Asylum (Asylum, #1)(16)

Dan picked at a muffin while Abby and Jordan chatted with Ash. Nobody seemed to mind that he didn’t say a word. He tried not to look all mopey, but he wasn’t sure he succeeded.

Afterward, Ash left to join a Frisbee game and Jordan said something about meeting up with people for a group project. Dan and Abby were quite suddenly alone.

Abby looked at Dan with a smile on her face. “Cheer up,” she said. “You look so serious.”

“I—” he started, but then something came over him and he knew he had to say this now or he never would. “Do you want to go out somewhere tonight? Just the two of us, I mean?”

“Yes.” She said, smiling, leaving Dan to inwardly celebrate the vast difference between “yes” and “sure.”

Tell her it’s a date, that you mean it like a date.

“It doesn’t have to be a date or anything,” he added sheepishly.

It’s a date, it’s a date, you’re asking her on a date. . . .

“Oh,” Abby replied, glancing down. “No, right, of course . . .”

“Or it could be a date?”

“Okay . . .” She laughed. “What did you have in mind?”

“Hm?”

“What did you want to do? Get dinner or . . . ?”

“Oh! Dinner, yeah. I heard, um, I heard that place down in town is nice. Yi was talking about it. Brewster’s? They do sandwiches and stuff?” This wasn’t so hard.

“Brewster’s it is,” she said brightly. “How’s seven?”

“Seven is perfect.”

“Great then! Seven o’clock sharp. I’ll see you downstairs at seven.” Abby shook her head and laughed. “Jeez, could I say seven a few more times?”

“Probably.”

After that, Abby said something vague about wanting to go to the sports center, and Dan said he needed to get in some study time, so they parted ways in the quad, smiling and waving like idiots. He watched her walk down the path until she was lost among the crowd of students hanging around outside.

Then he walked slowly back to the dorm. His sneakers crunched on pinecones as he ambled on and off the paths, and on one of the nearby lawns he saw a group gathered around a grill—it looked like a barbecue that a couple of hall monitors were getting started early for dinner. He could smell the smoke as it drifted up into the air and disappeared in the light breeze. He could hear the popping of the fire. He was feeling just fine.





The fact that tonight was a maybe date created more dilemmas for Dan. Like, did he shave? Would that communicate a level of formality that would say too much? Should he keep it informal, so it didn’t seem like he was making assumptions? He really hoped it was a date, though. He thought about Abby’s eyes: big, consuming, like there was a whole world in there he’d only just glimpsed.

“Idiot,” he said. He’d been so lost in his thoughts, he was now probably running late. He threw on a light blue shirt that felt casual but not sloppy. He tucked and untucked it, and even attempted a half-tucked slouchy thing that only catalog models ever seemed to do right. He decided jeans instead of slacks, and definitely no tie—way too formal.

He looked at his clock.

Time seemed to function strangely here. What had felt like hours of wardrobe deliberation turned out to be no more than twenty minutes. He actually had time to kill. Dan sat down at his desk and cracked open his laptop to check his email. There was a long one from his parents that basically just said they hoped he was having a great time with his new friends. Some junk mail. A video from Jordan of a cat running full tilt into a tiny shoe box, and a link to a new band he thought Dan should check out. For a second, Dan wondered what Jordan would think about this dinner with Abby. Had Abby told him? Dan didn’t look forward to Jordan’s inevitable jokes once he found out.

Then, an unread message in his Sent folder caught Dan’s attention. That was . . . odd. How could you even have an unread message in your Sent folder? By virtue of composing and sending the message, didn’t that mean he had himself read it?

Dan clicked on the folder, catching a subject line that read “RE: Your inquiry regarding patient 361”—but then his in-box minimized and an error message popped up midscreen. The cursor changed to the spinny wheel of sadness.

“What? Hey!” Dan smacked the side of the laptop. “Yes!” he shouted. “Yes, I would like to restart the browser, you piece of—and thank you ever so much for choosing this exact second to crash!”

Finally, the internet closed and reopened a second later, but his Sent folder was minus one mysteriously unread message.

Dan felt his pulse begin to race. I’m sitting in an old mental hospital, hallucinating emails about patients. Yeah. No biggie. Ready for that date, slugger?

“I have to get out of here,” he said to the room.

Dan shoved up his sleeves and grabbed his keys and wallet. He turned off all the lights except his desk lamp. He never wanted to come back to a pitch-black room again, afraid he might find—well, whatever trick his imagination had played on him that first night. He went out the door, locking it behind him.

Dan hustled down the hall and around the corner, taking the steps to the lower level in long strides. That weird feeling of being watched was always worse in the halls. He chalked it up to the small windows letting in such anemic slats of light. But he couldn’t go five steps in here without the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. Maybe it was knowing those photographs were downstairs, just sitting there in that office of horrors. He always seemed to forget about them when he was outside, away from Brookline, but when he was here, they crept back into his mind.