I Love You, Beth Cooper

by Larry Doyle

  “Champagne coming right…Yi.”

  His fingertip was bleeding. He pressed on with no concern for his own safety. Cammy and Treece watched with morbid fascination.

  Denis placed both thumbs under the cork and applied steady pressure, suavely at first, desperately thereafter. He leaned against a wall for leverage, clasping the sweaty, slippery bottle between his forearms and applying insufficient force accompanied by girlish exertions. Blood dripped over his knuckles.

  “This is…odd,” he she-grunted. “The internal pressure is 90 psi. It should just—”

  In walked Beth, screaming into the phone.

  “Don’t you dare GPS me!”

  Denis couldn’t even begin to analyze the health ramifications of that, because at that exact moment, Rich appeared behind Beth. He raised his arm and opened his hand. A ribbon of condoms cascaded behind Beth’s head.

  Ribbed, Rich mouthed lubriciously.

  Denis’s eyes widened just in time for the cork to pop and ricochet off his cornea.

  HE OPENED HIS MOUTH TO SCREAM. A foaming column of lukewarm champagne geysered into the back of his throat. He gasped, gulped, and gurgled in various combinations. That it was not school milk but champagne that came out his nose did not make Denis feel any more sophisticated.

  This, as it turned out, was exactly the kind of thing Cammy found amusing: the pain and suffering of others. Her laugh was surprisingly husky, somewhere between a chortle and a guffaw. Treece was too nice to laugh, but not nice enough to offer help.

  Beth snapped her phone shut and rushed to Denis’s side.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m great,” Denis claimed. “Oh, ow.”

  He cupped his bloody hand over his bludgeoned eye, and without even realizing he was doing it, slid down the wall to the floor.

  “Yee,” he said.

  “We need ice.” Beth turned to Rich, who was tucking the last of the prophylaxis into his shirt pocket. “Ice?”

  Rich hurried to the kitchen island “bar area” and stuck his hand in the plastic bowl of ice. It came out wet.

  “Frozen peas,” Beth ordered, snapping her fingers at Rich and directing him toward the refrigerator.

  Rich resented being snapped at. This dickhead from Stevenson High School did that at José O’Foodle’s once, and Rich spat in his O’Salsa, nearly killing him. Apparently the guy had a peanut allergy and Rich had been eating only Snickers bars that month. No one ever found out how peanut and cocoa traces made it into a salsa made only from fresh tomatoes, chiles and beer, but it cost the Dining Thematics Corporation nearly $2 million.

  “What are you doing?” Beth yelled at Rich, who had been reminiscing the above paragraph. “This is your friend down here!”

  Rich abandoned his reverie and went to the refrigerator. He opened the freezer door and began picking through the contents.

  “Frozen peas…Frozen peas…Fro-oh-zen pa-puh peas…”

  “Anything cold!”

  Rich hurled a box across the room.

  “Stat!”

  Beth snatched it out of the air.

  “Frozen waffles?”

  Rich peered in the freezer. “Either that or Lean Cuisine.”

  “Whatever,” Beth said, meaning whatever.

  His mission completed, Rich took out a pint of ice cream and went looking for a spoon. He singsang to himself:

  I scream, you scream…

  WITH PARAMEDIC SPEED, Beth ripped open the box and extracted two frozen waffles. She dropped to her knees, straddling Denis’s thighs, a bodily juxtaposition Denis had only experienced with Greg Saloga prior to a belly-pinking.

  Beth took his hand and lifted it off his injured eye. She tenderly pressed the waffles against it.

  “Agh,” Denis said.

  “It’s okay,” Beth soothed. “This will help.”

  Why was Beth being so nice to him? Was it because she was so nice, or because it was to him? Either way, she sure was nice. Denis gazed at her through his surviving eye.

  “I’m sorry I’m so pathetic,” he thought, and then realized he had also said it.

  Beth laughed, so lightly and so kindly that Denis felt it in his chest, not his stomach.

  “Can I tell you a secret?”

  Yes, tell me all your secrets, Denis kept to himself.

  Beth leaned in, whispered: “All boys are pathetic.”

