The first day of school was calm. Max aced at English class, even though it felt weird having someone trying to teach him how to speak in a language that he used for more than half of his life.

They had math afterward. Max normally sucked at math, but that teacher was actually good at his job, and Max’s two new friends helped him with the exercises.

PE was kind of boring, the first half was just diagnostic tests, and the second half was the whole class getting an ear full about respect, even though none of the students misbehaved or talked back to the teacher or refused to take the tests.

“Why do PE teachers always feel the need to act like generals?” Max commented, leaning back on the bench outside of the school. “It just makes me respect them even less…”

“Everyone knows that PE teachers are army rejects. Honestly, I kind of pity him. Got nothing going for him, and his life is sad to the point where he needs to bully teenagers to feel any kind of control over his miserable existence.” Daniel said while scrolling through Twitter.

“Honestly, most of my old teachers were like that.” He sat straight and looked at them. “I had this history teacher that once gave detention to a boy for letting his pencil fall, and then also gave detention to three other students when they tried to defend him. And in my old school, you couldn’t bring lunch or food from the outside. They said that it was because we could smuggle drugs, but they just wanted to make sure we bought the canteen’s food. Like, the oldest kids at that school were like ten, eleven in a worst-case scenario, why would a bunch of kids be smuggling drugs into a school?”

“Jesus... But you want to hear something even worse? Here students have a tier depending on their family’s income; there’s A, B, and C. Many of the tier A students depend on the school to even have breakfast or eat at all, but here’s the kicker. All the food they serve at lunch is either dangerously undercooked or straight up rotten. I even saw a cockroach in the cafeteria once. And last year, I went to buy a sandwich, and the ham was covered in mold. These kids are basically given a choice between starving or risking getting salmonella or something else,”

“God... What the fuck is wrong with schools?” He got up and picked up his backpack, seeing a fancy car approaching “Well, my ride's here. See you guys tomorrow?”

“Of course. We’ll be at the library,” said Daniel.

“Bye, Max.” Elisa waved. 

“Bye, guys.” He waved them goodbye and got into the car.

The two teenagers waved as the car disappeared into the distance.

“Well.” She got on her bicycle. “Time to go home, so I can come back to school again tomorrow… I fucking hate this...”

“Don’t worry, according to my calculations… We only have 248 more days of school left.”

“Did you take out the weekends?” Elisa turned to see Daniel counting the days on his phone’s calendar “Tell me the results tomorrow.” She started pedaling away.

“Ok- Fuck, I lost count!”