The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life (9 page)

Patrick said, “Jungle Golf’ll be a quick stop. I mean, we won’t actually golf, right?”

“Right,” I said, and got this text from the Yeti:_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I said, “Looks like we’re playing hangman with the Yeti.” Which made our total 843.

“Awesome,” Patrick said.

“Hold up,” Dez said, from the backseat.

Patrick was about to turn in the direction of the jungle animal photo op.

“
Mohonk
means lake in the sky.”

“We’re supposed to go all the way to
Mohonk Mountain House
?” Winter said.

I knew what she meant, but the truth was Mohonk wasn’t that far, it just felt that way because it was so unbelievably expensive that neither of our families could ever afford to go
there. The only person we knew who’d ever been there overnight—not just to visit the grounds or to apply for a catering job, like me—was Carson, whose family had reunions there every summer.

“Hold on.” I set my phone aside after texting the letter
E
to the Yeti and looked at the list.

Things started to click.

“I think there’s a
bunch
of Mohonk stuff here,” I said. “There’s gazebos and a maze made of shrubs and a dock there.”

“The lady will a
maze
you,” Dez said. “There’s probably a clue hidden in the maze.”

“Should we do it?” Patrick asked.

NOPE, the Yeti said.

I sent in the letter
A
and got this back:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ A

The highway entrance was right there. I sent in the letter
O
.

I asked, “How many points are we talking?”

Dez did some quick figuring and said, “Probably only a hundred or so, depending on how many gazebos there are. Plus the clue.”

_ O _ _ _ _ _ A

“I think we should do it,” I said, shooting in the letters
S
and
T
, with no luck, then
L
.

Patrick said, “It’s probably going to take us an hour and fifteen total to get there, do the stuff, and get back.” The drive was probably twenty minutes each way. It was already—I looked at the clock on my phone—ten to three.

How the hell had that happened?

We’d be back by four, four thirty.

My phone lit up: _ O _ _ _ L L A

Gorilla!
I thought, and I sent in
G
to be sure.

“I think it might be worth it,” I said, “because there’s no way to know how important the clue is, right?”

What came back: G O _ _ _ L L A

But I tried Gorilla. It didn’t fit.

“What’s another word that sounds like gorilla?” I said. “G. O. Blank. Blank. Blank. L. L. A.”

“I need to see it,” Patrick said.

I held the phone out and he looked and I said, “And if not a lot of people figure it out or do it, that may give us a real advantage. I mean, I seriously doubt Barbone’s going to go all the way to Mohonk. It just doesn’t seem their speed at all. And I’m pretty sure someone at Mohonk would see their car all pimped up with Tigger and kick them out or something.”

Winter laughed and I was sort of irritated by the sound of it. Since
when
did she like Carson? What had she and Carson been talking about in Party Burg? And why had he cozied up to me so much during prom committee meetings? Was it because I was Winter’s best friend and confidante? What if none of it ever had anything to do with me at all?

“I need directions, people,” Patrick said with a little too much edge, I thought.

“Just head north on the highway,” I said. “There are signs.”

He had handed my phone back to me while we’d been talking and I said, “Well?”

He said, “Godzilla.”

“Of course!” I said, and I sent it in.

The text I got in return said: WELL DONE.

“That’s it?” I said. “The Yeti just said well done. No points, no nothing.”

“Mysterious,” Patrick said.

“Annoying,” Dez said.

POINTS? I texted.

The Yeti wrote back: NOPE.

CLUE? I wrote.

And the reply was: TOINSNW CLRUILHCH

“Okay,” I said, “Now it looks like we’ve got a word jumble.”

Dez asked to see my phone so he could look at the clue and after a while he handed my phone back and the photo with the alien was on the screen. “Why were you looking at this?” I asked. “Is it okay?” Because if we had somehow screwed it up, it was better to know now.

“Yeah,” Dez said. “It’s fine. It’s just, I look at it and I sort of see two aliens, if you know what I mean.”

“You’re not an alien, Dez.” I wanted to hug him.

“Well, no, not here. Not with you guys.” He rested his head back on the headrest. “But at school I am. And at college, who knows? College is another planet.”

