The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life (3 page)

10. Final judging starts at 1:00
A.M.
, and teams not back to The Pines by then will be disqualified. BE ORGANIZED. If it takes us more than five minutes to confirm your points total, we’re outta here. The Yeti has many good qualities but patience is not one of them.

11. (That’s right, this list goes to eleven!) The victor takes home the Yeti, 300 bucks, and has the honor of running next year’s hunt.

NEXT TO THE YETI’S RIDE STOOD LETICIA FARRICE
and the rest of last year’s winning team. I didn’t remember all their names but Leticia was pretty much my idol. She had ruled the school as last year’s senior class president—a title Winter had campaigned for this year, with me as her reluctant VP candidate. We’d lost to “The Matts,” aka Matt Sadowski and Matt Horohoe, a loss I had mostly taken in stride because there was a part of me that would have voted for them, too, if I hadn’t felt too dumb not voting for my own ticket. I wasn’t thrilled that losing a
vice
presidential election made me the also-ran of the Also-Rans. There was certainly no glory in being the Oyster Point High equivalent of Joe Lieberman, especially when Principal Mullin probably didn’t have any idea who he was either.

Leticia had won her election by a landslide and had even successfully negotiated an arrangement with Principal Mullin whereby seniors could leave school for lunch or other free periods, a feat that had secured her legacy forever. I had channeled her when I’d negotiated peace over the prom committee’s Battle of the Prom Song, a fierce showdown that had pitted the pop kids against the hip-hop kids against the
indie/alternative kids. When I’d had enough (let’s face it: all three songs were pretty good), I’d suggested, simply, that we have the DJ play all three of them, in a random order to be determined by drawing straws, at the high point of the night. Everyone had seemed content with that and they didn’t know it but they owed it all to Leticia, whose spirit guided me. She had just finished her freshman year at Yale, and here she was, a stone’s throw from me, with the Scavenger Hunt list in hand, to pass on the hunt tradition. I wanted very much this time next year to be one of the seniors who returned like this, victorious, looking exotic and worldly and
over it
.

Over high school.

Over Barbone.

Over everything.

Leticia blew a whistle quickly and loudly and people started to draw closer to her. “We need your entry fees,” she shouted, and so I got out my wallet and said, “I’ll go.”

Carson reached for his wallet and said, “I’ve got this” to his own team, and I felt even surer that something was up between us, at long last, or had always been.

So we went up to pay, side by side, and Carson said, “Liking the pigtails.”

Without looking at him, I smiled and said, “Thanks,” and I felt like maybe asking him flat out why he hadn’t broken up with Jill yet.

All week at school, since hearing the rumor that a breakup was imminent, I’d been going about my business, waiting for word of it. All week, I’d sort of avoided Carson on account of the horrible awkwardness of my raised expectations but now here we were.

Me with pigtails.

Him liking them.

“Is Winter pissed about something?” he asked and, surprised by the out of context-ness of it, I crinkled my nose and said, “I don’t think so. Why?”

“No reason,” he said, and I realized it was true that Winter was acting sort of subdued around Carson. Maybe she felt as awkward living with this rumor about the impending breakup as I did. Because much as I’d tried not to think about it or talk about it too much, it had been impossible to not fantasize about what life would be like once Carson was free.

To be with me.

“Hey,” said a guy, who I sort of remembered from last year because he’d started a petition in school to start a paper-recycling program—something we still didn’t have and which Earth-hating Mullin didn’t much see the point of.

“I can take that.” He pointed at my two twenties.

“Oh.” I handed the cash over, and he said, “Which car?”

I pointed and said, “The blue LeSabre.”

“Riding in style,” he said, and I said, “Always” and smiled because he was cute, and seemed funny, and why not. He then made me text “LeSabre” to the phone he held, a phone I could only assume was the official Yeti phone.

“The rest of your team can text me, too, if they all want to get the alerts,” he said, then he moved on to Carson’s entry fee and number while I eyed the Yeti. I wondered how heavy it was, whether I’d be able to take one of each of those two hairy-looking feet in each hand and heft him over my head in a gesture of victory. There was no way to know.

