I Love You, Beth Cooper

by Larry Doyle

  Rich puffed out his chest in a halfway decent impression of Coach Raupp. “Good game, ladies!” With two crisp claps, he woofed, “Hit the showers!”

  To Rich’s surprise and Denis’s astonishment, Beth shouted “Showers!” and trotted off the court. Treece giggled and pranced behind her; Cammy cocked her head in a what-the-hell and joined them.

  Rich double, triple and quadruple took, mugging between the girls and Denis. “They’re hitting the showers!”

  Rich ran all the way out of the gym before having to run back in to get Denis.

  17.

  SKINNY DRIP

  SAY “WHAT THE FUCK”…IF YOU CAN’T SAY IT, YOU CAN’T DO IT.

  MILES DALBY

  “COME ON.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Come on.”

  “What are you doing!?”

  “Come on!”

  Rich was dragging Denis down the double staircase that led to the girls’ locker room. From inside could be heard the giggly echo of girls taking off their clothes.

  “We weren’t invited.”

  “I’m pretty sure we were.” Rich tugged.

  “Rich, you don’t have to prove anything.”

  Rich released Denis’s wrist and went into the locker room by himself.

  Denis watched the door close. He rubbed his wrist, contemplating the three-dimensional nude model of Beth Cooper he had rigorously constructed in his brain. Many data points were mere speculation, placeholders lifted from magazines and the Web, and it would be interesting to compare his hypothetically nude Beth Cooper with live field observations. It was what any true scientist would do.

  “Muy chiquitas!” Denis heard through the door, followed by assorted girlish sounds.

  DENIS STUCK HIS HEAD IN. Spinning blades did not decapitate him. He stepped all the way inside.

  The girls’ locker room smelled different than the boys’, but less different than he thought it would; it was the same sour milk and lemon bleach mélange, overlaid with stale perfumes playing on a dozen piquancies simultaneously. The place smelled exactly like his Great-Aunt Peg.

  Denis moved toward the giggling. The locker room was laid out, as he suspected, as a mirror image of the boys’. That meant, he calculated as he crept, the showers were just off the very next row of lock—

  Beth Cooper’s butt.

  He saw it for only a moment.

  At 2:32 a.m. on June 4th, in the two-thousand-and-seventh year of Christ (Our Lord).

  A Monday.

  It was more than perfection: more round, more buoyant, more everything you could want in an ass. It had a single, perfect flaw: a birthmark, on the right cheek, exactly where it would be if Cindy Crawford’s face were a butt.

  And then it was gone, with the rest of her, into the showers.

  Denis had been so enraptured he only now noticed Treece at the end of the aisle, facing him stark naked as well as totally nude in addition to fully, frontally, au naturel.

  “Come get wet,” Treece said, and ran to join her two nakedly nude female friends.

  Denis momentarily considered the possibility that he had fallen asleep watching Showtime Extreme.

  “That invitation good enough for you?”

  Denis also hadn’t noticed Rich, on the floor at his feet, struggling to get his pants off without taking the time to undo his belt and unzip his fly.

  “I don’t know about this, Rich.”

  Rich was up, trying to undo all the buttons of his shirt at once.

  “What’s to know? Stop thinking with your brain, dude!”

  The girls were laughing, shrieking and, apparently, slapping wet parts of one another.

  “They’re drunk.”

  “I know! We are so lucky!”

  “I just don’t want to ruin anything.”

  Rich was down to a pair of slightly irregular Tommy Hilfiger boxer briefs.

  “Dude, first of all, there’s nothing left to ruin, I regret to inform you. Except this. And this, my friend, is a rare occasion. Chances like this don’t come along every day! In fact, they never come along! This does not happen.”

  From the showers Treece singsang, “You guys coming?”

  Rich pointed emphatically in the direction of the moist female pulchritude. “Carpe diem! Seize the day, boys; make your lives extraordinary!—Robin Williams, The Dead Poets Society. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die—William Powell, The Thin Man. You only go around once in life!—Some beer commercial!”

  “Tonight I’d be happy just to stay alive,” Denis said.