“A better planet,” I said, because he was going to school in the city, and we all thought of New York as a better place. “You’ll fit right in.”

I believed it. I had to. Because I was counting on it being true for me, too.

“Don’t suppose you can do a word jumble if I just read you the letters,” I said to Patrick, who shook his head, but there was plenty of time to figure it out once we got to Mohonk.

Right?

The next text from the Yeti came through on all our phones a few minutes later and said, SEND ME VIDEO OF YOU RINGING THE BELL IN FRONT OF FORT WAYNE AND I WILL REWARD YOU AN ADDITIONAL 50 POINTS. OFFER IS GOOD FOR THE NEXT TWENTY MINUTES ONLY.

“Get off here!” Winter shouted, and Patrick said, “What? Why?”

An exit was rapidly approaching and Winter explained, “We’re only like five minutes from Fort Wayne and there’s fifty points on the line there for the next twenty minutes.”

“Crap,” Patrick said.

He was all the way over in the left lane. Traffic was brisk.

“We’re going to miss it!” Winter shouted.

“Winter,” I said, “are you sure this is the right exit?”

“Yes,” she insisted. “I’m sure. Hurry, you’ll miss it!”

“Dude,” Dez said, looking out the back window. “Go now. After this white car.”

“Everybody calm the heck down!” Patrick yelled, and then he looked over his shoulder and checked his mirrors, pulled into the middle lane, and then did it again, into the right—a shrill
beeeeeeeep
came from the car he cut off—and then he went off onto the exit ramp. We all seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, then, until Patrick said, “Now which way?”

I started trying to load Google Maps on my phone.

“Make a left,” Winter said, “and then a right at the third light.”

“Oh, that’s right,” I said, and turned to Winter. “I forgot.”

“Forgot what?” Patrick asked.

“Forgot that Winter loves men in uniform.”

“I do not,” she said.

Fort Wayne was a military academy and because one of Winter’s cousins went there, she’d been invited to a dance once and that had turned into more and more invitations.

I started singing,
“I love a man/ I love a man/ I love a man in a uniform,”
and Winter pinched me on the shoulder hard and said, “Stop it. I don’t.”

“But you do!” I said.

“I don’t!” Winter shouted, and I just said, “Okay. Jeez. Sorry.”

“I think maybe Winter has a secret boyfriend she’s not telling us about,” Patrick said, entirely unaware of how close he was to the truth. “I mean, a right at the third light? When have you ever known Winter to know how to get
anywhere
?”

“I don’t have a secret boyfriend,” Winter said.

“She doth protest too much!” Patrick said, and Winter just shook her head and looked out her window; and we were all quiet until we arrived at the gates to Fort Wayne, where I heard the deep clang of a large old bell even before Tom Reilly and his team came into view. We parked next to their yellow Volkswagen Beetle with its bumper covered in stickers for weird skateboard and surfing brand names I’d never really heard of. We got out and went over to talk to them. But I quickly realized I’d left my phone in the car and went back for it. I saw Winter’s phone just sitting there, too, and I did a pretty awful thing. I woke it up and read a text from Carson that said, WELL SHE WON’T BE MY GIRLFRIEND FOR LONG.

I felt like I froze from fingertip to toe, but apparently I didn’t because I had it in me to scroll back to read: HOW WOULD YOUR GIRLFRIEND FEEL ABOUT THAT?

And before that, Carson’s text that said: WISH I WAS ON YOUR TEAM.

These next few things happened as if in slow motion.

I put the phone back.

I noticed my hand trembling.

I got out of the car and walked across the parking lot.

I rejoined my team and planted a smile on my face while I wondered whether anyone could sense the way my skin felt like it wanted to jump off my body, run screaming from me.

My friends were talking to Tom Reilly and Steve Paglia, who was cute in a way I’d always found sort of foreign and alarming—he was just too perfect—and for a minute I wondered why I hadn’t ever nurtured or pursued
that
crush, instead of letting Carson overshadow other possible boyfriends. It suddenly seemed like I’d made all the wrong choices because here I was, about to graduate, and I’d never really had a boyfriend at all. Worse, I was after the same guy that my best friend was after and it was
her
he was making promises to,
her
he wanted. Whatever signals I thought I’d been reading—
liking the pigtails
—I’d been reading all wrong.

