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

mother.
    “What else, guys?” Dez asked, and I commanded my eyes to focus on the list. “An orchid,” I said.
    “A toilet seat,” Winter said.
    “A plastic plant?” I asked.
    “That’s a maybe,” Dez said.
    “An ant trap,” Winter said, and Dez wrote again. Then he said, “Mary, you start thinking about what’s next after the Deep,” and I said, “Excellent. On it.”
    “I’ll help,” Patrick said, stopping too short at a yellow light that I would have blown through if I’d been driving.
    “Help by not driving like an old lady,” I said.
    “No seriously,” he said, ignoring the jab.
    “Okay.” I skimmed the list. “Where could we get a pumpkin at this time of year? It’s thirty points.”
    “No idea,” he said. “Next.”
    “Put your name in lights,” I said. “One hundred and fifty points.”
    “What does that mean?” Patrick asked.
    “That’s what I’m asking you,” I said.
    “Oh,” Patrick said, and he laughed.
    I laughed, too, and thought,
Good
, because it suddenly seemed possible that the hunt and the fun of it all might be enough to get me to stop feeling weird about things.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “The marquee at the old movie theater?”
    “Maybe,” I said. “I guess. Sounds hard.” I scanned the list again. “Photos of your team with a giraffe, a gorilla, and an elephant. Twenty-five each.” As soon as I said it, I knew. “Guys,” I said. “Jungle Mini-Golf.”
    “Too far in the other direction,” Dez said. “Maybe later.”
    “Wait,” I said, flipping back to the first page. “There’s also, ‘Photo of your team with an alien’.”
    At which point we all said, “Flying Saucers!”
    Flying Saucers was the local outer space–themed greasy spoon we’d all been going to together for years.
    “We should do that next,” I said. “It’s close, and there’s that sporting goods store and party store across the street. We can get the number one foam finger and a bunch of other stuff. Like a grass skirt and a likeness of Tigger, maybe the Halloween witch.”
    Then my eyes fell on this:
A stone-cold lady near the lake in the sky will amaze you with a clue.
    I read it aloud and said, “What does
that
mean?”
    “No idea,” Patrick said.
    “None here, either,” Dez said.
    “Beats me,” Winter said, then added, “What’s a Dixie-cup icosahedron?”
    “An icosahedron,” Patrick said, correcting her pronunciation, “is a regular polyhedron with twenty identical equilateral triangular faces, thirty edges, and twelve vertices.”
    “That helps,” Winter said with a snort.
    “You’d know one if you saw one,” Patrick said, giving Winter more credit than she deserved. Winter had never once paid attention in math, opting instead to pass notes to me.
    “And you can make one out of Dixie cups?” Winter asked.
    “I guess so,” Patrick said with a shrug. “I’m game to try.”
    “There is
no way
anyone on Barbone’s team even knows what that is or how to even think about making one,” I said happily.
    “They could look it up,” Patrick said.
    “They won’t bother,” I said, feeling confident. “How many points is it?” I flipped through my list.
    “Sixty-five,” Dez said.
    “Awesome,”
I said.
    Patrick looked over and smiled. “Awesome indeed.”
    “‘The Yeti has caught a chill,’” Dez read from the list. “What size clothes do you think the Yeti wears?”
    “Look at you,” I said. “Already all you want to do is shop.”
    Dez smirked and said, “I know what I bring to this team, honey, and it ain’t muscle.”
    “I’d put it at a five T,” Winter said. “Bigger than my sister. Smaller than my nephew.”
    I jotted down 5T in the margins of my list and said, “Best. Team. Ever.”
    “We should have a team name,” Dez said.
    “Lame,” Winter said, and Dez reached over and pinched her leg.
    He shrugged and said, “We could’ve gotten cute T-shirts made.”
    Winter rolled her eyes and said, “Yeah. Size