Hal and Mario on liars (pp. 773–774)

Hal builds a whole taxonomy of liars for Mario — the dominators, the self-deprecators, the buriers, the rococo over-elaborators — and then arrives at the only kind he now fears, the liar "where there's simply no way to tell," the one who gives nothing away, and calls that the real monstrosity: they walk among us, they teach our children, inscrutable, brass-faced. He doesn't name her, and he doesn't have to. The description is a portrait of the family's founding condition — the hidden father whose face was "any room's fifth wall," and the mother who is Dean of Females, who literally teaches other people's children, whose graciousness Joelle couldn't detect one fake thing in and still knew could vivisect her. Hal has grown up inside inscrutability and here, at seventeen, identifies it as the thing to be most afraid of, without seeing that he's describing home.