My mam says I’m useless and I know she’s right but in school I get A1 in everything, I hardly even need to look at a book, I remember everything, absolutely everything I read. My English teacher says I remind him of a story by some South American writer, I can’t pronounce the name never mind spell it, about someone who was able to remember every single thing he ever saw or heard or smelled idk I’m not that bad. Ask me to recite Macbeth which we are studying and I can do all the voices up to Act Three where we stopped before Christmas, I can do poetry until it’s Coming Out My Ears, poetry is easy. My mam says poetry is useless which is another reason I might kill her. She’s only the boss’s PA but she acts like she runs Computing Solutions herself. I don’t even know what they make in there, some kind of software, maybe a game for mobiles, or parts of a game idk like what’s so great about that? There must be a billion software companies in the world, most of them probably have retina scanners too. I couldn’t care less. I’m For History and I’m For Poetry. I’m Against Technology.

She comes home with a takeaway from KFC.

I don’t eat that shit.

I said I would cook some boil-in-the-bag rice and do a stir fry with whatever was in the fridge but she said no cooking two dinners, I should eat what’s put in front of me. So like I didn’t eat.

So now I’m anorexic.

You’re going to die, she goes, you’re going to die in a horrible awful way, anorexia is a terrible way to go. You’ll turn into a stick and every bone in your body will hurt.

This went on all through dinner. I ate four chips. They disgust me. They are not even potato but some potato simulacrum, like a virtual potato, a Playstation Potato. When you eat it you don’t feel like you’ve eaten except for the salt.