The Donut Diaries (5 page)

That was it. I was doomed.

‘Donut! Donut!’ they all chanted.

In a vision I saw what was going to happen.
My
name was no longer Dermot. My name was Donut and there was nothing I could do about it.

For the next couple of hours the kids in my class got what fun they could out of calling me Donut. Actually, most of it was fairly harmless, except for some horrible little kid who said, ‘Knock knock.’

I sighed, and said, ‘Who’s there?’

‘Donut.’

‘Donut who?’

‘Donut ask me again or I’ll punch you.’

Then he punched me on the arm, quite hard. Some kids laughed, even though it was as 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 down.’

I didn’t want to. I
really
didn’t want to. But I couldn’t think of what else to do, and then there was always the faint chance that these kids might be OK after all. So I sat down, gave a weak little smile and got ready to make some conversation. I think I might have been on the verge of talking about the weather, or last night’s telly. But before I could even open my mouth the seven kids (the tables sat eight) all got up. One by one they came round and emptied all their disgusting food on my tray, so it piled up and spilled over. It looked like a dinosaur had taken a dump on the tray. Then they all took their now-empty trays
and
raced out, giggling like girls. Except for the FHK, who had the same blank face as usual.

I was stunned by all this. I knew they’d played some kind of trick on me. Kids on other tables started to point and laugh as well. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and looked into the face of Tamara Bello.

‘You understand what’s happening here?’ she said in that voice of hers like melted chocolate.

I shook my head.

‘Anyone who doesn’t finish their lunch gets a dinner-hall detention.’ She pointed towards the exit, where a teacher was checking the dirty trays that the kids were piling up.

‘A what?’

‘You’ll find out.’

‘But, but … they can’t! It’s not fair!’

‘Life isn’t fair. Tuck in.’

Then Tamara Bello was gone.

I stared at the mound of muck on my tray. Of course, I couldn’t eat it. It looked like
it
might be able to eat
me
. I thought about trying to explain what had happened to the teacher on guard. But I couldn’t say who had done it, partly because I didn’t know the names of the scumbags, and partly because even if I had known I couldn’t have said, because if you squeal on people, that’s it, you’re finished – you may as well just go and flush your own head down the toilet.

So I was stuck.

Then something clattered down in front of me. It was an empty tray. I looked up into a funny little face I recognized from my form class. Little, that is, except for the front teeth, which were as big as shovels. All things considered he couldn’t have looked more like a rodent if he
was
playing the part of King Rat in the panto.

‘I picked up two trays by mistake. Just leave that mess there and show the empty tray to the teacher. Do it quickly before anyone notices.’

He had a funny way of talking – every so often he’d make a sort of ‘
ungth
’ noise. So it sounded more like – ‘
Ungth
I picked up two
ungth
trays by mistake. Just leave that mess there and
ungth
show the empty tray to the
ungth
teacher.’

‘OK, thanks,’ I said, still in a bit of a daze.

‘
Ungth
like, er,
now
.’

A gang of kids were leaving and I joined in with them. I dumped the empty tray and I was out of there!

And I think I’d made a sort of friend.

I ate three plain donuts on the way home. I reckoned this was OK, as I’d definitely got my average down. Before I went to see Doc Morlock I was on four a day. Since then I’d been averaging about two. So I could have three and still be heading in the right direction.

DONUT COUNT:

Wednesday 13 September

THINGS A BIT
better today, in the sense that nothing really terrible happened. I hung out with my new friend, the goofy short kid. Turns out he’s called Renfrew, which is one of those names that you sort of half think might be funny, but you’re not sure why or how. I’ve decided to forget that he looks like some kind of vole or whatever, and also to ignore the fact that he goes ‘
ungth
’ all the time, as he’s the only friend I’ve made, so far. Anyway, he’s probably writing in
his
own diary right now about how his only friend is a tub of lard called Donut, who happens to like Dermots.

Anyway, Renfrew came up to me after morning registration and said: ‘
Ungth
that was pretty pants what those Xavier kids did to you yesterday.’

I agreed that it was, indeed, pretty pants, and I thanked him for helping me out. And that was it, we were friends. Then Renfrew told me all about the thinking behind who gets put in what form, which had been baffling me. He’s got a brother in Year Ten, so he understands it all. This is how it is.

The ultra-brainiacs are all in Campion. I’m quite glad I’m not in Campion because they get extra homework. The next brainiest, who also seem to be the coolest, get put into Xavier.
Xavier
is definitely the form to be in, not least because it begins with the undeniably cool letter ‘X’. And guess who’s in Xavier? Yep, the FHK. Actually, I don’t have to call him the FHK any more because Renfrew told me he’s called Steerforth. But guess what? I’m going to carry on calling him the FHK, because this is my diary and I can do what I want in it.