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chocolate bar with a quid from Frankie’s wallet. Now I owed Frankie one jumper, one pound and one pudding from Mum’s deli.
    Of course – the deli!
    I could find Papa Pete and get the spare keys off him.
    The deli was a six-minute sprint from the flat. I still had time. I still had a little life in me.
    I ran through puddles. I ran through traffic. I ran like the fastest man on Mars. I ran until my side was burning and I nearly threw up the chocolate bar. I only stopped once, to check through a bin, in case some kid had decided to chuck his uniform in it on his way home from school yesterday.
    When I got to the deli, I saw Papa Pete through the window. He was clearing tables. Mum was nowhere to be seen. That was good. Papa Pete would be cool about the ruined school photo, the trashed uniform and the lost keys. My mum? Not so much.
    I got down low and pressed my hands and face up against the window, trying to send a telepathic message for him to look over at me. Even though I couldn’t see Mum, I decided it was too risky to go inside without knowing exactly where she was. I didn’t want her to appear at the wrong moment.
    A man with a very obvious toupée looked at me. Since my hair was all messed up, and my face was dirty, and my hands, shirt and tie were smeared with chocolate, the guy must have thought I was Oliver Twist, begging for scraps. He shook me off with a snooty sniff and flipped open his newspaper.
    I smushed myself up against the glass and tapped as loudly as I dared until I finally got Papa Pete’s attention. Then I gestured for him to come outside. But Papa Pete gestured for me to come inside. I gestured for him to come outside. Like my regular vocabulary, my gesture vocabulary is not very extensive. Then a woman with a tray stepped between him and me.
    Mum!
    I dropped to my knees before she saw me. She started talking to Papa Pete, so I pressed my ear against the glass. I could al
most
hear what they were saying.
    “What are moo doing?” I heard her ask Papa Pete, though I doubted she said “moo.”
    I could not let Mum know I was here. I waved frantically at Papa Pete in a gesture that had to mean “Don’t tell her I’m here.”
    Papa Pete froze, mid wave. Then he flexed his muscles. “Wiping down tables can be flossing,” I sort of heard him say. “Got a cramp in my farm.”
    “Really?” Mum said, “because it looked like you were waving to Shank through the clindow.”
    I looked about to determine who this Shank character was, and what in the world a “clindow” was and found myself staring right into Mum’s eyes.
    I waved hello!
    She crooked her index finger at me, gesturing “come here.” That is the worst gesture in the world.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    “So let me get this straight, Hank,” my mum was saying. “You ruined two uniforms in one day. And now you want to ruin a third?”
    “The second one wasn’t my fault. It was—”
    “Is that my pastry on your sweater?”
    “Like I was saying, Mum, it’s Frankie’s sweater. Just listen to me for one sec—”
    She reached down and plucked off a flake, and ate it. “It is my pastry! Why is—?”
    “It’s a long story and I don’t have time to go into it now.”
    Just then, the man with the toupée set down his newspaper with a loud “harumph”. Then he put on his coat, muttering to himself, and marched over to us. His silver moustache was twitching in anger.
    “Madam,” he said, “I cannot abide you letting filthy street rats into the dining room. It is simply unsanitary. Until your commitment to hygienic standards is vastly improved, I shan’t be returning.”
    “This street kid, for your information” – Mum flared her nostrils – “is my son.” She patted my greasy, sticky hair.
    “Then I suggest you bathe him at once. The odour is most unpleasant. Good day.”
    While I watched Lord Hairpiece leave, my mum was rubbing her fingers together, trying to rub off the gunk from my hair. “What product is this? Is it