Pierrot was not the only seven-year-old in Paris living with a single parent. The boy sitting in front of him at school hadn’t seen his mother for four years, ever since she ran away with an encyclopedia salesman, while the class bully, who called Pierrot "shorty" because he was very small, had a room above his grandparents’ tobacco shop on Mot Piqué Avenue and spent most of his time throwing water balloons out the window at passersby’s heads and then insisting he hadn’t done anything.
And in an apartment on the ground floor of his own building, on nearby Charles Floquet Avenue, lived his best friend, Ansel Bronstein, alone with his mother, since his father had drowned two years earlier during an unsuccessful attempt to cross the English Channel. With only a few weeks’ difference in age, Pierrot and Ansel had essentially grown up like brothers, as one mother took care of both boys when the other needed a little rest. But, unlike many siblings, they never fought.
Ansel had been born deaf, so they had developed early on a sign language to communicate easily and express with their nimble fingers everything they wanted to say. They had even created special symbols for each other for their names. Ansel had given Pierrot the symbol of a dog because he considered him both good and loyal, while Pierrot had thought of the symbol of a fox for Ansel because everyone said he was the smartest in the class.