There’s a lot of yelling. Two of the cops take Steve down, pin him to the ground, his face pressed against a patch of snow. The third cop stands over Jessup. Jessup can’t tell if the cop is checking to make sure he’s okay or ready to stop him from retaliating.
But he’s not thinking about retaliating. The truth is that he’s stunned. Steve’s a senior, too. They’ve played together at Cortaca High School for four years. Were on teams together a couple of times through Pop Warner. Had he ever, even once, said anything, done anything to Steve?
He takes a second to sit back up. It hurts like hell where Steve nailed him. But when he sits up, he realizes there’s a huge circle of students around them. Mostly they are gawking, but a few of them have looks on their faces that Jessup recognizes: hatred. Directed toward him.
“I didn’t do anything,” Jessup says. “He just hit me.”
He looks around for a friend. The first person he sees that he knows is Alyssa Robinson. She meets his eyes, says calmly, loudly, evenly, “Go fuck yourself, you fucking Nazi.”
The cop standing by Jessup yells, “Hey! All of you! Get to class. Now!”
The students start to disperse, but they aren’t quiet. Alyssa isn’t the only one to say something. The two cops have Steve cuffed now. He’s lying on his stomach, looking at Jessup. Jessup knows that if Steve weren’t cuffed, he’d try to hit Jessup again. He wants to rub at the spot where he was punched, but he doesn’t want to give Steve the satisfaction. Instead he just stays seated, looks away. After a couple of minutes most of the students are gone. There’s a steady trickle of kids getting dropped off or parking their cars, but mostly they just give curious looks and walk by. One kid stops to take a picture with his phone.
The cop standing over Jessup gives him a sharp look. “You okay?”
Jessup nods.
“Then get your ass to class.”
He stops by his locker, stuffs the borrowed jacket away, heads to his first-period class, AP Spanish. He sits down and pulls out his phone. He isn’t really doing anything on his phone, but it helps him pretend to be busy so he doesn’t have to make eye contact, doesn’t have to see the way people are looking at him. Señora Jenkins seems like she’s oblivious to all of it, which makes sense, because she usually seems like she’s oblivious to everything. She teaches Spanish by the book, which is fine, because, like most subjects, it comes easily to Jessup. Once the bell rings he’s able to lose himself in the work; they are in the middle of their aesthetics and beauty unit, studying architecture in Barcelona. She runs a slide show for half the class, her notes clearly cribbed from the internet. The second half of the class is spent silently working on a persuasive essay.
In chemistry he sits in the back anyway, his benchmate a quiet kid who is only a junior and who has barely said a word to him all year. His jaw aches and he’s got a soft hum in his ear from where Steve hit him. When it’s time for gym class, he asks for a hall pass and goes to the nurse’s office. The nurse is old—she’s got to be close to retirement—but she’s nice, and she doesn’t take a lot of interest in Jessup. Gives him a bag of ice and lets him lie down on one of the vinyl couches. After a while, she asks him if he wants her to call his parents, and when he says no, she gently sends him on his way.
It’s lunch, and he thinks about just going to the library and trying to hide, but he feels himself hardening, some stiffness in his bones that won’t let him do it, David John’s “stand straight, look people in the eye” echoing in his head, and he goes to the cafeteria.
When he passes through the doors, there’s not a record-scratch of quiet, but there’s a tonal shift, enough conversations shuttering to make Jessup self-conscious. There’s a table with a couple of guys from the team, their girlfriends, and he can feel the tension rippling off them, the relief when he passes them by. There’s an empty table off to the side, and he sits there, pulls out his lunch, pulls out his AP European History textbook. Camouflage.
He doesn’t want to look like he’s rushing, but he also doesn’t think he could eat quickly if he tried; the sandwich sticks in his throat, dry wheat bread and sliced chicken left over from dinner, carrot sticks, an apple. He pretends to read the book, flips a page every minute or so, and soon enough it feels like the cafeteria is back to its normal buzz. But at some point he feels the table shift, someone sitting across from him.
Deanne.