I Love You, Beth Cooper

by Larry Doyle

  “Con-grad-ulations.”

  “You’re a cool guy,” Beth cajoled. “Be cool.”

  “I could lose my shitty job.”

  Denis began working on a Plan B. Appeal to reason. Rejected. Smash loser over head with beer, grind jagged bottle neck into his throat. Rejected. Grab beer and run. Analyze.

  Beth already had a Plan B. She smiled shyly at the loser.

  “I’ll touch your dick.”

  “AND THEN SHE TOUCHED HIS DICK.”

  Denis sat in the back of the Cabriolet, a six-pack of Molson Dark in his lap.

  “Ew,” Treece opined. “Even I wouldn’t do that. Unless the beer was free.”

  Up front, Beth and Cammy were sipping tallboys, heads shagging to DJ C’s unexpectedly slammin’ graduation mix:

  You’re my one, baby, yes you are

  My sweet hot secret cherry tart

  We’ve been playing in a minor key

  But you’ve finally reached majority

  “She touched his dick,” Denis repeated.

  “So there’s hope for you,” Rich said.

  Treece qualified, “If you’ve got beer.”

  You’re legal

  Oh my oh my oh my

  You’re legal now

  Oh my oh my oh my

  “Inside or outside?”

  Denis pretended not to understand.

  “The pants. Inside or outside?”

  Treece did a little clap. “Good question!”

  INSIDE, FOR LESS THAN A SECOND, and then out.

  Inside, a moment’s grope, and then out, her fingers splayed apart.

  Denis’s brain rewound again.

  Inside, her sea-mint fingers curled around his unwashed

  grease pole,

  cheese stick,

  night crawler,

  chancre factory,

  Jergened gerkin,

  rancid flaccid fetid flesh appendage,

  dick, dong, dingle,

  peter, pecker, pork-sword, pud,

  wiener.

  Inside, a swift kick to Denis’s gut, and then out.

  “That’s no good,” the loser said when Beth withdrew before the party could start.

  “I touched it,” Beth responded. “That was the deal.”

  The loser began walking the beer back to the cooler. Beth followed him, and Denis followed Beth.

  “You can’t. I did what I said.”

  “What are you gonna do, sue me?”

  “Call the police.”

  “A consensual act.” The loser sounded like a man who knew his way around the sexual assault laws. “Your little brother saw it.”

  Yes, he had. If he had died right then, which he was considering, the coroner would’ve found the exculpatory evidence burned into his retina.

  “Completely,” the loser licked his skinny purple lips, relishing “con-sensual.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Denis heard himself say, “when she’s only fifteen.”

  On their way out with the beer, Beth grinned at Denis and patted him on the head. “Good job, little brother!”

  “I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT,” Denis said, back in the car.

  Treece took him at his word, and spoke over him to Rich. “I saw you chatting with Señor Weidner.”

  “Yes, and?”

  “I always thought he was a handbag.”

  “So why are you telling me?”

  “’Cuz you’re right there.”

  “And anyway, why would you think Weidner’s gay? He dresses terribly.”

  “He’s always lisping.” Treece demonstrated, substituting interdental fricatives for her usual sibilance: “¿Donde estha la cothina?”

  “That’s Castilian. That’s the way they talk in…some place in Spain.”

  “Castile,” said Denis, on automatic.

  “Cathstile.”

  “I guess that’s why you don’t see many Cathstillians.” Treece thought this was tremendously funny.

  “You know,” Rich spoke over the loud whinnying, “it’s not right to assume someone’s gay just because of the way they talk, or look, or act.”

  Treece stopped with a snort. She regarded Rich with fond pity. “Nobody cares if you’re gay.”

  “I’m not.”

  “No one cares.” She threw up her hands festively. “So be gay already.”

  Rich thought, No one?

  You’re legal

  Oh my oh my oh my

  You’re legal so

  Bye-bye bye-bye bye-bye

  The Licks song went into an endless fade, perfectly soundtracking the swirling collapse of Denis’s mental universe.

  Beth Cooper was a nice, pretty girl who always returned the pencils she borrowed. She did not touch dicks for beer.

