I Love You, Beth Cooper (15 page)

“I'm bleeding. Happy
now?”

In answer, Kevin reached down, took Denis by the shirt, and lifted him to his feet and two inches farther, dangling him on tiptoes. Adding insult to impending injury, Zooey Bananafish had overruled his last song request, replacing the downbeat dirge with some uptempo sino-blaxploitation. Kevin seemed to approve, pursing his lips with white-boy negritude and bopping Denis up and down to the beat.

“‘Battle Without Honor or Humanity,' Tomoyasu Hotei,” Rich explained to Sean, “originally used in
Shin Jingi Naki Tatakai,
2000, Junji Sakamoto, recycled in the chop-socky pastiche
Kill Bill, Volume One,
2003, Mister Quentin Tarantino.”

“Fuckin' A,” Sean agreed.

Kevin continued to shake Denis like a maraca, apparently waiting to pummel him at the upcoming horn break. This was beyond embarrassing. It was sorry enough to be beaten to the delight of your peers; to be made to perform meat puppetry as your own premurder entertainment was at the very least unsporting.

“I am not your plaything!” Denis said, all pissy insistence. “Hit me or put me down!”

“Glad to oblige.” Kevin cocked his fist.

Then, as is often the case with carefully planned military operations, something huge jumped on Kevin's back.

“Leave my friend alone!” Greg Saloga yelled, latching on to Kevin's eyebrow ridges and yanking hard. Kevin
let go of Denis and staggered backward, spinning and stumbling as the big red boy clawed his face and throat. The third Army Man stepped in, and in a flurry of expert hand combat mixed liberally with playground flailing, disengaged Greg Saloga and secured his arms. This annoyed Greg Saloga. He screamed and threw his head back, butting his captor's eyes. The soldier fell to the carpet.

Sean released Rich and grabbed a crystal ladle from the champagne fountain. He swung it at Greg Saloga, who allowed the leaded glass cudgel to shatter harmlessly on his temple. Greg Saloga then harmfully kicked Sean in the testicles. Sean went down.

Coach Raupp stormed over to Greg Saloga.

“Yo,
time out,
Saloga—”

Greg Saloga punched Coach Raupp in the throat. He went down.

Kevin, in villain tradition, had stood back and watched his henchmen vanquished like henchmice. With the seething hulk of Greg Saloga now facing him directly, Kevin had the option of fighting this obviously less skilled and now exhausted boy, or honoring the other villain tradition and running away. Kevin began to edge back toward the door. There was no need. Greg Saloga glanced at the inert and writhing bodies around him and fell to his knees, letting out the most primal wail anyone had heard in a couple hundred thousand years. He covered his face and screamed into his hands, “Why must I…
hurt?
”

An electric whirr preceded Becky Reese as she maneuvered her wheelchair through the crowd and motored over to Greg Saloga. He grasped both wheels and dropped his terrible head into her withered lap. He sobbed, and she stroked his greasy hair, for wasn't he
also one of God's creatures after all? And the only boy in the entire class who had ever voluntarily talked to her?

Everyone had forgotten about the execution of Denis Cooverman, and were caught up in the heartrending saga of borderline retarded Greg Saloga and his repulsive love for the genetically defective Becky Something, until Greg Saloga looked up and screamed,
“Stop looking at us!”

Everybody stopped looking at them, and turned back to…
Denis?

Kevin himself was surveilling the perimeter for his missing plaything:

Rich was at the champagne fountain, rubbing his raw neck on the ice bison…

some kid…

Cammy staring back with light contempt…

Treece with vacant evasiveness…

another kid…

nice tits…

Valli with a needy grin…

“
Yeeuh!
Stop breathing up my skirt!”

Kevin ratcheted back to Treece. She stepped sideways, swatting behind her, revealing Denis crouched there, breathing up her skirt.

