the expulsion hearing: candor as seduction-Strategy
he had a terrible fear of rejection; he was telling her up-front now that tomorrow he was going to ask her out for a date and was begging her not openly to reject him if she didn’t want to go, to think up some plausible excuse—though of course he said he realized that what he was saying would make that excuse hard to believe, now that he’s openly asked her to make up an excuse.
Context
The dosed Wayne's dead-on imitation of Tavis is the book's sharpest parody of confessional candor as instrument — total honesty deployed as seduction, and working. The Tavis-scenario is a recursive candor-trap: announce your fear of rejection, beg her to spare you by inventing an excuse, then note that you've just made any excuse unbelievable — a display of vulnerability engineered to make the target feel she's meeting a uniquely "honest and open" man. And "chillingly," in Wayne's projection it succeeds: Tavis seduces the cheerleader "even when he's totally open on the date about the fact that he'd deliberately told her he was afraid of rejection… only as a strategy," the honesty finally "so exhausting she'd basically just laid back exhausted and let him X her just to shut him up. Except—chillingly—he hadn't shut up." This is manufactured sincerity's terminal form: candor weaponized past the point where its own exposure disarms it, sincerity so relentlessly performed it works even after it confesses to being a performance.