Cold contempt at the mirror: the weeping Possalthwaite and the math sermon

pivotal · 17 Nov YDAU, ~1420h

• When: 17 November YDAU, from ~1420h, the empty males' locker room; Freer and Pemulis's challenge match starts at 1430h
• What: Freer's fullest portrait. Shirtless, towel around his neck, in no hurry to dress for the match Pemulis needs for a WhataBurger seat, he stands at the Academy's best mirror "ministering to his skin" — ballooning a cheek to cream a possible pimple, tweezing a nostril, checking his jaw in the side-mirrors, squeezing a damp tennis ball while scanning his forehead by feel — while thirteen-year-old Todd Possalthwaite weeps on the bench over his father's welched Disney-World promise ("Nothing's true"). Freer's commentary runs cold throughout: the boy's grief is "a disappointed dinkle"; a kid thirteen "hasn't even been in the same room with real disappointment yet"; baby wouldn't know genuine-article angst "if it walked up and got him in a headlock." When Pemulis counters with his trust-math sermon, Freer heckles that too — warning the kid to flee, sneering at the probationer's credentials, and reading the consolation itself as predation. Pemulis, for his part, keeps mentally auditioning cartoon violence against him. (Corroborated in n332: "I'm in there suiting up waiting for Freer and doing a little B.B.-intervention on Possalthwaite.")