Denis reflexively went back into debate mode. “Kevin, let's assess.” The swollen lower lip and blood dripping off his chin undermined his rhetorical authority to some extent. “It appears as if I'm gonna require major dental work, which I think we can agree was your
ultimate
goal…”

Kevin did not agree. He started coming for Denis, and he wasn't laughing anymore.

Another huge something jumped on his back. This time it was the Big Girl. She was not trying to save Denis. She just thought it was a party game.

“Wooo!” she whooped, riding Kevin. “Wooooooo!”

From there it degenerated quickly. Assorted skirmishes, some four years coming, broke out. Eric Gallagan and Brett Pister mixed it up over their junior year Young Trump project, which failed because Gallagan used too much peanut butter or because Pister couldn't market fresh assholes at a homo convention. Jon Eggert had always wanted to punch someone and thought this the ideal cover; unfortunately he chose Aaron Farrington, who had just completed his black belt in Kuen-Do and had been looking for an ethically acceptable situation in which to use it. The gearheads started peeling the Mathletes off the stairs, one at a time.

“Yeeee-
ha!
” the Big Girl yelled in response to Kevin hurling himself backward into a wall in an attempt to dislodge her.

Stuart Kramer tried to get a food fight going, first by chanting “Food fight! Food fight!” and then by flinging a couple of fistfuls of corn relish around, but nobody took up the challenge, perhaps because once a class clown graduates, he loses all his power to amuse. Valli Woolly emerged from the bathroom, shrieking, “Which one of you degenerates pissed all over the floor in there?!”

In the midst of all this, Denis made his escape. He skirted along the buffet table toward the door, dodging assorted scuffles and avoiding anybody he might have referenced in his valediction. He had gone as far as antipasti, just flatbreads from the door, when he heard a monstrous bellow that seemed to be directed at him.

It was Kevin, of course. He lumbered under the Big Girl, lurching toward Denis, lunging with arms outstretched in the manner of classic monsters and zombies. Denis responded with a classic silent
scream.

And that's when the front of Valli Woolly's house exploded.

THE INITIAL BLAST CAME
from behind the buffet table, which upended in rather dramatic fashion, sending chip shrapnel across the room and spraying dips and salsas in less dynamic but more devastating arcs. Denis took a platter in the chest. The two-story bay window blew out at ground level, with the upper panes raining down in a cascading shatter of glass. All this was accompanied by the requisite screaming, shrieking, and religious conversion.

Everyone thought: terrorists. Because, really, what else was there to worry about? Valli Woolly immediately suspected those animal rights losers who wore bloody chicken suits in front of her father's restaurants, and, being Valli Woolly, was annoyed they would firebomb her party and not one of her father's boring business dinners.

It was a few moments before anyone noticed the large repurposed military vehicle sitting halfway in the living room.

“Go go
go go go,
” Beth Cooper called urgently from the Hummer.

Kevin stopped bucking the Big Girl and simply gaped. The Big Girl swayed. “I wanna get down,” she said, and threw up on Kevin's head.

Denis couldn't see what was going on, because his face had been blown off. Cold chunks of cheek or forehead flaps hung over his eyes, assuming there were still eyes under there. Denis thought about changing his specialization from neurosurgery to facial reconstruction, though it just occurred to him that the wet stuff on his hair might be brains. Denis heard Beth calling him, using his full name again.
As he turned in the direction of her voice, the pieces of his face fell away and into his hands: roasted red pepper and hot
sopressata.
That would explain the smell.

“Denis Cooverman!” Beth called again.

Denis shook off his imagined injuries and started toward the Hummer, picking his way through the party carnage.

Something grabbed his ankle.

It was Coach Raupp, lying on the floor, holding his throat.

“Don't get in the car with her,” he rasped.

