I Love You, Beth Cooper

by Larry Doyle

  With Unpleasant Memory Repression set on FULL, Denis tilted his head back and let the hot water ripple over his eyes and lips, like in a soap commercial or an otherwise not very good movie on Cinemax.

  His memory fogged over with steam.

  “Hey,” he says, so cool. “I’m having a little thing later. Music. Drinks. Prizes.”

  “Wow, that sounds fun!” She bites her lip. “I have this other stupid thing I’m supposed to go to…”

  A mischievous glimmer in her eye.

  “…but maybe I can stop by for a few minutes.”

  He cocks a brow. “We won’t need more than a few—”

  “DENIS, ARE YOU OKAY IN THERE?”

  Denis dropped the conditioner.

  “Just getting out, Mom.”

  Denis dried, rolled on some X-Stinc Pit Stick, followed up with several clouds of his father’s deodorant powder, brushed his teeth and gargled with X-Stinc Breath Killaz, formulated for the male teen mouth. He tried on some corduroys, some cargo pants, brushed his teeth again, and pulled on a brand-new rugby shirt that was pre-grassed and muddied to look as if some serious rugby had already been played in it.

  “You look cute,” his mother squealed. “Supercute.”

  Denis was devastated.

  “She doesn’t mean that,” Denis’s father said. “You look fine. You might want to pull the waist of those pants down a bit.”

  THE STREET LIGHTS CAME ON outside Denis’s house.

  It was 9 p.m.

  Denis sat, hands folded on the kitchen table. Rich continued rolling back and forth, in longer and longer swaths.

  They had spent much of their lives this way, at this kitchen table, in front of the TV, lying around in Denis’s room, not saying anything. Of the more than 20,000 hours they had logged since bonding in kindergarten over their mutual ostracism, Denis and Rich had spent perhaps 8,500 of those hours, almost an entire year, doing nothing at all, except being together.

  Rich picked up the conversation exactly where it had left off a half hour before.

  “I should punch you.”

  “Please do.”

  Rich was not going to punch Denis. Every time he did—when they were five, nine and thirteen—he was the one who ended up crying. Instead, he decided to agitate Denis, something he had become exceedingly good at over the past fourteen years.

  “Hey,” he brought up in casual conversation, “what if she comes and brings her Army Man and he kills you?”

  Denis’s Reptilian Complex scurried under a rock.

  “Not a very good party,” Rich observed.

  “He wasn’t really going to kill me.”

  “Or maybe Party of the Year.”

  “She won’t bring him.”

  “She might. She said she might.”

  Denis touched his neck, tracing the raspberry thumbprint on his windpipe. He gulped, and gulped again, but the cold, hard loogie of dread stubbornly inched up his throat.

  Rich grinned.

  Then felt awful.

  Those two seconds neatly encapsulated their entire friendship.

  RICH LOOKED FOR SOMETHING to get Denis’s mind off what he had just put it on. He reached across the table and plucked an iPod from its cube.

  “New?”

  “Graduation present,” Denis hocked out.

  Rich fingered the smart new design and interface that made all previous iPods look like gleaming turds.

  “I hear this one vibrates for her pleasure.”

  Denis snatched the iPod back.

  “You vibrate for her pleasure.”

  Rich laughed. “That’s not even an insult, dude.”

  Denis returned the iPod to the dock, rotating the cube seven degrees counterclockwise, then two degrees clockwise.

  Sensing something had gone awry with his party’s feng shui, aside from the total lack of guests, Denis began fiddling with the two-liter bottles of soda on the kitchen island, or “bar area.” He harmonized the carbonated beverages with a plastic bowl filled with ice and a box of Dixie Krazy Kritter cups.

  “You know what I got for graduation?” Rich said, swiveling in his chair. “A bill. My dad says I owe him two hundred and thirty-three thousand, eight hundred and fifty bucks.”

  (Rich’s father was a dick.)

  “A quarter of a million dollars? They don’t even buy you shoes.”

  “That includes fifty grand for ‘wear and tear’ on my mom,” Rich said, acknowledging, “She is pretty worn and torn.”

