# Figurative Language Audit — Chapter 13 ("The Memory and the Kiss")

**Stance:** Skeptical professional edit per `checks/audits/figuration_audit.md`. Every image treated as guilty until it proves work. Sources checked: chapter text, Ch13 packet (figuration dials: sparse, rooted in paint/ground/card stock/room geometry/photo framing; closed Ch12 families including the wall aphorism; sentence-as-object ban), June voice card (perception → judgment → self-rebuke; visual/craft nouns; exits before asks), reading guide §2/§4/§6, thread ledger S-MEMORY-01, timeline (Week 5, Nov 17), continuity Ch12 memory canon, mechanical gate report (0 open findings; WATCH hits only).

**Inventoried and classified literal-craft, not figuration** (each checked against the battery threshold; none is a comparison or personification doing image work):

- "killed the panel's white" — standard studio idiom for toning a ground; dead trade metaphor, literal action.
- "watched the brick start to buzz" — painter's term for optical vibration of doubled lines; perceptual report.
- "thin ochre dragged almost dry, reversed and faint, a grocery price coming through from the other side of the paper" — describes the actual painted subject (the Ch12 chicken-thigh ghost), not a vehicle.
- "exactly where a store clerk would have put it" — placement fact about the painted formula tape.
- "enough air between them for either one to be cropped out" / "the record of six inches between them" — literal properties of the photograph; June's installer eye.
- "a subject that can hold both of us" (Theo) — support/ground near-dead idiom, in the mouth of a man who crates paintings.
- "as grateful for the problem as he was horrified by it"; "starting it had not made the next second belong to her"; "the camera was making categories real" — psychological/agency statements with no live vehicle; "categories" is the book's literal institutional vocabulary (Ruth, forms, labels).

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## Per-image battery

**1. "as if either action could count as preparing"**
1. Clarifies June's pre-class nerves: busywork performed as readiness before painting an entrusted memory.
2. Yes — self-aimed joke, June's documented armor ("jokes aimed at herself").
3. Yes — clothespin line and rubber-band stripe are this chapter's physical objects.
4. Sharpens: converts fidgeting into self-diagnosis without naming anxiety.
5. The frame is mildly portable, but the nouns (clothespin count, thumbed stripe) are not; no rewrite needed.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "as if either action could count as preparing" — literal anchor: double-checked card details before an assignment she fears; focalizer basis: June's self-deprecating register, perception-first rhythm.`

**2. "The room made every partner a wall."**
1. Nominally clarifies the back-to-back easel arrangement: partner present, unreadable.
2. Partial at best — June thinks spatially, but she does not mint maxims; her rhythm is perception → judgment, and the maxim arrives after the perception already landed.
3. Weak — "wall" gestures at the book's wall motif, but the packet explicitly closes Ch12's wall-aphorism family and caps the noun: "Use the paintings and objects rather than repeating the nouns by summary." This is the noun by summary.
4. Decorates. The preceding sentence — "close enough to count the brush taps, invisible enough that she could not check his face" — already does the entire job with better specificity. The aphorism re-states it as theme.
5. Fully portable: "The room made every X a Y" is a maxim template that would survive transplant into any novel with paired furniture. Cut.
6. Pause and think "come on" — a sharp reader hears the writer underlining the chapter's thesis in the third paragraph.
`UNEARNED — "The room made every partner a wall." — failed questions 3, 4, 5, 6 — ORDER: CUT (the sentence before it, "close enough to count the brush taps, invisible enough that she could not check his face," already carries the fact; deletion also clears the packet's closed wall-aphorism inheritance and reduces room-personification in the chapter to the single later instance).`

