The Viewing Room drop-in: warning Hal about the huge lady with the notebook

pivotal · 11 Nov YDAU (P.M. Study Period)

• When: Wed 11 Nov YDAU, during the Blood Sister viewing in the Viewing Room (V.R. 6).
• What: Her fullest on-page appearance. Mid-Blood-Sister, "Bernadette Longley sticks her long boxy head in the door and sees Bridget Boone and says 'I thought I heard you in here' and comes in uninvited with Jennie Bash in tow." She looks at the sulking, chew-packing Hal and delivers the scene's plot beat: "You know there's a totally huge lady cruising the halls looking for you, with a notebook and a very determined expression" — the profile hunt arriving at Hal's door (identification note below). Then the needle: "'Plus I hear your best friend in the whole world did something really funny today,' Longley says" — the Pemulis news, which Boone theatrically declines to hear. Texture: "Bernadette Longley wears knee-length candy-cane trousers and a sweatshirt with the fleecy inside out"; she is one of the girls whose kicked-off sneakers prompt Hal's meditation on how "Girls literally embody the idea of making yourself at home"; offered Boone's TCBY carton, "Longley puffs her cheeks and blows air out with a fatigued sound." The scene's endnote gives her critical voice on the film itself: with the heroine's dead novice's hideous facial burn-scars unexplained, "Bernadette Longley says she kind of hopes that's the case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and more spiritual wound/hideousness" — a symbolic equation that "strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock."