The Avril-C.T. crux: adjacent bedrooms, "extremely close," and Hal's imagined tableau

pivotal · YDAU (and standing) — the liaison lattice

• When: standing condition, YDAU present
• What: Avril and C.T. sleep in adjacent second-floor HmH bedrooms ("separate rooms"), "pretty much the Dynamic Duo of compulsion," and "have never represented themselves as anything other than unrelated but extremely close" (event 2). Orin dates C.T.'s move-in to days before JOI's suicide (event 17) and reads it as a usurpation. Hal, in the blizzard reverie, imagines their sex directly: "Sex between the Moms and C.T. I imagined as both frenetic and weary, with a kind of doomed timeless Faulknerian feel to it," Avril "staring blankly at the ceiling," C.T. "never once shutting up." Whether the closeness is sexual, and whether C.T. is truly no blood relation (event 2), are left entangled and open.