  Denis reached out to put his hand on Rich’s shoulder, but misjudged the spinning rate and had to settle for his friend’s ear.

  “I’m sorry your dad sucks.”

  Rich seemed philosophical about it. “It was completely itemized. Very detailed.”

  He looked up at Denis.

  “Who knew he was paying attention?”

  THEY WERE QUIET AGAIN. Denis began to rearrange individual pretzel sticks in the casino bucket.

  “You shouldn’t be so nervous, dude.”

  “I’m not nervous. I’m particular.”

  Rich occasionally claimed to know things about the opposite sex. Such as: “They can smell fear.”

  This terrified Denis. “No, they can’t.”

  “I can smell it.”

  Horrified, Denis sniffed his armpit.

  “Oh, no,” he cried. “Fear.”

  Denis headed for the sink, removing his shirt.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What are you talking about? That was me, just now.”

  Denis ran water through a sponge and shoved it under his arms, bitterly.

  “Puberty has done nothing but screw me.”

  THIS WAS TRUE. Puberty had come late to Denis Cooverman, but it had come with a vengeance. Thick curly hairs and sebaceous secretions everywhere. Virulent erections in organic chemistry, mysterious in origin, certainly not attributable to his lab partner, Martha Warneki, whose breath smelled like dead things (Denis suspected she was hitting the formalin). His own smorgasbord of odors, unresponsive to traditional cloaking methods, so ghastly they sometimes awoke him in the middle of night, forcing him to shower just to get some sleep. Robust and succulent acne that in his junior year required medications so mutagenic that the packaging warned Denis not to touch any woman who was pregnant or thinking of ever becoming so. (This was not a problem.)

  In the past six months, Denis had gotten his adolescence more or less under control—he could often identify why his erections wouldn’t go away, though he remained powerless to stop them—but his hormones still reserved the right to rage at inopportune moments, such as the present one.

  “Goddammit,” Denis said, twisting a freshly soaked sponge into his pits, hoping to drown the fear.

  “Don’t worry,” Rich said. “She can’t smell you. She’s miles away.”

  Denis sniffed his rugby shirt. Perspiration, not the sexy kind. He began flapping the shirt in the air, keeping his elbows up in order to dry his armpits. One might say he looked like a frenzied chicken, but even chickens have their dignity.

  This was the kind of moment when Denis’s parents would usually walk in, and they did.

  “Looks like this party is well under way,” Denis’s father remarked cheerfully.

  Denis clutched the shirt to his bosom.

  “Spilled…something colorless.”

  Denis’s parents were accustomed to finding their son in awkward poses like this, and let it pass.

  Rich swiveled to Denis’s mother, who resembled Denis but in a much hotter way.

  “Hola, Mrs. C.”

  “Don’t call me Mrs. C,” Mrs. C said. “I mean it.”

  She turned to her son, by now mercifully reclothed.

  “How many guests are you expecting?”

  “Not too many,” Denis said.

  “None,” Rich clarified.

  “Well,” Mr. C said, prolonging the joshing thing, “don’t trash the place or commit any major felonies.”

  “We’
ll be home at eleven,” Mrs. C said.

  “And not one minute before,” Mr. C further joshed, opening the refrigerator door. “And it wouldn’t be a graduation party without…” He withdrew a large bottle in a festive CONGRATS gift bag. “…champagne!”

  “Whoa!” Rich exclaimed, and meant it. His own father once let him have a sip of his beer, but that was only to get him to take his nap.

  Denis looked to his mother.

  “You sure?”

  This was an argument Mrs. C had lost. She was magnanimous in defeat. “One glass per guest. And nobody who drinks, drives.”

  “And,” Mr. C said, “I know exactly how many bottles are in my wine rack. Twenty-three.” Denis’s father had become a wine enthusiast after watching an award-winning film about a couple of drunks who drank fine wine. Denis’s father drank the finest wine that Jewel-Osco carried and placed on sale.

  Denis’s mother gave Denis the disaster drill she gave any time she left the house.

