seating assignment

by James Sullivan

This girl, a transfer student, arrived one day in the middle of the term. This fact alone should have constituted clues one and two. And then get this: she took that back seat by the window. The children, had they paid attention to the signs, might have better understood their positions.

The teacher, this sort of feckless 40-something dearth of definition, was introducing the transfer student. But she ignored him. Like he was an extra on the scene. She forgot his name on the spot, and soon no one else remembered. She moved to the board as the de-named teacher stammered, then dashed a fresh piece of white chalk across the board: Mary King. Her hair was the color of sun-bleached lion mane. When she took her seat (you know the one, back by the window), the class parted before her like Savannah grass.

Then it came time for the flag pledge, and this was when Tom Edwards would stage his little half-rebellion. When the class stood and faced the red white and blue in the corner, Tom would do the same, but he would neither cross his heart nor recite the words. Rage against the wars or the taxes or maybe just the idea of being told to speak. He wasn’t sure which motivated him, but he thought he was onto some pretty edgy stuff.

So the teacher led them in reciting the pledge, and Tom stood with his hands on his waist, heroic, proud. That’s when he turned to check on the new girl’s reaction. She was kicked back in her seat, black loafers crossed over her desk. She had on this dark green skirt that seemed pinned by the Holy Ghost to her thighs at just the precise point so that no horny boy (Tom’s line of sight bending involuntarily) would get a glimpse too far. Tom dumbly fiddled with his belt loops as she glanced at him, like Just what the heck is that pose?

Thus the 40-something teach decided to discontinue the morning pledge, and in fact by the end of the week (by Mary’s suggestion, some would surmise) the American flag was removed entirely. Mary’s parents, she’d say, were anarcho-syndicalists, so she found the whole imperialist-whatever centralized power thing a little passé.

Which is part truth, part lie as you might have guessed by now. Like all of her history, like all of history, it rises up like a flame from a lighter when needed and then slips back into nonexistence. More importantly, centralized power to young Mary King was only a lame, passé thing, flawed and oppressive and so on blah blah blah, right up until it was sufficiently centralized. Then so much became possible.

Her flag design, for one thing, required centralized decision-making to take its place strung at the front of the class. With an upward curving sickle and two stars, the flag seemed to regard the class all throughout the day with a mischievous smile. Kevin, an anxious sort who was the type to get bullied at his own birthday party, meekly objected, twitching in his seat, to the perceived flag-face surveillance. The consensus was that, contrary to conventional intuition, Mary’s keeping him instead in the hallway, tethered to a pipe-anchored leash, actually granted him a freedom from worry that put him at total ease.

Were there some historian of the events of that school year, she might (though the sequence of causality is debated) point to Tom’s fixation on the leash as the start of what came later. She might point to how he’d sometimes dawdle in that hallway, admiring (Mary had thought) the rugged, authentic feel of that leather leash, almost whip-like in its brutish construction. There were no plastic parts like on a dog’s leash but, instead, hard steel that shone like an oiled, flexing bodybuilder, pumping its power before Tom’s eyes.

Perhaps in the glimmering strength of that steel was born the drive that would push Tom to launch the MK Resistance, with himself the leader.

First came Operation Lift Mary’s Skirt, a borderline suicide mission Tom volunteered for himself. The idea was that, aside from their intrinsic interest in female thighs and tight-stretched panty fabric, by revealing Mary King’s vulnerable side, they might shake loose some of her resolve and even some of the followers that had started to gather at her desk during breaks. As Tom came up behind her in the hall, he felt the universe accelerate. The whole building dolly zoomed through his eyes. Even as he reconsidered this plan, worried that they might actually attract more to her side, his hand whipped out before him. Just as his fingertips nipped at the hem of her skirt (red and green check that day) the polarity in him reversed and his hand was repulsed—hovering centimeters from the goal like a maglev. Mary King, eyes in the back, front, and sides of her head, noticed him and spun into a roundhouse kick, sending Tom, graced with a brief flash of white (His imagination? Her intent?), through the first-floor window and into a bush.

Next was Mission Flag Freedom, which saw Tom pulling a fire alarm. The whole school marched out to the blaring tone, all except for Kevin, who was to climb a desk, remove the Mary King flag, and replace it with one Tom had spray-painted with fifteen blue stars to represent the wills of the MK Resistance members. Kevin had climbed the desk and started to reach for that flag when—and he thought he saw a glimmer in the flag’s starry eye—a genuine 6.2 Richter scale earthquake turned the school building to jelly and jiggled him from the chair. Looking up from the floor, the halls of education creaking under this coerced dance, the eyes of the MK flag rippled in laughter.

One day Mary King’s followers retaliated by filling the boys’ gym shoes with frog dissection debris. Later, when Tom was scrubbing his feet in the tub and picking Christmas-colored gore out of his sneakers, he found a tiny eyeball rolling in the soap. For a minute, even slick and dead, it held his gaze.

