That is the only cheerful sentence available about that number.

And the boy two years below, the one it moved to in the autumn of 2013, is in none of this.

No policy change reaches backward.

Not one.

That is the entire nature of them.

Every protection in that district’s handbook is there because of somebody it was too late for, and the district will never know most of their names, and the only thing any of it does is reduce, by some amount nobody can measure, the number of fifteen-year-olds eating lunch in a stairwell next year.

That is the transaction.