The child is described through visible signs of distress and nonconformity: notebooks, rocking, old clothes, holes, talking to himself, “funny voices,” and a humiliating classroom accident. The adults and peers have learned to ignore him. The story's final horror is therefore administrative rather than supernatural: there is no intervention because the social system has already classified the child as background noise.
The title refuses even the dignity of a stable name. It belongs with the corpus's recurring concern with childhood, diagnosis and legibility, and attention / notice / witness.