I Love You, Beth Cooper (4 page)

A MOTLEY COLLECTION
of serving dishes were arranged in some intelligent design on the kitchen table:

a large cornflower blue plastic bowl,

a stainless steel mixing bowl,

an old ceramic ashtray, and

a chip bucket from the Ho-Chunk Casino in Baraboo, Wis.

They contained, respectively:

Natural Reduced-Fat Sea-Salted Ruffles,

Jays Fat-Free Sourdough Gorgonzola Pretzel Dipstix,

Triple Minty M&Ms, and

Quattro Formaggy Cheetos.

Denis sat at the table, very still, and Rich sat opposite him, rolling his chair back and forth.

This was the party thus far. It was 8:30 p.m.

“She's not going to come,” Rich said.

“She might. She said she might.”

“I'm still mad at you.”

“I know.”

Rich reached for a chip. Denis was upon him.

“Let's save the snacks.”

DENIS HAD BEEN OBSESSIVELY PLANNING
this party ever since he'd told Beth about it that afternoon. He made his parents stop at the grocery store on the way home from graduation. They were only too happy, since Denis had never hosted a party before, and only had that one friend.

Denis's mother even allowed crap into the house she otherwise forbade. For someone who shunned anything processed, preserved or tasty, she seemed to know a lot about the relative merits of the various brands of crap.

“Sea salt!” she exclaimed. “Yum.”

His mother did nudge him toward the more sophisticated crappy snacks, contending they would train his palate. She had been training Denis's palate since he was a baby, spiking her breast milk with pureed asparagus and later serving him
croque-tofu,
like
grilled cheese only terrible, and homemade chicken nuggets made from actual chickens. Denis was the only toddler on his block who referred to
basgetti
as
bermicelli
.

Years later, Denis's mother felt guilty when she read in her alternative health magazine,
Denial,
that junk food was linked to an early onset of puberty. At fourteen, Denis's puberty had yet to onset, and his mother feared his trans-fatty-acid-and-bovine-growth-hormone-deficient diet was to blame for his pubic postponement. Denis's doctor assured her that boys mature much later than fat girls, and that the stool sample she had cajoled out of her son was unnecessary, and extravagant.

Speaking of which, Denis spent forty-five minutes in the bathroom when he returned home, evacuating seven days of excess stress and its biochemical byproducts. A MacBook perched on his knees, Denis diagnosed himself with post-traumatic stress disorder and irritable bowel syndrome. He was half right.

Denis spent another half hour in the shower, deep-cleaning the entire assembly, going back to hit the trouble spots again and again. He rinsed, lathered and repeated, and for the first time in his life, put conditioner in his hair and waited the requisite two minutes.

During his final rinse cycle, Denis set the showerhead to PULSE and let the rhythmic jets massage the same three inches of his scalp while he replayed the best minutes of his life so far.

“You are so sweet,” she says, smiling. “I guess I'll have to let you live.”

“I guess you will.”

“Henneman must've given you major shit.”

“Little shit,” he coos in a suave French voice.

She giggles.

“Was it like 800 degrees in there? I was so hot.”

“You're still hot.”

The blood rushes to her cheeks, and elsewhere.

The human brain is an amazing organ, versatile
and loyal. Denis's five-pounder, which could recall Klingon soliloquies with queasy accuracy, could also creatively misremember recent events if it felt its owner needed a break. Rest assured, the brain had an unedited master of the scene in question and could evoke it at will, as it would later that night and seventeen years from now, with Denis walking down the street feeling pretty good about himself until his brain sucker-punched him with evidence to the contrary.

Denis's brain also had Big Green Kevin tucked away in the dark recesses of its Reptilian Complex, with the other monsters. It was keeping sight and smell samples on file in case it needed to activate the system's Fight-or-Flight Response, or as it was known around Denis's brain, the Flight Response.

With Unpleasant Memory Repression set on FULL, Denis tilted his head back and let the hot water ripple over his eyes and lips, like in a soap commercial or an otherwise not very good movie on Cinemax.

