the I-Day film; the psychic slack (pp. 437–438)

The school pays a full-time Ph.D. counselor, the bird-of-prey-faced Dr. Rusk, whom the kids rate as "whatever's just slightly worse than useless" — and so the actual emotional care of E.T.A.'s children falls, in practice, to Lyle, sometimes Mario, and "many times Avril herself." This is the Dean of Females doing the real maternal-therapeutic labor of an entire institution off the books, the mother of the house extended to mother the whole school. It reframes her control as competence: the surveillance-love the theme keeps eyeing critically is also the thing that catches the kids Rusk can't, the psychic slack of a couple hundred pressured adolescents taken up by the one adult who actually notices. The operations machine, seen from the side where it works.