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ball and adjusting his shorts. The boys swarmed around him. He looked puzzled, then furious, then blank. His blank look was his most scary. It meant he had gone beyond rage and into hatred.
    I stayed in the corner on one leg.
    Mr Fricker stomped off to his private office, which was just a bit of the gym with a curtain round it. It was where he kept the special attachments for his arms – the ping-pong bat, the hockey stick, the car vacuum cleaner, the cake slice, the frying pan. When he sprang out a minute later, a large pair of metal tongs protruded from his left wrist socket. From his right was a good old-fashioned pirate’s hook, on which hung a clear plastic bag. He stalked over to the changing rooms.
    I should probably have stayed where I was, but I just couldn’t stop myself from following. Nor could most of the other boys. Or the girls, including Miss Gunasekara – Mr Fricker’s second in command – who was as nice as he was horrid.
    And so we saw Mr Fricker approach the large greeny-brown poo, right in the middle of the changing-room floor. Saw him kneel down before it like a Masai warrior tracking a lion. Saw him grasp it firmly in the tongs and transfer it to the plastic bag.

    Behind us, there was a groan followed by a thud. Someone had fainted. 1
    Fricker turned and glared at us. He held up the bag with its gruesome contents showing through the clear plastic. ‘Evidence!’ he said.
    His eye seemed to seek me out in the crowd.
    Or maybe I was just being paranoid. Told Mum and Dad about the two poo incidents at dinner. Dad seemed quite interested, but Mum said it wasn’t a fit subject for the dining table. Ruby said that boys were disgusting, so I pointed out that for all we knew it could be a girl. She was too stupid to reply that the evidence actually suggested quite strongly that it was a boy, as the poos were in the boys’ toilet and the boys’ changing room. It’s a sad state of affairs when you have to point out the flaws in your own logic.
    As soon as the subject came up, Ella put her fingers in her ears and made cat noises.
    No sign of Crow. Reckon he’s been staked.
DONUT COUNT:

    1 This turned out to be Ludmilla, who had an unexpectedly delicate constitution. She had to spend the rest of the day in the sick bay. The sick bay is a grim and terrible room where you get sent if you are sick. All it contains is a sort of bed to lie down on and a bucket of sand to soak up the vomit if you puke. As the room smells of vomit most of the time, there’s always a very good chance you will puke, as nothing makes you puke like the smell of puke. I think this is officially called a vicious circle. Of puke.

Friday 19 January
    NOTHING MUCH HAPPENED at school today, which was a relief after recent events. About the most interesting thing was when Spam said, more or less out of the blue:
    ‘I heard that every time you do a fake burp you lose an hour of your life.’
    It took a while for that to sink in. I mean, the stupidity of it.
    ‘What the heck do you mean by a fake burp?’ I said. ‘Do you mean when you deliberately swallow air to make yourself burp, or do you mean when you haven’t really burped at all, but just made a burp-like sound to try to impress people?’
    ‘Well, I—’
    ‘And how come it’s exactly an hour? How would your body know? Is it, like, keeping count?’
    ‘It’s—’
    ‘And how does anyone know that this is true? Have scientists captured some kids and strapped them to a burp-monitoring apparatus and kept them imprisoned in a lab all their lives until they die? ’Cos, basically, how else would you measure it?’
    ‘I’m just—’
    ‘And even if they did that, how would they know when you were supposed to die – you know , if you hadn’t done any fake burps?’
    ‘Easy, tiger,’ said Renfrew, putting a restraining hand on my shoulder.
    ‘Sorry,’ I said. I’d been too hard on Spam, who was a gentle soul.
    I blame the poo. It had put me on edge.
    Mum took the