Dormitory C had been the high school choir room before the windows were boarded with three-quarter-inch plywood.
The risers had been torn out, leaving raw screw holes in the gray linoleum. In their place stood twenty narrow iron cots, arranged in two parallel rows of ten with a three-foot aisle down the middle. Overhead, four bare incandescent bulbs hung from twisted brown cords, illuminating walls painted that universal, depressing shade of public-works green that smelled of damp chalk and institutional floor sweepings.
At the front desk by the door sat Keisha Grant.
She was twenty-six, with tired brown eyes, her dark hair pulled back into a tight bun with a rubber band. A gray woolen cardigan was buttoned crookedly over her uniform, and her left ankle was bound in an elastic bandage, propped on an overturned wastebasket. On the desk lay an attendance clipboard, a box of wooden dominoes, and a yellow plastic pitcher of cold water.
“Ten minutes, Steward,” Keisha said without looking up from her roster. Her voice was flat, carrying the gravel of a woman who had spent four nights sleeping in an armchair. “Finch is standing right outside the glass. Don’t touch the bedding, and don’t give them anything to eat from your pockets. Venn has a rule about outside food.”
