Holden's desperate quest for attention

Further proving my point: The kid is apparently obsessed with buying drinks for women that are way older than him. In Chapter 8, he tried to buy Ernest Morrow's apparently attractive mother a drink. I don't think that there needs to be an explanation on why a sixteen-year-old offering a drink to some kid's mother is a problem.

In 10, he then attempts to buy drinks to three twenty-something women. It doesn't help his case that the waiter calls his bluff and won't let him buy alcohol because he's a minor, so he's trying to coax a dance out of women who aren't interested in someone obviously a kid (he claims he's in his twenties or thirties, but that went over as well as it would if I claimed I was in my thirties). When they do dance with him, he all the way mentally criticizes their dancing skills, along with considering them to be ugly. He's obviously desperate, but if I wanted to read a story about a desperate teenager, I'd read Tom Sawyer.