The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life (11 page)

SORRY, the Yeti wrote back. BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME.

“Told you,” I said to my team. “That’s not it.”

“We should go,” Patrick said, lifting his torso up and resting back on his elbows.

He was right.

It was time to get back to the business of the hunt for real. We’d spent almost an hour at Mohonk—a big risk, considering we were walking away with only 101 points, which brought our total to 994—so the Flying Cloud clue had better pay off.

I checked my phone but there was still no response to our having solved the Winston Churchill jumble, then we all stood up and, from the way we did, bodies all slow and tight, you would have thought we were zombies climbing out of our graves.

“I’m sleepy,” Winter said, and I said, “You’ll get over it.”

“We need some fast points,” Patrick said, and he and Dez started brainstorming on the way to the car while I tugged on Winter’s arm so that she’d lag behind.

“So?” I said.

“So I like him,” she said, and she shrugged a shoulder

I was about to say, “But you know I like him,” but instead I said this: “He has a girlfriend.”

“I know,” she said, “and I feel bad about that, but he doesn’t even like her like that anymore.”

I said, “Well, he should tell her that!”

“He will,” Winter said, and she looked so sure of it, so cocky, that I hated her for a minute.

“I don’t believe you,” I said, trying on righteous indignation for size. “Jill’s our friend.”

“I bet if he were breaking up with her for you, you’d feel differently,” she said.

My face burned and I walked faster, to outpace her, as if that would prove anything, and everything around me seemed shaky, the way things are when the heat is bouncing off the ground beneath your feet on a hot day. Then I got back into the car, where I sat and fumed and tried to read the list. Winter followed a minute later but we didn’t make eye contact in the backseat.

“I think we need to hit the ninety-nine-cent store,” Patrick said, oblivious. “The rest of the weird kitchen stuff. Maybe the maple syrup. There must be more.”

“Sold!” said Dez, with a worried look in the direction of me and Winter. “Or at least let’s head that way until we think of something better.”

We didn’t think of anything better—though we did argue about the best place to get a 12-pack of Bounty, and whether or not chocolate chip banana bread would bake eventually in a parked car on a day this hot, if we could find all the ingredients and a pan.

Our phones all buzzed simultaneously when we were a few minutes outside town: BE THE FIRST TEAM TO TAKE A BUBBLE BATH AT THE SHALIMAR AND WIN 200 POINTS.

We didn’t even have to talk about it.

Patrick said, “On it,” then stepped on the gas and Winter said, “We need soap. Bubbles.”

“The 7-Eleven,” Dez said. “It’s on the way.”

“We never emptied the shampoo from Eleanor’s,” I said. “It’s in the trunk.”

“Just drive!” Dez yelled.

Patrick made a sharp right turn and I screeched, “What are you doing? The Shalimar is that way!” I pointed.

“Mary,” he scolded. “Calm down. I know a back way.”

So I said a prayer that he wasn’t about to screw this up that went like this:
Please, God
,
let him not screw this up.

And then, sure enough, the glowing gold lights of the Shalimar—the very catering hall and ballroom where prom had been held—came into sight around the bend in the wooded road and we pulled into the circular driveway out front. It was eerily still, even with the fountain pulsing. There was no one around.

Dez said, “Holy shit. We really did it,” and I grabbed the shampoo bottle from the trunk and Patrick and I headed for the fountain. Winter and Dez quickly undressed down to their underwear and hid in the bushes lining the Shalimar’s circular drive, and I knew it was mine and Patrick’s turn to strip down to our intimates as soon as the fountain looked amply bubbly.

We’d taken a picture first of the non-bubbling fountain and sent it to the Yeti, then we’d sent another one of Patrick with the shampoo bottle. One more pic after we got into the water and we’d be done. I felt giddy that we’d actually succeeded in getting there first and giddier, still, that we might be able to flaunt our success to other teams who were still on their way here.

We needed a new team name.

We were no Also-Rans.

“Is it just me,” I said to Patrick, “or is the water getting bluer?”

He studied the plumes of water and then the frothy bath by our knees. “Definitely bluer,” he said. “Like a nice shade of toxic.”

