It didn’t weigh people up one after another and even the score. It would do its best to protect an enclaver kid as much as a loser, and it wouldn’t care that the enclavers had come in with a basketful of advantages. They still hadn’t been safe, after all. That was the only line it drew, the line between safe and not safe, before it doled out its help with an implacable unjust evenhandedness. And it expected me to do the same, and it made me angry even while I couldn’t see any way to do it better.
And this is where I realized the school might be a metaphor.