**3. "Do not improve it. Do not punish it for being ordinary." (Odile)**
1. Clarifies the assignment's ethic: no sentimentalizing, no inverse-sentimentalizing.
2. Yes — Odile is the sole character licensed for high-density lines; insult-as-diagnosis aimed at the work, not anyone's sentence.
3. Yes — extends her card ("Do not make it kinder") into spoken instruction.
4. Sharpens: it sets the failure modes June later navigates ("dear" vs. "bleak").
5. Odile-voiced; transplanting it would require transplanting Odile. Keep.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "Do not punish it for being ordinary." — literal anchor: the no-rescue assignment rule; focalizer basis: Odile's licensed economy, consistent with her voice card's diagnosis register.`

**4. "with a practical objection already assembled"**
1. Clarifies Ben's reflex: the objection exists fully formed before permission to voice it.
2. Yes — June observing; "assembled" is the right verb for the cohort's planner.
3. Yes — Ben's documented contingency texture (routes, forms, backup plans).
4. Sharpens the one-finger comedy; Odile's stare resolves it without dialogue.
5. Near-dead metaphor; survives the swap test by being barely a figure. Keep.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "a practical objection already assembled" — literal anchor: Ben's raised finger pre-loaded with logistics; focalizer basis: June's dry observational comedy at no one's unrepaired expense.`

**5. "hated that she knew the pause was orange"**
1. Clarifies that by sound and tube-order alone June identifies which color Theo hesitated over — and orange is her erased interval from the Ch12 card.
2. Yes — exactly June: painter's procedural knowledge plus desire registering as evidence against herself ("hated that she knew").
3. Deeply — Theo's "usual order" from five weeks of classes; the orange interval from S-MEMORY-01.
4. Sharpens: his hesitation is him handling her memory; her recognizing it is the Turn 1 engine (memorized too much) recurring under new pressure.
5. Meaningless outside this book. Keep.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "she knew the pause was orange" — literal anchor: Theo pausing over the orange tube while preparing to paint June's erased wall; focalizer basis: June's tube-level knowledge of him, registered as self-incriminating intimacy.`

**6. "a thin gray wash, the color of a day after it had bounced down four stories and lost the argument"**
1. Clarifies the literal value she mixes: airshaft daylight, attenuated by four stories of brick.
2. Yes — painters name grays by behavior; the dry defeat-joke is June's register.
3. Yes — "four stories" is Theo's fourth-floor kitchen from the card; "bounced" is real airshaft optics.
4. Sharpens: it states the painting problem (how dark is honest?) while keeping the memory unsentimental.
5. "Lost the argument" alone is portable; welded to "bounced down four stories" it is not. Keep intact.
6. Admire. Closest scrutiny point: the personified "argument" is the writerly edge; it survives because the defeat is the memory's actual class texture, not added mood.
`EARNED — "the color of a day after it had bounced down four stories and lost the argument" — literal anchor: diluted airshaft light as a mixed value; focalizer basis: June's habit of specifying pigment and light by exact behavior.`

**7. "the paint came off it in a long curl like a fern"**
1. Clarifies the waste pipe's peeling paint shape — the single most identifying detail of Theo's memory.
2. Yes, and crucially it is Theo's image, quoted from his card; June handles it as received material.
3. Canonical — verbatim from Ch12 (continuity: "waste pipe paint curl like a fern").
4. Sharpens: the whole beat is June fighting the simile's prettiness ("her first version made the curl pretty"), which is the assignment's ethic dramatized.
5. Not portable as deployed — the chapter interrogates the image rather than spending it.
6. Admire — figuration audited inside the fiction itself.
`EARNED — "in a long curl like a fern" — literal anchor: inherited Ch12 card detail; focalizer basis: June receiving, then deliberately roughening, her partner's own image.`

**8. "Paint did not permit six or seven"**
1. Clarifies that the medium forces commitment where memory was vague: a painted line has a countable number of pins.
2. Yes — June thinks in medium constraints; this is craft fact phrased as constraint.
3. Directly from the card's wording ("SIX OR SEVEN CLOTHESPINS").
4. Sharpens: it motivates "counted the sag and the distance between pins and chose seven" and the refusal to move the crowded fourth pin.
5. Not portable — requires this card, this ambiguity.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "Paint did not permit six or seven" — literal anchor: a painting cannot hold an approximate count; focalizer basis: June's medium-first reasoning about fidelity to entrusted memory.`

