Computers and then lunch

Hurrying to the computer lab after his first class and it's akward interactions, he sat down and found that the place which had in the past been a source of solace to the young man with how people tended to be more focused on getting through the finer points of Web design or setting up macros in MS office was now foreign; the seats were too small, the keys on the keyboard too close together for his bigger digits to quickly press and he found it harder to just *focus* on the task at hand as he kept having the urge to fidget.

Still, there wasn't anything really significant that came up... aside from the number of assignments he'd fallen behind on thanks to his unplanned vacation. Hopefully he could get caught back up though.

From there it was lunch... and arguably the part he'd dreaded the most: The cafeteria.

In the past Eric would have just brought a lunch or done without, but the change had made it so that he needed to eat much more and specifically more meat. Certainly more then he could reasonably carry in his backpack even if he'd had the time to prepare it so that meant going to the single most congested place in the school and seeing about getting some of the burgers or chicken nuggets or whatever the hell was on the menu today and dealing with the sheer number of smells and attention and everything else... god he didn't want to deal with anything else.

When he got to the room he was of course assaulted by the smells of some 250 students, an utter morass of sensory input that pushed a combination of his anxiety to dangerously high levels as the line for orders and payment slowly filtered through. Remarkably, the Dutch lunch lady was somehow completely unfazed by his appearance and simply took his order along with the crumpled bills before casually waving him on, as though someone ordering a trio of hamburgers was the most normal thing in the world.

Grabbing his tray he turned around and looked at the myriad tables of people and cliques of all the normal people going about their day with some of them stopping to stare or whisper at him, pushing his stress up further; every other time in his life he'd gotten attention like this it was either during or in advance of something bad happening.

He couldn't be in here, there were too many people, too many sounds and dynamics and people he didn't know how to talk to or what to do so gripping his tray he made his way for the fire exit and the outside; he'd eat his meal away from the other people, get some fresh air and just try and relax over by the bleachers.