He has to sit for a few minutes and wait for Hawkins to write up the warning. Hawkins hands over the piece of paper, tells Jessup to drive safe, and then saunters back to his cruiser. He pulls out and is past Jessup before Jessup starts driving. Jessup holds the warning in his hand. It’s not a ticket, but he’s not really sure if he can just throw it away, so he places it in the slot above the stereo.
By the time he gets to Victoria Wallace’s place, the party is well under way. The house is out past the university, out in the country a few miles, but not the kind of country that Jessup lives in. Victoria’s house is set on at least twenty acres. It’s the property that you buy when you can afford not to have neighbors. The house is at least two hundred yards from the road. As he turns off and heads up the driveway, he takes in the view: the university, the town of Cortaca, the lake. The property is on a rise. There’s an open field that starts flat but then turns steep off the city side of the driveway, dropping headlong into a thick corset of forest. The house and the driveway sit high enough up that it’s a clear view for a dozen miles.
The house itself is all glass and metal, but it’s built to resemble a farmhouse. Resemble, but Jessup thinks it’s only a passing resemblance. It looks like what a man who’d never worked on a farm would build. Beautiful in its way, easy to imagine it on the cover of one of those home magazines one rack over from the outdoor magazines at the bookstore. It’s the kind of house his mother cleans, but he can’t imagine ever living in a place like this. With all those windows, the gas bills in the winter must run more than what Jessup’s mom pays for the mortgage and taxes combined on their place.
Victoria is a junior. Her mom is a professor at Cortaca University—of what, Jessup doesn’t know—and her dad does something that lets him work from home. Whatever it is, they’re rich. Victoria drives the smaller, high-end, Volvo SUV. Brand-new. This after she totaled her first car, a Honda that had also been new. Jessup is friends with her boyfriend, Aaron Burns, and he’s been in the Volvo a couple of times with them. Leather seats and wood trim, chrome on the outside. He looked it up: close to sixty grand the way she was rolling in it.
Victoria’s parents are in the city for the weekend—they have a two-bedroom condo there and go down most weekends, so this isn’t the first time Victoria has thrown a party—and there are at least seventy kids inside the house already. Jessup figures another fifty before the night is over. Cortaca’s football team only carries forty guys, and most of them will come out, bringing girlfriends and buddies, and Victoria’s friends and people who just heard about it. Jessup will know everybody here.