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Washed out salmon pink gum is pinned under everything. Under all the tables, the chairs, between the chalkboard and the closets, even up there on the ceiling.

I should know. Strawberry gum is my favorite and miss Śedek hates chewing in her class, especially gum.

If you'll exclude the hidden gum, the room is bare. Six years of memories are stuffed in boxes or in the trash or burned by someone I can't snitch. Even though I'll add for transparency reasons, that I can't snitch anyone cuz Snitches Get Stitches.

The class photos of year 5, 6, 9 and 10 were gambled. No one cheated, wich was a suprise, if you'll account where we all came from but on the other side, it really wasn't because we weren't the people we were back then.

Miss Folse, our class teacher, took the one of year 5. She's an old maiden and probably will be for life, we scarred her too much in everything regarding children.

When she started her job, we were her first class. She was pretty hopefull back then, energetic, I think she wanted to change the others. Six years later, all hope for change is gone but a new hunger is seen behind her eyes. The hunger for thrill, for adventure, for the wild. In a way, she became one of us.

Seamus has taken the photo of year 6. He's with half a foot in prison, they say or well, Adrian says, and I saw him getting a court letter, so there's some truth in that. Seamus has never talked about it but I think he'll join the family business and I started feeling sorry for him. It's a gruesome place for a gentle soul.

Still, I don't know why he took it, he never seemed like a sentimental kind of guy. But who knows, I guess you can only know that, if things are going to end. Lestat (yes, that's his real name) told me a joke, that Seamus needs the photo so he won't feel to lonely in solitary.

I take a look out of the window. The break cage looks dull, now that it is neither a place of longing nor of excitement. And yes, our break room was a literal cage outside, I don't know who designed that. Still, fond memories fill my head, memories of me studying last minute in the break before an exam with my friends. Or that time in year 9, I suppose, when I found a tennis ball and we started playing with it, up until the ball rolled out of the cage and we could nothing but stare at it until I found courage to sneak out of the cage to catch it. The moment, where I finally understand, where I understand what my classmates knew all the time: That rules are only to be followed, when there's an adult watching, who'll care about rules.

Year 9 belongs to Hassan, no discussion there. He was behind the football-bomb, it was the year where he had to clean the entire staircase, The Paracetamol Affair Of Madrid happened.

Miss Śedek tried to bait him out all the time. Rumors had it because she liked him romantically, I believe it too but I never had the courage to ask him about it. Now that I think about, now that I'll never see Miss Śedek or Hassan again, I should have asked. Hassan was many things but he was never a liar and he liked bragging about stuff he shouldn't be doing. He would've told me, if I had asked him. Why haven't I?

The last photo, the one out of our Senior class trip to Paris, was long debated over but Sophie got it in the end. She is my friend, my kin, in a sense.

When she joined our ragtag class of troublemakers in year 6, she was a child, a horseloving, parents obeying little girl.

Nothing today would have given a hint about that. Her eyes have the same shining as ours, the lust after blood and crime. Sophie's parents seem to have catched up upon that, she's going to boarding school after graduation. It's one for troubled children.

I smile. All these years, the only thing I wanted was out. Out of this prison called school, away from their group beatings and pyromania, I wanted to be somewhere else where I would be with normal people again like in primary school.

After summer break, I will go to some elite school far away, somewhere idyllically quit. Don't really know how I got into there, just kinda happened somehow.

These german rich kids probably won't know what to to do when there's firework thrown at you or why you should never turn around at staircases or other things, I now know but they won't because they're called Paul or Anna and will never encounter the things I have seen and the others have lived.

I turn around and let the room be dark. Miss Folse's clock stopped working three days after she bought it and she never replaced it. She thought we would only destroy a new one but she also never put it away. Even though she denies it, I think she'll miss us too. We were her first after all and she already told us, that she'll never have a class after us.

She probably told us that to feel guilty but I was actually proud. Proud, that the woman who has raised thirteen mini delinquents from 10 to 16 years old without any of us getting into jail (or getting caught, for that matter). Proud that she never left, that altough the hope of change has long been lost, she still has made us popsicles for our class trips.

Maybe I'm proud because the things she, I, or all of us have learned between sneaking out of our cage and firebombs, between being high and identity fraud, was sharing pizza, was never snitching, was a thing that I could have never learned at a normal school from Anna's and Paul's: Community.

The feeling of belonging, of knowing who you are and who the others are, of trust and respect, of all these things they have in the Mafia but in actually nice, this is what happens if you start to see like they do.

The clock shows 12:50 am, end of the school day.