Clever
C “squinted at” his father and “curled his lips in.” The boy’s face “went blank, as it always seemed to when he questioned and got no answer.” His father “hid things from him.” Perhaps he, the narrator, was “a coward.” C “already seemed to know what was going to happen to him.” Just as his father “had been watching him,” he’d been watching his father, “making the calculations, extrapolating, charting the map of the territory that lay between” him and his father. The little boy and the big man had been watching each other. The irony was that C was clever enough to guess what his father’s silence meant.
A lot of nerve
They were surrounded by “angry boys.” They looked at both of them, but they yelled at Gavin. They wanted to know where the beer was. It had disappeared and no one knew where it was. However, all of them suspected Gavin, because he had already done the same thing before. In spite of the fact that there was an angry crowd in front of him, Gavin remained calm and collected. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Are you accusing me of stealing?” The irony was that he did steal the bear. Gavin was one of those people who had a lot of nerves to look and act innocent.
A parent
The protagonist felt bad. Sally had just dumped him and he had seen her at a party “listening closely in the rec-room basement to a rich boy” he despised so much. He was a little bit “desperate,” he needed to talk to someone about Sally. Of course he couldn’t talk to his mother “about anything, certainly not about being dumped by a poor, freckly white girl.” So he went to his father. Their meeting turned out to be awkward. He hadn’t known why he expected him to be “anything besides a stranger.” The irony is that blood relation can’t guarantee emotional intimacy.
