It didn’t matter what was said until he could feel a face drop over his own with the look of someone listening.  All he had to do was hold onto that look and he would be able to grasp most of what anybody might say.  Holding a look emboldened him.  He was giving a book his best look of someone reading it when the girl he had been trying to attract walked by yet again.  He looked up, but, on his face was still the disapproving look of one absorbed in his reading.  An automatic species-wide self-response is an expletive.  She heard him, came back, and — he saw it coming — spit on him.  In a jolt, he understood.  What happened had nothing to do with right or wrong: chance simply had lined up in that way.