the Year of Glad interview: using a boy for just his body
here you are using a boy for just his body, a boy so shy and withdrawn he won't speak up for himself, a jock with doctored marks and a store-bought application.
Context
The Admissions Dean leans across the table and delivers the scene's title-line indictment: the whole apparatus around Hal amounts to "using a boy for just his body." It is the book's purest early statement of athlete-as-equipment — the ranked instrument stripped of the interior that can't testify for itself, "a jock" whose paperwork was manufactured to move the body through. That the sentence is spoken by the institution most eager to acquire that body is the trap the scene closes.