He’s decided to avoid trouble and just leave the party—text Deanne and meet her somewhere else—when he feels a hand slap down on his shoulder. Wyatt.
“Kind of ballsy, huh?” Wyatt moves his hand from Jessup’s shoulder and clamps it on the back of Jessup’s neck. This is his way of being friendly. He looks across the room with Jessup at the crowd of boys and girls from Kilton Valley. The boys move slow, looking around, casing it out, but the girls come in bubbly and chatting, colliding with five or six girls from Cortaca High in a pileup of hugging and kissing. “Aaron said that Victoria goes to camp with one of the girlfriends and they all know each other or something, so she invited them to the party. Don’t think they would have been dumb enough to come if they’d won, but nobody’s going to bother stirring up trouble with the losers.”
“To the victor go the spoils,” Jessup says.
Wyatt gives a rough squeeze. “Now, don’t go doing that sort of shit, Jessup. I hate it when you go all gnostic on me. What do you mean, ‘To the victor go the spoils’? I know what it means, but what’s it supposed to mean?”
Jessup slides out from Wyatt’s arm. “You know, just because you learn a new word doesn’t mean you need to use it all the time. And if you are going to use it, at least use it right. I took AP Global same as you. You can’t just slide in ‘gnostic’ when you mean mystic or mysterious. Beside which, you ever think that you not understanding something might not be because I said something cryptic? Maybe you don’t understand it because you’re dumb.”
It’s an old joke, which is why it’s still funny, and Wyatt ruffles Jessup’s hair. Which he knows Jessup hates. Which is why he does it. Which is why that’s funny, too. Wyatt doesn’t get it as bad from the teachers as Jessup does in school, but that’s because Wyatt flies below the radar. His mom’s a bookkeeper and his dad works steady as a mechanic. He lives in Cortaca proper, on city sewer and water, and even though he loves to hunt and can bag a deer from four hundred yards no problem—he’s the best shot of anybody Jessup knows—he doesn’t wear camo to school. Gets B grades across the board. Not interested in anything better than that. That’s good enough to play football at UConn, and he’s already looked into dental school: only needs a B+ average in college for that. Does just well enough that the teachers ignore him, Blessed Church of the White America or not, though it’s not a thing you can tell just by looking. Jessup thinks of that and then thinks of the cop, Hawkins, telling him not to get tattoos. If it weren’t for what Ricky did, Jessup could fly below the radar, too, but what’s done is done, and the teachers get angry at Jessup all the time, as if it’s some sort of insult to them that he’s earning A grades, like they can’t understand why he isn’t as dumb as he’s supposed to be.
“Eh,” Wyatt says, “fuck ’em. We won, they lost. What are they going to do? Lose again?”