I Love You, Beth Cooper Read online

  “You should sit down,” Becky Reese said.

  Greg Saloga sat down.

  “In your seat,” Becky Reese clarified.

  DENIS MISSED his own near-death experience. He was busy expressing the regrets of fellow classmates who started malicious, hurtful and totally unfounded rumors (e.g. Christy Zawicky and her scurrilous insinuation that semen had been found in someone’s fetal pig from AP biology) or who chose indulgence over excellence (e.g. most of the class but specifically Divya Gupta, Denis’s debate partner, who drank an entire bottle of liebfraumilch the night before the downstate debate finals and made out with both guys from the New Trier team, revealing the entire substance of their argument even if she did not recall doing so). And Denis was just getting started, or so he thought.

  “And let us not regret,” he said, “that we never told even our best friend”—pause, then softer, slower—“I’m gay, dude.”

  Denis looked right at Rich Munsch, his best friend. This was unnecessary; everyone knew.

  Rich Munsch, however, was flabbergasted. He mouthed, somewhat theatrically: I’m not gay!!!

  Denis was about to respond when he felt four bony fingers dig under his clavicle.

  “Thank you, Denis,” Dr. Henneman said, leaning across Denis into the microphone. “A lot to think about.”

  For a bright kid, Denis was not quick on conversational cues.

  “I’m not done,” he said.

  “You’re done.” The principal moved decisively to secure the podium, driving Denis aside with her rapier hip.

  She heard a splish.

  She looked down and discovered she was standing in a puddle.

  THE AUDIENCE SPATTERED ITS APPLAUSE as Denis shuffled off the stage.

  “As I call your names,” Dr. Henneman was saying, “I would appreciate it, and I think everyone would, if you came up and accepted your diploma quickly, with a minimum of drama.”

  The applause grew.

  Denis felt good about the speech. He had let Beth Cooper know how he felt, after all these years, and had made some excellent points about other classmates besides. He wondered what Beth would say to him when he sat down beside her. He had prepared two responses:

  “Then we agree”

  or

  “It’s my medication.”

  Denis suddenly had a scary thought: What if she tries to kiss me? Would he politely demur, deferring such action to later, or would he accept the love offering, to the thunderous applause of his peers?

  So Denis did not see the dress shoe that belonged to Dave Bastable’s father that Dave Bastable had stuck in his path. Denis tripped, lurched forward, stomped his other foot onto the hem of his gown, dove across his own chair and sailed headlong into Beth Cooper’s seat, where, fortunately or unfortunately, she no longer was.

  2.

  THE 10-MINUTE REUNION

  YEAH. WE GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL. HOW…TOTALLY…AMAZING.

  ENID COLESLAW

  DENIS GRABBED a Diet Vanilla Cherry Lime-Kiwi Coke from the cafeteria table. He forwent the selection of Entenmann’s cookies that was also available for graduates and their families, because his stomach hurt. He could not tell whether this was because he was overheated and dehydrated, or because he had not defecated in the week leading up to his speech, or because he had just done either the single greatest or most imbecilic thing he had ever done in his life.

  In any case, the Diet Vanilla Cherry Lime-Kiwi Coke didn’t help.

  As he had every thirty seconds since he arrived, Denis surveyed the cafeteria. Fresh alumni, a few still in caps and gowns, most in caps and jeans, caps and cutoffs, caps and gym trunks, or, in the case of members of Orchesis, caps and orange Danskins, clustered in the same clusters they always had, in almost the exact spots they once ate lunch, even though none of the tables were there. Yet they all talked about how hot it had been in the gym and what they planned to do that evening, which was pretty much the same, only in different clusters.

  She was not there.

  ON THE REFRESHMENT TABLE a silver cube blasted the platinum thrash rap of Einstein’s Brain,

  Fuck this shit

  Nuff this shit

  The song captured the essence of adolescence and expressed it in easy-to-understand language, while simultaneously managing to aggravate adults, no mean feat these days. (Sales of the clean version were poor, however.)

  What you can do wit

  All this shit

  Just fuck it!

