothes in a pile on the bed and walked out to meet our fate. Carson was at the bottom of the stairs in a swimsuit and tee and led us out to the yard where Patrick was sitting on the diving board with his legs dangling over. Just like that he slipped into the water with a splash that felt too loud. The yard’s far edges were lit by golden gas lamp–style torches and cushy patio furniture sat just beside the pool under tea lights with dragonfly cutouts strung from the branch of one weeping willow to a shadowy oak. Even the stone path under my bare feet felt posh.

“All right,” Carson said. “I thought we needed to just take a break from the driving around and sniping and just chill and, you know, purge the bugs up our asses.” He made a big sweep with his arm. “Everybody in the pool.”

“You’re not worried about the bugs coming out of our asses and clogging the filter?” Patrick asked, while I studied the pool’s stone edges, the way its figure-eight shape seemed so perfect, so elegant.

“If that should happen,” Carson said, “we’ll deal.”

“Fine by me,” Winter said, her swimsuit black and sleek and super flattering and somehow totally right for Carson’s backyard. She went over to the diving board and did a near-perfect
dive, resurfacing slick like a seal, like she was already some expert trainer at SeaWorld.

“Your turn, Mary,” Carson said, and I saw myself as if on-screen, in some lame horror movie, where some malicious predator hid behind one of Carson’s yard’s fancy trees. I cast myself as the girl who was scared of everything, like skinny-dipping and sex and good-byes and ending up alone, but who would eventually, dumbly, follow some mysterious sound into the house or the trees only to be rewarded with a hand over the mouth, a slash of a knife across the throat, or a wallop on the head. Or maybe the movie’s hero—would it be Carson or Patrick?—would suddenly be there, ready to save me.

Polka-dot swimsuit or not, this was not that movie. I wouldn’t let it be. Because in another movie I was a girl, with a friend named Dez, and we were eight years old and going for our dolphin badges—treading water for five minutes and then going off the high board. In the pinnacle scene, three of the girls in class had already chickened out and when it was my turn to jump, I was thinking of chickening out, too. But then Dez had turned to the boy next to him—a boy whose name I wouldn’t have been able to remember for a million dollars—and said, “No way Mary’s chickening out.” And that had given me the push I’d needed to get up there and jump.

I ran and jumped off the pool’s edge, seeing no need for fanfare, and the water felt warm—needlessly warm—and I almost missed the shock of it, the shock of cold I’d been expecting. Was there such a thing as life being
too
cushy?

When I resurfaced, Patrick was waving his swimsuit in the air like a flag and I ducked from the spray of it, and he said, “Let’s get this show on the road.”

“Ladies,” Carson said, with a smile that seemed a little too cocky, a little too amused, but Winter was already taking straps down off her shoulders so I sunk back down into the water and did the same and soon we’d both put our suits on the pool’s edge.

“Okay,” Carson said, and he snapped a picture of us then put his phone on a lounge chair and jumped in and slipped his own trunks off and hoisted them up onto the diving board while treading water. “Somebody’s got to get a picture with me in it,” he said.

But I wasn’t getting out, not yet, not when it had taken so much mental energy to get in in the first place. Patrick pulled his swim trunks down off the pool’s edge, slipped them on underwater, and climbed out, dried his hands on his T-shirt, then took another picture on the phone. “We’re good,” he said, and Winter and I reached for swimsuits and slipped them into the water and slipped them back on and Carson did the same and we all got out to dry off. But we’d forgotten to bring out towels.

“I’ll go grab some,” Carson said.

“I’ve got to pee
really badly
,” Winter said, shaking one of her legs, so they both disappeared through the sliding glass doors of the deck, leaving Patrick and me alone, wet and a little bit cold. After a moment of standing on the deck, dripping, I said, “What’s taking them so long?”

“I have one guess,” Patrick said, and I pretty much ignored him and turned away.

“You’re afraid of me now,” he said then.

“I am not,” I protested.

