Assigned Seating

Devon Asare believed in systems. Systems were the reason he had a 4.0, a scholarship application that practically wrote itself, and a planner so thoroughly color-coded that his little sister called it "the rainbow of stress." Green was extracurriculars. Blue was deadlines. Red was things that could, if mishandled, end his life. Most of senior year was blue. AP Chemistry, which was supposed to be the safe and predictable jewel in his transcript, was about to become red. It became red at 8:04 on the first morning, when Mr. Hollis read the seating chart out loud. "Asare," Mr. Hollis said, squinting at the page. "Devon Asare. You're with — Cruz. Mateo Cruz." Devon turned around in his seat with the specific dread of a man watching weather move in. He knew Mateo Cruz. Everyone knew Mateo Cruz, the way everyone knows the one intersection in town where accidents happen. Mateo Cruz had set off the fire alarm sophomore year, allegedly while making nachos in the home-ec room, and had once ridden a library cart down the science wing ramp during an assembly, and currently had his feet on the lab stool, his hood up, and his eyes closed, possibly asleep, at four minutes past eight in the morning. "Sir," Devon said. "Is there a form. For seating." "There is not a form for seating," said Mr. Hollis. There is a thing worth knowing about Devon Asare, which is that the planner was not a quirk. People treated it like a quirk. His sister called it the rainbow of stress and his friends called it the baby binder and a teacher had once called it, fondly, "a little intense, Devon," and all of them thought they were describing a habit. They were not. The planner was the load-bearing wall of Devon's entire life. Devon's father had left when Devon was eleven, left in the specific chaotic way that teaches a kid that the adults are not necessarily in charge of the weather, and Devon had responded to that the way some kids respond, which was to build, plank by colored plank, a self that nothing could surprise. The 4.0 was not vanity. The scholarship application was not ambition. They were the same thing the planner was: a dam. And a dam works fine, holds back the whole river, right up until the river finds the one place you forgot to build. So Devon picked up his bag, and his planner, and his future, and carried all three to the back lab bench, and sat down next to the human equivalent of a red entry. Mateo opened one eye. He had the kind of face that the universe had clearly designed to get away with things — a slow, lopsided, unbothered face — and Devon distrusted it on principle. "You're the guy with the chart," Mateo said. "I don't have a chart." "You have, like, a binder. I've seen you with a binder. In the hall. You walk with it like it's a baby." Mateo closed the eye again. "It's fine. I respect a man with a baby binder." "It's a planner," Devon said, and hated how prim it came out, and hated more that Mateo smiled without opening his eyes, like he'd won something. Mr. Hollis was talking about the syllabus. Devon wrote down everything, dates flowing into blue, lab safety in red because it was a thing that could end your life and you should treat it accordingly. Beside him, Mateo wrote down nothing. Mateo had no notebook. Mateo had, as far as Devon could see, a single pen, and the pen had no cap, and Devon felt a muscle in his jaw do something it had never done before. "You're going to need to take notes," Devon said, low, while Hollis wrote on the board. "I have a system," Mateo said. "You don't have a notebook." "That's the system." Mateo finally sat up, hood sliding back, and for one second he looked at Devon with an expression that was not lazy at all, that was quick and bright and a little defensive, like a door opening exactly one inch. "Look. You do your thing. I'll do mine. We'll be partners the way countries are partners. Trade agreements. Minimal contact. Everybody keeps their own borders." It was, Devon would think much later, a genuinely good speech. It even had a metaphor. It had, in fact, a sustained metaphor — trade agreements, borders, minimal contact — extended cleanly across four sentences and landed on its feet, and it had been delivered by a boy with no notebook, one capless pen, and his hood up, at four minutes past eight in the morning, on no notice whatsoever. Devon was a person who noticed sentences. He could not help it; sentences were a kind of system, and he respected a well-built one the way another boy might respect a well-thrown ball. If Devon had been paying the right kind of attention, he would have registered, right there in the first ten minutes, that something was badly wrong with his diagnosis. You do not build a metaphor like that by accident. Mateo Cruz had just shown Devon, plainly, in the opening scene, the exact thing it would take Devon most of the semester to actually see. But Devon was not paying the right kind of attention. Devon was busy being annoyed, which is a thing that uses up nearly all of a person's attention and gives nothing back. Instead he said, "Fine. Trade agreements," and turned back to the board, and added a new entry to the planner in a color he didn't normally use. He used orange. Orange was for things he didn't have a category for yet.