Not yet.

“You’re Mary, right?” said the judge guy, and I turned and right then his name popped into my head. “Yeah, and you’re Lucas Wells?”

He smiled. “Yeah.”

“The recycling guy,” I added.

“That’s what I’ll put on my tombstone, yes,” he said, and I laughed.

Then I had nothing to say and he just said, “Good luck to you,” and I said, “Thanks.”

“You cool?” Carson said as we walked back toward their friends.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said lightly.

“I just mean Barbone and the Yeti-Georgetown thing.” He looked genuinely concerned, his eyes a bit sad.

I said, “Let’s just say I’d feel a whole lot better about it all if he didn’t win the hunt.”

He shook his head. “He’s not smart enough to win the hunt.”

“But we didn’t think he was smart enough to get into Georgetown,” I said. The fact of it still boggled the mind since Barbone had always behaved like he had rocks in his head. Sometimes, like during last week’s senior show, when he’d done a weird reinterpretation of the famous Chris Farley “Van Down by the River”
SNL
skit—this one about Principal Mullin, living in a trailer down by the river—I swore you could hear them knocking around in there. It was true that Mullin owned an RV, and the principal himself had seemed amused, but he’d been alone in that. Barbone, while laughable at times, was not particularly funny.

“Well, we’ll see what we can do,” Carson said, then he put an arm around my shoulders and squeezed and he smelled so good that I thought I might die.

Leticia blew her whistle again—hard and loud and long this time—and all talking stopped. Engines that were idling switched off. A few short whoops rose up
from the parking lot, like bubbles that quickly popped, and my eyes wandered over to our school in the distance, a big brick U on the hill leading out of The Pines. I imagined its bricks bulging from all the memories contained inside of it—like my own memories of long hours of practice in Mr. C’s band room where it always smelled of old spit, and where Patrick and I sometimes played duets after everyone else had gone home; and of the time when the whole school got detention because someone popped the balloons on the bulletin board announcing that one of the teachers had won some big award. I remembered crying in the second floor bathroom the day I’d heard that Jason White had asked Maria Ward, and not me, to the junior prom; I remembered consoling Winter in a far corner of the library the one time she had ever had her heart broken, all the way back in sophomore year. I remembered Dez’s reprise of his Daphne costume this past Halloween, when the rest of us had filled out the Scooby-Doo crew in a show of solidarity. (I’d made a pretty good Velma without much effort.) When you piled in all the memories—and those were just mine!—it seemed a wonder the whole place didn’t just explode.

Leticia produced a megaphone and said, “Welcome to the ninth annual, completely unofficial, uncondoned Senior Week Scavenger Hunt.”

Whistles and “yeah baby”s rose up—there was a stray, drunken sounding “You are
so hot
”—and I started feeling jittery, started shaking a leg. I looked over at Patrick and his eyes were alight. He was excited, and I was relieved. I was afraid he’d be bringing all of his sounds-dumb baggage into the day’s festivities, but he seemed genuinely up for the hunt now, which would make life better for all of us.

“In my hands,” Leticia Farrice continued, “I hold the first list!”

More whooping it up.

“I wish
my
name was Leticia Farrice,” Winter said, and I studied Leticia’s super-white teeth and brown skin and wondered for the first time what ethnicity—or ethnicit
ies
—deserved credit for creating this glorious human specimen, wondered how Leticia’s parents looked at their baby girl and knew she’d be just glamorous enough to pull off a name like that.

Le-TEESH-a! Fa-REES!

As opposed to a name like, well, Mary May
Gilhooley
.

I looked at my best girlfriend sideways and elbowed her. “Winter Watson is a pretty great name.”

Carson had drifted forward from his own car to better hear what Leticia was saying and he snapped a finger in front of my face and said, “Pay attention, Shooter.”

He was totally flirting, which I admit I probably would have thought was bad form if it wasn’t me he was flirting with. Jill was
right there
.

