The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life by Tara Altebrando

“because there’s no way to know how important the clue is, right?”
    What came back: G O _ _ _ L L A
    But I tried Gorilla. It didn’t fit.
    “What’s another word that sounds like gorilla?” I said. “G. O. Blank. Blank. Blank. L. L. A.”
    “I need to see it,” Patrick said.
    I held the phone out and he looked and I said, “And if not a lot of people figure it out or do it, that may give us a real advantage. I mean, I seriously doubt Barbone’s going to go all the way to Mohonk. It just doesn’t seem their speed at all. And I’m pretty sure someone at Mohonk would see their car all pimped up with Tigger and kick them out or something.”
    Winter laughed and I was sort of irritated by the sound of it. Since
when
did she like Carson? What had she and Carson been talking about in Party Burg? And why had he cozied up to me so much during prom committee meetings? Was it because I was Winter’s best friend and confidante? What if none of it ever had anything to do with me at all?
    “I need directions, people,” Patrick said with a little too much edge, I thought.
    “Just head north on the highway,” I said. “There are signs.”
    He had handed my phone back to me while we’d been talking and I said, “Well?”
    He said, “Godzilla.”
    “Of course!” I said, and I sent it in.
    The text I got in return said: WELL DONE.
    “That’s it?” I said. “The Yeti just said well done. No points, no nothing.”
    “Mysterious,” Patrick said.
    “Annoying,” Dez said.
    POINTS? I texted.
    The Yeti wrote back: NOPE.
    CLUE? I wrote.
    And the reply was: TOINSNW CLRUILHCH
    “Okay,” I said, “Now it looks like we’ve got a word jumble.”
    Dez asked to see my phone so he could look at the clue and after a while he handed my phone back and the photo with the alien was on the screen. “Why were you looking at this?” I asked. “Is it okay?” Because if we had somehow screwed it up, it was better to know now.
    “Yeah,” Dez said. “It’s fine. It’s just, I look at it and I sort of see two aliens, if you know what I mean.”
    “You’re not an alien, Dez.” I wanted to hug him.
    “Well, no, not here. Not with you guys.” He rested his head back on the headrest. “But at school I am. And at college, who knows? College is another planet.”
    “A better planet,” I said, because he was going to school in the city, and we all thought of New York as a better place. “You’ll fit right in.”
    I believed it. I had to. Because I was counting on it being true for me, too.
    “Don’t suppose you can do a word jumble if I just read you the letters,” I said to Patrick, who shook his head, but there was plenty of time to figure it out once we got to Mohonk.
    Right?
    The next text from the Yeti came through on all our phones a few minutes later and said, SEND ME VIDEO OF YOU RINGING THE BELL IN FRONT OF FORT WAYNE AND I WILL REWARD YOU AN ADDITIONAL 50 POINTS. OFFER IS GOOD FOR THE NEXT TWENTY MINUTES ONLY.
    “Get off here!” Winter shouted, and Patrick said, “What? Why?”
    An exit was rapidly approaching and Winter explained, “We’re only like five minutes from Fort Wayne and there’s fifty points on the line there for the next twenty minutes.”
    “Crap,” Patrick said.
    He was all the way over in the left lane. Traffic was brisk.
    “We’re going to miss it!” Winter shouted.
    “Winter,” I said, “are you sure this is the right exit?”
    “Yes,” she insisted. “I’m sure. Hurry, you’ll miss it!”
    “Dude,” Dez said, looking out the back window. “Go now. After this white car.”
    “Everybody calm the heck down!” Patrick yelled, and then he looked over his shoulder and checked his mirrors, pulled into the middle lane, and then did it again, into the right—a shrill
beeeeeeeep
came from the car he cut off—and then he went off onto the exit ramp. We all seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, then, until Patrick said, “Now which way?”
    I started trying to load Google Maps