**9. "A boy using the surface the world had left under his pen."**
1. Clarifies why the drawing lives on a grocery circular: paper scarcity; you draw on what the kitchen supplies.
2. Mostly — June thinks in supports and grounds; the fragment shape fits her compression. "The world" is the one grand word; checked against replacement ("the only paper in the kitchen"), the literal loses the class texture the line exists to carry.
3. Yes — circular, ballpoint, eighty-nine-cents ghost; the book's poverty texture, not imported pathos.
4. Sharpens: it explains the ghost she is about to paint and why erasing it would be a lie.
5. The sentence needs the circular to mean anything. Keep.
6. Accept, some will admire. This was a near-miss on question 2 and is noted as such.
`EARNED — "A boy using the surface the world had left under his pen." — literal anchor: drawing made on the back of a Key Food circular for lack of paper; focalizer basis: June reading biography through supports and grounds, her professional habit.`

**10. "the numerals had the pleased cleverness of a restored sign, and Theo's memory had not been pleased with itself"**
1. Clarifies the over-legibility of her first pass — restoration-grade tidiness falsifying a child's unselfconscious mark.
2. Yes — June installs, repairs, and makes damage presentable for a living; restored signage is her professional reference class.
3. Yes — and it sets up the rag-back to "the skipped places," a real technique.
4. Sharpens: names the precise failure (pleased-with-itself) the assignment forbids.
5. Not portable — needs both her trade and his card.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "the pleased cleverness of a restored sign" — literal anchor: too-clean numerals in the painted circular ghost; focalizer basis: June's art-handler eye for restoration falsity.`

**11. "the dinner price entering a drawing because nothing in that kitchen had the courtesy to stay out of anything else"**
1. Clarifies the literal bleed-through (cheap paper, dry pen) and the cramped-poverty fact it encodes: no separation between dinner math and a child's art.
2. Yes — "had the courtesy" is June's dry joke shape, aimed at a condition, not a person.
3. Yes — circular, pen skip, kitchen; pure scene material.
4. Sharpens: justifies keeping the skipped places rather than cleaning them.
5. Not portable — the personification is welded to bleed-through mechanics.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "nothing in that kitchen had the courtesy to stay out of anything else" — literal anchor: ad price ghosting through the drawing's paper; focalizer basis: June's wry register converting class texture into craft decision.`

**12. "a lie told with good manners" / "a different lie and easier to admire"**
1. Clarifies the two failure modes she avoided: sentimentalizing the memory, or aestheticizing its bleakness.
2. Yes — June's craft ethic is honesty of rendering; "easier to admire" is her suspicion of performed bleakness, consistent with her unsentimental-praise care move.
3. Grounded by the epigraph's commands and cashed out two sentences later in her own biography ("years making damaged rooms presentable for other people's walls").
4. Sharpens: defines the "irritating middle" the panel actually landed in.
5. "A lie told with good manners" floats free if excised — checked against replacement; the surrounding sentences pin it to this assignment and this résumé, so it holds in place. This was the swap test's closest interrogation.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "a lie told with good manners" — literal anchor: the rejected sentimental version of the airshaft panel; focalizer basis: June's rendering-honesty ethic, immediately grounded in her installer history.`

**13. "asked to leave one unrescued and still worth looking at"**
1. Clarifies the inversion of her job: she repairs damaged rooms professionally; tonight the assignment forbids rescue.
2. Yes — she frames the panel through her own labor category.
3. Yes — her freelance install/repair work is canon; "no rescue" is Odile's spoken rule.
4. Sharpens: this is the chapter's thesis carried by her résumé instead of by abstraction.
5. Not portable — requires her specific work history.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "leave one unrescued and still worth looking at" — literal anchor: the no-improvement assignment versus her restoration trade; focalizer basis: June mapping painting ethics onto her actual job.`

