Molly Notkin's party: Joelle's overdose — "His damaged grinning boy Joelle never…"
His damaged grinning boy Joelle never got to know because Orin had disliked him often carried the case with the lenses, grinning like somebody squinting into bright light. That insufferable child actor Smothergill used to contort his face at the boy and he’d just laugh, which sent Smothergill into tantrums that Miriam Prickett would resolve in the bathroom somehow.
Context
Mario glimpsed from outside the family, in Joelle's memory of JOI's shoots: a "damaged grinning boy" whose response to being mocked to his face is to laugh — which defeats the mocker. A four-line preview of the full dossier (071) and of Mario's constitutional immunity to cruelty.