His memory fogged over with steam.

“Hey,” he says, so cool. “I'm having a little thing later. Music. Drinks. Prizes.”

“Wow, that sounds fun!” She bites her lip. “I have this other stupid thing I'm supposed to go to…”

A mischievous glimmer in her eye.

“…but maybe I can stop by for a few minutes.”

He cocks a brow. “We won't need more than a few—”

“DENIS, ARE YOU OKAY IN THERE?”

Denis dropped the conditioner.

“Just getting out, Mom.”

Denis dried, rolled on some X-Stinc Pit Stick, followed up with several clouds of his father's deodorant powder, brushed his teeth and gargled with X-Stinc Breath Killaz, formulated for the male teen mouth. He tried on some corduroys, some cargo pants, brushed his teeth again, and pulled on a brand-new rugby shirt
that was pre-grassed and muddied to look as if some serious rugby had already been played in it.

“You look cute,” his mother squealed. “Supercute.”

Denis was devastated.

“She doesn't mean that,” Denis's father said. “You look fine. You might want to pull the waist of those pants down a bit.”

THE STREET LIGHTS CAME ON
outside Denis's house.

It was 9 p.m.

Denis sat, hands folded on the kitchen table. Rich continued rolling back and forth, in longer and longer swaths.

They had spent much of their lives this way, at this kitchen table, in front of the TV, lying around in Denis's room, not saying anything. Of the more than 20,000 hours they had logged since bonding in kindergarten over their mutual ostracism, Denis and Rich had spent perhaps 8,500 of those hours, almost an entire year, doing nothing at all, except being together.

Rich picked up the conversation exactly where it had left off a half hour before.

“I should punch you.”

“Please do.”

Rich was not going to punch Denis. Every time he did—when they were five, nine and thirteen—he was the one who ended up crying. Instead, he decided to agitate Denis, something he had become exceedingly good at over the past fourteen years.

“Hey,” he brought up in casual conversation, “what if she comes and brings her Army Man and he kills you?”

Denis's Reptilian Complex scurried under a rock.

“Not a very good party,” Rich observed.

“He wasn't really going to kill me.”

“Or maybe Party of the Year.”

“She won't bring him.”

“She might. She said she might.”

Denis touched his neck, tracing the raspberry thumbprint on his windpipe. He gulped, and gulped again, but the cold, hard loogie of dread stubbornly inched up his throat.

Rich grinned.

Then felt awful.

Those two seconds neatly encapsulated their entire friendship.

RICH LOOKED FOR SOMETHING
to get Denis's mind off what he had just put it on. He reached across the table and plucked an iPod from its cube.

“New?”

“Graduation present,” Denis hocked out.

Rich fingered the smart new design and interface that made all previous iPods look like gleaming turds.

“I hear this one vibrates for her pleasure.”

Denis snatched the iPod back.

“
You
vibrate for her pleasure.”

Rich laughed. “That's not even an insult, dude.”

Denis returned the iPod to the dock, rotating the cube seven degrees counterclockwise, then two degrees clockwise.

Sensing something had gone awry with his party's feng shui, aside from the total lack of guests, Denis began fiddling with the two-liter bottles of soda on the kitchen island, or “bar area.” He harmonized the carbonated beverages with a plastic bowl filled with ice and a box of Dixie Krazy Kritter cups.

“You know what I got for graduation?” Rich said, swiveling in his chair. “A bill. My dad says I owe him two hundred and thirty-three thousand, eight hundred and fifty bucks.”

(Rich's father was a dick.)

“A quarter of a million dollars? They don't even buy you
shoes.
”

“That includes fifty grand for ‘wear and tear' on my mom,” Rich said, acknowledging, “She is pretty worn and torn.”

Denis reached out to put his hand on Rich's shoulder, but misjudged the spinning rate and had to settle for his friend's ear.

“I'm sorry your dad sucks.”

