the self read entirely off its class-signs

Where the opening interview had deans read Hal as an animal, here a working-class night-staffer reads him just as completely and just as wrongly, decoding him off the surface entirely — the spotless Nikes, the creased jeans, and above all the "whom," the one grammatical tic that files him a whole planet away. The person is again invisible behind the broadcast: what reaches Johnette is a bundle of privilege-markers, and the detail she'll remember forever is not Hal but a class-signal, the fussy pronoun spoken by a mouth too clogged to swallow. [sweep · shared-ground addiction-recovery]