I Love You, Beth Cooper (8 page)

Denis was preoccupied. He was rifling through his closet, tossing out
Journals
of
the American Medical Association
and
Juvenile Oncology,
his snorkel, copies of
Famous CGI Monsters
and
Celebrity Sleuth: Women of Fantasy 15,
an old diving mask, Hobbit Monopoly and 3-D Stratego, and a pair of big, floppy, noncombat swim fins.

Wielding the impotent fins, he whined, “Why didn't I play baseball?”

Kevin arrived at the doorway. Sean and the other one fell in behind him.

Denis thrust his hands back into the closet, praying they would reappear holding anything resembling a weapon. A loaded revolver would be ideal, though unlikely (his mother felt hunters should be tried for war crimes and his father drove a Prius); a stick with a nail in it would be acceptable. What Denis retrieved certainly resembled a weapon; it was a 1:1-scale replica of the original Skywalker light saber with electroluminescent polycarbonate blade and ten motion-controlled digital sound effects.

Kevin barked with amusement. His troops barked exactly the same amount. A martial grin spread across his face as he reconnoitered the room: a medical school skeleton wearing a “BGHS Debate Team” T-shirt; the original
Star Wars
poster of Luke, light saber aloft; further charts of human muscular and circulatory systems; a poster of Professor Stephen Hawking posing with a poster of Marilyn Monroe;
Futurama
figurines…(In Denis's defense, a girl hadn't been in his room for more than ten years.)

“What a Eugene.” Kevin chortled. The laughter triggered an endorphin rush that broke his fragile
concentration, and he lost his homicidal focus. Why, he wondered, did he even consider this easily snappable geek a threat, instead of an amusing nuisance to be swatted away, or lightly stepped on?

And then he saw it.

On the wall above Denis's bed: Beth Cooper beaming down, kneeling in her cheerleading uniform. Denis had scanned the yearbook squad photo, Photoshopped the others out (digitally re-creating the portion of Beth's skirt obscured by Treece's knee), enlarged the image 7,000 percent, printed it in tiles, joined the tiles with an X-Acto blade and rubber cement, affixed the assemblage above his bed with wallpaper paste, and moved his bed three inches to the right to center the image. It had taken him five hours, not counting buying and setting up the scanner.

Kevin didn't appreciate all the effort. He grabbed the pelvis of the medical skeleton and tore it off the spine.

“Dr. McCoy!” Denis gasped.

Kevin took a femur in each hand and ripped them free of the pelvis.

“Now,” Denis admonished, “that used to be a person.”

Fiendish glee best described Kevin's expression as he approached Denis, slowly spinning the skeleton's lower legs around the knee joints.

“That is very disrespect
foo—”

Twenty-six foot bones kicked him in the ear.

Denis lifted his light saber to fend off the human nunchucks, but Kevin's bone-fu was unstoppable. Flying phalanges of fury booted him about the face and neck.

“Dude!”

Denis turned to see that Rich was at the open window, on the other side of it, beckoning him.

“Don't just—”

Denis took a calcaneus to the temple. He staggered backward into a corner, trapped. So this was it: boned to death in his own room. Not exactly the tragedy he had always dreamed about. He thought of his mother finding his bloody pulped remains, and then he thought of that copy of
Celebrity Sleuth: Women of Fantasy 15
on the floor, lying open to topless shots of Kristanna Løken, the Terminatrix. Embarrassing. If he had time, he would try to eat the magazine before he died.

KEVIN SEEMED TO BE DECIDING.
To kill or not to kill? Or how slowly? How excruciatingly? Whichever, he was relishing the decision-making process.

Something splintered against his skull. As it turned out, it was another skull. Beth stood behind Kevin, holding the jawbone of Dr. McCoy. “
Now
will you calm down?” she asked, grabbing his shirt.

Beth was allowed to touch Kevin in places he didn't even allow the army doctors to touch, but his shirt was not one of those places.

“You want some of this?” He raised a femur to her.

“Kevin.” Beth backed away, releasing the shirt. “Let's just—”

“
Do
you?” Kevin asked again, in a dead, calm voice.

Beth said “No” very quietly.