This was excellent advice. However, Denis noticed some movement at his back, which he correctly suspected was Kevin. He yanked his ankle away and ran to the vehicle, its front wheels already spinning in reverse, spitting orange and blue hummus on everyone and everything. Denis only had one foot inside when the Hummer lurched out of the living room and onto the lawn with Denis suspended between the front seat and the swinging door. Treece and Rich pulled him inside as the Hummer crashed through the valet stand, killing no valets, and then roared through Duxbury Woods, upsetting the expensive ducks.

CELL PHONES FLIPPED OPEN
throughout Valli Woolly's house. “Can you come get me?” a sophomore asked her mother. “Party ended early.”

Kevin, covered in puke and defeat, couldn't believe it: that little shit had his girl
and
his car. Until that moment Kevin had been just playing, in his fashion. He was merely pretending to kill Denis, and was only going to continue killing him until Denis became convinced he was genuinely being killed, and then stop. This was Kevin's idea of a funny joke.

He wasn't in a joking mood anymore.

Kevin didn't even feel Valli Woolly beating him on the back, and he couldn't hear her screaming, “You ruined it! You ruined everything! I can't believe I gave you a blumpkin!”

Jacob Beber, bystanding, looked confused.

“Oh,” Valli Woolly shrieked at him, “go Google it!”

THE MOOD INSIDE THE HUMMER
was mixed.

Beth was pumped up, drumming the steering wheel to some song playing only in her head.
“Wow!”
she kept repeating, with increasing insistence.
“WOW!”

“Yeah,” Cammy said flatly. “Wow.”

“Was that not the coolest thing you ever saw?”

“It was very realistic,” Treece said.

Rich was ambivalent. While the practical side of him recognized that driving a car into somebody's living room was going to attract a bunch of negative attention, his artistic side felt the movie of his life finally had the kind of action sequence that would make for a kick-ass trailer. “Great production value,” he said.

Denis was pumped, too, but not up.
“Do you know how many laws you just broke?”

By Denis's count:

Grand Theft Auto;

Criminal Destruction of Property;

Assault with a Deadly Weapon;

Aggravated Battery;

Leaving the Scene of an Accident;

Speeding; and, just now,

Failure to Signal.

“Seven—
at least!
”

“A new record!” Beth declared.

“I don't think that's a record,” Treece said.

Denis took a closer look at Beth. Her eyes were bloodshot, rheumy. The tip of her nose was cute, and pink.

“Are you too drunk to drive?”

“Eight!”

Beth took her hands off the steering wheel.

“What are you doing?”

Beth crossed her arms. “I'm too drunk to drive.”

The Hummer went through a red light.

“Nine!”

Denis took the wheel and successfully kept them from crashing into oncoming traffic, had there been any at two a.m., but in his zeal to survive he pulled too far to the right and started riding the curb. Beth grabbed the wheel back, swung the Hummer off the curb and into the relative safety of the left side of the road. “Where did
you
learn to drive?” she mocked.

“You're on the wrong side of the road.”

“How do you know we're not in Europe?”

“
Please
drive on the other side,” Denis pleaded.

“Beth, stop being a dick,” Cammy added from the back.

Beth harrumphed and swerved the Hummer back into its lane, where it
baWHUMP
ed over something large.

“
Good call,
Denis Cooverman.”

Treece glanced out the rear window, and delivered the good news: “It wasn't wearing clothing.”

“Beth.” Denis tried to sound calm and authoritative. “I think it would best if you pulled over.”

“Fuck you.” Beth didn't respond well to calm authority figures. “How about,
Thank you, Beth. For saving my life…again
?”

Denis had imagined that he and Beth would be one of those couples who never quarreled, that when they weren't kissing they would be laughing or lying in each other's arms, serenely, deliriously happy. He could never have imagined that she would make him so crazy angry he would scream at her in front of their friends. But in that instant, he learned a little about love.

“Saving my life?!” Denis screamed at Beth in front of their friends. “
Saving my
—? You almost ran me over with a military vehicle, owned by that homicidal rage ape you call a boyfriend who has thus far this evening attempted my murder with: 1) a hurtled mi
crowave, 2) playground strangulation and 3) well, a beating…a
to-the-death
beating!”