  Bye-bye bye-bye bye-bye

  “She’s not Beth Cooper,” Denis said quietly.

  Treece furrowed one brow then the other.

  “I’m pretty sure she is.”

  12.

  NIGHT MOOS

  MARTY, DON’T BE SUCH A SQUARE. EVERYBODY WHO’S ANYBODY DRINKS.

  LORRAINE BAINES

  FIVE TEENAGERS DRANK BEER on a dark country road covered with a pale green mist. It was midnight.

  “Ever been out here before?” Beth asked.

  “Who hasn’t?” Denis evaded. “I mean, Old Tobacco Road…”

  Old Tobacco Road wasn’t called that anymore. In the eighties, antismoking advocates insisted on changing it, but split between the heart-disease faction, which wanted Camino Corazon, and the cancer crowd, which wanted the more on-message Smoking Causes Cancer Road. In the end, the village board discovered the road was in an unincorporated area and that they had no authority to change it. Some time during the nineties, the county quietly changed the name to Gwendolyn Way, after somebody’s mother. But all the teenagers who hung out there still called it Tobacco Road, or Old Tobacco Road, or recently, the OT.

  “This place creeps me out,” Beth said. She finished her tallboy and crumpled it in her fist. “I don’t know why I keep coming out here.”

  “It’s peaceful.” Denis baby-sipped his Molson Dark.

  “Except for the ghosts,” Beth said.

  DENIS HAD NEVER HUNG OUT on Old Tobacco Road, and had never been there after dark. He had only seen it once, one Saturday afternoon when he was ten, on a Tales of My Youth drive with his father. Denis’s father had grown up in Buffalo Grove and never tired of showing his son his personal historical landmarks (the house on St. Mary’s Parkway, the baseball field where he hit a grand slam, the water treatment plant where he saw a dead kid). Many of the elder Cooverman touchstones were not there anymore, or ruined somehow. Tobacco Road was exactly the same.

  The narrow, barely paved road ran fairly straight but swooped up and down wildly, over hill and dale and steeper hill and deeper dale. Running along the eastern edge of the road was the Old Maguire Farm, the only major parcel of land in the area that had not been converted into a subdivision named for the English countryside. This was because Old Man Maguire had killed dozens of teenagers and fed them to his pigs, burying their bones in the corn, and therefore was reluctant to sell. Either that or he had killed his wife and nine kids one night by burning down his farmhouse, which reappeared every full moon, disappearing in the morning along with anybody foolhardy enough to have gone inside.

  On the other side of the road was a three-story turn-of-the-century building that had once been a home for the criminally insane, or an orphanage, or a home for children who killed their parents, or a whorehouse, or an insane asylum-cum-whorehouse. Next to it was a small cemetery, haunted by the restless souls of insane whores, and next to that was a bog, which had monsters.

  Denis’s father had told Denis these tales (minus the whores) that afternoon, emphasizing they were just “silly stories” teenagers liked to tell each other. Denis’s mother slept in the boy’s room for the next three months, mostly to punish his father.

  THE MOON WAS FULL. Beth’s convertible was parked a
t the highest point of Old Tobacco Road, overlooking a soupy pea fog that was either slightly radioactive or ghost children at play. This was the ideal vantage point to see the reappearance of Old Maguire’s farmhouse. It was behind schedule.

  “How’s that microbrew treating you?” Beth asked Denis.

  The brew was treating him very well. His fifteen sips, approximately half a bottle, was six ounces more beer than Denis had ever consumed, and the dose was having the psychopharmacological effects he anticipated: slight euphoria, tension reduction, loss of concentration. As a result, while Denis still knew Beth Cooper was no longer Beth Cooper, he was having difficulty maintaining his distress, his mind wandering over to Rich’s point of view, that Beth Cooper’s sexual generosity with the physically less gifted could work in the favor of a Denis Cooverman.

  “It’s good.” Denis said. “Very…brewed.”

  He sat in the front passenger seat next to Beth, at her invitation. Rich and Treece sat atop the backseats and Cammy was out of the car, sulking over being made to surrender shotgun to Denis. Why did she even cede authority to Beth Cooper? Cammy was smarter and had better technicals in all the beauty categories. Was it simply that Beth was head cheerleader? Was Cammy that much of a sheep?

