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

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 upfrom 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