  Although Denis didn’t like thrash rap, he was feeling a little outlawish and this song, he decided, would serve as his own personal theme song, saying in rhyme what he had said in rhetoric. He moved closer to the table to facilitate others in making the connection.

  “Oh, dear God,” Mr. Bernard said, rushing past Denis and picking up the music box, searching for a way to turn it off, or failing that, destroy it. Mr. Bernard did not like modern music or its devices, his primary qualifications to head the Music Department. He shook the box, but it only seemed to get louder:

  Fuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckit

  Mr. Bernard started to raise the box over his head.

  “Let me, Mr. Bernard,” Denis said, taking the cube from his twitching fingers. He pressed a nonexistent button on the metallic surface and the music changed to that Vitamin C song that wouldn’t go away. Momentarily lulled by the classical string opening, Mr. Bernard wandered away.

  He could have at least said Thank you, Denis thought, or Awesome speech.

  And so we talked all night

  about the rest of our lives

  Denis did his reconnaissance. He did not know what he would do if he found her, only that he needed to do it.

  Closest to the exit were clumps of parents who hadn’t been dissuaded from attending (Denis’s own parents seemed only too happy to wait out in the car, where the Sunday New York Times was). Mothers chatted up the teachers, hoping to squeeze out one last compliment about their children, while fathers checked their Treos for weekend business emergencies.

  Rich Munsch fidgeted beside his parents as his father interrogated Ms. Rosenbaum, his English teacher.

  “I mean,” Ed Munsch said, gesturing with his third complimentary Coca-Cola beverage, “is it really worth all that money to send him to college?”

  “Everyone should go to college,” Ms. Rosenbaum answered.

  Ed Munsch chuckled. “Well, not everyone.”

  BETH COOPER WAS NOWHERE.

  Denis began strolling, ostensibly checking things out but also providing an opportunity for the things to check him out. He was prepared to accept the accolades of his peers with good humor and a humble nod he had been practicing.

  He stopped at a twenty-foot orange-and-blue banner hanging on the wall. It read “Congrats to BGHS CLASS OF ’O7” and featured a Mighty Bison painted by Marie Snodgrass, who would one day go on to create Po Panda, star of Po Panda Poops and Oops, Po Panda!, two unnecessary children’s books. The bison wore a mortarboard and appeared to be drunk. Other graduates stood around the banner, signing their names to heartfelt clichés and smartass remarks.

  No one took note of Denis.

  Denis pretended to read and appreciate the farewell messages while searching for his name. The only entry that came close was:

  I’m Gay, Dude, signed Richard Munsch

  Just below this was affixed:

  This was Stuart Kramer’s “tag”—which he used exclusively in bathroom stalls and on his notebooks—placed there to ensure proper credit for this witticism. Denis was annoyed; that was his line.

  Denis considered seeding the banner with a few anonymous hosannas to his awesome speech, just to get the ball rolling, but he was afraid he might get caught, and he didn’t have a pen.

  WHERE WAS SHE?

  Denis was thinking about just leaving, and then he was thinking about just staying, when he felt those familiar authoritarian talons dig into his soft upper flesh.

  “Mr. Cooverman.” Dr. Henneman had snuck up on him again
.

  “Oh, Dr. Henneman,” Denis said, with hopeful bonhomie. “Or I guess now I should call you Darlene.”

  “No,” Dr. Henneman said. “You should not.”

  She fixed Denis with the look, the look she had fixed many thousands of times before, but which she had never imagined she would have fixed on this particular boy.

  “Mr. Cooverman,” she lectured, “I’ve never known you to do anything so reckless. At all reckless.”

  And then came the part of the upbraiding familiar to legions of Buffalo Grove High School malefactors, jokers, and stunt-pullers, an interrogatory also familiar to disobedient children and husbands throughout the English-speaking world.

  “What,” Dr. Henneman inquisited, “what were you thinking?”

  DENIS COULD NOT THINK of what he had been thinking. He knew that what he had been thinking had been carefully thought, and would surely satisfy Dr. Henneman. But he was having trouble accessing his brain. Every time he tried going in there, the view of his vast hypertextual data matrix was obscured by one insistent memory. All he could see was the replay of a few minutes in his room a week before, when he decided to go ahead with the speech. It was the image of Rich Munsch bobbing around in front of his face.