  “Here are our numbers,” she said, pointing to the well-pointed-at sheet on the wall next to the phone, “if…”

  She could never bring herself to complete the conditional, for fear of giving it life.

  “If someone’s dead or on fire,” Mr. C added, “call 911 first.”

  Mrs. C fixed her husband with a look that said, You’ve just killed our son and set him on fire.

  “What?” Mr. C responded. “Bad advice?”

  “I’ll be in the car.”

  She kissed Denis on the cheek.

  “Have fun. But not too much fun.”

  “Not much danger of that, Mrs. C,” Rich said.

  “Watch it,” Mrs. C said with a smile, though what she meant was, Soon my son will be on to better things and you will be gone.

  DENIS’S FATHER DROPPED the joshing shtick the moment his wife was out of earshot. He only did it to annoy her, and to seem cooler than she was. For some reason this was important to him, even if the only witness was his son’s loser friend.

  He sat down next to Denis, suddenly extremely earnest.

  “Son,” he said, “this is your last summer before college. That accelerated program isn’t going to leave much time for toga parties…or whatever. So I want you to enjoy this summer—”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “As a reward for all your hard work.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Denis was a great kid. Perfect, according to the Educational Testing Service. His father couldn’t help feeling this was his fault.

  “You know,” he said, slipping a paternal arm around Denis. “It’s okay to just have fun sometimes. Sometimes, you just have to say, What the F.”

  “Curtis Armstrong in Risky Business,” Rich cut in. “1983, Paul Brickman. Except he didn’t say ‘F.’”

  “Fuck,” amended Mr. C, under cross-generational peer pressure.

  “Yay!” Rich mini-cheered.

  Mr. C squeezed his son’s upper arm and rose. He stood there, allowing his message to sink in. Then he said:

  “There’s condoms in my bedside table.”

  “Do you know exactly how many there are?” Rich asked.

  Denis’s father alarmed himself by responding in a completely uncool and absolutely fatherly fashion.

  “They’re not toys,” he said.

  5.

  THE L WORD

  IF YOU GUYS KNOW SO MUCH ABOUT WOMEN, HOW COME YOU’RE HERE AT LIKE THE GAS ’N’ SIP ON A SATURDAY NIGHT COMPLETELY ALONE DRINKING BEERS WITH NO WOMEN ANYWHERE?

  LLOYD DOBLER

  IT WAS HALF PAST NINE. Little had changed. Denis was currently standing, scratching something on his pants. Rich fingered Denis’s new iPod.

  “Hey, so: I’m not gay, dude.”

  The iCube began playing “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Rich danced to it momentarily. Realizing this did not support his argument, he turned it off.

  “It’s okay if you are,” Denis said, trying to determine whether the crusty crud he was scraping had come from inside or outside his pants. “Really.”

  “Well, really, I’m not,” Rich insisted. “No soy homo.”

  “Okay.”

  “What makes you think I’m gay?”

  “Everybody thinks you’re gay.”

  “They don’t know me. You know me. What makes you think I’m gay?”

  Denis gave it some thought.

  “Everything,” he concluded.

  He elaborated: “I mean, you just, I don’t know, you seem gay to me.”

  “Is it because of drama club? Because you know, a lot of actors aren’t gay. More than half!”

  This was a difficult subject. They had never seriously discussed Rich’s sexuality before, even when they were eleven, after Rich had the idea to reenact the climactic light-saber battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader using their boners. Especially after that. But Denis felt he owed Rich a fuller explanation, having outed him and all.

  “Rich, all during high school, and before, you’ve never once had a girlfriend.”

  “Neither did you.”

  It was going to get ugly.

  “I tried, at least,” Denis argued. “And I did…” His voice trailed off. “…have one.”

  “Patty Keck!” Rich yelled. “Your secret shame!”

  Rich had agreed to never mention Patty Keck, Denis’s secret shame.

  “Yeah, well,” Denis grumbled. “My point is. I had one.”

  “Making out with a girl like that—” Rich shook his head with deep sadness. “I’m not sure that’s not gay.”

  This brought about a lull in the conversation. Rich plucked a pretzel from the bucket. Denis did not stop him.

