She is amazed that you can bring a bomb into a Starbucks and the overall mood will change not one iota. The people go on chuckling and smiling, even when Jason heaves his bomb up and plants it right down in the center of the table. Nobody even looks twice.
The three of them sit down.
“Now what?” Samantha asks.
“Now,” Jason says, “we wait. For the right moment.”
They wait. Light jazz versions of Christmas carols drift above their table. Samantha looks up at the baristas busy at the counter, and she looks down at the table, and then she looks up at the counter again, and it occurs to her that a Starbucks is basically a fast-food restaurant in disguise; a fast-food restaurant that supplies, in abundance, the illusion of class, and thus transforms itself into a place where people on the threshold of adulthood actually want to go to hang out.
Jason slaps his palms against the tabletop.
“Does anybody want anything?” he says. “As long as we’re here.”