Free The Donut Diaries by Anthony McGowan

That’s not my … Really, it isn’t.’
    ‘Well, the evidence seems to be clear, Dermot,’ said Mr Wells, looking as if I’d betrayed him.
    ‘There is one sure way of finding out if this boy is lying.’
    These were the first words uttered by Mr Fricker since I’d come in.
    Mr Whale looked at him. ‘Oh, and what’s that?’
    ‘Lie detector.’
    ‘And you have one of those?’
    ‘Oh yes, left over from my old SAS days, when I was one of the chief interrogators.’
    ‘But I thought you were in the Catering Corps?’
    ‘Well, yes, but we had squaddies pilfering rations all the time. It was my job to track them down and make them confess.’
    ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Mr Wells, ‘but I can’t allow one of my students to undergo that sort of interrogation. It’s against the Human Rights Act. I guess.’
    Mr Wells was probably trying to help me again, but a lie detector was exactly what I wanted, because for once I was telling the truth.
    ‘I’ll take it!’ I said. ‘Then you’ll all believe me. Will you at least wait until then before you tell my parents?’
    Mr Whale looked around at the others in the room. Then he nodded curtly.
    ‘When can this be done, Mr Fricker?’
    ‘Tomorrow lunch time. I’ll bring in my apparatus in the morning, but it takes a while to calibrate.’
    ‘Let’s hope for your sake, Dermot, that the results are positive.’
    ‘Negative,’ said Fricker. ‘Positive would mean he was lying.’
    Mr Whale did not like to be contradicted. ‘Whatever,’ he snapped, and then we were all dismissed.
    I briefly thought about fessing up to Mum and Dad so I could at least get my side of the story in first. But I couldn’t face it. They had troubles of their own. My mum’s company were getting rid of loads of people, and my dad only earned enough from his job to keep him in toilet paper. I had to beat this thing on my own.
DONUT COUNT:

Friday 26 January
    I WAS IN a terrible state this morning, waiting for the lie-detector test. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I could sense that people were staring at me and whispering behind my back. I was used to people laughing at me, but this was different. Suddenly I wasn’t a figure of fun any more. I was …
    Evil.
    Sorta.
    Cooooooooool!
    Well, no not really cool. Or cooooooooool! Because, after all, it involved poo, which is the opposite of cool.
    When he took the morning register, Mr Wells said ‘Milligan’ in a funny way, which seemed to shout out, ‘Milligan, also known as the Brown Phantom’.
    Tamara Bello inched her desk as far away from me as it would go. And Ludmilla didn’t even look at me. So there were a couple of up-sides! I’m kidding. It was all pretty bleak.
    At morning break, Renfrew took me to one side.
    ‘Everyone’s saying it’s you, you know.’
    ‘The Brown Phantom, you mean?’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘And are you?’
    ‘Do you really have to ask me?’
    ‘Well, it does look bad …’
    ‘Et tu, Renfrew.’ 1
    ‘I just had to ask.’
    ‘Fine.’
    I went to the gym at lunch. The guys came with me as far as the door, but left me there. Some things a boy has to do on his own, such as having a wee and getting his fingernails pulled out by Mr Fricker.
    The man himself was waiting for me outside his office. He hadn’t chosen which set of hands to wear yet, and he beckoned me with a bare stump.
    Inside there was a table and two chairs. On the table stood a large box, with dials on the front and wires coming out of the back. On top of it there was a red light and a green light.
    There was also a rack on the wall with Fricker’s special hands. He selected a pair encased in tight-fitting leather gloves. These were his much-feared Interrogation Hands. As soon as he had them screwed in, he seemed to change. Gone was the hot-tempered shouty psychopath. In its place was something colder and more clinical and, in a way, even scarier.
    ‘Sit down, Millicent,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to attach these wires