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

on my phone.
    “Make a left,” Winter said, “and then a right at the third light.”
    “Oh, that’s right,” I said, and turned to Winter. “I forgot.”
    “Forgot what?” Patrick asked.
    “Forgot that Winter loves men in uniform.”
    “I do not,” she said.
    Fort Wayne was a military academy and because one of Winter’s cousins went there, she’d been invited to a dance once and that had turned into more and more invitations.
    I started singing,
“I love a man/ I love a man/ I love a man in a uniform,”
and Winter pinched me on the shoulder hard and said, “Stop it. I don’t.”
    “But you do!” I said.
    “I don’t!” Winter shouted, and I just said, “Okay. Jeez. Sorry.”
    “I think maybe Winter has a secret boyfriend she’s not telling us about,” Patrick said, entirely unaware of how close he was to the truth. “I mean, a right at the third light? When have you ever known Winter to know how to get
anywhere
?”
    “I don’t have a secret boyfriend,” Winter said.
    “She doth protest too much!” Patrick said, and Winter just shook her head and looked out her window; and we were all quiet until we arrived at the gates to Fort Wayne, where I heard the deep clang of a large old bell even before Tom Reilly and his team came into view. We parked next to their yellow Volkswagen Beetle with its bumper covered in stickers for weird skateboard and surfing brand names I’d never really heard of. We got out and went over to talk to them. But I quickly realized I’d left my phone in the car and went back for it. I saw Winter’s phone just sitting there, too, and I did a pretty awful thing. I woke it up and read a text from Carson that said, WELL SHE WON’T BE MY GIRLFRIEND FOR LONG.
    I felt like I froze from fingertip to toe, but apparently I didn’t because I had it in me to scroll back to read: HOW WOULD YOUR GIRLFRIEND FEEL ABOUT THAT?
    And before that, Carson’s text that said: WISH I WAS ON YOUR TEAM.
    These next few things happened as if in slow motion.
    I put the phone back.
    I noticed my hand trembling.
    I got out of the car and walked across the parking lot.
    I rejoined my team and planted a smile on my face while I wondered whether anyone could sense the way my skin felt like it wanted to jump off my body, run screaming from me.
    My friends were talking to Tom Reilly and Steve Paglia, who was cute in a way I’d always found sort of foreign and alarming—he was just too perfect—and for a minute I wondered why I hadn’t ever nurtured or pursued
that
crush, instead of letting Carson overshadow other possible boyfriends. It suddenly seemed like I’d made all the wrong choices because here I was, about to graduate, and I’d never really had a boyfriend at all. Worse, I was after the same guy that my best friend was after and it was
her
he was making promises to,
her
he wanted. Whatever signals I thought I’d been reading—
liking the pigtails
—I’d been reading all wrong.
    “How many points do you have?” Tom asked Patrick, who said, “I don’t even know, man, but a lot. I mean, we’ll qualify for sure.”
    “Yeah,” Tom said. “I think we will, too.”
    “What about Barbone?” I asked Steve, feeling like someone else must have taken control of my body in order to get those words out. “Have you seen them?”
    “Nah,” Steve said, and something about the way he looked at me—never actually making eye contact, but looking in the general area of my forehead—made me realize he had no idea who I was.
    Four long hard years and I hadn’t even registered.
    Looking to Patrick, who apparently
had
registered, Steve said, “We saw Kerri Conlon and those guys leaving Flying Saucers when we were going in but that’s all.”
    Their other teammates were already back in the Volkswagen and they drove over and Steve said, “Let’s roll.”
    So they drove off and we sprang into action—my body still on autopilot, behaving as if it weren’t breaking from the inside out.
    We