Maple Glen Mental Institution

Chapter One: Taken

I was reading one of my sister's books, with permission of course, while sitting on our couch. The book was called The Ghost of Graylock, and it was a pretty good one. I was nearly at the end, and reaching a juicy part of it, when my mom called out my name. I closed the book, losing my page, and headed to Mom's room. Mom was putting on her puffy blue sleeveless vest, and I could tell we were going somewhere. As she zipped up the zipper and stood up, she said, "I have a surprise for you." Mom's surprises are usually lame and all, but this one strangely excited me. I clapped my hands and released a smile. I try to hide my smiles when I pretend to be angry, usually when one of my friends prank me, but my face betrays me every time.

I bounded for the car, opened the side door, settled into my seat, and buckled up myself. Mom did the same routine, only starting the car engine, and pulling out of the driveway backwards.

Mom took a strange route that I didn't recognize. The houses became less and less, more spread out. Some were so far apart, I next house I'd see would be at least ten miles away from the previous one. Their structures started to look old. Porches sagged, shutters hung from perimeters of their windows, and the paint peeled and decayed. The entire countryside was a land mass of brown, dead grass. There weren't any stop signs, stop lights, telephone poles, or intersections.

Everything seemed abandoned.

After a while, which seemed like hours, Mom pulled to a very large metal gate that had vines wrapped around the poles. It was bent, and the slightly warped. This was the strangest surprise of all of Mom's surprises. Bushes in the color of a dull green crowded the gate's sides. There was a keypad, that looked at least the most modern, and newest yet most improved, with numbers like a calculator. Mom rolled down the mud-spattered drivers' side window and reached her arm out, and entered a series of numbers on the keypad. Then came the loud, ear bursting, squeal of the gates opening.

Mom lurched the car pass the gates and drove on a long winding pavement road. It was twisting and turning in almost every direction. Still, there were no intersections. I felt like I was going down a driveway that led to a big fancy manor. Then, a sign embedded into the ground caught my eye. Looking out the window, as it passed by, I was able to make out the words, in old fashioned lettering,

MAPEL GLEN MENTAL INSTITUTION, EST. 1890

A mental institution? Sure enough, I wasn't crazy like those people in there. I tore my eyes away from the sign and leaned forward, toward Mom. "Hey, Mom. Are we touring an asylum or something?" Mom didn't say a word. Maybe this wasn't a surprise, and something else was happening. Suddenly, the car with Mom and me inside came upon a large building. It was huge. It had two pillars like the ones in those Roman temples from the really old times, which supported a bar that held an outline of the roof. Two double doors loomed below, incased within the wall. It had large tile steps that had blended mixtures of colors in the look of rotting food. Generally, I wouldn't call this an asylum that held insane people, I'd call this a mega fancy museum that held the world's most famous paintings, like Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

There wasn't a parking spot, so Mom just parallel parked at the base of the steps. This institute was founded in 1890, and by the looks of it, it seems to have been remodeled countless times. Maybe there are still remains of the original parts of the hospital, for example, rooms inside that aren't in use and are forbidden to be stepped into, like the Forbidden Library in the Harry Potter series.

We entered a lobby that held a big wooden desk nearby. A dude in a baseball cap was using the phone that had a twirling cord attached to it, and he was tangling his fingers in it, like those pop star girls in the oldies shows do while flirting with their popular quarterback boyfriend, on the phone, who always wore his football jersey around the couples' high school like a superstar or something. The cap guy, with the nametag pinned to the right side of his polo that read BRYAN, noticed us, said goodbye to his caller and hung up. He swung the chair to our direction, folded his hands, and propped his smelly feet atop the desk, legs extended. Bryan wasn't even wearing shoes. Just some old stinky socks with weird stains on the soles. He smiled at us. 

"So, I have her files," He motioned Mom to come to his desk. She did. I hung back. 

"And, all you need to do is sign this contract and that's that." He handed Mom some papers held in one of those tab folders, and looked at me. Mom distracted me by telling me, "You can sit in one of those chairs while I fill out some paperwork." 

I went to the chair sitting nearby a door that read 1ST FLOOR WARD. Mom took out a pen and started scribbling whatever she needed to write down. This didn't seem like a surprise. Maybe Mom was signing up to be a psychiatrist here. My thoughts were interrupted when a nurse in blue scrubs appeared. Her name-tag read: NURSE JEAN. She told me to follow her. I left Mom buried under the paperwork. I got up from my chair and head to the door that led to the 1st floor ward, or whatever and Nurse Jean entered a series of numbers on the identical keypad from outside that my Mom used to open up the gate earlier. 

We stepped into a hallway, but there were no doors. No crazy people scuffling around in asylum nightgowns or anything. It was a hallway with the ceiling striped in florescent lights, and the floor was tiles of mismatched colors. The walls were lined in a color of two-day-old oatmeal, and still, no doors.

I saw something out of a large window that lined the walls. It looked like a day room window, and I saw a familiar model of a car driving away. That was my Mom's car.

Mom was driving away. Leaving me here with a nurse and hidden crazy people. What was going on? Mom's surprise didn't involve her abandoning me in a mental asylum. Which just had happened. I tapped Jean on the shoulder. She turned around, eyeing me. "Why is my Mom driving away?" I asked her. I know it sounds dumb, but Jean should have an idea on what in the world is going on. Jean was confused. 

"She didn't tell you?"

Tell me what?

She must've read the confusion on my face, because she knelt down, and we were face-to-face. Eye level. Jean inhaled. "Your mom admitted you here...

You're a patient now."