She glanced past Kevin, who wheeled around to see the last of Denis going out the window. He turned back with a look of confused revulsion.

“You
like
this dork?”

Beth's failure to vomit at the suggestion was taken as a yes.

“I
am
going to kill him,” Kevin said, dropping the bones and heading for the window. His compatriots followed.

Beth looked around Denis's room, shaking her head. When she saw her poster, she smiled so hard she almost cried.

AS HE WAS DEFENESTRATING HIMSELF,
Denis observed that the eaves outside his window were only eighteen inches wide and sloped down at a 45-degree angle. This was the sort of detail he had surely noticed before, saw every day, but didn't attach any real importance to until it turned out to be really important. Like, for example, now.

His trajectory was going to take him past the eaves and another dozen feet straight down onto some lawn furniture that wasn't comfortable even when you sat on it properly. Denis would have to take death-evading measures. Using his sophisticated knowledge of physics and aerodynamics, he spazzed about and managed to save himself by wedging his face into the gutter.

“Hey!”

Denis coughed up the leaves he had promised to clean out the previous fall. Rich was twenty feet away, humping the far corner of the house.

“What are you
doing?”

“Drainpipe,” Rich grunted. “Shimmying.”

Rich gave Denis a thumbs-up. The drainpipe
jinked
as it disengaged from the gutter, and Rich held his increasingly ridiculous pose as the pipe fell away, slowly at first and progressively faster in accordance with the laws of gravity, and into the darkness.

Denis squirreled it down the eaves and peered over the edge.

“Rich!”

Ca-chunk.

A rivet popped on the section of the gutter he was leaning on.

The gutter
ca-chunked
again, and then
ca-CHANKed.

Denis plummeted. Just below were bushes planted to commemorate Denis's First Holy Communion, since the jujube was the source of the thorns in Jesus's
crown. (Denis's parents treated their Catholicism not so much as a religion as an anthropological teaching opportunity.)

Denis fought his way through the thorns of Christ, his clothes pierced and skin scratched where it wasn't already contused (there too, but harder to make out). He ran over to Rich, who was lying on his back clutching the drainpipe between his legs.

“I'm paralyzed,” Rich said with remarkable calm. “I'm a paralyzed virgin.”

“Sorry,” Denis said.

Above them, the gutter rattled.

Denis watched in shock and awe as three studly silhouettes leapt from the roof in unison and landed on the grass, tumbled together, and seamlessly rose to perfect commando formation.

Denis looked down at Rich. He was gone.

“Yo!”

Rich was standing in the next yard.

“Run, you dumb monkey!”

A very large dog appeared out of the shadows and swallowed Rich.

THE BEAST WAS ALL OVER HIM
when Denis arrived. Rich was thrashing his arms and legs wildly, tossing his head from side to side and squeaking and squawking, suggesting the dog was up to no good.

“Kimberly,down!” Denis commanded,yanking the dog's collar. Kimberly backed off Rich and sat, panting happily.

“And now I'm partially eaten.” Rich sighed. “The
chicas
don't go for half-eaten guys.”

Kimberly was a big dog, a rottweiler-Lab-and-possibly-black-bear mix, but she was no man-eater. She was merely playing with Rich, and maybe tasting him a little.

“Kimberly?” Denis scoffed. “She's just a puppy
d
-ahgoo!
” Denis sneezed, and remembered why he didn't play more often with this big fluffy sack of dander and mites.

He sneezed again, and felt his open eye start to swell closed.

He sneezed again, and there was Kevin.

“Listen, Kevin,” Denis began diplomatically, and then, where the abject apology should have gone, he sneezed in Kevin's face.

Kevin wiped off the snot particulates and, looking for a place to dry his hand, settled on Denis's face. He reached out and very nearly got his fingers bitten off.

Puppy Kimberly's large and sharp teeth glinted in the moonlight as she snapped and snarled, lunging at Kevin's body parts. He backed into his backup, feeling, what was it—
fear?
Roadside bombs and sniper fire barely got Kevin's attention anymore, but there was just something about fangs.

“Good dog!” Denis said. He reached down to help Rich up and discovered his friend had once again run off without him.
“Good doggie,”
Denis reinforced, and fled.

