Last attestation: Coyle weighs going to Rusk about Stice

texture · 20 Nov YDAU

• When: 20 Nov YDAU (the snowbound morning; Hal's first-person day)
• What: The novel's last Rusk reference keeps her exactly in role: an option on a worried kid's list. Coyle — rattled by the Stice business (the torn forehead whose "map was taking the edge off appetites all over the room," deLint's yelling, and the uncanny talk Coyle fears he's complicit in) — asks Hal and Mario: "I don’t know if I should go to Schtitt, or Rusk, or what. Or Lateral Alice. What if they haul him off somewhere, and it’s my fault?" Rusk is named second, after the coach and before the secretary — the counselor as one door among several, never the obvious one, for a problem (Stice's) her own jargon had already processed and missed (event 7). Whether anyone ever does take the Stice matter to her is not shown; her thread ends, like it ran, in the subjunctive.