The Donut Diaries Read Online Free

giggling, chattering, empty noise that could mean only one thing. A very bad thing. A gang of girls was approaching.
    I suddenly felt really silly, scrabbling around after coppers and five-pence pieces. But I also thought it would look like I was trying to be flash if I just got up and left it all there. You know,
Oh, look at me, I’m so posh I can just leave money lying on the ground, lah-di-dah, lah-di-dah, I’m just going to put on a silk dressing gown and do a little bit of ballet
.
    It was an actual, authentic dilemma, like in a movie where the hero has to decide, say, whether to save his girlfriend from the jaws of a crocodile or to rescue a small child who’s about to totter over the edge of a volcano into the fiery, bubbling lava below. Obviously, in the movie he’d end up doing both, probably using the stunned crocodile to catch the kid or something, but this wasn’t a movie. This was the thing that scientists have calculated is 87.4 per cent worse than movies: this was Real Life.
    So, not feeling too happy, I glanced up. And I found myself staring right into the dark eyes of Tamara Bello. She gave me this look that said,
What the heck are you doing here, scrabbling about on the dirty floor, blocking the way of me and my posse?
There was also a supplementary question that asked,
Just what sort of a buffoon are you, anyway?
    Then her face changed to something slightly different.
    An expression for which the word ‘revulsion’ may well have been invented.
    All the time I’d been vaguely picking up my coins without paying proper attention to what I was doing. Now I looked down and saw that what I’d thought was a coin was in fact a piece of squashed chewing gum, and my fingers were halfway through the act of prying it off the floor.
    ‘Look at that fat kid scraping gum off the floor!’ screeched one of the girls, who was dressed up as if she was going clubbing, even though it wasn’t anywhere near disco o’clock. She wasn’t from my school. Nor were the others, apart from Tamara, and she obviously wasn’t going to admit that she even knew me.
    ‘Have a fresh one,’ Tamara said, and dropped a piece of gum next to me as she and the others skipped past. One of them stepped on my hand, and another stuck her knee into my side, knocking me over.
    Annoyingly, I couldn’t think of a single decent comeback or cutting remark. In fact, I hadn’t managed to say anything at all, the whole time. I felt like a big fat dummy.
    And that’s exactly when you can fall back on your old friend, food.
    So up I got and off I did trot to the glittering lights of that palace of dreams, Burgerland. As I was queuing up at the counter, I decided to slightly modify my plan by getting a double cheeseburger, fries and a Coke.
    It was going to be a mighty big mouthful, but I’d earned it.
    I took my tray of goodness and found a table in a sort of booth thing, which was nice and secret, so nobody would see me doing my little trick with Satan’s toenail.
    I managed to get one giant mouthful of burger plus maybe seventeen fries in my mouth, as well as a good swill of Coke.
    Boy, it was good.
    Little did I know that it was to be the high point of the day. I fished the toenail out of my pocket, black and curved and evil, and got ready to put it in with the fries. But then I decided that I’d have another bite – not a big whale-bite like the first one, but just a dainty little nibble. OK, it turned into another pretty big one. Let’s say humpback whale rather than blue.
    And then I had a thought. What had I done with the nail? I looked down at the tray with its cardboard cartons of food. I couldn’t see it. I looked inside the burger bun, pulling it open to reveal the sticky cheese, gleaming like delicious orange snot.
    And then I felt a tickle in my throat, and I knew what had become of the nail, and with that knowledge came the Bucking Steed of Panic. I suddenly started to feel most unwell. Sweat sprang out on my forehead. I