“What is this stuff, anyway?” I tried to read the label on the bottle in his hands so that I could see the brand name. “People wash their hair with this?”

“Explains a lot, really.” He gave the bottle a squeeze.

“Like what?”

“Like why old ladies have blue hair.”

The thundering fountain filled the air around us with mist and Patrick dunked the now-empty bottle under the water and then poured it out. “I guess I just don’t understand,” he said, and I braced myself, knowing he wasn’t still talking about blue shampoo or hair. “We share everything. We’re closer to each other than we are to anyone else by a long shot, and I mean, why not at least give it a shot?” He shook his head. “So what if it doesn’t work out. At least we tried.”

“I’m
really sorry
,” I said slowly. “But I just don’t feel that way about you.”

“Is it because of prom?” He seemed to, well, stiffen.

“No.” I shook my head.

“Because guys get hard-ons, Mary.” His eyes bore into me. “Deal with it.”

With that, I kicked off my shoes and walked around to the other side of the fountain, where I’d be hidden by its plumes as I stepped out of my shorts as fast as I could then stepped into the fountain. I slipped off my top just as my underwear got submerged, and lifted it off over my head just as my bra went in and tossed it aside and went underwater,
lying back like I really was in a tub. I stayed under as long as I could, fountain jets pulsing against me, eyes closed against the toxic blue. I wanted to stay under longer—maybe look for some secret passage to the lost city of Atlantis—but my lungs burned with longing for air so I burst up to the surface.

Patrick and Dez and Winter had climbed in. Dez used his phone to line up the shot of the three of us, while Patrick took two heaping handfuls of bubbles and propped them on his head to make a big white bubble-fro.

Dez said, “Smile!” like it was two syllables and took the picture.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Patrick climbed out—wet, with blobs of bubbles sliding down his bare back to his SpongeBob boxers—and we all followed, grabbing our clothes and heading for the car. I was almost disappointed that no one was chasing us away from the Shalimar because I felt like running.

Very far and very fast.

Away from Patrick and all this awkwardness.

Away from Winter and her secret and my own jealousy about it.

And from high school and Barbone and everything else.

“Two hundred freaking points,” Dez said, and he high-fived me and I met eyes with Patrick and he seemed somehow more disgusted with me than ever before.

A few other teams had arrived as we started putting our clothes back on to wet skin. Tom Reilly’s car just kept on going; no point in stopping once the points were already claimed. A few teams we didn’t know cruised by shouting out curses and insults. Only Carson’s team stopped.

“Are you guys going to hit twelve-fifty?” Carson asked, and it was Winter who said, “Of course we are.”

“Awesome,” Jill said. “Us, too.”

Back in the car, Dez was adding up points and said, “We’ve got eleven ninety-four.” Then, “Guys, if we rearrange the hay in the park for sixty points, we’re in the next round.”

“Really?” I said. The park was just a few minutes away. “Hay bales and we’re done?”

“With time to spare,” he said, then he nodded and high-fived me again and I didn’t care what Patrick thought. He was the one who was going to have to
deal with it
.

WE OYSTER POINTERS HAD MIXED FEELINGS
about the “art installation” in the park overlooking the waterfront on Stomp Hill, which was basically a bunch of hay bales that the artist expected us common folk to rearrange for our own amusement. Some, including my father, argued that bales of hay can’t be art and dubbed the artist “some earthy crunchy nut job with too much time on her hands.” Others claimed the nut job was a visionary. Still others argued that just getting people to talk about what art
was
was sort of the whole point. When I’d decided to actually read what the artist had intended when her statement appeared in
The Oyster Pointer
—“The project is intended as a translation of the geometrical geography that was, and is, still necessary for productive agricultural labors and will depict the overlap between this original morphology of the cultivated land and an idealized and abstract pattern of the Cartesian knowledge”—I couldn’t help but side with my dad.

In the last few weeks, the hay bales had—according to
The Oyster Pointer
, at least—been arranged into the shape of a peace sign, some unfortunately square snowmen, a penis, and more.

“What about building a stairway-to-heaven-type thing?” Patrick offered as we stood in front of the hay bales, which were arranged in the shape of a phallus again. So some of our classmates had clearly already been there; probably Barbone.

