The detail about Cy that particularly unsettles me is one that may require a specific cultural background to appreciate: his speech pattern is exactly a stock sort of voice that has come to denote a simpleton in old American cartoons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EHDBJFoZL4

I'm not sure whether that's his natural mode of expression--which would of course have been blood in the water to his classmates--a deliberate ploy to fool people into underestimating his cunning, or even the latter playing upon the former.