I Love You, Beth Cooper (16 page)

They all stopped and looked to Denis. He was the crowd, apparently. He played along: “Orange.”

He yelled: “Blue!”

Denis wasn't especially spirited or overly true to his school, but he choked up, a little. He would miss those basketball games, with those players whoever they were, winning or losing or whatever they did, and with Beth, there on the court and on the sidelines, smiling and jumping and, yes, bouncing. And he would never forget tonight, when she cheered one last time,
just for him. That last part wasn't true, and he sort of knew it, but if you can't lie to yourself, who can you lie to?

The cheer, for whoever it was, wasn't finished.

“And now,” Beth said,
“real slow.”

Cammy and Treece decelerated sensuously. It was as if the imaginary marching band accompanying them had vanished and been replaced by a seedy jazz quartet.

“Can you feel it?” Beth cooed.

“What?” co-cooed Cammy and Treece.

“Feel the
heat
.”

The girls bumped and ground in a not-for-game-day version of the cheer, the one they did at camp, or sometimes for a small audience of generous dates. Rich was thrown at first, but quickly got with the saucy program.

“Orange and Blue,” Beth moaned.

“How sweet,” Cammy and Treece and Rich rejoined.

Together they throatily chanted,

“Kiss Kiss,” Beth meowed.

“Gotta go,” the girls and Rich purred.

Treece, Cammy and Rich hopped up and down, clapping gleefully. Beth just stopped. Her shoulders dropped and her hands fell to her sides. She caught Denis noticing this and curtseyed.

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.

“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:

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.”