Denis's cathartic breakthrough left Beth miffed. “You're spitting blood on me.”

“You're supposed to keep your bodily fluids to yourself!” Treece admonished.

Denis covered his mouth. “Sorry,” he said, reverting to Denis Cooverman.

“You forgot the skeleton attack,” Rich pointed out.

“We missed that,” Cammy said.

“It was pretty cool. Like
Karate Kid
meets
Pirates of the Caribbean
.”

“So,” Treece addressed Rich, “you were making out with E. J.”

“Who?”

“E. J. Charlotte? The best girls' basketball player in the country maybe? Big girl?”

“Her,” Rich said. “I wasn't making out with her.”

“It sure looked like you were making out. Denis, too.”

“What are you, like a blogger now?”

“I just thought it was interesting. I mean, it was like,
almost
heterosexual.”

“Yeah, that's right,” Rich said, overdoing the sarcasm. “I'm trying to work my way back. When I'm ready for a real woman, I'll let you know.”

“Okay,” Treece said.

“MUSIC!” BETH DECIDED.

She turned on the radio, predictably tuned to US 99.5, America's Country Station, this month heavily rotating Sgt. Dirk Dugan's post-
Idol
debut:

Beth fiddled with the dial. “87.1, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Denis mumbled, resenting Beth for ignoring his outburst and rebuking himself for not following through on it, and for outbursting in the first place.

Beth caught the tail end of Cheyenne Kimball's cover of Chrissie Hynde's version of an old Rod Stewart hit, based on a song by Jakob Dylan's dad:

Beth liked the first three chords of the next song, or felt the need for noise, and cranked the Hummer with the petulant guitars and angsty beat of Happy Talk and their hot new power bummer, “Passing Through.”

Amid the emo cacophony, it got very quiet. They were driving down Dundee Road, which for the want of an actual downtown served as the main drag, a strip of malls, of chains and franchises, that collectively constituted what they conceptualized as their
town,
or to be municipally correct,
village.
*

Everything was closed but all the lights were on. The music and the hour and the drink made for a melancholy parade through their adolescence.

There was the Jewel-Osco where checker Cammy staved off workplace rage by mentally totaling the items she swiped endlessly across useless scanners, where Beth bought the family groceries, where Rich shoplifted his first
Premiere
magazine.

There was the José O'Foodle's Rich got fired from, where Beth, Cammy and Treece went after basketball games and thirty-year-old guys with mustaches bought them ice-cream drinks, where Denis begged his mother not to picket the Szechuan Veal Stickers.

There was the AMC Loews Six where Denis and Rich saw
Star Wars I, II
and
III
at crowded midnight previews, where they saw
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
by themselves, where Cammy saw
Bring It On
in the sixth grade and inexplicably decided to become a cheerleader, where Treece was caught sharing a seat with a patron and got fired.

There was the old Starbucks, where they all acquired their first addiction.

That Curves used to be Comics & Comix, where Denis bought his comics and everybody else bought their paraphernalia. Next to Curves was a Baskin-Robbins where Mrs. Rama fired you if you gained more than ten pounds and where Rich worked the summer between eighth grade and high school after Mrs. Rama ran out of thirteen-year-old girls.

On the left was the PJ Fingerlings Rich got fired from, and where Treece lost her virginity, out back. Next to it was the Blockbuster where Rich still worked, at least until the next time he talked a divorced father into watching
Sin City
with his twelve-year-old son. In the same strip was Payless Shoes, where Beth worked thirty-five hours a week, where Rich had bought his best shoes, currently composting at the side of Old Tobacco Road, and where Denis went shoe shopping more than necessary.

And just up the road was the White Hen Pantry where only three BGHS students were allowed in at a
time, supposedly, and where Beth Cooper touched that guy's dick.

