I Love You, Beth Cooper (11 page)

RICH HAD NOT NOTICED
the barbed wire fence at first and this had caused a slight delay. He was now in the field, approaching the west face of the cow, not nearly fast enough.

“Go, go,” Treece insisted. “Go!”

Rich turned around, tamping his hands as he stepped backward, “Don't…wake…the…”

PLORP.

Rich felt his shoe sinking into a thick mud that was not mud. It made a wet sucking sound, pulling his foot in deeper. He had stepped in quickshit.

He jerked his leg up. Balancing on one foot, he inspected the befouled area. It was bright yellow, the exact color of his socks. In horror, he looked down. The cow plop had swallowed the toe of his shoe and was methodically oozing up the tongue, threatening to breach the rim. He reached down to rescue it, lost footing, hopped and

SQUITT
.

THERE SHE WAS,
feet on the seat, arms around her knees, rocking back and forth, not at all in time to the music. Denis had something to say but decided to wait until the song was over in about twenty seconds.

“Beth,” he jumped in anyway. “I lied before. About this song. I mean, I wasn't expecting to be listening to it with anyone, you especially…”

Beth opened another beer. “Life's full of surprises.”

“Not mine,” Denis said. “Usually.”

Beth turned off the car; the radio went silent. She swiveled toward Denis. She swigged her beer and perched the can on a kneecap.

She was staring into Denis's eyes, not saying
anything, but asking something. Denis didn't know what, and didn't care. He couldn't get enough of this eye-to-eye stuff.

And yet, just below Beth's eyes, her knees were ten inches apart.

It took all the willpower Denis possessed to not look up her skirt.
You've seen everything there is to see down there,
he told his visual cortex,
there's no need to—

spoke the panties.

Beth closed her knees without calling attention to Denis's pubic snooping. She smiled at him in a tentative way.

“So…why me?”

Denis had never considered this question, putting it on a very short list of unquestioned aspects of his universe. Beth Cooper was an axiom, an irreducible truth, like the sky being blue (though the latter is a more complex phenomenon, involving the differential scattering of electromagnetic radiation by particles with dimensions smaller than the wavelength of the radiation, as Denis exhaustively lectured Mrs. Anclade in the third grade). The choice of Beth Cooper was simple, and pure, and for Denis's purposes here, completely inexplicable.

“You?” he said after much too long a pause.

“Why not Claudia Confer? She's prettier than me, and a
lot
nicer.”

“I don't think she's…” Denis began compiling a Beth Cooper vs. Claudia Confer Benchmark Comparison, but lacking sufficient data, he said the only thing that came to mind.

“I didn't sit behind Claudia Confer.”

Beth laughed, dribbling beer onto her chin. She
wiped it off and licked her fingers. Denis decided that if reincarnation was real, through some heretofore undiscovered nonquantum mechanism, he would like to come back as one or more of Beth Cooper's fingers.

“You never even
talked
to me,” Beth said.

“You didn't seem too interested.” He stated a truth he had successfully repressed until now. “I'm surprised you even know who I am.”

“I know who you are!”

Beth had two distinct memories of Denis Cooverman:

Denis, at a blackboard, finishing an equation. He turns around, his fly open, stars on his underpants;

and

looking up Denis's nose as he says, “I love you, Beth Cooper.”

Beth took a long slurp of beer. “How could I
not
know Denis Cooverman?”

RICH SCRAPED THE SIDES OF HIS SHOES
along the grass as he approached the cow in anger. Earlier he had no beef with this specific cow, was merely going through the motions of tipping it. But now it had attacked him, indirectly, and it was going down.

The cow stood there, eyes closed, legs locked. This was the secret to tipping cows: they were fast asleep yet completely rigid. One push and they were sideways cows.

Rich positioned himself at mid-cow and placed his hands on its side about two feet apart. He pushed. The cow's belly gave slightly but its hooves remained firmly in the meadow. He shoved. The cow remained upright.

“Use your physics!” Treece advised from the sideline.

Rich repositioned his hands closer together, bent his head down, and put his back into it. He switched his feet back and forth, marching in place to gain a hold, and then running, his shoes spinning on the shit-slick grass.

He went down.

“Little help, ladies?”

CAMMY AND TREECE WERE LAUGHING
at Denis again; he could hear their merriment in the wind. It was quiet in the car. Beth had stopped talking, the music wasn't playing, and Denis didn't know what to do. Before tonight, he had never spoken to Beth without her speaking to him first. He had had plenty to say, much of it well-rehearsed, but when the opportunity arose to say it, he had always
pussed out,
in Rich's helpful analysis. The lone exception had been graduation, and even then he had been careful not to look in her eyes, knowing that if she had seemed the slightest bit upset or saddened or repulsed by his declaration, his heart would have arrested and his face would have bounced off the lectern as he crumpled to the podium, dead. Or thrown up at the very least.

There were her eyes now, two delicious dog's breakfasts, watching him from behind a sixteen-ounce can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

What was she thinking?

“What are you thinking?” Denis asked, cheating.

“Nothing.”

Goddammit.
That was all he had.