“Yeah,
Shooter
,” Patrick said, sort of obnoxiously. He’d never much liked my nickname, though he’d never been able to give me a good reason why except that I already had a name—a good one, he said—and that he didn’t really like oysters at all and didn’t much see the point of a food that you barely ate before swallowing, slime and all.

Either way, they were both right to snap me out of it.

It was important to pay attention.

But then Leticia put the megaphone aside and said something to her friends, then took up the megaphone again and said, “Okay, sorry. Just give us a minute.” So I kept an eye on her, but also set about assessing current threat levels.

There were maybe only ten or twelve teams, and only a handful that I thought mattered.

Carson’s team mattered. Because Carson was on it. But also because they were pretty good competitors. Arguably a little more daring than my own team, a fact that made me sort of sad, but what could you do.

Tom Reilly’s team—the skateboarder/slackers who still managed to get decent grades—mattered because they weren’t quite assholes, but weren’t good kids either. So, more daring than Carson’s team. Way less afraid of getting in trouble than me and my team.

It was possible The Matts—our senior class prez and VP—and their team mattered because they were jokester types and clever if not book smart.

Kerri Conlon’s car of towering girls from the basketball team mattered, though it was unlikely they’d do anything to jeopardize their scholarships to places like Seton Hall and Villanova and B.U.

Anyway, I couldn’t worry about any of them just yet. At least not until after the first round, when I could see who was left for the second list. So the only team to worry about right out of the gate was Barbone’s. Not that there was much we could do. They’d either get 1250 to qualify or they wouldn’t. But I still wanted to be sure to not lose any opportunity to know how they were doing, maybe even to foil them, though I had no idea how.

The real problem was this: I was pretty sure they would do
anything
to take home the Yeti.

Anything.

And they were the kind of kids who never got caught. Or if they did, the charges mysteriously seemed to go away. So they cruised through life acting like they had nothing to
lose, an assumption I took issue with. From where I stood, they had
plenty
to lose. Cars, credit cards, iPhones, varsity letters. The real problem was that there was no one around who had the courage to take any of it away. And if none of
those
people—no parents or principals or coaches—had ever been able to take anything away from Barbone, how did I stand a chance?

Leticia Farrice said, “When I throw the lists in the air, the countdown starts. If you don’t make it back here by six o’clock with twelve-hundred-and-fifty points, you’re eliminated. You’ll have until one a.m. for the second list
and the first list stays in play
, then we’ll tally points and declare a winner. Read the rules again so you don’t do something dumb.”

I raised eyebrows at my team as if to say,
“See?”

Patrick smiled and shook his head.

Leticia brought the whistle to her mouth again, blew it once fast, and then threw a stack of bright orange papers into the air. Most fell right to the ground without fanfare but a bunch more fluttered down lightly, the breeze in the air catching on the staple and opening pages up to form wings.

A sudden glimpse of my sister, off to the right of Leticia Farrice, leaning on a pine tree with a beer can in her hand, made me freeze. “My sister is here,” I said, and Patrick said, “Why?” then said, “I got this,” and took off to get the list.

I pulled out my phone and texted Grace: WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?

I looked across the parking lot as people ran for the list—snatching orange paper birds from the air—and for their cars and saw Grace pull her phone out of her pocket, then look up and around. Not finding me, she looked down again and typed. Grace had recently been “acting out,” as my parents
put it, and they were always talking about how to “handle her.” Most recently, my mother—whom I’d started to view as some kind of mostly benevolent but slightly maniacal dictator with whom all of my interactions would be good practice for my career in diplomacy—had followed Grace and her friends down to the river, to a party she’d been forbidden to go to, and had dragged her home then grounded her for a week.

My phone buzzed.

JUST HANGING OUT.

I shot back: THIS IS FOR SENIORS

Grace shot back: REPEAT: JUST HANGING OUT. NOT DOING HUNT.

I shot back: AND DRINKING?

Grace shot back: LIKE YOU DON’T?

I looked up. Chaos everywhere. My sister had finally spotted me, and she raised her beer can, as if to toast, and then took a hearty swing. She put her beer down on the hood of a car, typed again, and the text came though: AND ANYWAY, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO…TELL MOM?