Denis had included this song based on its popularity and adherence to theme, but he didn't like it—
drying breast? suckle sucks?
—and moreover didn't understand it, couldn't grasp the desperate desire to escape your upbringing, to kick off the dust of crummy towns that rip the bones off your back.

Why would you want to leave, and if you did, what's stopping you?

Beth turned off the music.

“WE ARE THE BISON!”

They were passing the high school, and Beth was cheering, and clapping, and not holding the steering wheel again.

Maybe she really is a scary psychobitch,
Denis thought, as he found himself screaming again.

“Put your hands on the steering wheel!”

Beth stopped cheering. She stared ahead sullenly and put her hands in her lap.

“Never take your hands off the steering wheel!” Denis screamed. “You
never
take your hands off the steering wheel! You keep your hands at ten and two!
Ten and two!
”

Denis took Beth's hands from her lap and applied them to the wheel in the proper configuration.

“
Ten
…and
two,
” he said in a tone that even he recognized as patronizing.

Beth gripped the wheel tightly, elevating her dainty wrists, and turned to Denis with a wide, iced smile.

“Better?”

“Eyes on the road.”

Still looking at Denis, Beth executed an acute left, using proper hand-over-hand technique, at a speed that would have rolled over anything short of a tank, which was more or less what she was driving. As fortune would further have it, where she turned there was also an exit.

The Hummer pulled into Buffalo Grove High School's parking lot. Beth accelerated straight toward the school, all the while maintaining approved driving form. A few seconds before they would vault the curb and crash into the gymnasium, making the national news, Beth applied the brake aggressively, stopping with a satisfying skid, an inch from the sidewalk.

Denis was gripping the door handle with one hand and the chest strap of his seat belt with the other, a fairly typical pose for someone riding shotgun with Beth Cooper.

Beth, cordial: “You requested that I pull over?”

“Thank you,” Denis said.

Beth opened her door and dismounted the vehicle. She began running toward the back entrance to the school. Cammy and Treece got out on their respective sides, and ran after her.

“What are they doing?”

“Something,” Rich said, and jumped out to join them.

Denis did not like not knowing what he was doing, which he had already had quite enough of this evening. But, the alternative was staying in a stolen vehicle owned by a drug-addled maniac who had thrice
attempted his murder. He arrived at the door just as Beth reached into her purse and produced a large brass master, the kind usually only found on janitors.

“You have a key?”

Treece answered for Beth. “Head cheerleader is a position of trust and responsibility.”

“Fools,” Cammy added.

DENIS WAS IN THAT DREAM,
the one he would continue to have for the next thirty years: wandering through Buffalo Grove High School at night, everything the same and oddly off, comforting and disconcerting, a feeling that he needed to be here and didn't belong, that he had forgotten to prepare for
something
. At least, in the present version, he was wearing pants.

“Could I ask what we're doing here?” he asked Beth.

“Homecoming.”

“At the risk of repeating myself and continuing to aggravate you, which is not my intention at all, you do know this is illegal.”

Perhaps it was his tone, polite and petrified, that softened her, or perhaps she had slipped into a more mellow state of inebriation, but Beth gave him those
poor puppy
eyes again. “Denis Cooverman. This is the
least
illegal thing we've done all night. Relax. You're going to enjoy it.”

She winked at him.

While he processed that massive emotional data dump, Beth and the others disappeared into the gymnasium.

THE GYM WAS HALF LIT,
dusky and cool. The chairs from graduation were stacked on rolling carts, a few orange tassels scattered on the floor. The podium was still up. Denis wondered, if he had it all to
do over again, knowing all the injuries and indignities that would befall him, would he still give that speech?

“Ready?”

Beth stood at center court, legs apart, arms akimbo.

Yes,
he would,
yes.

“Hit it!”

Beth, Cammy and Treece began to cheer.

Rich joined the girls. His moves were suspiciously perfect.