Her own scene: five nights deep, she opens the door to the boy who says 'whom'

pivotal · 17 Nov YDAU, ~0830

• When: 17 Nov YDAU, just after 0830, at the end of her fifth straight Dream Duty night shift.
• What: The book's one scene told from inside Johnette. "In Don Gately's medical absence, Johnette F. had worked five straight night shifts on Dream Duty," and she is in the front office writing up the Log, trying to think of synonyms for boredom, dipping a finger in scalding coffee to stay awake, when somebody knocks at the always-open front door — and knocking means stranger, or the Law. She runs the protocol: "got out the clipboard with the names of all the residents with unresolved legal issues who needed to be put upstairs out of sight before any police were let on the premises," in case it's more of those suit-and-tie police come to depose witnesses on "the Lenz-and-Gately-and-Canadian fuck-up," and carries the clipboard "as a kind of emblem of authority" to the window. But the knocker is no cop: an upscale boy about her own age or slightly less — weird tan, the whitest Nike hightops she's ever seen, ironed jeans, "a weird woolly-white jacket with A.T.E. in red up one sleeve and in gray up the other," showered hair half-frozen and standing up straight in front — radiating "high-maintenance upkeep and privilege and schools where nobody carried weapons." In the office she arms herself with the blandly hostile expression she keeps for upscale boys with no tatts and all their teeth — then reads him cold: "His talking had a burbly, oversalivated quality Johnette knew all too wicked well, the quality of somebody who'd just lately put down the pipe and/or bong," and his elaborately hedged request to maybe borrow-and-Xerox a meeting schedule is "the exact same roundabout Denial shit as persons without teeth." The scene closes over her shoulder into the future: "Much later, in subsequent events' light, Johnette F. would clearly recall the sight of the boy's frozen hair slowly settling, and how the boy had said whom, and the sight of clear upscale odor-free saliva almost running out over his lower lip as he fought to pronounce the word without swallowing." The boy is never named in-scene; the identification as Hal Incandenza is an inference, not stated in the text (see Dating notes).