I Love You, Beth Cooper (6 page)

Denis got that old testicular feeling again.

“I NEED BEER,”
Treece announced.

“Yes, you do,” Rich agreed. “¿Dónde está la beer, Coovemaster?”

“Um,” answered Denis, distracted. “My dad doesn't drink beer.”

“How is that possible?” Treece asked.

Rich remembered:

“We have
champagne
!”

He whisked the gift bag off the table, where it had been sitting unrefrigerated for the past ninety minutes, and pressed it into Denis's chest.

“
¡Tienes le champag-nah!”

“Could you please mangle one language at a time?” Cammy requested.

Treece wrinkled her nose.
“Champagne.”
She uncurled the word as if it were French for
excessive and frequent evacuation of watery feces
.

“Same alcohol as beer,” pitched Rich, selling hard.

“More,” Denis said. “Two-point…” He quickly calculated:

“…two times as much alcohol, on average.”

Rich could only shake his head in admiration at his friend's determination to be true to himself, no matter
what the cost. Rich himself was willing to be anybody anyone wanted and would keep trying on personalities until one of them became popular. For some reason, his most recent persona spoke a lot of half-assed Spanish.

“Let's pop this
pupito, rápido!
” habla Rich with insouciance, belied a bit by the way he was clawing at the gift bag Denis was clutching.

Denis removed the bottle from its bag.

It was Freixenet, one of the finer sparkling wines in the under-$10 category.

“Cristal,” Rich said. “Black Label.”

“Cristal seems to have changed its logo,” Cammy said. “And spelling.”

Treece bit her pinkie. “Champagne,” she said, “makes me do…
things
.”

Denis would never hear the word
things
the same way again.

Cammy snorted. “
Water
makes you do things.”

“Not regular water.”

If Rich were a paper-and-ink cartoon rather than a flesh-and-blood one, a lightbulb would have appeared above his head.

“Uno momento.”
He raced out of the room and romped up the stairs.

“
Un
momento,”
Cammy said.

THE SPECIFIC MECHANICS
of the champagne bottle were alien to Denis. “Seems self-explanatory,” he mumbled as he propped the bottle on his thigh and began peeling the foil back slowly, sweat speckling his forehead, as if dismantling a party bomb.

Beth reappeared in the kitchen, pissed.

“Yeah, well,
Kevin,
maybe,
Kevin,
maybe I have
better
things to do!”

She looked up and pointed at Denis's lap.

“I want some of that.”

She meant the champagne, but neither Denis nor
his lap immediately figured that out.

Beth started out of the room, her voice rising.

“I'm not going to tell you where I am!
Or
who I'm with! But I will tell you
this,
Kevin: I'm having
champagne
!”

She wants champagne
. Denis flailed away the foil and furiously twisted the wire, ten or fifteen times, stopped, then started to untwist it.

“Champagne coming right…
Yi.
”

His fingertip was bleeding. He pressed on with no concern for his own safety. Cammy and Treece watched with morbid fascination.

Denis placed both thumbs under the cork and applied steady pressure, suavely at first, desperately thereafter. He leaned against a wall for leverage, clasping the sweaty, slippery bottle between his forearms and applying insufficient force accompanied by girlish exertions. Blood dripped over his knuckles.

“This is…odd,” he she-grunted. “The internal pressure is 90 psi. It should just—”

In walked Beth, screaming into the phone.

“Don't you
dare
GPS me!”

Denis couldn't even begin to analyze the health ramifications of that, because at that exact moment, Rich appeared behind Beth. He raised his arm and opened his hand. A ribbon of condoms cascaded behind Beth's head.

Ribbed,
Rich mouthed lubriciously.

Denis's eyes widened just in time for the cork to pop and ricochet off his cornea.

HE OPENED HIS MOUTH TO SCREAM.
A foaming column of lukewarm champagne geysered into the back of his throat. He gasped, gulped, and gurgled in various combinations. That it was not school milk but champagne that came out his nose did not make Denis feel any more sophisticated.

This, as it turned out, was exactly the kind of thing Cammy found amusing: the pain and suffering of others. Her laugh was surprisingly husky, somewhere between a chortle and a guffaw. Treece was too nice to laugh, but not nice enough to offer help.

Beth snapped her phone shut and rushed to Denis's side.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, I'm great,” Denis claimed. “Oh,
ow.
”

He cupped his bloody hand over his bludgeoned eye, and without even realizing he was doing it, slid down the wall to the floor.

“Yee,” he said.

“We need ice.” Beth turned to Rich, who was tucking the last of the prophylaxis into his shirt pocket.
“Ice?”

Rich hurried to the kitchen island “bar area” and stuck his hand in the plastic bowl of ice. It came out wet.

“Frozen peas,” Beth ordered, snapping her fingers at Rich and directing him toward the refrigerator.

Rich resented being snapped at. This dickhead from Stevenson High School did that at José O'Foodle's once, and Rich spat in his O'Salsa, nearly killing him. Apparently the guy had a peanut allergy and Rich had been eating only Snickers bars that month. No one ever found out how peanut and cocoa traces made it into a salsa made only from fresh tomatoes, chiles and beer, but it cost the Dining Thematics Corporation nearly $2 million.

