LITMIR.BIZ

      “Boring.”

      “That’s what you always say.”

      “Cos that’s what it always is.”

      It was. The same boring lessons, the same boring teachers, the same boring food – meat slop with instant mash carved out of an enormous tray by a dinner lady with an ice-cream scoop. (Ryan always thought this was an insult, teasing you with a serving implement that suggested something nice was coming when it really wasn’t.)

      Even PE was boring at Bracket Wood. There had been one brief moment of excitement a while back when they had played a posh school called Oakcroft at football and Fred Stone had been amazing, but that was it.

      That, really, was why Ryan spent so much time and energy devising pranks. Because it made school a tiny bit less boring.

      He went back to clicking keys on his laptop keyboard. Every so often, he took a bite out of the frozen pepperoni pizza next to him. (Not still frozen: his mum had cooked it, but it had been frozen. I don’t quite know why I’m explaining this.)

      Tina looked on, worried. She knew that, really, Ryan should spend a bit less time on the internet. She wasn’t sure, in fact, that he should be spending any time on it, as she thought he might be watching things not suitable for his age.

      But sometimes Tina was so busy that she let her son play on it to keep him busy. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, her mum used to say, which isn’t quite as difficult a saying to understand as the one about butter not melting in the mouth. It means that if people, especially naughty boys, are left on their own with nothing to do, their hands will probably soon start doing naughty things – like ringing people’s doorbells and running away, or putting Cup-a-Soup powder in the bathroom shower head. (Which had been funny, though Tina did sometimes worry that her laughing quite so much at the sight of her husband’s head covered in instant leek and potato may have been one of the reasons he’d left.)

      That was always part of the problem. Ryan was naughty, but sometimes his naughtiness was really funny. Even most of the clips that he watched on the internet – when he showed her – were funny, and rather than telling him off, she ended up laughing with him. It was one of the things she loved about being with Ryan – sometimes it felt more like being with a friend than a son.

      But she did worry that although she was always his mum, and sometimes his mate, the one thing she couldn’t be was his dad – and that he might maybe sometimes need one. Not least to make him do up his school tie properly. By the afternoon, it was always halfway down his shirt. She sometimes wondered if he just pulled it down as soon as he got out of the door.

      “Crip! Crip! Crip!” said Holly, pointing at a bag of salt-and-vinegar crisps on the table. Holly in general missed out at least one letter of every word. “Yan!” she continued, to Ryan. “Crip!”

      “You won’t like those, Holly,” said Tina. “They’ve got a really strong taste. I’ve heard he’s really strict.”

      Ryan, gathering that his mum was no longer talking about crisps, or to the baby, shrugged.

      “Your point is …?”

      “Well, Ryan,” said Tina, getting up with Holly’s bowl, “I think we know what my point is. If the new head teacher is really strict, you might need to watch yourself.”

      Might I? thought Ryan. Hmm. A really strict head teacher? That’s a bit of a challenge.

      He didn’t say that, though. He said, “OK, Mum. I’ll be as good as gold.” And handed Holly, who was still straining with both arms towards the bag, a salt-and-vinegar crisp. In his defence, her face when she tasted it screwed up in a way that was really funny.