the secret-high HmH dinner

Concealment feeding the mother's gratification. When Hal gets secretly high he ends up ravenous, floods his eyes with Murine, and heads to the Headmaster's House "for another late dinner with C.T. and the Moms," where he "eats like such a feral animal" that "the Moms says it does something instinctively maternal in her heart good to see him pack it away." The maternal pleasure is real and is being fed, unknowing, by exactly what she must never know: his hunger is a drug side-effect, and her heart-warmed delight at nourishing her son is the direct yield of his hidden high. The family's advertised transparency runs, here, on the mother happily misreading the evidence in front of her — her deepest maternal satisfaction manufactured by the son's concealment. The secret doesn't just evade her; it produces the very tenderness she thinks it confirms.