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

here.”
    I headed back to the clothing section we’d passed when we’d come in—there was no way Carson was in this store, unless he was actually hiding from us—and Dez was right on my heels, saying, “So that’s all you’re going to say about it?”
    Finding the children’s clothes I grabbed a random hoodie in size 5T then walked back to the cashier, thinking I’d pay cash and just save the receipt and return the stuff tomorrow.
    “I don’t know what else to say. I just don’t feel that way about him.” I was suddenly a little annoyed at having to explain myself. Which was probably why I blurted, “I like someone else anyway.”
    “You do?” Dez asked. “Do tell!”
    “Carson,” I said, and Dez said, “Oh, don’t join that club, honey.
Please
.”
    Which was not the sort of response I was expecting, and it made me even a little bit more annoyed. I said, “What would you know about it anyway? I mean, relationship advice? Really?”
    Which wasn’t supposed to be as mean as it sounded, but it sure sounded mean. Because Dez had never actually dated anyone. Not that I knew of, at least.
    Dez seemed unfazed, though, and said only, “Just don’t get your heart broken.”
    Which didn’t make sense, really, because I was ostensibly breaking Patrick’s heart, and Carson was about to break Jill’s. And anyway what if I couldn’t help it? What if hearts sometimes had to get broken? What if that was just the way of the world?
    I paid and we stopped at the car, which was unlocked, and put the bag (85 points, which brought us up to 702) in the front seat, and soon we were rushing through the aisles of Party Burg—“I mean, even Party
Burb
would have been better,” I said, and Dez laughed—looking for Patrick and Winter, and since Carson’s car was still in the lot I was looking for him and his team, too. Right as Dez and I split up, I found Patrick down an aisle full of Tiki torches and summer party supplies. He was wearing a grass skirt and looking through a bin of off-season sale items, probably hoping for a Halloween witch.
    I said, “Aloha!” and he said, “Aloha,” and he looked happy right then, and I hoped the whole incident at Eleanor’s would just get bundled up with the incident at prom and drift away from us throughout the day, like a smalliceberg. More than anything, I wanted to hit some kind of rewind button on our relationship, and go back to some point before today, before prom, before anything went wrong. The thought that all this stuff was coming up now—when Patrick and I were so close to having to move away and drift apart anyway—was just too depressing. What kind of last summer would this last summer be if we weren’t back to being thick as thieves?
    He said, “I decided I’m going to give you some time to let the idea sink in a bit. Then we can talk more later.”
    The arrogance!
I thought. As if I didn’t know my own heart.
    But for the sake of peace, for the sake of the hunt, I said, “Fine. We’ll talk later.”
    He nodded and I said, “What else do we need?”
    He looked at his list. “Winter’s getting Tigger so if you could maybe try to for a piña colada scratch ’n’ sniff, that’d be excellent. And we have no idea what a Hello Kitty Cat means exactly, but maybe we should get some Hello Kitty stuff in case we come across a cat later?”
    So I took off in search of stickers and Hello Kitty and heard Patrick say, “Carson and those guys are here, by the way,” and felt a sort of skip in my heart, until I rounded a corner and saw a wall of Dora and Diego decorations and then Carson and Winter, talking close, and I saw the way she looked at him and bit her lip and pulled a strand of hair from the back of her neck forward and twirled it on a finger—things I knew were signs she was crushing—before she turned and walked away from him, away from me. I stepped back around the corner and found myself face-to-face with the weirdly misshapen head of Ariel, the