Asylum (14 page)

“Hm? What? A duo?” Abby frowned, staring off into the middle distance. “Oh, right. Yeah, maybe. Maybe that’s it.”

Dan didn’t want to take her response as personally as he did, given the fight she’d just had with Jordan, but she’d really turned cold there at the mention of the word
date
. Everything seemed to be slipping out of control. His new best friends were quickly withdrawing—from him and from each other. He had to find answers and hold the group together, or they’d be total strangers again. Then the Hydra really
would
be dead.

“Don’t worry, we’ll figure this whole thing out,” he said.

“I know
I
will,” Abby said coolly. “I’m going back into that office. One way or another.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

CHAPTER

N
o
 17 

T
he next morning it was time to pick a new set of classes, which meant that Dan had already been at the program for a full week and counting. In some ways, he couldn’t believe that it had been that long, but by and large, he felt like it had been much, much longer.

Dan planned to wait for Abby and Jordan at the admin building to see if there were any classes they wanted to take together, but when he got there, he saw that Abby was already moving from table to table in the art department area. She gave him a quick wave and then kept on going. Dan felt a pang of rejection, but pushed it down.

“So I might have been out of line last night.”

It was Jordan. He grabbed Dan and pulled him over to the Theoretical Mathematics table.

“
Might
have been?” Dan asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I know you’re on her side,” Jordan began, “but I swear I’m looking out for both of us. Between you and me, I’ve seen girls like Abby go through this kind of identity meltdown thing before. This whole story about her ‘aunt’ will blow over, you’ll see.”

“That doesn’t exactly sound like an apology,” said Dan. Anyway, what did Jordan even mean, “girls like Abby”?

“Fair enough.” Jordan inched forward toward the professor’s table, where the sign-up sheet waited. “Listen, Abby’s great, I love her and everything, and shame on me if this thing with her aunt is for real. I just can’t get wrapped up in a bunch of drama right now. I’m here for math, not la la crazy ghost hunting. I could’ve handled it better, though, that’s for sure. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is I’m sorry I was a jerk last night. And about the Hydra thing: it’s probably like you said, just Joe being an asshole.”

“No harm done,” Dan replied with a shrug.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“All right, then.” They’d made their way to the front of the line, and Jordan signed his name on the clipboard in the tiny scrawl of a true mathematician.

“I’m going to head over and sign up for Twentieth-Century German Lit,” Dan said.

Jordan stuck his finger in his throat and made a noise like he was choking, then smiled and went off in the opposite direction.

It wasn’t until the end of the morning, after waiting in one course line after another, that Dan acknowledged the sad truth: the three of them hadn’t chosen a single class together. Dan waded among all the students hanging around outside, and he finally found Abby finishing up a conversation with some people he didn’t know. He waited off to the side until she noticed him, and then with a wave to her other friends, she came up and immediately started talking about all the new classes she was excited to take. Advanced Portraiture, Impressionism, Graphic Novel Illustration. Jordan eventually found them, and his list of classes proved similarly alienating—Multivariable Calculus, Real and Complex Analysis.… Dan could solve for zero, but this went far beyond a fundamental grasp of numbers. He gazed down at his own schedule—history, literature, more history.… None of it matched up.

As they were talking, Dan noticed that as friendly as their conversation might sound to an outside listener, Abby never once actually looked at Jordan, and Jordan kept directing his jokes at Dan. It was hard to deny now: in the space of a few days—a few
hours
, really—their whole easygoing dynamic had changed. Is this what it always felt like, getting close to people?

The new class schedule meant a new routine, so Dan went from building to building, map in pocket, relearning his daily pattern. He hardly saw Jordan or Abby. They didn’t even share a common lunch hour anymore. True, they still met for dinner every night, but the conversation was now full of inside jokes from their different classes and stories for which the other two “just had to be there.” Jordan had said he’d apologized to Abby, and the fact that they could still sit at the same table seemed evidence of that. But she seemed distant, and pointedly avoided any mention of her aunt. Dan wondered if she still planned to go back to the warden’s office. He personally had no desire to ever go there again.

On Friday night, Dan arrived in the dining hall to find Jordan waiting at their usual spot. Three legal pads sat on the table next to his food tray, each one covered in his messy scribbling. As Dan moved closer, he saw the scribbles were numbers and equations—the kind of equations that had enough letters to look like sentences. Jordan didn’t seem to notice Dan’s approach but stayed bent over one of the pads, his hand moving at lightning speed across the page.

“Homework?” Dan asked, taking the seat across from Jordan. He couldn’t remember ever seeing Jordan working outside of class, let alone on a Friday night.

“You could say that.” Jordan scratched his right temple with the dry end of a pen. “One of my teachers mentioned this problem that’s supposed to be unsolvable. But the thing is, there isn’t a proof yet that
shows
it’s unsolvable. So I’m working on either the proof or the solution, whichever comes first. Call it a pet project.”

“Or OCD.” Dan meant it as a joke, but Jordan’s head flew up, his unruly mop of hair springing out in all directions.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” Dan said quickly.

