the apple and the torrent of saliva
The apple was good-sour but perfumy from the pocket of the Moms’s smock, and it stimulated a torrent of saliva.
Context
The scene runs on Hal's mouth — freshly dental-numbed, checking for drool he can't feel, unable to gather spit, then flooded by the Granny Smith — the whole oral apparatus of the secret user (the dry mouth, the spitting, the brush-and-mint logistics) surfacing here as raw physical preoccupation. The saliva-torrent is the body's foreground while the Pump-Room pull works underneath.