The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life Read Online Free

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