I Love You, Beth Cooper

by Larry Doyle

  “We broke at least nine, ten, laws. We’ve got to get out of town.”

  “Let’s go to my dad’s cabin!” Treece suggested. “He lets me go there any time I want, as long as I don’t tell Mom where it is.”

  Denis shook his head vigorously, reopening the nasal bloodgates. “I can’t ‘get out of town’!”

  Beth angrily shook the splatter off her hand.

  “Enough, Denis. Enough, okay?! You started this!”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. You’re the geek who stood up in front of our entire school, and all our family and friends, and declared your ‘love’ for someone you don’t know a thing about!”

  “He knows a lot about you,” Rich defended Denis. “Quiz him!”

  “He didn’t know about Kevin,” Treece pointed out.

  “There were lapses in the intelligence,” Rich acknowledged, then remembered: “He can do your signature!”

  “You said it was sweet,” Denis murmured.

  Beth snorted. It wasn’t a nice snort.

  “And you came to my house!” he countered her snort. “If you didn’t think it was sweet, why’d you come to my house?!”

  Beth didn’t answer.

  Cammy answered.

  “What do you think, super genius? We thought it would be funny.”

  “Oh,” Denis said.

  Rich went for the face save: “Us, too. I mean, the head cheerleader and captain of the debate team? That’s always hilarious…”

  DENIS’S BRAIN PLAYED IT ALL BACK FOR HIM, another hilarious episode of:

  LEAVE IT TO PENIS

  “THE GRAND DELUSION”

  FADE IN:

  INT. BUFFALO GROVE HIGH SCHOOL -- CAFETERIA

  STANDING AGAINST THE CINDER BLOCK IS DENIS “THE PENIS” COOVERMAN. HIS GRADUATION GOWN DRAGS ON THE GROUND AND HIS MORTAR IS TOO SMALL FOR HIS HUMONGOUS HEAD. HE FIDGETS AND TWITCHES AS HE TRIES TO ASSUME A “COOL” POSE AGAINST THE WALL. HE DOES A DOUBLETAKE AS HE NOTICES…

  BETH COOPER, HEAD CHEERLEADER AND PROM QUEEN, IS WALKING TOWARD HIM.

  DENIS GYRATES AND CONTORTS IN AN EFFORT TO LOOK LIKE HE DOESN’T NOTICE. HE LOOKS LIKE A SPAZ.

  SFX: LAUGHTER

  BETH STOPS A FEW FEET FROM DENIS. SHE IS SLIGHTLY TALLER THAN HE IS.

  BETH

  You embarrassed me.

  DENIS’S MOUTH HANGS OPEN. A BEAT. ANOTHER BEAT.

  SFX: LAUGHTER

  BETH (CONT’D)

  (BEGRUDGING) But it was so “sweet”,

  I’ll have to let you live.

  DENIS

  (VOICE SQUEAKING) Great. That’s great.

  SFX: LAUGHTER

  BETH, UNCOMFORTABLE, LOOKS BEHIND HER. HER TWO FRIENDS, CAMMY AND TREECE, ARE LAUGHING. THEY URGE HER TO CONTINUE.

  BETH

  So…Henneman must’ve given you major junk.

  DENIS

  (ACTING “COOL”) Some junk. Little junk.

  A modicum of debris.

  BETH ROLLS HER EYES.

  SFX: LAUGHTER

  BETH

  (CHANGING SUBJECT) Was it like 800 degrees in there? Like boiling?

  DENIS SNORTS POMPOUSLY.

  DENIS

  (“PROFESSOR KNOW-IT-ALL”) Actually, the boiling point

  -- of water -- is 212 degrees. Fahrenheit.

  HE SWITCHES TO HIS “COOL” GUY.

  DENIS (CONT’D)

  (COCKS FINGER) One-hundred Celcius.

  SFX: LAUGHTER, CONTINUING, AT HIS EXPENSE

  DENIS FELT LIKE he had been punched in the heart.

  He let go of his nose. The blood poured forth like tears, only red and disgusting.

  Beth expressed some concern.

  “Are you going to keep bleeding?”

  “For about three days.”

  “Tip your head back.”

  Denis tipped his head back. He made a face.

  “Now it’s running down my throat.”