**14. "not covered and not bright enough to defend itself"**
1. Clarifies the painted orange interval's state under first primer coat: dulled, gray-pink, half-erased.
2. Yes — June reading a value relationship; "defend itself" is her judgment of visual competition.
3. Yes — the orange interval is her own erased work from Ch12; the personification carries the fact that her wall could not defend itself against the repaint she executed.
4. Sharpens: double duty, optical and biographical, without naming the feeling.
5. Not portable — the whole charge is the Ch12 erasure.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "not bright enough to defend itself" — literal anchor: dulled orange under a thin primer skin in Theo's panel; focalizer basis: June's painter's read of value competition, loaded with her own history of participating in the erasure.`

**15. "as if the person using it had stepped out for more paint and left the job to continue without her"**
1. Clarifies the painting's literal composition: roller handle half in frame, no figure — absence as the subject.
2. Yes — June describing pictorial effect, her core competence.
3. Yes — built from her memory's own job logistics (tray lip, roller, coats).
4. Sharpens: "left the job to continue without her" states the erasure proceeding past her agency — the memory's true injury — without commentary.
5. Not portable — needs the install scenario.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "as if the person using it had stepped out for more paint and left the job to continue without her" — literal anchor: the half-framed roller handle in Theo's composition; focalizer basis: June reading compositional choice as job logistics, her native grammar.`

**16. "He had painted the minute when knowing still mattered and no one in the room had decided what that knowledge was worth."**
1. Clarifies which moment of the Ch12 memory Theo chose: the dead-salmon stage — before Decorator's White, before "you'd never know" became true.
2. Yes, narrowly — this is June doing professional interpretive reading of a canvas, which she does for a living; it is judgment following two full paragraphs of strict perception (plate, screws, primer skin, tape, sink), honoring her perception-first rhythm.
3. Yes — every term ("knowing," the room, the worth of knowledge) is the memory's own content; "you'd never know" is quoted canon.
4. Sharpens: it defines what Theo refused to paint (the rescue, the noble figure, the label), which the packet requires.
5. The sentence is abstract, and abstraction travels — checked against replacement: the literal version ("He had painted the dead-salmon stage") is already on the page one line earlier; this sentence adds the stakes of that stage, which the literal cannot. Closest interrogation in the chapter's quiet middle.
6. Accept; the attentive reader admires that it stops short of solving her fear (Week 6 protection holds).
`EARNED — "the minute when knowing still mattered and no one in the room had decided what that knowledge was worth" — literal anchor: the dead-salmon interval before the white coat in June's own memory; focalizer basis: June's professional canvas-reading, delivered after exhaustive literal perception.`

**17. "Do not make Brennan carry everyone's wet mistakes down Broadway." (Odile)**
1. Clarifies logistics: wet panels stay; Theo is not the class porter.
2. Yes — Odile's licensed wit; metonymy ("wet mistakes" = wet paintings) as crowd management.
3. Yes — racks, tape, Thursday pickup; and it needles Theo's usefulness, her documented mode with him.
4. Sharpens: comedy plus rule plus a reread-consistent flick at the nephew she pretends not to favor.
5. Odile-bound. Keep.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "everyone's wet mistakes down Broadway" — literal anchor: wet-work storage logistics; focalizer basis: Odile's insult-as-care register, consistent with her knowing.`