How could that be? Denis spoke nine languages, three of them real, had countless debate trophies (16), had won the Optimist Club's Oratorical Contest with a speech the judges had called the most pessimistic they had ever heard. Was there no romantic line, no con
versation starter, no charming anecdote, no bon mot, no riddle or limerick he could pull out of his ass right now?

He swallowed some beer. And it came to him. Alcohol was amazing.

“We
did
talk,” Denis said, arguing with something Beth had said nearly seven minutes earlier. “You borrowed a pencil once. You signed my yearbook.”

Beth allowed the pencil, but “When did I sign your yearbook?”

Alcohol was a bastard, Denis realized. “Seventh grade.”

“What'd I write?”

“I don't—”

“You remember.”

He remembered:

Denis cringed as he recited it, and left off
your friend, Beth
, because it was already sufficiently pathetic.

Beth put down her beer. She reached out and touched Denis's shoulder. “I'm sorry I led you on.”

Denis almost thanked her for the apology, but read her eyes, and laughed. So did she.

This was going incredibly well. Denis was determined to keep it going until he figured out a way to destroy it.

“So, we can talk
now
. Here, how about: what are you doing after graduation? I'm going to, it's this six-year combined pre-med/med-school thing. After that I'm not sure if I want to practice or maybe do research…”

Beth retrieved her beer. “Hey, good luck with that.”

“So, where are
you
going?”

“I dunno.” She finished the can. “Maybe Harper's.”

Offering credit courses in:

Applied Porcelain Sanitation;

Certified Dining Assistance;

Apparel Folding Science
…

“Oh,” Denis said. And:
“Yeah?”

“Maybe. If I can afford it.”

There, that wasn't so hard. It only took him thirty seconds. Not a record, but a solid effort. Denis couldn't determine what was worst, his dweebish braggadocio, Beth's disturbing educational plans, or that his condescending horror at them was so obvious.

“I have to pee.” Beth got out, walked behind the car and squatted out of view.

Denis sat in the car, not sure of anything, only that he hated himself, and listened to her pee.

TWO GIRLS AND A BOY
lined up along the cow.

Treece sniffed. “Don't these things ever take a shower?”

“Sh,” Rich hushed. “Okay, on four.”

“Four?”

“You want to supervise this project?”

Cammy demurred.

“Then, on
four.
”

Cammy was almost as bad as Denis, Rich thought. Almost. Denis was a real killjoy. He could construct a timeline between any idea and fatality. This had pre
vented Rich from pursuing many intriguing notions, such as sticking Alka-Seltzer up his butt (at seven, Rich had never heard of an embolism, but Denis made a convincing case against wanting one). Rich chafed at Denis's brain ruining all their fun, and by mutual agreement went to amusement parks without him, but the doom-modeling had saved Rich's life on at least five occasions:

the “Super Juice” made from Orange Powerade,
Batman Returns
cereal, crushed Superman vitamins and topped with Mr. Muscle oven cleaner (age 5);

the reenactment of the mining car chase from
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(age 9);

the
Harold and Maude
fake suicide reenactment and sympathy ploy (age 14);

the bulk-up and get-revenge plan predicated on taking “steroids” supplied by Henry Giroux (age 16);

the April Fool's Day Columbine “gag” reenactment (age 17).

Tipping a cow was less potentially deadly than any of the above, but Denis's joy-killing might have proven useful here.

“Uno, dos, tres, catorce!”

On
catorce,
they all began pushing and Cammy muttered
quatro.
Had Denis been there, he would have pointed out it was nearly impossible to tip a cow, for the same reason Treece could not sleep on her stomach: ballast.

“This is stupid,” Cammy grunted.

Denis would have agreed. Because, in addition to the mechanical difficulties of overturning an underslung half-ton object, cows can't lock their legs and they don't sleep standing up. This cow was just resting her eyes, and though she was laid-back, even for a cow, she had come to the conclusion that these people weren't going to go away by themselves. Her head turned with remarkable swiftness, her muzzle close
enough to Rich's face that her whiskers tickled his lips when she screamed,
“Moo!”

A HIDEOUS SOUND
followed by a shriek disrupted absolutely nothing in the Cabriolet.

“What was
that?!
”

“Sounded like a cow,” Beth said.

“A
cow?
That was no…ordinary cow.”

Beth was deep into her fourth beer. “You're not afraid of cows, are you, Denis Cooverman?”

“Vaccaphobic?” Denis shook his head. “Of course not.”

“Jesus fuck!” Rich sprinted out of the mist and hurdled into the backseat, winded. Cammy and Treece, falling over each other with throaty and nasal laughters, staggered up a few seconds later. Treece had to lean against the trunk with both hands to keep from passing out with amusement.

“What's wrong?” Denis asked.

“What's so funny?” Beth asked.

“Nothing's funny,” Rich wailed. “A cow bit me!”

“Cows can't bite,” Denis said. “They lack upper incisors.”

Rich jabbed viciously at a fantastically large hickey on his neck. “Well,
this one fucking could,
Tiny Einstein!” He had never called Denis that in front of anyone else before.