  Treece’s hand appeared next to his head, holding two tiny white cylindrical objects.

  “Here, stick these up there. They’re super absorbent.”

  “Gah!” Denis said.

  “They’ll fit,” Treece assured him. “They’re comfort minis.”

  Denis batted her kind offer away. She dropped them in his lap.

  “Fine,” she said. “Bleed to death.”

  Denis quietly bled to death.

  It was all a joke.

  Or, more accurately, he was all a joke. A beaten, bleeding, pantless joke.

  Denis picked up the tampons.

  Perfect, he chuckled, choked on some blood, and cacked it onto his lap.

  19.

  LOVE MEANS

  LOVE MAKES ROOM FOR FAULT.

  GIDGET LAWRENCE

  THE ROAD WAS DARK, lit only by fireflies.

  They were headed north through Lake County, which was known for its lakes. Fox, Griswold, Nipersink and Pistakee Lakes. Lakes Catherine, Louise and Marie. There were a few hundred thousand others, according to the brochures.

  Denis had never been to any of them, though he had snorkled in three oceans and four seas. His parents had wanted him to be cosmopolitan, rather than a child.

  It was almost 4 a.m. In the backseat, Treece was asleep on Rich’s shoulder, her mouth wide open. Rich, in turn, was leaning on Cammy, dreaming in wide-screen. Cammy considered shoving him off her. Instead she closed her eyes.

  The radio kept playing DJ C’s Slamming Graduation Mix. They had been through:

  “Graduation,” by Third Eye Blind, “The Graduation Song” by Dave Matthews, and that Vitamin C song that wouldn’t go away;

  “Graduation Day”s by Head Automatica, Kanye West, Chris Isaak and Gym Class Heroes;

  The Goo Goo Dolls’ “Better Days” and 10,000 Maniacs’ “These are Days”;

  “Bittersweet Symphony” by the Verve or Semisonic or one of those;

  “Blackbird” by the Beatles and “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “Fly Like an Eagle” by Steve Miller and “I Believe I Can Fly” by R. Kelly and “Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz, and Dropline’s “Fly Away from Here (Graduation Day)”.

  Now playing was the Calling’s “Our Lives,” or the Ataris’s “In This Diary”; Denis had trouble telling them apart.

  These are the days worth living…

  DENIS AND BETH HAD NOT SPOKEN to each other through any of it. It was possible that they would never speak again. Denis would never figure out if Beth was nice, crazy, sad or mean, or some combination and in what proportions. Beth would never learn that beneath Denis’s geek exterior there was a far more complicated Denis, roiling with neurosis, obsession and fear, and if that wasn’t enticing enough, beneath that lay a sea of undifferentiated rage, the kind women like. Beth and Denis would be like two ships, two ships that sideswiped, causing ugly but not irreparable hull damage, and then passed in the night.

  What kind of fool was Denis to ever imagine it could have been any different? There was no fool like a high-IQ fool. He could calculate © two different ways, the Wallis method and the Leibniz Series, but he could not see what any idiot could see, what everyone saw, many of them idiots: Beth was beautiful, popular and had a peerless derriere, and he was just another dweeb with two bloody tampons hanging out of his nostrils.

  Let’s make the best out of our lives

  “HEY,” BETH SAID. She turned down the radio. She did not look at him, which was for the best.

  “I wanted to say,” Beth said, “about what Cammy said. She thought it would be funny. I mean, we all thought it would be like a fun thing, and…I guess I did think it would be kind of funny. I’m sorry.”

  Denis said nothing.

  “But I—” Beth went silent for several seconds.

  Then she said:

  “Guys tell me they love me all the time. But that’s usually when…they want something.”

  Denis had not wanted that, not specifically, not right away.

  “So I just…I don’t know.”

  She seem
ed finished.

  “Well,” Denis said, “it was kind of funny.”

  He took the ends of the tampons and strung them out, making a superabsorbent handlebar mustache.

  Beth laughed, and gagged. “Is it possible that you could please take those out now?”

  “Let’s see.” Denis comically yanked the strings.

  It hurt so much.

  His nostrils had stopped bleeding, but now they burned like he had snorted fluorine. Denis dangled the assailants in front of his face. There were tiny hairs stuck on the end. Denis blinked back tears so as not to undercut the humor of his amusing mutilation.

