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

Little Mermaid, and her sidekick, Flounder, such a strangely happy-lookingfish. I thought about prom and all the backstabbing I’d witnessed in the four years leading up to it. And how until I’d seen her twirling her hair a minute ago, until I’d replayed that partner-swapping slow dance in my head, noting the way Winter had looked maybe a bit too happy in Carson’s arms, it had never occurred to me that my best friend might be holding a knife behind
me
.
    “What did you mean?” I asked Dez, when he appeared holding some Tigger napkins. “When you said, ‘Don’t join that club’?”
    Dez seemed to squirm a little and for a second he studied the wall of Rapunzels to his right, as if she could save him by letting down her hair and pulling him up into some lofty tower. He said, “I just mean a lot of people like Carson. And if Patrick knew you were one of them…”
    “A lot of people like who?” I asked, and he sighed and said, “You wouldn’t be asking if you hadn’t already figured it out.”
    So she
did
like him, and she
had
kept it from me. She’d let me go on and on about how I liked him for years and had never said a word?
    “Did you see the Yeti’s text?” Winter said, coming into view at the end of the aisle, and since I hadn’t, I took out my phone. I was thinking was how nervy she had been in the car, trying to discourage my own crush to make way for hers.
    The text said: BONUS FAST-ROUND ITEM: SEND US A PICTURE OF A BIRD, ANY BIRD, WITHIN THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES. TWENTY POINTS.
    “Not worth it,” Dez said. “Unless there’s a pigeon in the parking lot.”
    “Or Tweety Bird?” I said. “Here in the store?”
    We all headed off in different directions to look for Tweety Bird, and I bumped right into Carson near some stickers and took one of the same sheets of scratch ’n’ sniff cocktails he was holding off the display. “Hey there,” I said, feeling that nervous giddiness as I looked at those fierce eyes of his, those hands, the way the guitar T-shirt hugged his chest.
    “Hey yourself,” he said, and it felt flirty. But he’d looked flirty with Winter, too. Was there something a little bit flirty about everything he did?
    “How’s it going?” I said, suddenly at a loss for anything he and I could actually talk about, anything other than secrets. Did he
know
that Winter liked him? What would happen if I told him? Besides her killing me. Was that what they’d been talking about?
    “Okay,” he said. “I guess.”
    But he looked distressed and I imagined, for a second, that it was from the pressure of Winter’s unwanted advances. If he was going to break up with Jill to be with me, the last thing he needed was my best girlfriend crushing on him. I thought about saying something, like “So that’s weird about Winter, huh?” or “Don’t worry about Winter, I’ll handle it,” but here, in Party Burg, with everyone else just an aisle or two away, it didn’t seem wise; and maybe there was a part of me that was still scared of sticking my neck out.
    I didn’t know for sure that he liked me.
    Even an hour ago, I’d felt certain our paths were about to collide in a big, romantic way, but now…? The story I’d written in my head about how this was all going to go down didn’t seem to be lining up with reality. Winter at the very least—Patrick, too—had thrown away my script. How was I to know Carson wouldn’t, too?
    When Patrick appeared and said, “I sent a picture of Tweety Bird and grabbed some Hello Kitty stickers in case you hadn’t found them,” I was grateful for an escape from the paralysis of the moment. I headed his way, but then Carson said, “Mary?” and I turned.
    “Do you think cheating is ever justifiable?”
    At first this seemed entirely out of the blue to me but then it started to make sense. But I didn’t want him to
cheat on
Jill. I wanted him to break up with her. And cheating was one thing I felt really strong about.
    Really anti.
    “I don’t