He can see it, Trevell’s girlfriend friends with Aaron’s girlfriend, Victoria. Those girls friends with the girls from Kilton Valley. Go to summer camp together. Parents dropping five grand so their darlings can sleep in cabins and do overnight trips in tents, sit around campfires, canoe, hit the archery range, an expensive way to have your kids feel poor for a month. Nothing in common except parents who can afford it, which means they have everything in common. No tribe except money, skin or no skin, talking about David John and Ricky and that night in the alley and the way that blood begets blood and Jessup, no matter what he does on the field, no matter what he does in school, will always have been born into the wrong family, will always be on the wrong side of that divide.
The way all the kids at the party are looking at him, Jessup knows there’s no win for him here. If he hits Corson, he proves the point. It’s an impossible situation, and it makes him want to scream. A few weeks ago, Wyatt was bitching about reverse discrimination and quotas, how it’s bullshit that libtards will do anything to get blacks and Mexicans into colleges but nothing for white kids like him and Kaylee and Jessup, how being white means they have to work twice as hard to get half as much as the Left hands out to people just for being colored. Jessup argued with him, saying it’s more complicated than they make it out to be at the Blessed Church of the White America, but Wyatt shut him down. Said Jessup was only whistling that tune because he was sticking it to an ebony girl, and even though Jessup wanted to punch him, he didn’t do anything or say anything because there was no win there either. All he could do was bury the comment, pretend like Wyatt never said it, convince himself that Wyatt was making a joke.
There’s never a win. Not for somebody like Jessup. He didn’t get to choose what he was born into, didn’t choose the Blessed Church of the White America. And what kind of choice can he make now?
While Jessup has looked around the room, Corson has kept his eyes straight ahead. “So, I’ll ask again. Am I black?”
“I don’t want trouble,” Jessup says. “I was just leaving.”
Derek steps forward, a spark in his eyes. “No, man. This is our party. You can stay. You guys,” he says to Corson and his buddies, “get the fuck out of here.” Steve Silver is standing behind Derek and grabs his arm, says something into Derek’s ear. The spark in Derek’s eyes goes out.
Corson ignores everything around him. Points at Jessup. “I’ll answer the question for you. No. You don’t look at me and think ‘black.’ You don’t think ‘African American,’ either.”
The girls in the room all seem to be fading back, some of them pulling on the arms of boyfriends, but this is a roomful of football players. There aren’t enough peacemakers. The boys are leaning forward.
“You kicked out my fucking taillight,” Jessup says again, but again it’s the wrong thing said the wrong way. He can hear that it sounds weak.
“Why don’t you just go on and say it?” Corson has moved across the room now, with the deliberate gait of somebody who has been drinking. He gets close enough to crowd Jessup. “Say it.”
“I’m not saying shit.”
Corson’s voice is loud, he’s playing to an audience. “You look at me and you’re thinking ‘jigaboo.’ You’re thinking ‘big ol’ buck,’ aren’t you?”
Jessup shakes his head. There’s nothing he can say.
“No?” Corson laughs now. “Oh, Mr. White Power is all quiet when I get up in his face.”