Assigning Desks

The student introductions came to an end, and to complete my disappointment, I discovered that no one lived in my village. Most of the students already knew each other from previous years and had sat next to those they liked most. The noise from their conversations had already become a nuisance to the teacher. Seeing this, he decided, for the sake of silence, to assign the students to desks by numbers, a method of randomly separating friendships, though it never guarantees success.

The teacher walked around the room, pointing at the desks and assigning students to their new seats. One by one, we moved to our respective places, defeated and apathetic, trying to make the most of the few minutes left before the bell rang. I ended up at one of the front desks, sitting on a chair that was chipped, missing its varnish, and with one screw loose, just as uncomfortable as any other.

To my right sat a girl named Elizabeth, full of simplicity, dressed in white as if she had dressed for a day of celebration. Beautiful, to put it simply, I would only come to fully notice her beauty later, when my interest in observing every detail of her enchanting face wouldn’t seem so obvious. She had been forced to sit there and didn’t seem pleased about it, clearly preferring to sit next to Marianne. She felt wronged being so far from her good friend, remaining quiet and still for the rest of the lesson, making no noise, whether from her voice or the scraping of her chair.

All the teachers had the same idea as our teacher. His idea, so basic and outdated, yet a product of his so-called genius, influenced the others. Grateful to him, they too arranged the students to sit beside those they got along with the least, as it seemed to everyone the best strategy to reduce the constant murmurs in the classroom.