Why is the reader upset to learn that the little boy is being punished for dropping the ball? How did the author cause the reader to react emotionally...

When we
first meet the unnamed little boy on Camazotz, he is the only "aberration" in an
eerily perfect suburban landscape in which everyone is synchronized and performs every action
perfectly. The other children "play" more like emotionless robots than real children.
We feel sympathy for the boy from the start because he is seemingly the only "real"
child in the neighborhood. The frightened way his mother whisks him into the house when he fails
to bounce his ball perfectly then raises our curiosity. A short time later, when Calvin, Meg and
Charles Wallace go to the door of his house to return the ball, we again sympathize with the boy
because of the fear his mother exhibits. She denies her son dropped the ball, says the children
in her section "never drop balls" and turns "very white" when Charles
Wallace holds out the ball. Her terror seems entirely out of proportion to the "mistake
"her son has made.

When we see the boy again, in a little room in the
Central Central intelligence headquarters, bouncing a ball and screaming "as if in
pain" every time the ball bounces, we again feel sympathy because we know, having witnessed
it, that the boy's "crime" is completely minor. Our sympathy is heightened by the fact
that Charles Wallace, under the spell of IT, giggles at the boy's pain and seems to take a
savage pleasure in the fact he is being punished and won't deviate again. Our distaste for the
soulless planet and for the mind-controlled Charles Wallace leads us to identify more strongly
with the boy who behaved in a way we understand to be normal.