  “Nik-nik-nik-f-f-f-Indians!” Rich hollered as he drained his first Molson Dark.

  Cammy eyed him with appalled disinterest.

  “Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider, 1969, Dennis Hopper.”

  “There’s something wrong with you,” Cammy said.

  Beth popped open her second PBR, sucking off the foam. For a moment she had a thick, gorgeous beer mustache.

  “You do know,” Denis advised, “open liquor in the car, you could lose your license?”

  “Too late!” Beth tipped her can in toast, and then chugged.

  Denis had no idea that a woman guzzling cheap beer could be so sexy, the way she kissed the rim and her throat undulated as the golden domestic nectar flowed through it. The gulugulugugug was less sexy but could be filtered out.

  Denis bit a swig off his Molson. That went so well he took another, and another. Soon enough his lips ceased parsing and the beer freely drained down his gullet.

  Beth crushed her beer can and tossed it. Denis reflexively squeezed his beer bottle and it slipped out of his hand, spilling in his lap. He waved off nonexistent help, pinched the bottle by the lip and flung it into the dark. He immediately reconsidered. “We should probably pick those up,” he said, leaning out of the car.

  Beth prodded him with another Molson. Denis forgot everything his mother had ever taught him about caretaking this delicate planet and took the bottle from Beth. He twisted the top effortlessly, producing no effect. He applied more pressure and his hand slid off the cap. His palm was sweaty. Of course it was. Everything was. He could hear the sweat beading inside his ears. Goddammit. Before long he would need to explain he had not wet his pants, or, oh, god, she wouldn’t think that, would she?

  “You’re having bottle trouble tonight.” Beth took the bottle, gave it a quick twist, and to Denis’s everlasting relief did not open it. Undeterred, she brought the bottle to her mouth, wedged it between her back molars and

  she bit the fucking cap off!

  “I know.” She took a quick slug before returning the bottle. “I’m going to ruin my beautiful teeth.”

  Denis’s whole mouth throbbed.

  Beth popped her third PBR, sucked it off. “So,” she grinned, “ever come up here with Patty Keck?”

  Denis glared at Rich.

  “Girls talk,” Beth corrected him.

  Denis gulped his beer and winced. Beth Cooper talked to Patty Keck, his secret shame? This could not lead anywhere good. He searched his brain for a change of subject. What a mess it was in there. It was as if somebody had broken into his cerebrum and dumped all the neurons on the floor. They flopped around unhelpfully.

  And then Denis heard, coming over the radio, driving eighties synthpop and a topic:

  Will you recognize me

  Call my name or walk on by…

  “This song.” Denis directed everybody’s attention to the radio. “What if,” he said, “our parents, on their graduation night, what if…?” His ex tempore skills were below his tournament best. “They could have been sitting right here, on Old Tobacco Road, in their vehicles, cars that were available at the time, and they could have been parked in this exact spot, listening to this exact same song.

  “Which means,” Denis built to what seemed a profound cosmological observation, “we were here, too…in cell form.”

  There was a silence, which Denis took to signify amazement.

  “I don’t remember getting high,” Cammy deadpanned.

  “We’re high?” Treece asked.

  “I just thought it was interesting.” Denis backpedaled from profundity. “How we all go through this. The same songs. The same rituals…”

  “Intriguing, professor,” Cammy said.

  “I mean, we all…” Denis struggled for a common and yet precisely right word. “…graduate.”

  “My parent’s didn’t graduate to this song,” Treece said. “They’re, like, forty-plus.”

  “This song is at least twenty years old,” Denis said.

  “Uh, no,” Treece argued. “They didn’t have cool music back then.”

  “‘Don’t You (Forget About Me),’ Simple Minds,” cited Rich, “from the sound track of Breakfast Club, 1984, John Hughes.”

  “Are you going to do that all night?” Beth asked.

  “I can’t help it. I’m like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.” He did a slightly more nasal version of his Pacino.

  I’m an excellent driver. Qantas.