  “Voilà,” he said with brave insouciance. “Do you have, one of those, um…bags?”

  Beth reached down next to her seat and pulled out a McDonald’s bag. She looked away as she handed it to him.

  “Thank you,” Denis said, debonairly dropping the bloodied wads into the bag. “You know, it’s funny. Or interesting. Tampon is the actual medical term for the cotton plug they use to treat epistaxis, or nosebleeds…”

  “Fucking Kevin,” Beth said, slamming the steering wheel with her palm.

  Denis sensed the subject had changed. He didn’t have a lot more on tampons anyway. “Yeah,” he said in support of Beth’s statement. “Fuck that Kevin.”

  “Have you ever been in love?” Beth asked Denis.

  Denis didn’t know how to answer that. He knew the answer, or thought he knew the answer, but this didn’t seem like the appropriate time to bring it up.

  “I mean, truly in love,” Beth continued, as if responding to what he thought. “In true love.”

  A couple of weeks before, Denis had gotten an e-mail from Rich.

  From: RichMunsch@yahoo.com

  Subject: True Love

  Date: May 19, 2007 11:25:39 PM EDT

  To: DenisCooverman@yahoo.com

  * * *

  “There’s her poop. It just came out of her butt. I can feel it. I can feel the poop. It’s warm. It just came from her butt. This was just inside of her. My girl. I’m touching it. It’s her poop. It’s Wendy’s poop. I know it may seem weird that I touched her poop, but it was inside of her.”

  —Timothy Treadwell

  It was a quote from a movie, like most of Rich’s e-mails were, and while Denis never figured out which movie, he found himself agreeing with it. That was true love. By that definition, he had not quite made it to true love.

  Beth had a different definition.

  “You know, where you love someone, with your whole heart, you just love them, and they can be mean to you, and hurt you, not physically, but hurt you, you know, make you feel like shit or worthless, but you still love him? You know what I mean?”

  “I’m beginning to,” Denis said.

  Beth smiled.

  “It can really suck, huh?”

  Denis could see what was happening here, what he was being repurposed as, but it was better than nothing, he figured.

  “How long have you two been going out?” Beth’s new friend who was a boy asked.

  “Since Christmas. We met right after. And, you know, he’s been away since then, but we kept in touch, and the whole thing sort of happened through e-mail.”

  “That’s great.”

  “He’s a really sweet guy,” Beth said. “Online.”

  “Sweet,” Denis repeated. So both he and an abusive whoremongering, child-killing cokehead were sweet.

  “You don’t want to talk about him,” Beth said. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  Too tired, perhaps, Denis spoke without even overthinking.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Is it about my boobs?”

  “No, but I do have several queries in the arena, which I’ll get to.”

  “They’re Cs. Bs during basketball season. Ms. Levitt doesn’t like us flopping all over the place. Except Treece. She can’t help it. I’m sorry. What was your question?”

  “Oh, I was just wondering about your brother.”

  “What about him?”

  “I don’t know. Like, what was his name?”

  Denis had speculated that his name was Dennis.

  “David.”

  “What was he like?”

  “I have no idea,” Beth said. “He was already sick when I was born. He died when I was two. He was twelve. I don’t remember him at all. There’s this picture of me visiting him in the hospital, but it’s like he’s just some sick kid.”

  WHEN DENIS WAS TEN, he told his parents he wanted a baby brother. Since he had never expressed any interest in a sibling, they asked him why. He said that he thought he might be coming down with leukemia, and that he would need a close blood relative for bone marrow transplants. He had read about the bioethics of parents having a second child to provide marrow for an ill sibling in an issue of the Journal of Juvenile Oncology that he had been secretly subscribing to. He theorized there would be no ethical issue if his parents had the child before he was diagnosed, as a preventative measure. Only he used the word prophylactic. That’s when they knew he was going to be a doctor.

  Denis’s parents said they would see what they could do, but they didn’t, not really.

  “LEUKEMIA,” DENIS SAID.

  Beth was spooked. “How’d you know that?”

  “What else do little kids die of?” Denis said.

  “Oh, right,” said Beth. “You’re the doctor.”

  “I’m sorry. About David.”

