The moment?
That's 'the moment' his popularity drops.
Here's the next interaction with Ozy:
And Ozy is
clearly not trying at all to make him feel better about the situation. He's got his nose in a book and is humming 'Ice Ice babby' as a subtle jab at Avery. He's certainly not listening to him, despite having been literally
right there when everybody else left.
The next strip is Avery moping in his house, and the one after that is when he returns to his open seat at the lunch table. The first thing Millie says is "You're not out advertising yourself?", which means she didn't pay any attention whatsoever to his moping the prior day, and Ozy clearly didn't see fit to mention that Avery was feeling down in the dumps because it didn't work.
They
tolerate him. They don't seem to be friends in any real sense of the word; they all happen to share a lunch table (with Stephan, too, whom I'm also pretty sure they aren't exactly enamored with).
It's fine to not be friends with people, is the thing; if I knew Avery I probably wouldn't want to be friends with him, either, although he's the kind of annoying that you don't really turn away from the lunch table because he's kind of sad. Thing is, I wouldn't go out of my way, as Ozy did earlier in the arc, and try to undermine his entire plan, or go up to him and explicitly say "If you're cool, I'm the prime minister of Laos", or just constantly make fun of him behind his back. Kid's clearly enjoying himself for what little time he has being the center of attention, just let him do his thing.
Unless they're jealous and trying to tear him down so he comes crawling back to their table and winds up lowering himself back to their level, relegated to the loser table, ignored or bullied by the popular kids.
/utterly ridiculous over-analysis
And to cut it off before it comes up, no, I'm not looking for ways to hate the comic, and I
don't hate the comic. I've been enjoying it, actually, and for all my whining about how Ozy and Millie are jerks in this arc (and they really are), I've been enjoying this arc, too. The only one I really haven't enjoyed so far has been the Neighborhood Association arc.
It's just that there are things about this comic that deserve to be pointed out because I'm quite certain they weren't authorial intent but they really do raise eyebrows. Overall, this is a pretty cute, unassuming, inoffensive comic, which makes these particular bits a lot more jarring. I'm willing to attribute this to age; DCS didn't have a lot of experience making sympathetic characters, and wound up being rather hamfisted in his attempts at getting his point across. Almost every writer winds up doing this early in the career, and at this point he just hasn't figured out the balance yet.
Unfortunately, if he strikes a balance during the course of O&M, it's pretty much tossed aside once we get Raine Dog...
tl;dr
I like the comic but seriously Ozy and Millie are kind of jerks.
