الوسم: great

***************

Chaz rushed out of school and got on the bus.
Immediately, he pulled out his phone and started
tweeting.
“Birthday: so far so brilliant. On way home for
dinner. And presents? Recording equipment?
Or even ukulele? Sick!”
Five minutes later, he’d already had 46 favourites
and 104 retweets. He’d even got 22 new
followers today. Ten on Twitter, and 12 on You-
Tube. Life was sweet.
Once he was home, he was planning to go
straight to his room to make a new vlog. But his
mum called him over. His parents were sitting
at the table with a chocolate cake covered with
candles. God, he loved birthdays. He couldn’t
see any gifts. But that was fine. Probably his
present was recording equipment, and it was
upstairs. That’s why they stopped him. Sick!
He wished his sister could be there, but she’d
left years ago. Actually, he thought, it wasn’t
long after her 16th birthday. Maybe she didn’t
get what she wanted. The parents were a bit
past it — always talking about books written
by old farts. Whatever. Now he communicated
with his sister through Twitter. She was in Edinburgh
studying to become a forensic pathologist.
“Hey, Mum, Dad,” said Chaz.
“Happy birthday, Charles,” said his mum.
“You’re 16 now,” said his dad. “We’d like to have
a talk.”
“Yeah, sure. Can we have the cake while we’re
talking?” said Chaz.
“In a minute,” said his dad. “We’d like to talk to
you about your future, Charles.”
“In the future, you know, I’d rather you called
me Chaz.”
“That’s sort of what we want to talk about,” said
his mum.
“You see,” his father started. “It’s like this, son.
You’re not really our son. Not our biological
son, anyway.”
“What? I’m adopted?” gasped Chaz.
“Your mother gave birth to you,” said his dad.
“She incubated you, so to speak. But your genetic
material is completely different.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“Charles… You really are Charles. About 17
years ago, we acquired something very valuable
in an auction. It had belonged to a famous
author called Charles Dickens. We acquired
Charles Dickens’s toothpick.”
This was a bit of an anticlimax. What next? William
Shakespeare’s nail scissors?
“But we had this incredible idea,” his father
continued. “Charles Dickens was one of the
greatest literary geniuses of all time. What a
thing to give to the world: to bring back Charles
Dickens. To let him continue his work and bring
great literature into the world.”
This conversation was not going in a good way,
Charles thought.
“So we had the toothpick analyzed for genetic
material,” his father said. “And then we managed
to revive it and grow it. And clone it.”
There was a silence. Chaz was first to speak.
“No,” he said.
“That’s right, Son. You are Charles Dickens.”
“But I’m not Charles Dickens,” Chaz protested.
“I don’t even like his bloody books.”
“Oh, Charles, that’s not true,” said his mum.
“You liked A Christmas Carol.”
“That was the Muppets!” Chaz shouted.
“Nevertheless, Charles Dickens — you — wrote
it.”
“I did not! I hate writing.”
“You write all the time,” said his mum.
“I tweet all the time,” said Chaz, “on Twitter. Not
the same as writing effing, boring novels.”
“Charles…” started his father.
“I’m Chaz, damn it. C-H-A-Z. And you’ve just
stolen my life from me. I had a life, and now you
say it’s some**** else’s.”
“No, we’ve given you a life…”
“No, stolen. I never wanted all those books you
keep throwing at me. I hate books. What happened
to the ukulele I asked for?”
“That’s not a serious instrument, Charles.
Books are works of art,” said his father.
“They’re past it,” Chaz screamed. “Just like you.
I tweet. I have 12,000 followers. And I do vlogs
on YouTube. I’ve got followers there, too, and I
keep getting more. I might even…”
Chaz was about to say, “might even get a book
deal”, but that would have been counterproductive.
“So I’m supposed to sit down and write these
stupid, boring novels because — wait for it —
because ‘I’m a gift to humanity’?”
“You make it sound like it’s a bad thing,” said
his dad.
“OMG, I’ve had enough of this shit,” screamed
Chaz, and ran out of the house. He pulled out
his phone and walked down the street while he
typed.
“omg u can’t believe what psycho tossers mum
and dad are. U were so right to escape,” he
wrote to his sister Jane on Twitter.
The user imnotjane responded within seconds.
“O I can. It is a truth universally acknowledged
that our parents are toerags.”
“U won’t believe what they told me.”
“Try me,” tweeted imnotjane. “But maybe not
on Twitter.”