The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life by Tara Altebrando Read Free Book Online Page A

you naked,” Dez said, and I choked a little in my throat from surprise—Winter, too—though really I shouldn’t have.
    Ask a stupid question….
    But the truth was, for someone who’d never even had sex, Patrick had a funny kind of weirdly strong sexuality—or was it sensuality?—about him.
    What if it
had
meant something?
    “Maybe it’s
you
I want to see naked, Dez,” Patrick said jovially. “Did you ever think of that?”
    “Patrick, Patrick, Patrick,” Dez said, shaking his head and looking far away out the window. “If you only knew.”
    “Focus, people,” Winter said, and so I obeyed and looked at the list. “I’m pretty sure there’s a silver bangle at my great-aunt Eleanor’s house,” I blurted.
    “And a flag.”
    I turned a page.
    “And a snow globe.”
    And kept scanning.
    “And a bunch of the kitchen utensils.”
    And scanned some more.
    “And a music box that plays ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.’”
    I stopped talking as the point values piled up in my head.
    “Guys,” I said, feeling my pulse quicken, “Eleanor’s house is a
gold mine
.” I couldn’t get words out fast enough. “She’s got all sorts of old random weird crap. Probably more stuff I’m not even thinking of. Possibly like, I don’t know, three hundred points worth of crap.”
    “We’re going to take stuff from a dead woman?” Winter asked.
    “Can we even get in?” Dez asked.
    “Yes and yes,” I said. “Keys under Mary on the Half Shell.”
    “Wait.” Dez flipped through his list. “There’s a Mary on the Half Shell on here.”
    “What? Where?” I flipped, too, and confirmed it—
Shuck a Mary on the half shell
—and my hands started to shake with nerves and excitement. Then Dez said, “What the hell is a Mary on the Half Shell?”
    I could count the Marys on the Half Shell I knew of in Oyster Point on one hand and was suddenly sick with fear that another team had gotten to Eleanor’s before us. Her house was on a pretty busy street, but the garden had grown over with weeds, so hopefully anyone who knew it was there in the first place had forgotten about it.
    “Patrick, drive,” I said. “Before anyone else gets it.”
    He made a U-turn and Winter said, “What about Flying Saucers?”
    “What’s a Mary on the Half Shell?” Dez all but screamed.
    “It’s a statue of the Virgin Mary,” I explained. “In a grotto that’s sort of shaped like a shell, I guess. So if we have to shuck one, it means we have to take the statue from her shell.”
    Dez shook his head and said, “You Catholics are weird.”
    “It’s worth a hundred points,” I said again. “That’s an awful lot. And if somebody else takes Eleanor’s statue, my family is never going to get over it.”
    We rode on in silence until a text from the Yeti came through that said, HIT US WITH YOUR EARLY POINTS TOTALS SO WE CAN SHARE. WE WON’T NAME NAMES.
    So I texted in 285—Home Depot plus Mary—which wasn’t exact
yet
, but we’d be there and beyond soon enough. A few minutes later a text came back that said: LEADING TEAM HAS 285.
    “Guys,” I said, “I think we’re in the lead.”
    There were high fives and whoops and I could feel my heart swell just the tiniest bit but then shrink back down to an even smaller size on account of Mary on the Half Shell.
    Please, God, let her still be there,
I thought, and then Patrick blew through a yellow light and I loved him for it.

4
     
    I HAD TO DIG THROUGH WEEDS AND BRAMBLE, swatting away bugs I’d startled—God, I hated bugs—before I could exhale.
    Mary was still there.
    She was maybe two feet tall, dressed in the Holy Mother’s standard-issue white-and-blue hooded robe—with her hands pressed flat together in prayer. Her lips were tiny and pink and her nostrils mere indents the same color as her peach skin. Her blue eyes appeared to have been crying paint thinner, since a trail of dissolved paint ran down each cheek. Gray bird gunk soiled her gown’s hood and right