Trust math, locker room

Pemulis's own father surfaces twice in this scene, both times as clothing. He was never once seen out of "a white Hanes T-shirt gone permanent yellow under the arms," and Pemulis dresses by shoving his head through the neck-hole first, "his late great Da's old-fashioned way," where the moneyed kids do the arm-holes first. The dead father is worn on the body as a class-marker: a dressing reflex that instantly sorts scholarship kids from upscale ones, transmitted wordlessly and for good. What lands is how this dyad reads against Possalthwaite's a few feet away — Pemulis's Da is dead and poor and gone, but he's genuinely inside Pemulis, lodged in a gesture, whereas the living, solvent, promise- breaking father is the one who leaves nothing behind but a hole. The father you can't see got transmitted; the father you can see just welched.