The just one

My backpack was already packed, my brain had clocked out, and my legs twitched like a sprinter on the blocks. Then, at last, the bell rang, sweet liberation! We erupted outside like jubilant prisoners on perfectly legal parole. The excitement level spiked as the imaginary adrenaline meters inside us lurched into the red, fuelling wild speculation about the glorious days ahead, now that early-morning alarms had been sentenced to a long, merciful hibernation.

We clustered in the parking lot, scanning for the family vehicles that would whisk us away from our academic penitentiaries. And yes, while we grumbled theatrically about our “gruelling” workloads, we were only in primary school, our maths burden stopped well short of calculating rocket-propulsion trajectories to Mars.