The Donut Diaries Read Online Free PDF Page A

far away from funny as Earth is from Alpha Centauri. 1
    The best thing about today was that we got sent home early, just before lunch, which was supposed to make it a nice gentle introduction for us.
    I got some chips and ate them on the bus on the way home. Then I ate my second emergency donut, which was supposed to be used only if the first one went missing in action.
    Of course, Dad wanted to hear all about it when I got in, as did Mum when she got home later from her office.
    ‘What were the teachers like?’
    ‘Did you make any friends?’
    That sort of thing.
    I answered with nods and grunts, which didn’t really satisfy anyone.
    For dinner we had risotto, which means rice with bits in it. I don’t really know what the bits were. Might have been courgettes in there. The truth is, it might have been stuffed pterodactyl and I wouldn’t much have cared.
    DONUT COUNT:

    1 That’s a star 4.37 light years away, in case you didn’t know.

Tuesday 12 September
    I KNEW IT was going to happen. At morning break today I went out into the yard and a load of kids yelled out, ‘Here comes Donut.’
    Then another group shouted, ‘He likes Dermots!’
    It wasn’t just the kids from my class, so word must have leaked out.
    I saw the floppy-haired kid. He didn’t join in with the chanting, but there was something about the way the other kids glanced over at him , as if looking for his approval, that made me think that he was behind it.
    I just went and found a quiet corner and waited, with my head bowed, for break to be over.
    Fat and alone.
    After break we had geography, with Mr Braintree. His beard blended into his tweed jacket, so you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began, which was quite interesting. More interesting, at any rate, than finding out that the biggest export of Ecuador is bananas.
    Then it was lunch time. I walked by myself to the dining hall, which was in the ancient part of the school. The smell should have warned me what was coming, but I figured that nothing could possibly taste as bad as that smell smelled, which was maybe kind of naive. I joined a queue and picked up this sort of tray thing with different compartments. It was exactly like being in a prison movie, and I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure nobody was sneaking up to stab me in the back with a shank made from a sharpened toothbrush.
    I shuffled along in the line for a while until I reached the serving counter. Then a dinner lady, working like a sort of decrepit robot, put a big dollop of mashed potato on the tray with one hand and a piece of grey rubber on top of the potato with the other. We were supposed to help ourselves to a mixture of peas and carrots. I put one pea and one piece of carrot on my tray. Then another dinner lady spooned out what can only be described as frogspawn and added a spoon of red gunk in the middle of it.
    ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘what’s that stuff?’

    ‘Jam.’ The dinner lady didn’t seem to have any teeth.
    ‘No, I mean the other stuff.’
    ‘Tapioca.’
    I was going to ask her what tapioca was, but I was shoved forward from behind. Anyway, I knew what it was.
    It was poison.

    So, there I was with my prison tray full of poisonous slop. I looked around the big hall. There were kids everywhere. Talking, shouting, laughing, screaming. One kid was even eating. Most of the tables were already full. I saw one empty chair and walked towards it. When I got near, I realized to my horror that the floppy-haired kid was there. Actually, writing out ‘floppy-haired kid’ all the time is taking too long, so from now on I’ll call him the FHK.
    One of the other kids – one of those pale kids who don’t seem to have any eyebrows or eyelashes – looked at me and said, ‘Get lost, fat boy. This table is for Xaviers only.’
    The FHK leaned over and whispered something in his ear. The pale kid laughed and the rest of the table joined in.
    ‘Only kidding,’ said the pale kid. ‘Sit right