**18. "The word showcase landed exactly where June had been keeping December."**
1. Nominally clarifies that the announcement converts a distant date into a live deadline.
2. No — this is a word-as-object caption, the exact shape the packet bans ("do not write that a sentence clicked, leveled, landed, carried weight"); June's interiority rhythm is perception then judgment, not narrating what vocabulary did upon arrival.
3. Weak — "where she had been keeping December" gestures at her exit-clock, but the image has no scene material; the materials arrive in the next two sentences.
4. Decorates. The sentences that follow do the real work concretely and better: "a date at the far edge of a packet, easy to leave stapled there instead of in the room. Now it had a door, a room of other people's coats, a table with plastic cups, and a label that might put PARK / BRENNAN under a thing they had made together."
5. Fully portable — any announced word can "land where" anyone "keeps" any month, in any novel. Cut or rewrite.
6. Pause — the reader sees the writer staging impact before showing it.
`UNEARNED — "The word showcase landed exactly where June had been keeping December." — failed questions 2, 4, 5 — ORDER: REPLACE-WITH-LITERAL ("Until tonight, the eighth Tuesday had been a date at the far edge of a packet, easy to leave stapled there instead of in the room. Now it had a door, a room of other people's coats, a table with plastic cups, and a label that might put PARK / BRENNAN under a thing they had made together." — i.e., delete the sentence and promote the existing literal passage, stitching "Until then" to "Until tonight").`

**19. "easy to leave stapled there instead of in the room"**
1. Clarifies June's avoidance mechanics: the showcase date as physical packet page versus inhabited fact.
2. Yes — June manages dread through objects (tote, packet, cards); canon since Ch02's PARK / BRENNAN packet.
3. Yes — the packet is a literal, signed, nontransferable object in continuity.
4. Sharpens: avoidance gets a staple, not a mood.
5. Not portable — requires the packet object.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "easy to leave stapled there instead of in the room" — literal anchor: the showcase date as a page in the signed class packet; focalizer basis: June's object-mediated avoidance.`

**20. "Empty rooms flatter badly." (Odile)**
1. Clarifies her acceptance-with-warning of the joint subject: an empty room tempts self-flattery by omission.
2. Yes — Odile's licensed aphorism, diagnosing the work, not anyone's sentence.
3. Yes — direct response to the named subject; also reread-consistent (she is approving the very canvas that will carry the coda).
4. Sharpens: plants the standard the joint piece must later meet.
5. Odile-bound.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "Empty rooms flatter badly." — literal anchor: the After Class subject as approved with a craft warning; focalizer basis: Odile's four-word diagnosis license.`

**21. "Once the subjects were named, the room became more dangerous without anyone moving faster."**
1. Clarifies that public commitment (named subjects on a roster) raises exposure while tempo stays ordinary.
2. Yes — June's exit-awareness frames rooms by risk level; the paradox ("without anyone moving faster") is her precision.
3. Yes — and immediately evidenced: Priya/Ben's receipt, Ruth/Sam's rail, Mara's tape label.
4. Sharpens: licenses the catalog that follows; "become public by degrees" is the engine of the chapter.
5. The abstraction alone would be portable; the evidentiary catalog welds it here. Keep.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "the room became more dangerous without anyone moving faster" — literal anchor: roster-committed joint subjects making each pair publicly legible; focalizer basis: June's risk-mapping of social space, cashed in concrete cohort behavior.`

**22. "both frowning as if the paper had taken a position"**
1. Clarifies Priya and Ben's negotiation posture toward a receipt-and-thumbnail.
2. Yes — June's comic observation of the cohort's documented paperwork politics.
3. Yes — Priya/Ben's rent-math/leaseholder canon makes paper-with-positions their literal history.
4. Sharpens: one clause carries their whole thread without revealing the protected application outcome.
5. Not portable — the joke depends on their established relationship to forms.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "as if the paper had taken a position" — literal anchor: two people frowning at a shared receipt sketch; focalizer basis: June's affectionate comedy keyed to the cohort's paperwork history.`

**23. "June had nearly reached the door in her head"**
1. Clarifies pre-emptive exit rehearsal: she is mentally gone before the photo call.
2. Yes — exit-awareness is June's signature ("exits before asks," exit checks); this is its cleanest expression in the chapter.
3. Yes — the actual classroom door she will use; the move pays her voice card directly.
4. Sharpens: makes Mara's platform announcement an interception.
5. Not portable in function — it is a character tell, not decor.
6. Accept invisibly, admire on reread.
`EARNED — "nearly reached the door in her head" — literal anchor: rehearsed departure route before flyer photos; focalizer basis: June's canonical exit-first wiring.`

