Uh oh. Am I in trouble. Me and my friends’ experiment with making the lunch hour last all afternoon has been ruined. And so have we.

We’re not bad boys. Ok, we are lippy and sometimes we don’t shut up when teachers tell us to, but we really do know the difference between right and wrong.

But the thing is, we’re testing the boundaries. We are 13, after all. And when you become a Year 9 and get the freedom to leave school at lunchtimes, the temptation to break the rules becomes too much to bear.

Here’s what happened. Me, Jack, Ashok and Robbie went to my house for lunch. My mum was out at work all day and she’d said it was all right to bring friends back occasionally. On our way, Rob said “let’s not go back afterwards.” I knew it was a bad idea, but everyone else was so excited that I went along with them.

So after we cleaned up the lunch things, we went upstairs to play games on my computer. Then disaster struck. My mum came home. We all sat there, frozen, hands clamped over our mouths. What were we going to do? I heard her making phone calls. And then she put on some Mozart real loud, always a sign that she was settling in for a long blast of work.

We knew we couldn’t stay up there the rest of our lives. Ashok came up with the idea of jumping out of the first floor window to escape. What a brain. Then Jack said that since the music was so loud, we’d be able to sneak downstairs past her office and out the front door. It didn’t really seem likely that we’d manage it without being caught, but I was desperate.

Sure enough, the creaking floorboards and Jack’s sudden fit of hysterics got my mum out of her seat and into the front hall in nanoseconds thinking we were burglars. I wish we had been. Prison would have been a holiday compared to her fury. She didn’t shout but boy, was she mad. She said she’d never be able to trust me again and how she’d had such high expectations of all of us and how all the other parents were going to be as disappointed as she was. And then came the worst bit. She piled us all in the car and drove us to school to face the headteacher.

The rest is history. We’re all on report for the rest of the term and our parents are watching us like hawks. They don’t need to. Although it’s corny to say it, I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll never do anything so stupid again. But in a way, it was something that I had to do once, if only to feel what it was like.