Character Analysis
Will is fifteen, grieving, and operating on automatic — until the elevator becomes a forced pause. He isn't coded as a thug or a victim; Reynolds renders him as a specific young man navigating a specific inheritance. His voice is the novel's instrument: plain, immediate, undeceived about his world, and — by the end — in the first moments of actually deciding rather than simply following. Whether that deciding changes anything is the question Reynolds refuses to answer for him.
How They Speak
Plain, clipped, full of neighborhood-specific reference — the speech of someone who has never had to explain his world to an outsider