**24. "June looked at the room because the room had been looking back all evening"**
1. Clarifies why "this room" is the right joint subject: the room — cohort, camera, paired easels, Odile's arrangement — has been the evening's witness.
2. Yes, narrowly — the chiasmus is wry-June, and her rhythm holds: look, judge, then the literal colon-list ("paired easels, sink, tape scars on the shelf, windows black with work-lamp reflections").
3. Yes — the surveillance is this chapter's literal condition (photo session, roster, paired easels).
4. Sharpens: motivates the subject choice the plot requires, without a speech.
5. The chiasmus shape is portable — checked against replacement ("June looked at the room. Paired easels, sink…"), which loses the causality (the room earned the subject by watching). With image 2 cut, this stands as the chapter's single room-personification and holds. Nearest-run thing among the passes.
6. Accept; a few will admire.
`EARNED — "the room had been looking back all evening" — literal anchor: an evening of being watched in this specific room, cashed immediately in literal inventory; focalizer basis: June's perception-judgment-evidence sequence justifying the After Class subject.`

**25. "It arrived with the exact caution of a borrowed frame."**
1. Clarifies the physical quality of Theo's arm around her: deliberate, careful, handled as not-his, returnable.
2. Yes — June perceives touch through art-handling; it is both her trade and his.
3. Triple-anchored: frames are Theo's daily labor (Aiello pickups, archive), "borrowed" echoes Mara's scarf in the same photograph, and the fake category itself is a borrowed frame around two people.
4. Sharpens: the kiss that follows is legible as her refusal of exactly this caution.
5. Unswappable — strip the gallery-labor world and the simile dies.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "the exact caution of a borrowed frame" — literal anchor: Theo's placed, careful arm in the flyer photo; focalizer basis: June's installer vocabulary reading her partner's touch as handling protocol.`

**26. "Fine was going onto a flyer. Fine was going into the group thread. Fine was going to sit at the front table with PARK / BRENNAN underneath it and the record of six inches between them."**
1. Clarifies the consequence chain: Mara's spoken verdict ("It's fine") rates a photo that now becomes permanent in three public venues.
2. Yes — June cataloguing exposure routes is her exit-awareness applied to media; the anaphora is dread by inventory, her stress mode (more exact, not more lyrical).
3. Yes — flyer, thread, front table, masking-tape-style label are all scene logistics; PARK / BRENNAN is canon paperwork.
4. Sharpens: converts a casual word into the pressure that forces the kiss — the chapter's hinge.
5. Distinguished from the banned word-as-object family: it does not caption the word's delivery; "Fine" is metonymy for the rated photograph, and every clause lands on a concrete venue. Not portable.
6. Accept; the triple anaphora is performed but earns its drumbeat as causation for the kiss.
`EARNED — "Fine was going onto a flyer..." — literal anchor: a mediocre photo about to become flyer, thread, and table record; focalizer basis: June's exact inventory of exposure under pressure.`

**27. "The room did not disappear. ... It meant the kiss was happening in the same world as everything else."**
1. Clarifies the kiss's reality-status: no dissociative swoon; she retains coordinates (wet rack, windowpane, roster table), which is what makes it undeniable.
2. Yes — June's spatial precision intensifying under stress is her documented response.
3. Yes — the coordinates are this room's literal fixtures.
4. Sharpens: the negation refuses the genre's disappearing-room cliché and performs the packet's no-swoon order; "that made it worse" is the midpoint turn itself.
5. Not portable as deployed — the listed fixtures do the anchoring.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "the kiss was happening in the same world as everything else" — literal anchor: retained spatial inventory mid-kiss; focalizer basis: June's heightened exactness under pressure, used to make desire evidentiary rather than atmospheric.`