  “It’s kind of stupid. My big sad story. It’s like the dramatic tragedy of my life, and I wasn’t even there. And it’s not even an interesting story. Excuse me.”

  Beth stopped the car, opened her door, and threw up. She closed the door, and continued driving.

  “You okay?”

  “That was shitty champagne.” She turned to Denis, smiling through watery eyes and lips glazed with vomitus. “Yours was much nicer.”

  The radio was now playing Ataris’s “In This Diary,” or the Calling’s “Our Lives,” whichever the other one was.

  These are the best days of our lives

  “Um,” Beth said, “Can I say something personal?”

  Please do. “Uh. Yeah. Sure.”

  “You kind of…reek.”

  Denis sighed heavily. “It’s the fear.”

  “I think it’s your shirt.”

  Denis looked down. His rugby shirt was a goulash of putrefying meats, molding cheeses, salmonelling creams and ptomaining tapenades.

  “I kind of spilled some dip on it.”

  “Take it off.”

  Denis’s pupils constricted involuntarily.

  “I’m not going to molest you.”

  “I wasn’t terribly concerned about that.”

  Denis removed his shirt in the manner of a girl at a strip poker game, maintaining maximum coverage until the last possible moment.

  “Personally,” Beth said. “I hate hairy chests.” She put out her hand and snapped her fingers. “Hand it over.” Denis handed it over.

  “Let’s give it a little air…”

  Beth held the shirt out of the window and shook it. Smelly bits and rancid ooze took to the wind and the whole operation went swimmingly until the shirt flew out of her hand.

  “Oh, shit!” Beth laughed.

  She slammed on the brakes.

  In the backseat, Cammy woke up to discover she was cradling Rich like a baby. She flung him off like he was a severed head that had landed on her in a horror movie.

  Treece, who lay in Rich’s lap, jostled half awake. “Okay,” she mumbled. “Okey-dokey…” She started to unbuckle Rich’s belt. Rich reached down and eased her automated mouth away from his fly. She happily went back to sleep.

  Beth threw the vehicle into reverse and spun the wheel to execute a three-point turn in only two points.

  “THERE IT IS.” Denis spotted the shirt crumpled at the side of the road. Beth stopped.

  Nobody said anything for a moment.

  “I’ll get it,”
Denis said.

  The cold gravel on his feet and cool breeze on most of his skin reminded Denis: he was a man in underpants. He crouched as he entered the high-beamed proscenium, reflexively covering his ass, and was further reminded: he was a man in lucky underpants.

  These were the briefs his mother had begged him to burn: inelastic and threadbare with three or more holes conspiring in the rear. At least they were white(ish) and not star-spangled or Spider-Manned, styles he retired sophomore year after the Geometry Incident. He had worn this lucky pair to every debate tournament except State, when he let his mother pack, and look what happened there. He had worn them for his graduation speech, washed them, and put them on again with his party attire, feeling they would boost his confidence and possibly perform miracles.

  His mother suspected as much.

  “You’re not wearing those awful underpants,” she asked.

  “Mom,” he answered.

  “What if you do get lucky?” his father argued. “Then you’re wearing ratty underpants.”

  His mother rejected both sides of the proposition. “He is not wearing those things. And he is not getting lucky, not like that. Not on my watch.”

  Denis swiveled to remove his rear from direct view, sidling away from the headlights in nondominant primate fashion. He reached down for his shirt, intending to tie it around his waist like a big-assed girl, and discovered he was not alone.

  He saw their eyes first. Four red circles, vibrating. Then he heard the high chittering sound. Two raccoons were inspecting his shirt, and finding it delicious. From inside the car, where Beth and the others were watching, they must have looked awfully cute. But from Denis’s perspective, low to the ground and close enough to see their rabid little teeth and razor yellow claws, they appeared as what they were: fierce competitors for a valuable resource.

  “No,” Denis said. “That’s not food, it’s a polyblend.”

  The raccoons switched from nervous trill to robust snarl with stunning alacrity. Denis was back in the car almost as quickly.

  They all watched as the raccoons clutched the shirt, nibbling, and then scampered with their catch into the woods.

  Cammy and Rich found this rip-snorting.

  “Oh, Denis,” Beth said, utterly contrite. “I am so sorry.” And then she cracked up.