Not pale.

There is a thing that happens to a child’s face where the blood goes out of it from the top down and you can watch it happen across about a second and a half, and his lips went grey, and his hands came up in front of his stomach and gripped each other.

At the time I read that as: a thirteen-year-old is frightened of police officers at his door.

What it actually was: a thirteen-year-old who had known for three days that there was one single thing he had done that was going to bring somebody official to this house, and who was watching it arrive.