Friday Night Lights: Prologue–Chapter 3

After tonight, Boobie knew the fans would be back in his corner extolling him once again, the young kids who were counting off the years until their own sun-kissed moment excitedly whispering to one another as he walked down the street or through the mall.

It was a fascinating face, Huck Finnish, high-cheekboned, yet somehow devoid of expression, the eyes flat and deadened against the roar and tumult that surrounded him, impervious to it, unable to react.

A big game against the Rebels would be further vindication, further proof that he had what it took to be a college quarterback in the Southwest Conference.

The sound of vomiting echoed through the dressing room of the stadium, the retching, the physical embodiment of the ambivalence Ivory Christian felt about what he was doing and why he was there.

As the number-one student in his class, his aspirations extended far beyond the glimmer of expectation that a Texas school, any Texas school, might be willing to give him a football scholarship.

The players congregated behind it in the liquid, fading light, yelling, screaming, pounding each other on the shoulder pads and the helmets, furious to be finally set loose onto the field, to revel in the thrilling roar of the crowd.

The stillness was ruptured by a thousand different sounds smashing into each other in wonderful chaos — deep-throated yells, violent exhortations, giddy screams, hoarse whoops.

The people in the stands lost all sight of who they were and what they were supposed to be like, all dignity and restraint thrown aside because of these high school boys in front of them, their boys, their heroes, upon whom they rested all their vicarious thrills, all their dreams.

Earlier in the season, Boobie had cheered on Comer’s accomplishments with a proud smile. As the season progressed and Comer became a star while Boobie languished, the cheers stopped.

His face was etched in agony, the passes coming off his hand in a tentative, jerky motion, thrown desperately without rhythm.

But Odessa also evoked the kind of America that Ronald Reagan always seemed to have in mind during his presidency, a place still rooted in the sweet nostalgia of the fifties — unsophisticated, basic, raw — a place where anybody could be somebody, a place still clinging to all the tenets of the American Dream, however wobbly they had become.

And there were those like Burnett, who saw religion in Odessa used not to reinforce religious beliefs at all but as an excuse for people to come together and be made comfortable with their own social beliefs in racial and gender bigotry.

“Why don’t you just try,” said Trapper, who examined him and could find no discernible injury.

He could have spent hours moving down that thirty-foot aisle, for this was the part of the game he truly did love, the attention, the adulation, as far removed as possible from the grit and relentless routine of the practice field.

In his uniform, with all the different pads he fancied, he looked a little like Robo Cop. But stripped of all the accoutrements, reduced to a gray shirt soaked with sweat, he had lost his persona. He looked like what he was — an eighteen-year-old kid who was scared to death.