  Rich shook his head as he shoveled off his underwear. “You’re not alive unless you’re living.”

  “Who said that?”

  Rich looked up, surprised.

  “I think I did.”

  He ran to the showers, where he whipped out his Nicholson:

  Heeeeeeeeeere’s Johnny!

  The girls whooped.

  Denis stared down the aisle. Draped across the bench that ran lengthwise between the locker banks was a predictable progression of shoes, blouses, brassieres and skirts. And there, at the end, was a swath of white cotton with tiny pink lettering.

  it called to him from afar, welcoming him to the party.

  The panties talked him into it. Yes, he was going to go for the gusto, carpe the diem. He was going to shower naked with three beautiful girls and his best friend. He was going to live. He certainly was!

  Denis sat on the bench and unlaced his shoes. He removed his right shoe, then his left, and placed them next to one another on the bench next to him. He removed his right sock, then the left, and stuffed them into his right and left shoes, respectively. He stood up, unhooked his belt, and began carefully snaking it out of his pants.

  “Hey,” he heard Rich giggle. “I can do that myself!”

  Denis whipped the belt from his pants like a rip-cord. He dropped his trousers, quickly folded them over his arm, and opened the locker, looking for a hanger. A hand reached over and took the pants from his arm. Denis closed the locker door and there was Kevin, holding Denis’s pants with one hand and punching him with the other.

  Denis stumbled into the bench and fell onto it, landing on his back with his legs on either side. Blood poured from both nostrils in symmetric streams down his cheeks. Kevin swung one foot over the bench and stood astride Denis, looming above him.

  Denis was confused. “How did you find us?”

  “LoJack, dipshit.”

  “But I’m the geek,” said Denis, truly aggrieved. “I’m supposed to use technology against you!”

  Kevin wound up to deliver a face-changing blow, targeting the strike with cruel precision.

  “Stop punching me!” Denis insisted.

  Denis scooted on his back, in modified crab walk, sliding twenty feet until there wasn’t any more bench. He launched off the end and oofed onto the concrete.

  Still straddling the bench, Kevin speed-waddled down the aisle until he was once again on top of Denis. He reached down and

  SWHACK!

  “Jah!” Kevin fell back, grabbing his eye.

  SEVENTY-FIVE INCHES of dripping freckles, packing two twisted white gym towels, thrust out a sunken chest.

  “Taste my wet blade!” Rich cried.

  Kevin came at him. Rich coolly snapped once, striking Adam’s apple; he advanced, snapping both wet towels with synchronous precision, driving Kevin back down the aisle.

  The girls rushed in behind him, gathering up clothing.

  “Doyle, Klepacki!” Kevin screamed.

  “Klepacki?” Treece vaguely recalled. “Oh, right. Dustin.”

  Sean Doyle and Dustin Klepacki stormed in, hoping to see the female flesh Kevin had forbidden them (he was an abusive lout of a boyfriend, but a gentleman). To their disappointment, the only flesh on display was pale, red and male. The girls were wrapped in tiny towels that nevertheless left far too much to their meager imaginations.

  Kevin pointed angrily at Rich.

  “Aren
’t you going to say, ‘Get them!’?” cracked Denis, back on his feet. “Or, ‘Bring them to me!’?”

  Kevin chose, “Kill them both!”

  “Oh, boy!” Rich said. “Gollum in LOTR: The Two Towers—”

  Sean and Dustin advanced. Rich sidearmed them both, snapping their outermost nipples.

  “…2002, Peter Jackson.”

  They came again. Rich overhanded them in the mouth and ear, respectively.

  “Also Vladislaus Dracula in Van Helsing, 2004, Stephen Sommers.” Rich tossed a wet towel back to Denis, who caught it with unexpected élan. As Rich tactically retreated, Denis moved forward until they presented a united defense. “Go,” Denis called over his shoulder. “We can handle these three. We’ve been preparing for this all our lives.”

  Without even looking, Denis snapped Kevin in the belly button, which he knew from experience was exquisitely vulnerable.

