Avril's concealed love — Mario as "the family's real prodigy"

texture · YDAU present / ongoing

• When: Ongoing; Hal's suspicion in the YDAU present.
• What: Hal fears Avril sees Mario as "the family's real prodigy, an in-bent savant-type genius of no classifiable type" — that his slow intuition scares her, his academic poverty breaks her heart, and the smile he has worn every morning "since the suicide of their father" makes her want to cry — while she disciplines herself "not to hover or wring," a restraint the text calls "noble, pitiable."