DENIS RAN LIKE A DUMB MONKEY
through the backyards of Hackberry Drive:

through the Deters', whose son Lawrence went to Notre Dame on a football scholarship but decided to become a priest instead, breaking his father's heart;

through the Lemleys', whose daughter Lucia had once sold Denis fudge and lemonade made from recipes contained in the rhyme
milk, milk, lemonade, around the corner fudge is made;

through the Cobes', who always gave out full-size candy bars on Halloween;

through the Schmidts', whose twenty-two-year-old daughter Shauna got undressed every night at nine,
and took her time about it;

through the Snelsons', who always went out of town on Halloween, leaving a bag of cheap peanut butter kisses hanging off their doorknob, until that one Halloween;

and into the Confers' yard, under which nine cats were buried, and where Denis finally caught up with Rich, who was doubled over and breathing hard.

“Coach Raupp was right,” Rich winced. “We are total pussies.”

Denis tapped Rich on the back. They both saw:

Kevin and his troops marching at them double time, in a cadenced trot. They hurdled a four-foot chain-link fence without breaking stride.

Rich mulled this. “We may be dealing with cyborgs.”

Denis took off toward the front yard.

“Hey!” Rich yelled, betrayed.

ACROSS THE STREET
there once was a playground equipped with the monkey bars that Justin Cherry was briefly the king of, before tumbling off and becoming stupid. The Park District had taken the unpopular legal position that Justin was already stupid; as part of the ensuing massive settlement, the playground had been torn down and replaced by “Justin's Jungle,” a rain-forest-themed Safeplay™ space, built on a Tiny-Turf™ seamless safety surface and constructed from EnviromenPal™ recycled plastic play components. Children seemed to enjoy it, despite its safety.

Denis ran up a monkey tongue and into its manic head.

“Have you learned
nothing?
” Rich complained, climbing the structure after him.

The boys clattered across the SynTeak
^™
Suspension Bridge and through the Eco-Go
^™
KnowFun
^™
Pagoda.

“Is there a point to this?” Rich asked. “Is there a
plan here?”

Denis dove into a crawl tunnel that was mercifully free of theme, except for being banana yellow.

“Oh,” Rich said.
“Hiding.”

Denis curled up near the midpoint of the tunnel, positioning himself between two of the Comfortholes
^™
that dotted the structure, allowing children to smile and wave at their parents and allowing parents to never ever lose sight of their precious, precious children. Rich didn't fit quite as nicely as Denis; his head and neck pressed against the top of the tube and knees jammed into the opposite wall.

Moonlight filtered in the ends and holes of the tunnel. A warm wind whistled through almost imperceptibly. The boys' panting slowed to heavy breathing. If Rich and Denis were ever going to make out, this was the time.

Rich grinned.

“Beth Cooper was
straddling
you,” he said, vastly expanding the meaning of
to straddle
.
“Excellente.”
Rich chortled lasciviously and may have winked; it was too dark to tell.

Denis was raising a finger to shush Rich when a massive limb shot through the hole next to his head. He first mistook it for a leg; the toes grabbed his nose and he realized it was a heavy-duty arm.

About the same time another arm sprang from an opposing hole, took hold of Rich's collar and began whipping him back and forth, slamming his head into the tunnel wall.

Denis freed his nose from its attacker and scooted away, and into a third arm, which wrapped around his neck and began choking him with a definite purpose.

Rich made all the expected sounds as his head spanged off the hard yellow plastic. Denis made no sound at all because there was no air getting in or
out of his lungs. Instead he steadily turned the color surrounding his injured eye, which had passed indigo and was entering aubergine.

Based on the rate of his progression to unconsciousness, Denis concluded that he was being
both
suffocated and strangled, in effect overkilled, and that his death would arrive shortly. He wondered where the requisite premortem flashing-before-his-eyes of his life was.

