That’s tomorrow. Tonight, it’s football. The sleet is starting to gather. It’s the kind of cold wet that makes certain kids wish they’d picked a different sport. Cortaca High School is a mix of kids. Poor whites like Jessup living outside of Cortaca on country roads, hills, and hollers, right off county highways or buried back down dirt roads, in trailers or beaten-down houses with missing windows, sweat-equity additions finished only with Tyvek, with months or years before siding goes up. Woodstoves if you’re lucky, the constant whine of a chainsaw or the thunk of a maul giving you a house warm enough to make you sweat. If you’re not lucky, propane, the house at forty-five degrees all winter, balls freezing under thin blankets, sleeping with your clothes on because nobody, not even Treman Gas, will fill your propane tank on credit. The poor blacks mostly living in Cortaca proper, up in the housing complex on East Hill, East Village—Jessup calls it the Jungle, but so do all of the blacks and the poor whites, with only the rich whites calling it by the proper name, too scared to give it its due—and the rest of the poor blacks near the downtown core, old houses once proud but now subdivided into two, four, eight apartments. Only a few of the poor blacks are out in the country like Jessup, but there are enough poor whites in town that there’s a lot of crossing of color lines there. The kids who aren’t poor are all affiliated with Cortaca University or in that orbit. Professors’ kids. Professionals’. Or just come from money. Moms available for birthday parties and carnival night during elementary school, dads who can take the day off to chaperone the middle school field trip to Hershey Park in the spring, parents who insist on honors and AP classes in high school, who know how to procure and pay for tutors when their darlings can’t handle the math or Spanish or chemistry. Jessup is in the classes dominated by rich kids and doing fine, top 10 percent of his class for grades. Not valedictorian, but within spitting distance, not bad for no tutors, for playing three sports and having a part-time job, for helping to raise his sister, top 10 percent of his class something to crow about, a ticket out of here. Beat the drum and check your numbers, teachers never quite believing he can hold his own. Not with a camo hunting jacket and what everybody knows about his brother and his stepdad. Small town, small town, small town. No way for a clean slate.
The Kilton Valley team comes from an hour away. Rich kids in a commuter town. There will be a few boys like Jessup on the team—everywhere, there are boys like him—but mostly the kids from Kilton Valley live in houses with epoxy-coated garage floors, four-bedroom homes with gas fireplaces used only for decoration, thermostats set to seventy-two in the winter, sixty-eight in the summer, cedar fences to keep the golden retriever in. Jessup has heard that the Kilton Valley team practices on an indoor field when the weather is bad. There will be boys on the Kilton Valley team who are already looking forward to getting home before the game has even started, thinking about warming up and drying off instead of the ritualized brutality Jessup loves.
As he jogs through the parking lot, the stadium lights seem too bright for the weather. He can see fat, furious dollops of ice and rain coming in streaks. The wind has kicked up, too. It’s sharp, cutting. The hit of skin on skin, helmet on skin, skin on turf is going to burn. It’s going to burn now, but worse, it’s going to burn later, under the hot showers. Around him, most of the other boys jogging to the field are wearing long sleeves under their pads. Not Jessup. Just his jersey. Bare arms. He wants the boys from Kilton Valley across the line to think about the cold. He wants them to think about what it means that Jessup isn’t hiding from the weather, what it means that it doesn’t bother him. It won’t bother him. Not during the game. He accepted, long ago, that to play football is to understand pain. Both to give and to receive. It is one of the reasons he is good at what he does. Because the secret to being a linebacker is not just the willingness to punish and to accept punishment alike, but to revel in it.