When the school year ended

The last exam ended at half past four on a Thursday, and for a minute nobody moved. We had sat through three days of papers — Chinese in the morning, maths in the afternoon, physics the next — and when the invigilator said time we did not, as we had supposed we would, leap up. We sat with the pens still in our hands while the pages were collected, the way you sit in a cinema after the film has ended, half-hoping that something else will begin.

Then it did. The noise came back to the classroom like water to a dry riverbed. Chairs scraped. Someone opened the window onto a grey, warm afternoon, and the smell of the plane trees outside drifted in, mixed with the usual smell of the room, which is chalk and old paper and the particular damp of a June caught in the plum rain. It was the last time that room would be ours.

We had spent the week before revising in it, forty of us bent over past papers while the rain ran off the tile roof. Now there was nothing left to revise for, and the emptiness of the desk in front of each of us looked like a small, surprising freedom. I took the textbooks off the shelf under the window, one by one, and stacked them into a plastic bag. The physics book I had barely opened all year. The maths book, the one I had carried to every lesson since September, was held together now with tape at the spine. I put it in the bag anyway, because throwing it away felt superstitious, as though the next year might ask for it back.

The report card came on Friday. It is a thin sheet of printed paper, with a row of numbers beside the subjects and a short line of handwriting from the head teacher at the bottom. Mine was middling, the kind of result that asks nothing of you and promises nothing, the kind you fold in half and put in the drawer at home before anyone can think to ask about it. My mother looked at it without comment, which was worse than comment would have been. The first year was over, and the numbers that summed it up fit on one page, in a handwriting I did not recognize.

What I remember most is not the exams but the hours after them. That first evening the bicycle shed was full of people who should have been going home, and nobody left. We leaned against the tin roof and talked about nothing in particular — about the holidays, about who was going where, about the school in September we would not be coming back to as the youngest. The air was thick and still, the streetlamps came on before it was properly dark, and somewhere down the street a radio was playing the old evening broadcast that the whole city seems to listen to.

By Saturday the classroom was empty. The chairs were stacked on the desks, forty of them, and the blackboard had been wiped clean so that only a faint ghost of the last sum remained. I stood in the doorway for a moment before I locked it. The first year of high school had begun in September with a room full of strangers and ended in June with a room full of friends, and I was leaving it to the summer. Outside, after weeks of grey, the sky had turned blue for the first time.