  The girls all turned away from him. He finished, involuntarily, “1988, Barry Levinson.”

  “If we want to get high, I could get us some,” Treece offered, adding for the boys’ benefit, “My dad’s a lawyer.”

  Denis, incredulous: “Your dad gives you pot?”

  “Uh. No.” Treece huffed. “His clients.”

  The prehistoric but cool song faded as a pretty pianissimo crossfaded up. That pretty pianissimo. All of the blood that hadn’t coagulated in Denis’s face drained out.

  “I don’t know how that song got in there,” Denis dissembled. “Into that mix. I don’t even know how I got it, must have been a compilation or something.”

  Beth was merciful. She signaled to Cammy, making walking fingers. Cammy shook off the sign. Beth gave a more adamant thumb jerk. Cammy sheepishly grabbed Treece’s wrist and pulled her from the car. Rich joined them, glad to not be around when the first line of the song struck.

  Beth, I hear you calling…

  In the distance, Denis heard a chortle and a whinny.

  THREE TEENAGERS WALKED after midnight down an isolated road known for its dungareed maniacs and zombie hookers. Rich, recognizing the sudden genre switch from raucous teen comedy to teen slasher pic, was a little jumpy. He reassured himself that either Cammy or Treece, probably Treece, would go first, and that as the comic relief he had a better than fifty percent chance of ending up being the killer, who might die, but only temporarily.

  “Why are we walking?” Treece complained. “When I get my own car I’m never walking anywhere again. My dad was going to give me his old car but then that stupid cunt Cheryl crashed hers.”

  “That’s what you get for splitting up your parents.”

  “Mean, mean.” Treece turned to Rich. “Never admit your innermost fears to Cammy.”

  Rich didn’t respond. He was preoccupied, toeing the middle of the road, eyes darting right to watch for plunging bloody pitchforks, darting left for oncoming bosomy corpses.

  “I don’t see what’s so spooky,” he said, affecting an air of unspookedness.

  “They say the succubus Gwendolyn wanders in a white teddy,” Cammy related a recent addition to the Tobacco Road canon, “looking for virgins to deflower and devour.”

  “Not my problemo,” Rich lied. “Anyway, it�
�s not like we’re trapped in a house or on a boat or in the woods miles from civilization. There’s all sorts of ways to run.”

  “Oh my god!” Treece gasped. “Look!”

  Rich’s feet left the ground. They made a jerky paddling motion as if trying to tread air. He landed off-kilter, and his “What?” came off less curious than craven.

  Cammy indicated: “Cow.”

  Through the mist Rich could make out the silhouette of some creature, possibly a cow or a Hellbeast. It was about fifty feet off the road, standing in a meadow, increasing its cow chances.

  “Let’s tip it!” Treece was delighted with her own suggestion.

  Rich tried to think if succubi could take cow form. Not in Flesh for the Beast (2003), or Sorority Succubus Sisters (1987), or Necronomicon (1968). There really weren’t very many great succubus movies, Rich decided. He felt a sharp pain in his side.

  It was Treece’s elbow. “Tip it!” She pointed emphatically at the cow.

  “Me? It was your idea.”

  “You’re the guy.”

  “More or less,” said Cammy.

  “You know, these challenges to my sexuality are just wrong,” Rich said, marching toward the cow.

  DENIS WAS GETTING A GOOD LOOK at his lap.

  Oh, Beth what can I do?

  “Here,” he told his crotch, “let me change it.”

  He fumbled in his pocket for his iPod. A hand pressed against his chest. He looked up. Beth was smiling at him.

  “I was named after this song.”

  “You were named after a Kiss song?”

  Beth fell back in her seat. “My parents were, you know, headbangers.” She half-laughed. “Still are, kinda.”

  Denis’s parents were normal kids who became normal adults with normal jobs. His father was an information systems analyst and his mother did freelance graphic design for progressive causes and products. So normal Denis had never given them much thought. But now Denis wondered what his life would be like with head-banging parents, being named for a song by a band who dressed in black-and-white face, spat blood, and whose other hits included “Lick It Up” and “Love Gun.”

  Beth was gazing through the windshield.