  THEIR FRESHMAN YEAR, Rich was on the receiving end of a mass towel-snapping that briefly landed him in the hospital. He feigned unconsciousness to halt the assault; the school nurse, who once sent a headachy kid back to class with meningitis, called an ambulance. The MRI, which his father was certainly not going to pay for, showed nothing, and Rich was sent home with a doctor’s note that kept him out of gym for the rest of the year.

  Rich vowed he would never again be the victim of this specific sort of attack, and dragooned Denis as his sparring partner. Together they developed the perfect rat tail, experimenting with rolling patterns and moisture levels; they discovered the most devastating towel was rolled wet, so tightly as to wring it nearly dry, and then resoaked just before use. They practiced on each other, first using Indiana Jones, the Skywalkers and the Bride Who Killed Bill as battle models, moving on to bullwhip fetish videos that weren’t terribly useful, eventually graduating to enthusiast Web sites and barely legal books such as Filipino Fighting Whip (Tom Meadows, Paladin Press, $20), which taught Advanced Training Methods and Combat Applications based on the ancient martial art of Kali.

  They got quite good.

  Denis was not the towel master Rich was, but could hold his own, as evidenced by the double snap he had just applied to both of Kevin’s cheeks, very nearly simultaneously. They were backing up the staircase, casting long shadows on the wall like some black-and-white guy from some old movie, with Rich supplying the matinee sound track.

  “Dah dah dah-dah, dah dah-dah,” he Indiana a cappellaed. “Dah dah-dah, dah dah dah-dah-dah!”

  The army men, despite their combat experience, couldn’t seem to outflank these two boys and their John Williams score.

  “Dah dah-dah! dah dah-dah! Dah dah-dah! Dah dah-dah dah dah!”

  Near the top, Kevin perceived an advantage and led a charge.

  “Yaaaaaaaa—ach!”

  Rich tagged him right on the tongue.

  Kevin recoiled onto his compatriots and they all tumbled down the stairs together, landing in a hopefully broken heap.

  “Classic!” Rich yelled.

  “Great. Let’s get out of here.”

  “You go.” Rich assumed the heroic persona. “I can hold them off.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “They don’t want me. They want you. And I can run twice as fast as you can.”

  That was debatable, but with the forces below rapidly regrouping, Denis decided to accept the gesture as best as one teenage boy could accept the love of another.

  He handed Rich his towel.

  “I’d hug you, but you’re naked.”

  “Understood.”

  18.

  THE PUNCHLINE

  THAT WAS WAY HARSH, TAI.

  CHER HOROWITZ

  THE GIRLS WERE AT THE BACK ENTRANCE, discussing something, when Denis arrived. He was pinching his ruptured nose, to little stanching effect.

  “What’s ub?”

  “We’re fucked,” Cammy said, summing it up nicely.

  Flashing lights directed Denis’s attention outside, where a police car was parked next to the Hummer. A Buffalo Grove peace officer had a clipboard wedged against her belly and was writing down license plate information.

  Denis was about to be arrested. He was trespassing in his high school, and he wasn’t wearing pants.

  “It’s like that dream,” Denis said.

  “Shush,” Beth said. She pointed. Fifty feet from the Hummer, its wheels half up on the curb, was her Cabriolet. Kevin had taken it from the party, after Sean and Dustin had persuaded a valet that he didn’t need a ticket. Denis had never seen it with the top up; it was a crummy little car.

  “Come on.”

  “Come what on?” Denis asked.

  Beth and the girls had slipped out the door and were darting between clumps of bushes en route to the convertible. Denis briefly balanced the positives and negatives of eluding the police with the positives and negatives of surrendering to the police multiplied by the exclusively negatives of the infantry men behind him, and followed.

  BETH CRAWLED to the passenger side, the one facing away from the crime scene. She discreetly opened the door and climbed in. The others bunny-hopped and monkey-walked into the car. The stealth was unnecessary; the police officer was on the phone with her husband, telling him where the goddamn diaper wipes were for the five-hundredth goddamn time.

  “Fuck,” Beth whispered, finding no key in the ignition. She reached into the sun visor. “Fuckety fuck,” she said, “fucker took the fucking spare.”