  THIS WAS NEWS TO DENIS, perhaps the best news he had ever heard. If Beth thought all guys sucked, he didn’t need to not suck, only to suck less. This was doable. Possibly.

  Denis relaxed for the first time since the previous Sunday. He became the smart, sweet, moderately clever and only medium pathetic boy he usually was.

  “On behalf of all boys, then,” Denis said, “I apologize.”

  Beth made a serious face. “Accepted.”

  “It’s 150,000 years late, but it needed to be said. Also, I’d like to apologize for all that war and stuff.”

  “You’re funny.”

  “Sometimes even when I’m trying to be.”

  Beth took Denis’s hand and led it back to his eye, transferring responsibility for the waffles.

  “Gentle pressure.”

  Denis twisted a flinch into a grin. “Thanks, Lisbee.”

  The moment vanished.

  “Don’t call me that,” Beth said. “I hate that.”

  “But Kevin—”

  “That is one of the privileges that Kevin enjoys,” Beth explained coldly.

  Cammy concurred. “Kevin has many privileges.”

  “Front door privileges—” Treece began, working into another sodomy whinny.

  Beth raised her hand, silencing them.

  On the opposite side of the kitchen island, Rich was upside-down spooning ice cream onto his tongue, waiting for such a conversational opening. “So, Beth,” he said, “you think your Army Man has triangulated your signal and is on his way over? Because we might need more waffles.”

  “Never mind him.” Beth waved dismissively. “He thinks just because he’s killed some guys, he can kill anybody he wants.”

  That didn’t help.

  “Let’s see under there,” Beth said. Denis whimpered as softly as he could as Beth removed the waffles. The blast area was already purple en route to black and beyond.

  “Open.”

  The eyelid stuttered as it retracted.

  “Pee-yuke,” Treece noted.

  “Dude.” Rich grossed out. “That’s NC-17.”

  It looked worse than it was, since it looked like Denis was at least blind, perhaps dying, and possibly a brain-eating zombie.

  From the inside, it looked: bloody. Denis tried to focus on Beth’s face, which he knew was only inches away. What he saw, swirling in a red sea, was a blurry pink mass with two darker circular areas in the upper half and a small horizontal smear in the middle of the lower half. If that was a face, then:

  “MY CONTACT!” Denis gasped.

  Beth snapped her fingers again.

  “Contact down!”

  Treece and Cammy initiated contact-retrieval maneuvers, dropping to squats and sweeping the floor with their fingertips in long, overlapping arcs.

  “Don’t worry,” Beth told Denis. “We’ll find it. We always do.”

  “You wear contacts?” Denis asked, enthralled by this defect they apparently shared. “What’s your prescription?”

  Before either could comprehend the deep geekitude of the question, and before Denis could compound it with whatever he might say next:

  “Found it!” Treece said.

  She held up the champagne cork. A gelatinous dollop clung to the metallic cap. Quite proud of herself, she marched over and presented it to Beth.

  “What do I win?”

  “The thanks of a grateful nation,” Rich said, presenting her with the half-eaten pint of ice cream.

  Treece held the container like an acting award.

  “Chubby Monkey!”

  Beth peeled the sticky contact
off the cork, rolling it around on her fingertip.

  “Gucky.”

  She stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked the lens off.

  As she swished it around, salivating, her luscious lips pursed, pulsating. Her pretty pink tongue unfurled and there on the wet tip, bathed in Beth Cooper’s juices, was Denis’s sense of sight.

  Beth Cooper had invented a whole new sex act: the eyejob.

  She tilted Denis’s head back and gently pried open his swollen eyelids.

  “Ohhhhhh.” He moaned with pain and pleasure, which is how all the weird fetishes start.

  “There.”

  Denis blinked. His contact was back in. Beth came into focus, framed by a velvety crimson swirl.

  “How’s that feel?”

  Denis didn’t have to answer. Beth could see for herself.

  Denis grinned shit-eatingly.

  “Pretty good, I guess,” Beth said.

  Beth bounced from her knees to her feet in a single cheerleading move. Denis’s ascent was graceless by comparison, hindered by the need to keep a forearm wedged between his legs. He clutched the counter and hauled himself up. Leaning against the kitchen island, hips inward, he twisted his upper torso in the direction of the girls, and smiled. He was fooling almost no one.