“What are you
doing?” Beth yelled at Rich, who
had been reminiscing the above paragraph. “This is
your
friend down here!”

Rich abandoned his reverie and went to the refrigerator. He opened the freezer door and began picking through the contents.

“Frozen peas…Frozen
peas
…Fro-
oh
-zen pa-puh
peas…”

“Anything cold!”

Rich hurled a box across the room.

“Stat!”

Beth snatched it out of the air.

“Frozen waffles?”

Rich peered in the freezer. “Either that or Lean Cuisine.”

“Whatever,” Beth said, meaning
whatever
.

His mission completed, Rich took out a pint of ice cream and went looking for a spoon. He singsang to himself:

WITH PARAMEDIC SPEED,
Beth ripped open the box and extracted two frozen waffles. She dropped to her knees, straddling Denis's thighs, a bodily juxtaposition Denis had only experienced with Greg Saloga prior to a belly-pinking.

Beth took his hand and lifted it off his injured eye. She tenderly pressed the waffles against it.

“Agh,” Denis said.

“It's okay,” Beth soothed. “This will help.”

Why was Beth being so nice to him? Was it because she was so nice, or because it was to him? Either way, she sure was nice. Denis gazed at her through his surviving eye.

“I'm sorry I'm so pathetic,” he thought, and then realized he had also said it.

Beth laughed, so lightly and so kindly that Denis felt it in his chest, not his stomach.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

Yes, tell me all your secrets,
Denis kept to himself.

Beth leaned in, whispered: “All boys are pathetic.”

THIS WAS NEWS TO DENIS,
perhaps the best
news he had ever heard. If Beth thought all guys sucked, he didn't need to not suck, only to suck
less
. This was doable. Possibly.

Denis relaxed for the first time since the previous Sunday. He became the smart, sweet, moderately clever and only medium pathetic boy he usually was.

“On behalf of all boys, then,” Denis said, “I apologize.”

Beth made a serious face. “Accepted.”

“It's 150,000 years late, but it needed to be said. Also, I'd like to apologize for all that war and stuff.”

“You're funny.”

“Sometimes even when I'm trying to be.”

Beth took Denis's hand and led it back to his eye, transferring responsibility for the waffles.

“Gentle pressure.”

Denis twisted a flinch into a grin. “Thanks, Lisbee.”

The moment vanished.

“Don't call me that,” Beth said. “I hate that.”

“But Kevin—”

“That is one of the privileges that Kevin enjoys,” Beth explained coldly.

Cammy concurred. “Kevin has many privileges.”

“Front door privileges—” Treece began, working into another sodomy whinny.

Beth raised her hand, silencing them.

On the opposite side of the kitchen island, Rich was upside-down spooning ice cream onto his tongue, waiting for such a conversational opening. “So, Beth,” he said, “you think your Army Man has triangulated your signal and is on his way over? Because we might need more waffles.”

“Never mind him.” Beth waved dismissively. “He thinks just because he's killed some guys, he can kill anybody he wants.”

That didn't help.

“Let's see under there,” Beth said. Denis whimpered as softly as he could as Beth removed the waffles. The blast area was already purple en route to black and beyond.

“Open.”

The eyelid stuttered as it retracted.

“Pee-yuke,” Treece noted.

“Dude.” Rich grossed out. “That's NC-17.”

It looked worse than it was, since it looked like Denis was at least blind, perhaps dying, and possibly a brain-eating zombie.

From the inside, it looked: bloody. Denis tried to focus on Beth's face, which he knew was only inches away. What he saw, swirling in a red sea, was a blurry pink mass with two darker circular areas in the upper half and a small horizontal smear in the middle of the lower half. If that was a face, then:

“MY CONTACT!”
Denis gasped.

Beth snapped her fingers again.

“Contact down!”

Treece and Cammy initiated contact-retrieval maneuvers, dropping to squats and sweeping the floor with their fingertips in long, overlapping arcs.

“Don't worry,” Beth told Denis. “We'll find it. We always do.”

“You wear contacts?” Denis asked, enthralled by this defect they apparently shared. “What's your prescription?”

Before either could comprehend the deep geekitude of the question, and before Denis could compound it with whatever he might say next:

“Found it!” Treece said.

She held up the champagne cork. A gelatinous dollop clung to the metallic cap. Quite proud of herself,
she marched over and presented it to Beth.

“What do I win?”

“The thanks of a grateful nation,” Rich said, presenting her with the half-eaten pint of ice cream.

Treece held the container like an acting award.

“Chubby Monkey!”

Beth peeled the sticky contact off the cork, rolling it around on her fingertip.

“Gucky.”

She stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked the lens off.

As she swished it around, salivating, her luscious lips pursed, pulsating. Her pretty pink tongue unfurled and there on the wet tip, bathed in Beth Cooper's juices, was Denis's sense of sight.

Beth Cooper had invented a whole new sex act: the eyejob.

She tilted Denis's head back and gently pried open his swollen eyelids.