Jordan bent over his paper again.

Then, with dinner in full swing and Jordan favoring numbers over Dan’s company, Abby arrived. She hit the salad bar and grabbed a glass of orange juice, but instead of joining them, she took a detour to a nearby table where the art kids congregated. Dan thought of them as the art kids because they chain-smoked, dressed like Broadway extras, and wore ironic grandma glasses even though maybe only one in five of them actually had bad eyesight.

Jordan had apparently noticed, too, despite being nose deep in math. “They think they’re it,” he said.

“I didn’t know she hung out with them.” Dan cringed. He sounded and felt so stupidly high school. Us versus Them. Outcasts versus In Crowd.

“Hi,” Abby said when at last she came over. She sat down, placing a sketchbook on the seat next to her. “I was just showing Ash and Patches some of my new work.”

“Patches?”
Jordan said, looking up.

“Yes. Patches. Is there a problem with that?”

Mayday, Mayday.

“Nope.” Jordan snorted, low enough to sound like a cough. He brought his attention back to the legal pads. “No problem at all.”

Abby shifted in her chair, sitting with one leg crooked under her. Despite her expectant face and the paper flowers woven into her braid, she was troubled. His heart sank when she said, “So I was thinking tonight might finally be the night. What do you say? Feeling up to sneaking around?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a pretty long week.” He wished they’d never gone into the old wing. It was changing them all somehow. It was changing
Abby
. Dan pressed on. “I was hoping we could just watch a movie or something. Something light. Besides, if we get caught again—”

“We won’t get caught,” she said flatly, ignoring the rest of what he’d said. She dug into her salad, eating so fast Dan couldn’t imagine she had time to taste it. “So what do you say, meet me at the bottom of the stairs at eleven?” She stopped assaulting her food to look at him, her gaze unwavering.

“Um … I’m not sure …” Dan replied, not knowing what to say.

“Jesus, Abs, give the guy a break. He obviously doesn’t want to go.” Jordan flicked his eyes from Dan to Abby, a smirk on his face.

“Thank you
so much
for joining the conversation, Jordan. I
was
going to ask if you wanted to tag along, but I’m sure crunching numbers is more fun.” Abby stabbed a cherry tomato with her fork. The fork scraped hard against the bowl, sending a nails-on-chalkboard shiver down Dan’s spine.

“Yeah, it probably is. Maybe you can get your superawesome art buddies to go instead,” Jordan shot back.

“Maybe I
will
. At least they won’t go all
A
Beautiful Mind
on us.”

“You wouldn’t even
begin
to know what is happening in my mind,” Jordan said. “Thanks to your stupid office I’ve been having these dreams.
Nightmares
. Like something got inside of me when we were down there and it’s been trying to claw its way out. But what would you care? You’re too busy thinking about yourself to worry about anyone else.”

Abby opened her mouth and shut it again.

It was up to Dan to say the right thing. “What sort of nightmares?” he asked gently.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Jordan pushed a hand through his tangled hair, smearing ink across his forehead. The poor guy had never looked so unhappy. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. Dan knew better than to press him.

After a minute Jordan sighed. “Wait, I do want to talk about it.” He looked around nervously, as if to make certain that nobody was eavesdropping. “It happened the night you guys went down into that basement—the night Joe caught us. I’ve had the same dream every night since then.
Exactly
the same. I keep dreaming that I’m in this … cell. And there are these doctors all in white looking down at me, only they don’t have faces. They have voices and hands and tools, but their faces have holes for eyes and noses and mouths. Then they put all these straps on me, lock me down, and …” Jordan’s shoulders sagged. He reminded Dan of a wounded animal. “They show me pictures. And they shock me. They shock me over and over again. There’s this white, hot pain and I can hear my parents talking somewhere behind the doctors. They’re saying, ‘He’ll be better now. He has to get better now.’”

“That’s horrible,” Abby whispered. “I’m sorry, Jordan.”

Jordan nodded, staring down at his equations.

Dan was frozen. He knew from Professor Reyes’s class that they used to administer electroshock therapy to homosexuals in order to “cure” them. Did Jordan know that, too, or had he dreamed it out of nowhere? And how about the fact that Jordan’s dream was so similar to his one he’d had. Was it yet another not-quite coincidence? Were they tapping into some Jungian collective unconscious? What was the connection?

Jordan gathered up the legal pads and tucked his pen into his jeans pocket. Then he stood, gave a half smile, and picked up his tray. He hadn’t touched his dinner.

“I need a nap. I’ll see you two around.…”

Jordan wove his way through the tables, ignoring a few kids who called greetings to him as he went.

“I guess that means he won’t be going back downstairs with us,” Abby said, returning to her salad.

Dan was shocked. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

“Well, it’s true!” Sighing, Abby let her fork drop into the wooden bowl and leaned back against her seat. “And the only reason you’re upset is because you obviously don’t want to go either, so why not just say so?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to go with you.…” Dan struggled for the right words. “I just think maybe this whole thing is far beyond being too weird. You’re worried about your aunt, I totally get that. You want answers. I get that, too. It’s just that—”