Pages 39–42
Two panels stapled together. First, the Bruce Green story finishes: by tenth grade Mildred Bonk has metamorphosed into the frightening smoking-alley set, and by graduation-year she, Green, and their baby live in a dealer's trailer off the Allston Spur — still undated, no header. Then a section break, a YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT header, and midnight in Hal and Mario's dorm room: the same room as the 9 May phone call (pp. 32–33), exact date unspecified. The second panel is dialogue only, in a totally dark room — two voices and the "…" of silence are all you get.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Visine and Clorets (p. 39) — real redness-drops and breath gum: the standard concealment kit (Erdedy stocked Visine too, p. 20).
- serial-cartridges (p. 40) — episodic shows on cartridge, watched on the TP (the rental world of p. 19).
- Booboo / Boo (p. 40) — Hal's names for Mario; families here run on "internal monikers" (p. 29, as ten-year-old Hal explained).
- Tosca (p. 42) — real Puccini opera, a famous tear-jerker.
- agoraphobic (p. 42) — clinically afraid to leave home or enter public space.
- portcullis (p. 42) — a castle gate's heavy grating; the Academy apparently has one out front.
After you read: three things
1. Two stranger-scenes finally touch. The trailer's landlord is "Tommy Doocey, the infamous harelipped pot-and-sundries dealer" with unclean snake tanks (p. 40) — point for point the Allston trailer dealer Erdedy's woman described on pp. 18–19: harelip, snakes, trailer, no pleasantness. It's the first time two of the book's unconnected worlds have visibly shared a person. Meanwhile the panel closes the Bonk romance with a shrug: "for a while life was more or less one big party" (p. 40).
2. Mario is the one who says things. He asks Hal the same unanswerable question weekly ("You never say, is why," p. 41) and names what Hal talks around: "You’re talking about since Himself passed away" (p. 41) — so the father's death is now plain fact. Sideways, through Mario's questions, you also get the Moms: never cried, seems happier and taller, laughs more at C.T., and now never leaves the grounds at all. Hal's answers keep collapsing into "…" — the same typographic silence that ended the conversationalist scene (p. 31), now pointed at the same subject.
3. Weigh the flag parable yourself. Hal's comfort for Mario: there are two ways to fly a flag at half-mast — lower the flag, or "You can also just raise the pole" (p. 42), to twice its height. As consolation it says the Moms's grief is real but disguised by elevation; as evidence it's only Hal's guess, and he marks it as one: "She’s plenty sad, I bet." (p. 42). The scene ends on the bet, not on proof.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.