Before noon, the east-facing window was the first to grow warm.
Sunlight slanted in, drawing pale golden lines across the wood grain of the desks as if someone had brushed over them with a fine paintbrush. Iruka announced that they would tidy their desks before lunch break, and the classroom immediately filled with reluctant sounds of things being moved. Some students hugged their lunchboxes to their chests, some protected their erasers first, and some were still wrestling with half-finished sheets of paper, as if the line on the page might run away while they ate.
"Wipe your desks first," Iruka said. "Lunch can wait a little. Your desks can't."
Naruto looked up. "Do desks need to eat too?"
"They don't," Iruka said. "But they need to be clean."
Kiyo had already opened his lunchbox halfway, but he had no choice but to close it again when he heard that. He glared at the lid unhappily, as if it had betrayed him. Che nudged his chopsticks farther inside, in case he really did reach out later and scatter rice everywhere.
Tidying a desk was actually very simple.
Put away the notebooks, set the pens down securely, wipe the edge of the lunchbox, then brush yesterday's scraps of paper and pencil shavings aside. But once something simple landed in Class One, it usually stopped being simple. Everyone had their own habits on their desks. Naruto's was the messiest: a pencil case on top, papers in the middle, and little notes he had somehow dug up from who knew where pressed underneath. Kiyo's desk was neat, but there was always a strip of cloth dangling from one corner, swaying back and forth as though the desk had grown a tail.
"That strap of yours," Che said after looking at it twice. "Can you