**28. "or turn the room into an audience they owed a shape to"**
1. Clarifies what Theo declined: converting the kiss into public narrative for the watching cohort.
2. Yes — "shape" sits inside June's craft vocabulary, and the owed-performance frame is the fake-couple engine she has serviced since the Ch04 origin story.
3. Yes — the room full of classmates is literal; the debt of performance is the book's premise.
4. Sharpens: defines Theo's restraint as a positive act, which the kiss's meaning depends on.
5. Semi-portable in isolation; bound here by the cover-story canon. Holds.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "an audience they owed a shape to" — literal anchor: the cohort watching a kiss the fake category obliges them to narrativize; focalizer basis: June's craft-noun compression of performance debt.`

**29. "Theo did not make it larger for her."**
1. Clarifies his restraint: no performed surprise, no escalation, no joke into her mouth.
2. Yes — June registering scale management; her praise mode is precise negation of the false move.
3. Yes — itemized by the three concrete refusals that follow, plus the held brush.
4. Sharpens: his acceptance is what converts cover into real.
5. Minimal vehicle; not portable in function. (Verbatim echo with image 34 noted there.)
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "did not make it larger for her" — literal anchor: Theo's unperformed, brush-guarding stillness mid-kiss; focalizer basis: June's negative-space precision about what he refused to do.`

**30. "The kiss entered the evening the way the wet panels had entered it: present, inconvenient, not available for group discussion."**
1. Clarifies the social aftermath: the kiss is now a fact in the room that must stay there unhandled — exactly the rule the cohort just enacted (Mara lowering the phone, Odile not looking up).
2. Yes — post-kiss June processing through studio logistics is her deflection signature; "not available for group discussion" is her dry register doing crowd control.
3. Fully scene-grown: Odile's wet-work announcement, the racks, Thursday pickup are this chapter's own logistics beat, forty lines earlier.
4. Sharpens: it names the tact mechanism the prior sentences dramatized, and quietly predicts that this, too, gets picked up later (Mara's stairwell offer, "Tomorrow").
5. Not portable — without the wet-rack logistics the simile has no vehicle. Strictest scrutiny applied per the audit brief: the triadic colon-list is the performed element, and "entered the evening" abstracts; the replacement test ("No one mentioned it") loses both the storage logic and the deferred-custody meaning, so the figure does work literal cannot.
6. Admire — the strongest structural image in the chapter.
`EARNED — "The kiss entered the evening the way the wet panels had entered it" — literal anchor: wet work that must stay on the rack, untouched, until Thursday; focalizer basis: June's logistics-first processing of an event too live to handle, mapped onto the chapter's own storage rules.`

**31. "with more care than paper should have required"**
1. Clarifies the gap between object and meaning: the card is paper; her handling says custody.
2. Yes — June's self-rebuke step, third beat of her interiority rhythm.
3. Yes — Theo's card, Sonia's rubber band: tracked continuity objects (S-MEMORY-01).
4. Sharpens: feeling shown as handling pressure, per the guide's object-first rule.
5. Not portable — requires this card's custody history.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "more care than paper should have required" — literal anchor: re-stowing Theo's memory card under the rubber band; focalizer basis: June catching her own tenderness as excessive, her canonical self-rebuke.`

**32. "That was the strange part at the bottom of the night"**
1. Clarifies the residue after the evening drains: no panels to carry, only the umber cuff mark and the card.
2. Yes — June thinks in what settles and remains; the clause introduces a literal inventory.
3. Yes — the missing wet board, the cuff, the card are all tonight's objects.
4. Sharpens mildly: frames the unfamiliar empty-handedness of leaving.
5. "Bottom of the night" alone is near-idiomatic and would travel; the inventory it introduces would not. Holds, barely.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "the strange part at the bottom of the night" — literal anchor: leaving a class with wet work racked instead of carried; focalizer basis: June's residue-and-inventory habit of mind.`