  “You hurt your back?” Treece asked.

  Cammy pointed at the ice cream.

  “Chubby Monkey.”

  Treece looked at the ice cream, then at Denis’s crotchal contortions and back at the ice cream. The creamy banana taste in her mouth helped her put it all together.

  “Oh,” it dawned on her. “The monkey is chubby.”

  During the polite silence all around, Denis scooted the perimeter of the kitchen island, placing it between his erection and judgment. Rich slid the frozen waffles across the counter. Denis lowered them out of sight.

  “You might’ve scratched your cornea,” Beth said. “Maybe you should go to the hospital.”

  “Oh,” said Denis, who had been thinking the same thing, “Let’s not spoil the party.”

  “What party?” Cammy wanted to know.

  Denis’s tendency to answer sarcastic questions sincerely was short-circuited when he realized he was still gripping the bottle of:

  “Champagne!”

  “La bebida de los gods!” Rich yelled in support. He grabbed a stack of the Krazy Kritter Dixie cups and attempted to set up five in a row. This took a few tries.

  “Delicious champagne,” Denis said, buying Rich time.

  “Delicioso,” Rich agreed. He finally accomplished five upright cups, and stepped back with a hand flourish, as if he had just done a magic trick.

  Denis filled the first cup. The second cup started strong but quickly faded to a dribble. Denis considered filling the remaining three cups with squeezings from his rugby shirt, but took the high road.

  “Even things up a little…”

  Denis poured from the first cup into the final three, then some from the fourth cup into the second cup, and then a little bit more from the first into the third, producing five Dixie cups with approximately no champagne in them.

  He distributed the cups, making sure to give Beth the one with Ally, the pretty giraffe, on it.

  Treece squinted suspiciously. “Why’d I get the hippo?”

  “It’s all good fat,” Cammy said.

  “That’s racist,” Treece jabbed at Cammy.

  “It’s not race-ist,” Cammy mocked.

  “It’s fattist.”

  “You said you were fat. Two minutes ago. And every two minutes before that.”

  “I was owning it.”

  Beth sighed. “You’re not fat, Treece.”

  “I have fat,” Treece said.

  “Everybody has fat.”

  “Not everybody,” Cammy said.

  “A toast!” Denis yelled.

  Usually when one proposes a toast, one has a toast to propose. This was one of the details Denis had neglected based on its infinitesimal probability of coming up. And yet, here he was, toasting Beth Cooper with a paper cup of champagne. He improvised.

  “To the future!”

  Rich had his friend’s back. “To the future—and beyond!”

  “Go future!” Cammy exclaimed with a tiny swing of her fist, suggesting less than complete sincerity.

  “Go, future!” Treece exclaimed with the same tiny swing, signaling true enthusiasm.

  “The future,” Beth simply said.

  The girls micro-chugged their champagne splashes. Rich sipped his urbanely. Denis, who had left his own cup empty, made a show of guzzling it.

  Treece crushed her cup and looked for someplace to shove it. She noticed something sticking out of Rich’s shirt pocket.

  “Party balloons!” she squealed, extracting the unfolding ribbon of ignominy.

  “Um.” Rich raised a finger. “Those aren’t—”

  “I know what they are,” Treece said, tearing a foil pouch open with her teeth. She popped the condom into her mouth, breathed in deeply, and blew out a ribbed rubber bubble.

  Beth turned to Denis, amused but also a little disappointed.

  “What exactly,” she wondered, “did you have planned for this evening?”

  “Oh,” Denis said, sort of maybe pointing toward the contraceptive Treece was inflating. “Those are my dad’s.”

  Treece stopped blowing. “Your dad’s not hiding in a closet or something? I hate that.”

  Beth then said with polite finality:

  “Well, this was fun.”

  Treece tied off the party balloon and flicked it at Rich.

  HIS LIFE HAD CHANGED, in some potentially tragic but no doubt important way, and Denis didn’t want it to end.

  “Not yet,” he said. “You can’t go…yet.”