The conflict burned on in this pattern. Perhaps it was that teacher’s experience in a little Catholic school decades ago, his own fifth grade teacher an old nun with the cold war fresh in her memory, that allowed him, out of nostalgia and no small deference to Mary King, to give his support—or at least to step out of the way—when the students gathered cardboard, hockey sticks, soccer nets, and boards ripped from the groundskeepers’ shed and in the middle of his classroom erected their own barrier wall.

“So that there will be no further bloodshed,” said Mary King’s press secretary Sarah, a girl savvy enough to throw her fuzzy pink hairband in with the strongest matriarchal figure. They conferred in the back corner inside a cubicle the teacher had ordered, and Sarah would then emerge with decrees: “We Christen this beautiful wall!” The bloodshed to which she referred was presently but language, but nonetheless Mary King’s followers erupted in cheers, and the MK Resistance shuddered on their side, which had started seeming to everyone all at once rather chilly.

Ah, but then, almost as if by speaking the word, for maybe Mary King had liked the ring of it, Sarah seemed to have willed for bloodshed. Or you might say she plucked the word blood out of a jar of slips, total surprise, when little did she know that every folded slip in the universe had the same word waiting to open for her. Do you remember Mary King’s seat?

The wall divided the classroom and eliminated all aggression but for the occasional stray rubber band or spit wad. But those in the MK Resistance were growing restless with this uneasy peace. True, Mary hadn’t put Kevin on his leash for a while, and the bruise on Tom’s jaw was starting to revert to a human color. But that teacher, taking after the nun in his school days, had implemented systemic inequality in the classroom. Like with the Berlin wall the teacher was modeling, there was a clearly preferable side. During lectures on the Mary King side of the wall, administrative employees served tea and British biscuits to the delight of the MK loyalists. Tests on the MK side were always open book (Mary King herself never needed to look). That kid Billy, with the habit of chewing raw garlic, defected mysteriously to the Resistance.

Conditions were untenable.

So, the Resistance mounted a last stand. On the outdoor basketball courts, Tom, Kevin, and the rest launched a direct attack: rocks catapulting off tennis rackets, volleyballs spiked with bone strength, wads of garlic spit with precision, and a stiff stream of water from the most powerful SuperSoaker Tom could find.

It was a rout. MK supporters shrieked and dove for bushes. Kevin waved the blue-starred Resistance flag. Press Secretary Sarah wailed and pleaded with the MK followers not to flee. But, in a manner of speaking, God had bled. Mary King herself was untouched (save, she is loath to admit, for a spritz of SuperSoaker water on her thigh, some last remnant of Tom’s will), but her omnipotent grip on the class, the school, the world had slipped—if only for a moment. She was still young and learning the way the world works for her.

But a phone call fixes so much.

One phone call as Mary King weaved through the flak, skirt whipping like George Washington’s flag over the Delaware, and the entirety of the police force deployed on school grounds to aim rubber bullets at the Resistance forces. Rubber band warfare had grown up. The non-lethal munitions popped and ricocheted off walls, signs, poles, and student skulls. Tear gas canisters painted arcs of pain across the courtyard. A police K9 mistook (or used as pretense) the smell of Billy’s garlic for drugs and dragged him by the leg across the pavement, sandpapering his hands and cheek. One officer who’d taken up boxing the previous year seized the opportunity to test his right hook on a punching bag with some meaty bounce.

Things were a little out of hand.

Mary King rode about on the back of a police motorcycle, arms crossed as she observed the carnage, cool as if she were in a chariot. She personally located Tom Edwards then had him cuffed and strapped to the bike as they did circles around the school grounds to make sure the Resistance members were thoroughly beaten.

Now, as for Tom, it wasn’t as bad as you’d think. She could have ended him. She could have strung him from a tree. Dodgeballed him into pulp. Drawn and quartered him on the jungle gym.

But he was necessary. Mary’s light had to reflect on something. An adversary served only to highlight, reinforce, bear witness to her ability. His antagonism animated her.

Things went back to normal at Mary King Junior High School. Mary named the teacher (Mr. Nakamura, who started to look more Japanese by the day) and took her seat in the back by the window. Strangely, a lot of students who’d had only minor involvement in the little conflict started to fade into the background. Their faces grew indistinct, lazily depicted. Say the classroom were framed. All the light would center on Mary King, but not far away, lit enough for detail to appear, were Tom, Kevin, and Billy. They balanced the composition, putting Mary in context.

It’s often said that everyone imagines herself the hero of her own story. An endorsement of ultimate relativity in which there is no main character in life, and everyone is in some sense wrong to imagine themselves so. A smart perspective, sure, but it misses an essential angle: What if someone weren’t wrong?

All right, children, stand for the pledge.  

Photo of James Sullivan

BIO: James Sullivan is the author of Harboring (ELJ Editions). His stories and essays have appeared in Cimarron Review, New Ohio Review, Third Coast, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, and Fourteen Hills among other publications. Originally from South Dakota, he split his adult life between Japan and the American Midwest and now resides in South Carolina. Connect on socials @jfsullivan4th