Ah, here it came:

The back of Beth Cooper's head, and then the right side of her perfect face, as she turns to talk to Kate Persky…

Neon parrot fish swarming around him, wanting his wet bread, as he scuba-dived in the Great Blue Hole off Belize with his parents
…

Beth cheerleading on the gym floor, from high in the bleachers, glimpsed around somebody's fatty tattooed head
…

In his room, reading
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,
lying on his bed next to Rich, watching
The Valachi Papers
on a portable DVD player
…

The back of Beth's head again, turning slightly as she reaches over her shoulder to return a pencil she had borrowed from him.

That about summed it up.

Denis heard celestial trumpets. The tunnel filled with a brilliant light.

White light,
Denis thought,
that's a bad sign.

I'm dead.

In a plastic yellow tube.

Just as quickly, Denis wasn't dead anymore. The arm released him. Air streamed into his lungs and blood flowed to his brain. The sound of celestial trumpets resolved into a high-pitched car horn, and the beckoning light bobbed and veered away from the
mouth of the tunnel.

Denis was confused, and then flabbergasted, when a happy face appeared in one of the Comfortholes
^™
.

“Hi!” Treece said.

OUTSIDE THE TUNNEL,
a white 1996 Cabriolet convertible had Kevin pinned against a giant laughing giraffe. Beth was leaning on the horn. Under the circumstances, Kevin was conciliatory. “Lisbee?” he said, like a boyfriend who had done something awfully wrong and was so sorry even though he wasn't certain what it was he had done.

And then: “Lisbee!” he screamed, slamming both fists on the car hood, like a guy who was too coked up to wait three seconds to see if the first strategy worked.

Beth responded by easing the brake and tapping the gas, causing the vehicle to gently lurch into her boyfriend.

INSIDE THE TUNNEL,
Denis crawled over to Rich. After being yanked to and fro and having his head slammed into a durable plastic enclosure a few dozen times, Rich was a bit discombobulated.

“I'm a shaken baby,” he said.

A hairy hand continued to grip Rich's shirt, but was only halfheartedly whipping him back and forth in a distracted manner. Denis got the hand's attention by biting it, hard.

Sean yanked his arm out of the tunnel, yowling.

Denis nudged and shoved and finally shoveled his semi-conscious friend out the tunnel. With Treece's help, he folded Rich into the backseat of the Cabriolet. Beth threw the car in reverse, and Denis hurled his torso over the front door as it backed away.

The Cabriolet was doing minus 40 mph when Beth
spun it 180 degrees and Denis's lower body did an impressive demonstration of centrifugal force as he clung to the interior door handle. The car tore forward down a grassy incline with Denis struggling to remain attached, and then hit the curb, throwing the boy aboard.

BETH SWUNG
on to Arlington Heights Road without stopping or signaling in accordance with the Illinois Rules of the Road, or without yielding the right of way to the Volvo XC-90 that was already on Arlington Heights Road. This resulted in some sudden brakeage on the Volvo's part.

Rich bounced around in the backseat, more than dazed.

“You okay?” Treece asked. “Is your brain dead?”

“Is blood coming out of my ears?”

“Not a lot.”

Denis was up front, in a position that might unfortunately be described as fetal, on top of Cammy, who did not appreciate it. She shoved the boy mass off her lap and down into the passenger legroom space that the Cabriolet wasn't known for.

Denis rocked from side to side on the floorboards as Beth swerved around any object doing less than twice the speed limit.

“We got away,” Denis pointed out from his cubby. “You can stop escaping.”

Cammy shrugged at him. “She always drives like this.”

In the back, Rich stared into infinity.

“I was in driver's ed with her.”

DRIVER'S ED WAS TAUGHT
by Coach Raupp, who resented having to do it and was incensed that physical education class time was wasted on such an
ass-
spreading activity
. This was reflected in his teaching style, which was screaming. He screamed on the test course,
If that cone was a BABY GIRL, you would have KILLED it!
He screamed on the road,
Pull over NOW so I can SLAP you!
The only time he wasn't screaming was when he was showing
Wheels of Tragedy
(1963), and its sequel
Highways of Agony
(1969), two films that had been dropped from most driver's ed curricula because their incorporation of real accident footage of dead, mangled and dismembered teens led to more crying than learning. But every time that imprudent hippie was scooped off the roadway and his stoned brain casually slid out onto the pavement, Coach Raupp could be heard cackling in the back.