  “You gotta do it!” Remembered Rich was saying, in full dramatic flower. “It’ll be like—”

  Rich puckered his lips and scrunched his nose, and began yelling in a nasal and New York-y accent.

  “You’re out of order! You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order!”

  Denis said what he usually said when Rich went into another of his inscrutable celebrity impressions: “What?”

  Rich’s response, in the standard format: “Al Pacino in…and Justice for All, 1979, Norman Jewison.”

  Rich bounced up and down a couple of times.

  “Unforgettable speech. Like yours is going to be!”

  There was nothing there to quench Dr. Henneman, Denis decided. He also concluded that the sociology of alien civilizations and implications of infinite universes might be too esoteric for the discussion at hand. And he probably shouldn’t bring up mating. He began composing a creative plausibility, what in debate they referred to as bullshit, when Rich’s face came bobbing across his brain again.

  “You will never see her again!” Rich declared with awful finality. “Nunca. After graduation she will be gone! Until like maybe the tenth reunion, if you both even live that long.”

  Rich enjoyed having an audience, even of one, and took a little strut before delivering his next, tragic line.

  “And she’ll be so very pregnant—baking someone else’s DNA—she’ll have this big cow grin and she won’t even remember who you are!”

  “She’ll remember me,” Denis said. “I sat behind her in almost every class.”

  “Behind her. Behind her. Be-hind her,” Rich incanted, like a poorly written television attorney. “She never saw you.”

  Rich stepped back for his close-up.

  “You don’t exist.”

  This was a persuasive argument. Denis knew what it felt like to not exist, and didn’t much care for it. He doubted it would hold much sway with Dr. Henneman, whose existence nobody doubted. He scanned his memory again, for even the slightest scrap of logic behind this monumental blunder, and there was Rich again.

  “If you don’t do this,” Rich said, pausing to imply quotation marks before croaking out of the side of his mouth in a quasi-tough-guy voice:

  “You will regret it, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”

  “What?” Denis said.

  “Bogart, dude!”

  “I DUNNO,” Denis told Dr. Henneman.

  Denis had upon his face that sheepish but supercilious grin only found on a teen male in trouble. He had never deployed it before, but Dr. Henneman had certainly seen it, and she was trained to wipe it off. “Not the behavior I expect from someone going to Northwestern University.” And then, oh so coolly: “You know, one call from me and you’re going to Harper’s…”

  That smirk wiped right off.

  “Oh. Don’t do that.”

  Harper Community College, located just five miles away in once lovely Palatine, offered credit courses in:

  Computer Information Systems;

  Dental Hygiene;

  Certified Nursing Assistance;

  Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning;

  Hospitality Management; and

  Food Service.

  It was where young lives went to die.

  “That would be…unimaginable,” Denis said, even as he was extravagantly imagining it. “I, I don’t know what I was thinking…I was…I was under an influence!”

  The phrase under an influence triggered a series of autonomic responses in Dr. Henneman: check eyes, arms, grades. But wait, this was Denis Cooverman. Valedictorian, debate champion, meek, quiet, perhaps too quiet, socially isolated…She studied Denis for Goth signifiers: pale, check; pasty, perhaps; eyeliner, no; hair, ordinary; piercings, none visible. His gown: there could be any number of semiautomatic weapons or sticks of dynamite under there.

  But, c’mon: Denis Cooverman.

  If Dr. Henneman had been one of those evil robot principals you keep hearing about, she would have started repeating IRRESOLVABLE LOGIC CONFLICT as smoke poured from her optical sockets and her head unit would have sparked and then exploded, just like in Mr. Wrona’s sweet custodial dreams.

  Instead, she bowed her head and whispered, “Drugs?”

  “Oh? No,” Denis flustered, “not drugs. They’re whack,” quoting a health education video that could use some updating. “No, by influence, I meant my thinking process was influenced, negatively impacted, by which I mean…Rich Munsch.”