**33. "Nothing in the room was waiting politely for June's answer."**
1. Clarifies that her "Tomorrow" to Mara is freely chosen: Theo at the sink, Priya stacking cups — no audience, no pressure.
2. Yes — June checks the room before committing; negated personification is her anti-sentimental reflex.
3. Yes — grounded in the two literal actions just shown.
4. Sharpens: distinguishes this decision from the coerced photo earlier — the chapter's two consents, one forced, one free.
5. Semi-portable shape; welded by the specific sink-and-cups evidence.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "Nothing in the room was waiting politely for June's answer." — literal anchor: an indifferent post-class room behind her decision to allow the photo; focalizer basis: June verifying the absence of audience before choosing.`

**34. "The message did not make Philadelphia larger. It made it printed: board, yes, formal, call tomorrow."**
1. Clarifies the offer's state change: from conversational possibility to institutional fact — board approval, formal terms, a deadline for the call.
2. Yes — "printed" is precisely June: the job is at Nia's printshop, and June's working life is labels, wall text, and proofs; she registers reality as production states.
3. Deeply — Tasker printshop canon (S-OFFER-01), Nia's office with rolled posters and dead pens, the clean wall needing screws by January: all continuity-verified.
4. Sharpens: the colon-list enacts "printed" — four set terms, no adjectives — and the negated half refuses the looming-city cliché, which is the packet's own order (offer concrete, not processed).
5. Strictest scrutiny applied per the audit brief: "made it printed" half-survives transplant to any text-message scene — but only here does the word also name the employer and the focalizer's trade, which is what lifts it from conceit to perception. The "not X, but Y" seesaw is the residual risk; replacement ("The message made Philadelphia printed") loses the explicit refusal of inflation, which is doing characterization work — June's danger is precisely that the offer is *not* a fantasy. Noted: "make it larger" repeats verbatim from image 29 fifty lines earlier; read as the night's deliberate rhyme — both the kiss and the offer refuse enlargement and become concrete instead — it lands; it sits at the limit of one chapter's tolerance and any further use of the frame in Ch14+ should be refused.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "It made it printed: board, yes, formal, call tomorrow." — literal anchor: a verbal possibility becoming a board-approved formal offer from a printshop; focalizer basis: June's production-state vocabulary, with the trade and the employer fused in the vehicle.`

**35. "That was true in the same limited way *boss* had once been true."**
1. Clarifies her one-word answer "Nia" as accurate-but-partial disclosure — withholding the offer from Theo.
2. Yes — June auditing her own honesty by precedent is her self-rebuke step.
3. Canonical — Theo's "I said boss because it was true. It just wasn't the whole truth" is his own established line; she is reusing his crime against herself.
4. Sharpens: marks the symmetry the rupture will later exploit — both now hold true-but-partial answers.
5. Not portable — meaningless without the boss precedent.
6. Admire on reread.
`EARNED — "true in the same limited way boss had once been true" — literal anchor: her one-word "Nia" concealing a formal offer; focalizer basis: June measuring her own evasion against Theo's documented one.`

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## Orders

1. **CUT** — "The room made every partner a wall." (failed Q3/Q4/Q5/Q6; closed wall-aphorism family and Ch12 "wall" noun cap; the preceding sentence already carries the fact.)
2. **REPLACE-WITH-LITERAL** — "The word showcase landed exactly where June had been keeping December." → delete and promote the existing literal passage with a stitch: "Until tonight, the eighth Tuesday had been a date at the far edge of a packet, easy to leave stapled there instead of in the room. Now it had a door, a room of other people's coats, a table with plastic cups, and a label that might put PARK / BRENNAN under a thing they had made together." (failed Q2/Q4/Q5; sentence-as-object ban family.)

**Residual watch notes (sub-threshold, no order):** the negated-figure frame appears three times ("The room did not disappear," "did not make Philadelphia larger," "Nothing in the room was waiting politely") and "make it larger" repeats verbatim across the kiss and offer paragraphs — defensible as the midpoint's deliberate rhyme, but the frame is at capacity; Ch14 should not inherit it. Feed to the tics tracker.

**UNEARNED-FOUND**
