Read The Donut Diaries for Free Online Page A

other mates. They took the mickey a bit, but only the way you do with your friends. But now it was different. I’m in a new place with new friends. And new enemies. So maybe it’s not just the fear of Camp Fatso that makes me want to cut down on the donuts.
    I called Jim on his mobile (I haven’t got one as Mum says they give you brain cancer, and anyway you’re not allowed to have them at St Michael’s). He sounded a bit down, which sort of cheered me up. He’s coming over tomorrow.
    I think Mum and Dad knew it had been a hard week, and everyone was vaguely nice to me today. Even Ruby and Ella. Well, not that nice. They just ignored me, but not in the usual ‘I hate you’ ignoring way. Just ordinary ignoring, without any hate in it.
    For dinner, Mum cooked loads of nice things. It was even arranged as a starter, main course and dessert, just like in a posh restaurant. We had smoked salmon for the starter, which I quite like even though someone once told me it’s not even the remotest bit cooked, but completely RAW. And then we had grilled chicken, despite it not being a Sunday. And for pudding we had something called sorbet, which is like an ice lolly without a stick, and which didn’t totally suck.
    DONUT COUNT:

Sunday 17 September
    JIM AND ME were lounging around in my room, surrounded by loads of junk. My mum had told me that unless I tidied up a bit she was going to come in with five bin bags and throw everything out. But tidying your room is famously the hardest job in the world, except maybe being the Queen’s Official Bum Wiper (my dad told me she has a special person to do it for her, and she’s really fussy about it being done properly, and he says if you don’t do it well enough that counts as treason , which still has the death penalty.) 1
    ‘So are things OK at Seabrook then?’ I said to Jim.
    He put his finger in his ear and had a good old root around. ‘It’s all right.’
    ‘Pete and Ben and The Other Jim are there too, aren’t they?’
    I should say here that there was another Jim at my junior school. He was quite boring, so everyone called him The Other Jim. I reckon even his mum called him The Other Jim.
    ‘Yeah,’ said Jim – not The Other Jim, but my Jim, the real Jim. ‘But it’s different now. They’ve got new friends and …’
    He just trailed off. I didn’t know what to say. Then Jim cheered up by himself. He looked around.
    ‘Your mum’s right. There’s a lot of junk in here, isn’t there?’ he said.
    ‘Not really. It’s just my stuff.’
    ‘Nah, most of this is embarrassing. It’s gonna have to go.’
    Now I looked around, and began to see things for the first time. Yep, he was right. There were things here that could destroy me. Plus, frankly, there was hardly any room to sit. So we divided everything into three piles:
    KEEP
    CHUCK
    DUNNO
    The KEEP pile was heavily electronics-based, and basically represented the past two birthdays and Christmases, plus some money my granny gave me before she went ga-ga (I wasn’t allowed to keep the money she gave me after she went ga-ga). It had all my PS3 games, my DSi (not pink, but a nice, decent white), my iPod, that sort of thing. They weren’t going anywhere, although I did have a sneaking suspicion that the DSi didn’t really cut it any more.
    The CHUCK pile was on the small side, because I kept taking things out of it that Jim put in. The biggest item was some kind of toy animal. Couldn’t tell you exactly what kind. Maybe an aardvark. Possibly a sloth. 2
    Anyway, this thing , the toy whatever , was pretty beat up. It had been part of the family for a long time, and it showed. Ruby and Ella had really put it through the wringer. Ruby had cuddled it to within an inch of its life and then finished it off with a yellow ribbon noose around its neck. Then she’d daubed pink nail varnish on the corpse. Ella had shaved off its fur and put staples all over its poor floppy ears and gouged out its eyes, probably to use in