  “You know she’s not going to come.”

  “I can construct at least six scenarios where she comes.”

  “Stop constructing scenarios, dude. School’s out.”

  “1),” Denis enumerated, “her ‘other thing’ gets cancelled; 2), it’s too crowded and loud…”

  “She’d hate that.”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “Yeah, I don’t have six years’ experience smelling her hair.”

  It was ugly.

  THEY TOOK TURNS glaring at different parts of the room, anywhere but directly at each other.

  Rich’s glare roved to the festively wrapped bottle that was still sitting on the table where Denis’s father had put it down.

  “Or maybe she’ll hear we have a whole bottle of champagne.”

  “You mock,” Denis said, “but you know nothing of chaos theory.” Denis wasn’t sure how chaos theory applied here, exactly, but he knew that Rich did know nothing of chaos theory, or much else, unless it was in a movie. Denis often used his superior intellect to score points on Rich, but like here, they were hollow victories.

  “Nobody’s coming,” Rich said. “They’re all going to Valli Woolly’s. Maybe we could go there. Oh, no, wait—you called her a stuck-up bitch in front of the whole school.”

  “You wrote that.”

  “I didn’t say it in front of the whole school.”

  “That was your idea!”

  “It wasn’t my idea to gay me!”

  Denis was unrepentant. “It was in keeping with the theme.”

  “Theme.” Rich snorted. “Even when you’re breaking the rules, it’s through assmosis.”

  Another lull.

  “You know,” Rich said eventually. “Gay guys don’t say, ‘dude.’”

  “Lame gay guys do,” said Denis, still mad about the Patty Keck breach.

  “So what’s that say about you?” Rich asked sarcastically. “Your only friend is a lame gay guy.”

  Lull.

  “Which I’m not.”

  WITHOUT APOLOGIZING or even acknowledging they had fought, forty-five minutes later Denis and Rich were friends again. They sat at the table, glumly crunching the fancy crappy snacks.

  “You know,” Rich was saying, “when we go to college we won’t have to be this way.”

  �
�What way?”

  With thumb and forefinger, Rich branded an L on his forehead.

  “We’re not—” Denis started to protest.

  He conceded the point.

  Rich was working himself into one of his production numbers.

  “Nobody else from B-G is going to Northwestern, and U of I is a huge school. We can reinvent ourselves!”

  He sang:

  I can be whoever I want to be.

  Denis did not recognize:

  “Leslie Ann Warren in Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, 1965, Charles S. Dubin, director.”

  That’s not gay, Denis thought, but did not say.

  “First,” Rich said, balancing a pretzel on his lip like a smoking French guy, “we gotta change your name. Denis is…unfortunate.”

  “Not as unfortunate as Dick Munsch.”

  “D-E-N-I-S? You’re a vertical stroke from penis, dude.”

  Rich drew a D in the air and appended the stroke.

  “I’m well aware of that,” Denis said.

  “And my name is not Dick. It’s not gonna be Rich either. I’m gonna go by Munsch. Or maybe ‘The Munsch.’ Now, you: Denny, El Denno, Deño, Den-Den…What’s your middle name? James, right? DJ. Eh. Cooverman…Coove!”

  Denis grimaced. “Sounds…vagina-ish.”

  Rich waggled his eyebrows and opened his arms to welcome:

  “The Coove…master!”

  Denis looked at his watch. “What time do parties start?”

  “Now. Let’s open the champagne.”

  “We can’t open it until she gets here.”

  Rich grabbed the champagne bag. Denis grabbed back, directly above Rich’s hand. Rich wedged his left hand above Denis’s right. Denis clawed the top of the bag. Rich released the bottle, conceding defeat.

  Rich moved on: “So your parents use condoms.” He took three seconds to say the last word.

  “Not a topic for discussion.”

  “That means they still—”

  “Stop talking if you wish to live.”

  “Do you think they’re lubed or—”

  Denis bounced a Ruffles off his friend’s face. Rich picked up the chip and ate it. Chewing thoughtfully, he asked, “You ever jerk off with a condom on?”

  “No,” Denis replied.