“How many points do you have?” Tom asked Patrick, who said, “I don’t even know, man, but a lot. I mean, we’ll qualify for sure.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “I think we will, too.”

“What about Barbone?” I asked Steve, feeling like someone else must have taken control of my body in order to get those words out. “Have you seen them?”

“Nah,” Steve said, and something about the way he looked at me—never actually making eye contact, but looking in the general area of my forehead—made me realize he had no idea who I was.

Four long hard years and I hadn’t even registered.

Looking to Patrick, who apparently
had
registered, Steve said, “We saw Kerri Conlon and those guys leaving Flying Saucers when we were going in but that’s all.”

Their other teammates were already back in the Volkswagen and they drove over and Steve said, “Let’s roll.”

So they drove off and we sprang into action—my body still on autopilot, behaving as if it weren’t breaking from the inside out.

We went up to the bell. Patrick reached for the rope that hung from the ringer and he rang it three times while I filmed him and then sent the video in to the Yeti for 50 points. Which meant we were at 893. The others all headed for the car, then, but I felt the whole thing was sort of anticlimactic, with only Patrick doing the ringing, so I went for the bell and rang it myself, loud, wanting more than ever to be
noticed
.

By Steve Paglia.

By Carson.

By Mullin.

Anyone!

“Jesus, Mary,” Winter said, jolting on her walk back to the car. “A little warning would have been nice.”

I said, “Oh, you’re one to talk.”

When she looked at me funny, I said, “What’s going on with you and Carson?”

She blinked three times fast. “It’s complicated, Mary.” Then she took off toward the car and to the sanctuary Dez and Patrick would provide.

“All right!” Dez declared. “Mohonk awaits!”

So we got back on the highway and settled in for the twenty-minute drive with Dez softly singing “The Rose”—“
I say love/it is a flower/and you its only seed.
”

“Those can’t be the words,” Winter said, sounding almost annoyed.

“That’s what it says.” Dez held up the sheet music.

Winter just shook her head, and I put my sunglasses on and sank back into my seat and told my skin to calm the ef down. I thought I should probably forget about Carson and Winter and just tally all our points—double-check everything to be sure going to Mohonk wasn’t a huge mistake—but I thought for sure I wouldn’t be able to read through the
tears forming in my eyes. Because this wasn’t how it was all supposed to go, or how it was all supposed to end, and I wondered, Was this what it was going to feel like when we all had to say good-bye come fall?, and then wondered about good-byes in general, and how anyone ever survived them at all.

MOHONK MOUNTAIN HOUSE LOOKED LIKE IT
belonged somewhere else entirely, like in the Swiss Alps or the hills of Germany, with all those balconies and turreted towers, and all those rich people lurking behind the hundreds of windows. We parked in the visitors’ lot and went to get day passes in the admissions office after a quick fight about whether it was possible to “break in” to Mohonk, and whether we should try. Then we headed out toward the gardens. It was sort of hard to believe that Mohonk was so close to Oyster Point, where people like Barbone lived, and to the Oyster Hut, where locals flocked for fried seafood and French fries and a salad bar loaded up with Kraft dressing. Not that the restaurant didn’t have its charms, but I couldn’t help but think my parents could learn a thing or two from Mohonk, where the menu posted by the information desk boasted things like frisée salads and truffles and Cornish hens.

“We should split up,” I said as we headed into the shrub maze. “If you find the clue, shout out that you got it and we’ll all meet back out here.”

So we all headed off down different hedge paths, and I
soon hit a dead end. When I turned back around and went out to where I’d come from, I picked another path to head down and, that quickly, I was totally turned around and lost. But this path led to another two, so I picked one of those and figured I’d run into somebody—and hopefully the clue—eventually.

I was only wandering for a second before I heard Dez calling out, “I got it,” and I felt sort of sad that it was already time to leave the maze. I’d often daydreamed about being wealthy enough to vacation at Mohonk and I wanted to get lost in a daydream today, maybe one about Carson, and how it was all going to shake down tonight, or in the next few days, that it really
was
me he wanted. How the whole Winter thing was a misunderstanding.