When the fixed seating chart was posted, Kiyo's first instinct was to look for his own name.
After finding it, he wasn't happy. Instead, his face scrunched up.
"Why am I so close to Naruto?"
Naruto happened to be passing by. "Who are you talking about?"
Kiyo swiftly covered the seating chart. "No one."
"You just said me."
"You heard wrong."
"My ears are great!"
"Your pencil isn't."
Naruto was immediately distracted. "It didn't break today!"
After saying that, he pulled a pencil from his pencil case to show him. The tip was indeed still intact, though one side had been sharpened long and the other short. Kiyo took one look and said seriously, "It still looks dangerously close to breaking."
"Your shoelaces are dangerous."
Kiyo looked down. His shoelaces were protected by the old cloth strips Nao had tied around them today, and they hadn't come loose.
"They have forehead protectors," Kiyo said.
Naruto froze. "Shoelaces have forehead protectors too?"
"They do."
Naruto looked down at his own shoes, as if he had suddenly realized they were missing something.
After Iruka-sensei put up the seating chart, he turned around and saw the two children studying their shoes with their heads down. He fell silent for a moment.
"You two, sit down first."
The fixed seats weren't actually all that fixed.
A child in the first row was sick and absent. Shikamaru thought the light was too bright, so he moved his chair back half an inch. When Naruto sat down, he accidentally bumped his desk crooked, making the desks beside it crooked too. Sasuke's seat hadn't moved, but the wind by the window kept blowing up his paper, forcing him to hold it down with a book. East Corridor Group Two's positions had been written onto the chart, yet