Rich seemed philosophical about it. “It
was
completely itemized. Very detailed.”

He looked up at Denis.

“Who knew he was paying attention?”

THEY WERE QUIET AGAIN.
Denis began to rearrange individual pretzel sticks in the casino bucket.

“You shouldn't be so nervous, dude.”

“I'm not nervous. I'm particular.”

Rich occasionally claimed to know things about the opposite sex. Such as: “They can smell fear.”

This terrified Denis. “No, they can't.”

“
I
can smell it.”

Horrified, Denis sniffed his armpit.

“Oh, no,” he cried.
“Fear.”

Denis headed for the sink, removing his shirt.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“What are you talking about? That was
me
, just now.”

Denis ran water through a sponge and shoved it under his arms, bitterly.

“Puberty has done nothing but screw me.”

THIS WAS TRUE.
Puberty had come late to Denis Cooverman, but it had come with a vengeance. Thick curly hairs and sebaceous secretions everywhere. Virulent erections in organic chemistry, mysterious in origin, certainly not attributable to his lab partner, Martha Warneki, whose breath smelled like dead things (Denis suspected she was hitting the formalin). His own smorgasbord of odors, unresponsive to traditional cloaking
methods, so ghastly they sometimes awoke him in the middle of night, forcing him to shower just to get some sleep. Robust and succulent acne that in his junior year required medications so mutagenic that the packaging warned Denis not to touch any woman who was pregnant or thinking of ever becoming so. (This was not a problem.)

In the past six months, Denis had gotten his adolescence more or less under control—he could often identify why his erections wouldn't go away, though he remained powerless to stop them—but his hormones still reserved the right to rage at inopportune moments, such as the present one.

“Goddammit,” Denis said, twisting a freshly soaked sponge into his pits, hoping to drown the fear.

“Don't worry,” Rich said. “She can't smell you. She's miles away.”

Denis sniffed his rugby shirt. Perspiration, not the sexy kind. He began flapping the shirt in the air, keeping his elbows up in order to dry his armpits. One might say he looked like a frenzied chicken, but even chickens have their dignity.

This was the kind of moment when Denis's parents would usually walk in, and they did.

“Looks like this party is well under way,” Denis's father remarked cheerfully.

Denis clutched the shirt to his bosom.

“Spilled…something colorless.”

Denis's parents were accustomed to finding their son in awkward poses like this, and let it pass.

Rich swiveled to Denis's mother, who resembled Denis but in a much hotter way.

“
Hola,
Mrs. C.”

“Don't call me Mrs. C,” Mrs. C said. “I mean it.”

She turned to her son, by now mercifully reclothed.

“How many guests are you expecting?”

“Not too many,” Denis said.

“None,” Rich clarified.

“Well,” Mr. C said, prolonging the joshing thing, “don't trash the place or commit any major felonies.”

“We'll be home at eleven,” Mrs. C said.

“And not
one minute before,
” Mr. C further joshed, opening the refrigerator door. “And it wouldn't be a graduation party without…” He withdrew a large bottle in a festive
CONGRATS
gift bag. “…champagne!”

“Whoa!” Rich exclaimed, and meant it. His own father once let him have a sip of his beer, but that was only to get him to take his nap.

Denis looked to his mother.

“You sure?”

This was an argument Mrs. C had lost. She was magnanimous in defeat. “
One
glass per guest. And nobody who drinks, drives.”

“And,” Mr. C said, “I know exactly how many bottles are in my wine rack. Twenty-three.” Denis's father had become a wine enthusiast after watching an award-winning film about a couple of drunks who drank fine wine. Denis's father drank the finest wine that Jewel-Osco carried and placed on sale.

Denis's mother gave Denis the disaster drill she gave any time she left the house.

“Here are our numbers,” she said, pointing to the well-pointed-at sheet on the wall next to the phone, “if…”

She could never bring herself to complete the conditional, for fear of giving it life.

“If someone's dead or on fire,” Mr. C added, “call 911 first.”