Front-office night-talk with Joelle: the Lowell bar-shooting and the football/brightness probe

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pivotal · 0450h, 11 Nov YDAU

When: 0450h, 11 November YDAU, the Ennet House front office (Gately on Dream Duty; Joelle up watching the snow)
What: A deepening Gately-Joelle interaction (dialogue-only). Gately recalls a Lowell bar night from his drinking days: his crew humiliated a local man over his girlfriend, stayed, and the man came back "packing" and shot the crew's boy in the back of the head; blotto, they "walked him around in circles" instead of to the hospital, and he died. Joelle counters with her own blood-memory (her Daddy belt-tourniquets a chainsaw victim). She probes his U.H.I.D. veil while Gately reveals he "got kicked off of football my tenth-grade year for flunking English"; Joelle insists he's "way brighter than you think," diagnosing his shame-about-shame; the exchange spirals into her cryptic "I am so beautiful I am deformed." Establishes the intimacy/tension carrying the later arc.