  He needed a reason for them to stay. He had a hundred-dollar bill in his wallet, a graduation present from Aunt Brenda, but it might be awkward trying to split it three ways. Also, potentially insulting. His Diamond Series Extra-Extended Special Edition Lord of the Rings Trilogy Blue-Ray HD Box Set? If they started watching it now…

  “We haven’t drunk the wine!” Rich declared.

  Of course! The forbidden wine!

  “Twenty-three bottles!” Denis added, parallel-processing how much time it would take them to drink that much wine and how much trouble each successive bottle would get him into.

  “I don’t like wine,” Treece said. “Unless it’s in a cooler-type situation.”

  Denis hoisted a two-liter bottle of Diet Blackberry Sprite above his head. “We got coolers!” he said triumphantly, as the sweaty bottle slid out of his sweaty hands and exploded on the kitchen floor.

  Goddammit.

  Rich jumped into the social abyss. “And music!” He handed the iCube to Denis. “Wine, women, and 5,000 songs!”

  “Well, I haven’t loaded that many yet,” said Denis, shaking soda off his shoes. “But I did put together a special playlist for the occasion. A ‘Commencement Mix’—”

  “DJ C’s Slammin’ Graduation,” Rich quickly saved.

  “Or that.” Denis pushed.From the iCube came 53Hz to 16kHz of seventies mellowness:

  Life, so they say, is but a game

  and we let it slip away

  “Slammin’,” Cammy said.

  “That’s more for chilling,” Rich said. “Ironic chilling.”

  Denis pressed advance. Out came languid fifties harmonies:

  There’s a time for joy, a time for tears…

  “My mom helped me put this together,” Denis explained.

  A time we’ll treasure through the years…

  Denis ripped the iPod out of the cube and started scrolling through the list. “There’s real music on here,” he said, spinning. “That Einstein’s Brain song, Happy Talk, the Licks…you like Very Sad Boy, right?”

  Beth touched his elbow. He looked up. She gazed into his good eye.

  They really could have kissed ergonomically.

  “We do kind of have to go,
” she said. “Thanks. It was a great party.”

  She moved in to kiss him, hesitating.

  Was it the smell? The smell of fear and pathos?

  No, it was she didn’t want to hurt him. She kissed the other, uninjured cheek.

  “Bye.”

  The simultaneous bursting and breaking of Denis’s heart was drowned out by a tremendous roar. Blinding lights engulfed the front of the house. Denis’s first thought was it had to be the Apocalypse, but it was something much, much worse.

  8.

  MORE WAFFLES

  BIFF WILCOX IS LOOKING FOR YOU, RUSTY JAMES. HE’S GONNA KILL YOU, RUSTY JAMES.

  MIDGET

  “SHIT,” Beth said. “Kevin.”

  9.

  PARTY MONSTERS

  NUNCHUCK SKILLS, BOWHUNTING SKILLS, COMPUTER HACKING SKILLS…GIRLS ONLY WANT BOYFRIENDS WHO HAVE GREAT SKILLS.

  NAPOLEON DYNAMITE

  DENIS WAS DEAD. This much was certain. The only real question was whether, as he was dying, would Denis cry, or beg, or scream like a girl, or lose control of his bowels, or in some other way abase himself, robbing his demise of the tragic gravitas he felt it deserved. Denis considered hitting the bathroom as a precaution, but Rich and the girls had already rushed to the front of the house, leaving him standing there alone, looking silly without even the simple dignity of being dead.

  And his face hurt.

  Reflexively, Denis reached up to touch his battered eye and poked it with the iPod he was holding.

  “Yiye!” he said in response to this relatively minor amount of pain. He was not going to do well, being stabbed, or stomped, or whatever cause of death his killer had chosen.

  Denis looked down at his iGouger.

  Goodbye to You

  Michelle Branch

  The Spirit Room

  So now his possessions were mocking him too. Goddammit, Denis muttered as he dropped the iPod in a pocket, goddammit, and joined the party to his execution.

  THEY WERE GATHERED in the living room, in violation of house rules, gawking out the front window at the tremendous roar. Denis slunk up and peeked out around Treece.