The last glimpses: scarce, avoiding Hal "as if he sensed something," lurking by the dumpsters

pivotal · 17-20 Nov YDAU (post-expulsion; overlaps events 20-22)

• When: 17-20 Nov YDAU, the days after the expulsion (Hal-POV across the 20 Nov material; Doucette's sighting "since early this A.M.")
• What: After the expulsion the friendship and the DMZ plan both come apart. Pemulis, who "had poured a terrific volume of practical pre-Boards math into my head for two weeks, taking his own time and not asking for anything in return" (scene 165), abruptly stops the tutorials, goes scarce, misses meals, and monopolizes the truck; Hal reads the ceased tutorials as an oblique "You Are Ready" and notes, ominously, that "Pemulis had been avoiding me ever since I returned from Natick on Tuesday—as if he sensed something" (scene 170). Pemulis still tries the door — "Mike Pemulis came by and asked if you were up and about" (scene 179) — but Hal's withdrawal has severed them ("since Pemulis and I stopped," scene 179). On the morning of the 20th, expelled and stashless, Pemulis "was nowhere to be seen," reported by Doucette "lurking" out by the West House dumpsters looking "anxiously depressed" (scene 183) — the very hidden clearing behind the dumpsters where the cohort's pre-outing rituals happened (n110), and a plausible somewhere the vanished DMZ (event 22) could have gone. [The arc's terminus — Pemulis avoiding Hal "as if he sensed something," and haunting the dumpsters — is left exactly this suggestive and this unresolved; the timeline draws no conclusion about the DMZ's fate or Hal's.]