After running away from the Beale home, Jeffrey winds up sleeping in the zoo by the buffalo enclosure. A groundskeeper by the name of Earl Grayson takes pity on him and brings him to the baseball equipment room. Naturally, Earl is curious about Jeffrey and wants to know how he ended up sleeping in a zoo. Jeffrey tells him that he used to live on 728 Sycamore Street. Earl is surprised; Sycamore Street is in the East End, and that's a part of town with an exclusively black population. Yet Jeffrey's white. Earl jokingly scrapes some of the dirt from Jeffrey's forearm with his fingernail to see if he's really white after all. It's his way of saying that he can't quite believe that a white kid would ever have been living in a black neighborhood in a racially segregated town like Two Mills.
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