Steve the Teacher: Okay class, let’s split off into partners and do Exercise 2. We’ll go over it after you guys are done.

Me: Oh dear god please no.

At this point, starting guns fire in the distance, nervous pit stains appear, and the entire room plays a furiously faux-nonchalant game of musical chairs, except with eye contact and not chairs.

“Finding a partner” is one of the lesser appreciated terrors of the young student.
There’s nothing scarier than the possibility of ending up with that weird girl with the greasy hair and the voice of a seal. This bodes dangerously for me, the normal kid sitting next to her. All eyes will undoubtedly treat my corner of the room like a cluster of lepers. By indiscriminately making a sweeping rejection of an entire region, their chances of being paired with “Sealia” are cut drastically.

In most cases, everyone will have a preferred target. The Golden Partner. I try utilizing my eyes as a working combination of mild heat vision and telepathy to control my target’s focus. If I succeed, he catches my eyes, and I quickly convert mine into tractor beams that lock him in until it’s too late for him to escape. I have won, at least for that day.

Never let them see you bleed. Sweat, but never pant. Nobody wants a nervous kid for a partner or a friend. It’s a difficult process to put on an air of being above petty scrambling while keeping a constant vigilance on a 270-degree region, but in times of real need, unknown potential always realizes itself. Your eyes will adapt to bend light around your temples like bullets in “Wanted,” and your senses will become attuned to the emotional statuses of both your friends and your enemies. The moment you show fear, the culture will sniff you out immediately. You are then doomed to a less-cool partner, or worse.

Ostracism. If there are 185 penguins in an arctic colony, mathematically, one of them isn’t mating this year. I failed to mate with anyone in my 8 a.m. French class last year. Over the course of time, every person in class paired off with an unofficial daily partner. I didn’t.

There are three options when this happens. First, I look to see if anybody’s partner has failed to show up. Perhaps I can snatch them up like a Hungry Hungry Hippo marble. When this inevitably fails, I switch to option two: try to fit a third nut into a peanut shell. The way the tiny desks in my classroom are attached to the chairs and packed in, this becomes an exercise in extreme awkwardness, especially when you’ve built a reputation in class of not talking much or interacting with other life forms.

I often then concede defeat and slip into option three: sit alone, stare intently at my book and read the partner exercise to myself semi-audibly. This is true humiliation, coming to its full, awkward, disgusting climax when my French teacher came over near the end of the semester, knelt down by my desk and did the exercise with me. Consider myself blacklisted, unless a pity clause was to be invoked in some other kind soul. It was not.

Selection is about speed, strategic angles, communication and willingness to mouth the word “sorry” to that one guy while pointing to the kid sitting next to you. Play the game wrong, and you’ll end up as alone as I was. Don’t end up like me. Find your partner.