Comic burst with symbols flash design

I letter for Bramble and Stone, which means I fill speech bubbles with other people's bad language and somehow keep my dignity. Our editor, Col Haddow, has one rule for swearing. You never spell it out. You draw a burst, you scatter hash, at, dollar, ampersand and asterisk across it like a fistful of gravel, and a child reads the rage perfectly well without learning a single word they will be sent home for. I had drawn the one on Marcus's page myself, a squat jagged thing with curls for swirls, and I was rather proud of it.

Marcus answered the door in socks, a pencil behind one ear just as mine was, and held up his own page. He had copied my burst in biro, every spike of it, then filled it with symbols that were not mine at all: a tilde, a caret, a little tick. "That's the swear one," he said, pointing at the asterisk. "Gran says that's the worst one."

I told him an asterisk only means something has been left out, and he looked at me as though I had said the lift was never coming back. Behind him, Pauline called that the kettle was on and he should let the man in before the pigeons came in too. I sat on the arm of their settee and redrew his burst, keeping his symbols exactly as he'd placed them, because a boy who invents his own rude punctuation has already understood the trick better than most editors. When I left, the stairwell smelt of chips. Halfway down the eleventh floor I noticed I had signed the corner of his page without meaning to, a tiny ampersand where my name should have gone.