  Dr. Henneman smiled. This would be perfect for her blog, The Uncertainty Principal, the twelfth most popular high school principal blog in the state.

  “You really shouldn’t be taking romantic advice from Richard Munsch,” she said.

  Denis—and this will be a recurring theme—didn’t know that this would be a good time to shut up.

  “But he was right,” Denis insisted. “I had to do something. I would have been forgotten. Not even. I’m not there.” Denis pointed to his head, and because he was Denis, he pointed precisely to his hippocampus. “She has no memory of me. No dendritic spines in her cortex that whisper: Denis.”

  (Denis knew that dendritic spines did not whisper, but he could be poetic, too, in his own way.)

  “So I had to,” Denis continued his pleading. “To stimulate dendrite growth. I mean”—and this is where he thought he had her—“Dr. Henneman, haven’t you ever been in love?”

  Dr. Henneman had been in love, and was in love, with her husband, Mr. Dr. Henneman, who was standing not more than fifteen feet away but remained invisible to all of her students because it required them to acknowledge that she had feelings and plumbing. The plaintiveness of Denis’s cry, however, rekindled in Dr. Henneman the heartache of Paul Burgie, the brown-eyed demon who took her to second base (then above-the-waist petting and not a Rainbow Party) and reported back to the other seventh-grade boys that Dr. Henneman’s nipples were “weird”—as if he had a representative sample!

  Dr. Henneman caught herself crossing her arms tightly across her chest, as she had through junior high. Such silly, everlasting pain. She answered Denis with something approaching empathy.

  “There’s another Beth Cooper out there,” she told him. “One just for you. The world is full of Beth Coopers.”

  Dr. Henneman began to walk away, already filing Denis under STUDENTS, FORMER and composing additional summer projects for Mr. Wrona. The grooves between these floor tiles could use a good tooth-picking…

  “Dr. Henneman?”

  “Yes, Mr. Cooverman?”

  “You won’t call Northwestern.”

  Dr. Henneman chuckled. “As if I have any actual power,” she confessed, as she often did to graduates. “Denis, with your SAT score
s, you’d practically have to kill someone to not get in.”

  ALONE AGAIN, Denis decided to assume a cool pose against the wall, in case anyone chose to reference him while discussing his now infamous speech. It was a pretty good pose: casual yet defiant. But no one was talking about his speech; few even remembered it. At the end of the ceremony it had flown out of their heads like trigonometry, gone forever.

  Denis canvassed the room, a cruel smile playing across his lips, he thought.

  Rich’s father was at the snack table, filling paper napkins with cookie remains. Rich was performing for his mother and Ms. Rosenbaum, both laughing despite obviously having no idea what he was doing. Miles Paterini and Pete Couvier, the junior ushers, were acting like they were already seniors, scoping out where their lunch table would be, temporarily forgetting how unpopular they were. And there was Stephen Gammel guzzling a Coca-Mocha, the horrible new carbonated coffee beverage, and Lysa Detrick showing off the chin she got for graduation, and:

  There she was.

  BETH COOPER WAS less than thirty feet away. Twenty-seven floor tiles. She was chatting with Cammy Alcott and Treece Kilmer, fellow varsity cheerleaders and Table Six lunchers. Chatting about him, Denis suspected. Remarkably, he was about to be correct.

  Cammy, who had a preternatural sense for when she was being stared at, noticed Denis first. Denis jerked his face to the side—universal body language for Yes, I was staring at you—while maintaining his casual yet defiant pose against the wall. It made him look like a male underwear model, except not. Out of the corner of his rapidly darting eye Denis saw Cammy point. Treece, and then Beth, turned in his direction.

  Denis considered yawning to underscore his indifference to the attention, but he was afraid a scream might come out, undermining the effect.

  Cammy made a short remark, with either a slight smile or a slight frown. Treece whinnied like a frightened mare, a thing she did in situations where other people laughed.

  Beth Cooper began walking toward Denis.

  WHEN DENIS WAS EIGHT, he read a story about a boy who discovered he could render himself invisible by turning at a precise angle. Young Denis spent several days systematically rotating himself until he, too, knew the exact angle of invisibility.