  Denis had never heard a complete sentence that was more than fifty percent fuck before.

  “Listen,” Denis suggested. “Maybe we should just—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Denis!”

  Beth reached under the steering column and popped a panel out of the dashboard. She fiddled with some wires. Nothing could surprise Denis at this point, and yet this did.

  “You also hotwire cars?”

  “Just this one. Sometimes my parents take away the keys.”

  The car started. Still hunched below windshield level, Beth put the Cabriolet into drive.

  “Wait,” Denis said, “Rich!”

  “Forget him,” said Cammy. “He’s already dead.”

  “I can’t leave without my friend.” Denis reached for the door.

  Beth grabbed his thigh in such a way as to not cause an erection. This was remarkable; Denis sometimes got erections from grabbing his own thigh. Beth was gritting her teeth and Denis saw something in her face he had never, ever seen before. She was desperate.

  “Denis,” she said. “I could go to jail.”

  You’re going to jail anyway, Denis thought, and you’ll probably go to less jail if you turn yourself in. But he knew a little about Beth now, and a lot about desperation, and so he determined this advice would likely not be received in the spirit it was given. He also knew he wasn’t leaving Rich behind, which meant letting Beth go. Rich wouldn’t approve.

  Nevertheless.

  Denis tried to think of an appropriate exit line, something romantic and yet manly, like See ya in the funny papers, Funny Face, except it would have to make some sense in this context and not use the same adjective twice. Ironically, if Rich were here he’d have the perfect line, only then it wouldn’t be necessary. That was ironic, wasn’t it? It was so hard to tell anymore.

  Beth’s desperation was beginning to take on exasperated and peevish undertones.

  “I won’t give you up,” Denis said finally, too late to have any iconic impact, even if it hadn’t come out as I woe gib oo ub.

  Denis reached for the door again but the handle fell away. A long speckled creature clamored across his lap and into the backseat.

  “We should probably go,” Rich said.

  HAD THE POLICE OFFICER been paying attention, she would have noticed the driverless convertible drop off the curb and slowly roll away. She was, however, dealing with a domestic disturbance. “Oh, well, here’s an idea: you get a job that pays for more than your goddamn beer and then I’d be goddamn delighted to stay home and
take care of our child!”

  Through the rearview mirror, Beth could see the officer waving her arms and screaming into her cell.

  “What’s she doing?”

  “She’s calling for backup,” stated Denis.

  “HEY!”

  The yell came not from the police officer but from the entrance to the building, where Kevin, Sean and the one called Dustin had just emerged.

  “Shit,” Beth said, and floored it. The police officer noticed this, sighed, “I gotta go, sweetie,” and hung up the phone. She did not leap into her patrol car, light the cherries and peel out while shouting into the radio about being in pursuit of suspects traveling west on Dundee Road, because this was Buffalo Grove. There were no high speed chases in Buffalo Grove, especially of teenagers, because in Buffalo Grove, the teenagers, no matter what they had done, eventually went home.

  She pulled out her clipboard and added a line to her report.

  BETH HAD THE REMARKABLE ABILITY to dress herself under a towel without revealing anything, while at the same time driving recklessly at high speed.

  Clothing flurried about the backseat as two girls and a guy sorted out their wardrobes.

  “That’s my top,” Cammy accused Treece.

  “I’m borrowing it.”

  “You’re going to boob it all out.”

  Treece threw the top, hitting Rich on the face. He caught it in his teeth, and offered it up to Cammy, doggy-style.

  “Drop it,” Cammy commanded.

  Denis wasn’t getting dressed. He was squeezing his nose and estimating his rate of blood loss.

  “Where’s your pants?” Beth asked.

  “Your boyfriend has them.”

  “Well, they’re not going to fit him.” She glanced at Denis, frowned, reached behind him, and extracted something from inside his collar.

  “Oh, those,” Denis explained. “They must’ve gotten there when I slid—”

  “I don’t care, Denis,” Beth said, pulling on her panties as she cut off an eighteen-wheeler and veered onto the on-ramp for I-53 North.

  “Where are we going?”