the admissions interview (pp. 3–10)
The Dean at left, a lean yellowish man whose fixed smile nevertheless has the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material, is a personality-type I’ve come lately to appreciate, the type who delays need of any response from me by relating my side of the story for me, to me.
Context
Nobody in this room lets Hal be his own source. His uncle sits at his immediate right and speaks for him — "Hal's excited," "Hal's right as rain," the facial tic is "adrenaline" — and even the Deans present Hal's story back to Hal rather than ask him for it. The family's function throughout is mediation: C.T. is the mouthpiece who metabolizes the boy into pleasant institutional copy, and the scene's crisis is precisely the moment the Deans strip that mediation away ("This seems somehow impossible with you here, sir") and demand the boy speak raw. He can't — the sounds come out as something the room hears as animal distress. The family system has stood so long between Hal and the world that without it his own voice is unintelligible. What the enclosure protects, it also disables.