25
If the main auditorium had been designed to be impressive, room 103 looked engineered for stark efficiency. The dingy drop ceiling with fluorescent panels made the furniture extra dismal and sucked the colors from people’s faces. The ranks of laminate tabletops and attached swing-out plastic seats lacked only oars and shackles to achieve complete academic drudgery.
The room even smelled of boredom.
At an empty seat in the back, Dale carefully lowered the heaped plate of sandwiches onto the tabletop. It’s not like egg salad on sliced wheat was a real sandwich, not like the pastrami on onion roll and roast beef and stuff that everyone else had eaten. Four skinny little sandwich halves barely counted. And he’d taken an apple rather than a few of the itty-bitty brownies, or the cookies,