“Too hard,” Winter said.

“That’s what she said,” Dez said.

If you only knew,
I thought, careful to not make eye contact with Patrick.

I
knew
guys got erections.

I was
perfectly prepared
to deal with it. When the right guy and the right erection came along.

“Think easy,” Winter said then. “Think outlines. Think the sort of crap a four-year-old draws. Butterflies and flowers.”

“But we could get extra points for being clever,” I said, remembering for the first time the Special Points. “We haven’t even been thinking about special points and how to get some.”

“Well, I don’t do clever,” Winter said, and Dez said, “Give yourself some credit, Winter. You can be clever.”

“Name one time when I was clever,” Winter said, and I laughed.

Even when you were mad at Winter, it was hard to be mad at Winter. She rested her head back on a bale of hay and said, “Let me know when you special people come up with something.”

“Let’s look at the list,” Patrick said. “Maybe there’s something else we could get points for? Like if it’s a picture of something on the list or something?”

“See, now that’s brilliant!” I said, too enthusiastically, judging by Patrick’s look, and I took out my list and sat on a hay bale just in time to see Carson’s team pull up and park
behind Patrick’s car. One by one, they all got out and strolled over to where we were sitting and trying to be clever.

“Are you guys done?” Jill asked with hands on her hips, and Dez said, “Do we seem like the types to make a penis to you?”

Jill laughed. “Not exactly, no!”

I said, “We were just going to start. Why don’t you come back in fifteen minutes?”

“Fifteen minutes?” Jill looked at her teammates. “Why don’t we just help you guys then we’ll do our thing?”

“That’s okay. We can handle it,” I said, feeling myself quickly tiring of this conversation, though I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because Jill was obviously oblivious to everything that was going on in her own boyfriend’s head.

“What are you going to make?” she asked.

“We don’t actually know yet,” Patrick said, and I felt a little bit annoyed that he’d admitted it.

“Well, then, just let us go,” Jill said. “We’ll be really quick.”

“But we just need to do this and then we’re into the next round,” I said. “So if we want to really have a shot at Barbone, you just need to let us do this. Okay?”

“But,” Jill said, “we only need to do this and like one other thing to get to the next round, so maybe we should go first so we’ll have time to get the last fifty points.” She looked at her watch and it annoyed me that she was wearing a watch—was that some kind of statement?—and she said, “There’s time.”

“We were here first,” I said sharply, and it seemed like all of my friends just froze. I knew how it sounded. What was I? Eight years old?

“We’re all on the same side,” Jill said, and I said, “Well, I
mean, we are. But I’m the one who really wants to stick it to Barbone, you know?”

Not even eight years old! More like five!

But it was true!

“Fine,” Jill said. “Be that way. But you still don’t know what you’re making and we’ll be done by the time you figure it out.” She started walking toward the hay bales.

“Carson,” I said, turning to him, though why I thought he would be the one to help me out I have no idea. “Seriously?”

He shrugged and said, “We’ll be quick,” then walked past us all and, that quickly, he and Jill and Heather and Mike were rearranging hay bales to take the shape of…

“What the hell are they making?” I asked. “And why am I the only one who’s annoyed by this?”

“That’s a really good question,” Patrick said. “Why
are
you so annoyed?”

Maybe it was silly to get so worked up about Barbone taking the Yeti to Georgetown, but it suddenly mattered very much that it was my team who won it. Dez and I, at least, had been tolerating Barbone since kindergarten so I felt he was ours to take down. I didn’t say any of that, though—only looked at Winter, who wouldn’t make eye contact—and so we just stood there and within the next few minutes, Carson and Jill’s team had managed to make an igloo. A
small
igloo, yes. They’d barely used a fraction of the hay bales available, but it was an igloo nonetheless.

“Why didn’t we think of that?” Dez said, and Patrick said, “Because we’re thinking too hard, trying to be too clever.”

“Speak for yourself,” Winter said.

Carson’s team had already snapped a picture and they were all heading for his car.

“I don’t know, Mary,” Jill said by way of parting, “I thought we were all in this together.”