“You are,” he said. “And if you’re not, you should be.”

Faster than I could process, warm hands—palms—cradled my head and warm lips kissed mine. It was more
burst than kiss, like energy being transferred from Patrick to me through sheer force of will—like he was trying to cram every moment we’d ever shared, every secret spilled, every dream revealed, every deep desire admitted to into one grand gesture—and then it was over and he just looked at me and waited and said, “What about now? Do you see what I’m talking about now?”

He was too much.

Overmuch.

But because I loved him, I didn’t slap him or say
What the ef, Patrick?
I gave it a moment—gave my lips and my heart and my head and the rest of me, still practically naked, the time to share signals and hormones and impulses and whatever else they shared, and I took my own heart’s pulse but still felt nothing.

“I just don’t think that’s how it works, Patrick,” I said sadly, and then Winter appeared at the sliding door, with Carson behind her, and they tossed towels—warm, dry, thick—at me and Patrick before going back inside.

Patrick towel-dried his hair for a minute while I patted down my body, tingling from the pool but not from the kiss, and then he looked at me with this look that just pained me and I realized he felt like I did—my liking Carson was, to him, the same as Carson liking Winter—and I wished we could somehow console each other, except I knew we couldn’t. That, for him, I was part of the problem, even if for me, he—my best friend who adored me—was part of the solution.

“Apparently I once told Barbone he was ugly,” I said.

“That doesn’t sound like you,” he said.

“You always think the best of me,” I said, squeezing water from my hair. “Even when you shouldn’t.”

“That’s what love is,” he said, and he got up and walked inside.

Winter was brushing her hair the in bedroom where we’d changed. She looked confident—older, somehow—when she said, “Patrick looks like somebody died.”

“I feel awful,” I said. “He kissed me and I felt nothing.”

“It’s like you said, Mary. You can’t control who you like. You can’t feel bad about it.”

“Well, I do,” I said. “I feel bad about a lot of stuff all of a sudden.”

“Join the club,” Winter said, then she turned away from the mirror to face me. “How was it?” she asked. “Seeing Jill?”

I was pulling my shirt on over my bra and my skin was cold and dry. “Well, she’s pissed.”

“Well, she should be,” Winter said, a little bit too nonchalantly. She was running fingers through her long wet hair. “But she should be pissed at Carson! Not me!” Then, she added, more softly, “Or at least
more
pissed at him.”

I just gave her a look. “Apparently it was Barbone who told her.”

“Barbone?” Winter’s eyes went wide.

“I guess he saw you guys,” I said.

“Well, he’s got nerve,” Winter said.

“I told him he was ugly once,” I said. “Like in fifth grade. When he had a crush on me.”

“Well, he is ugly,” Winter said, and I just looked at her.

She said, “Well, so what. It doesn’t excuse him.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t excuse me, either.”

“You were in fifth grade!”

“Still.”

My phone, in my bag on the bed, buzzed. It was a text from Dez: BEING DISCHARGED. SPRAIN. PHYSICAL THERAPY. BUT SENDING ME HOME.

I wrote back: HOME OR HUNT?

“Dez is getting out,” I said.

“Is he coming back out?” Winter asked.

“Not sure yet,” I said, “but we should hurry, just in case.”

Downstairs, the boys had put two pots of water on the stove, presumably one for the spaghetti and one to hard-boil an egg. They’d put the words Le Sabre in lights on the Lite-Brite, even though we were in the Lexus now, and texted it to the Yeti.

“Dez may be coming back,” I said.

“For real?” Patrick said, turning to me and holding an X-ACTO knife to Barbie’s head. “Awesome.”

Winter covered her eyes, not wanting to see her Barbie operated on, as Patrick skillfully dug a hole into the doll’s brain. I got shivers just thinking of it ever being done to a living person but if it helped brain function, I thought I could probably do with some trepanation myself. This Flying Cloud thing couldn’t be all
that
hard.