Running Away From Home and Spending Five Days Wandering NYC

Eleven-year-old Kareem Granton ran away from home and spent five days sleeping on the subway. He talked to New York magazine’s Katie Van Syckle about how he spent time his time and what he saw:
At Chuck E. Cheese’s, there were free refills. I ate from salad-bar plates people left behind. To be safe I rinsed them off with soap and water from the bathroom. Kids dropped tokens and I’d pick them up. I banged on the side of out-of-order machines and told the tokens to come out. It was like I had my own ticket machine. I won the jackpot. I won the spinning wheel and I won a hundred tickets. I bought candy with the tickets. Laffy Taffy. A big old handful. So if I needed a little snack, I would just eat one or two of them. After a while my stomach started to hurt.
I vaguely recall running away from home when I was about seven or eight, but in reality it ended up being mostly hiding out in a park behind our apartment complex for a few hours until I got hungry and decided to go back home.
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