Asylum (Asylum, #1)(31)
“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 *.”
“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 mouth 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.”