Sam and Colby: The Asylum

Chapter 30

Did I actually want Colby to call me his girlfriend? We both clearly kept hinting at the idea of it, but did I really want to date him? His life was full of... well, his life was full of this. Crazy adventures and new ideas and new places. And new places meant new people. This guy had an entire fan base that had to be at least 75% female, and when there's that many people, some of them were bound to be attractive. Undoubtedly more attractive than me.

Not that I considered myself ugly. I just wasn't really sure what else to say to Colby in my car that first day. But I wasn't lying about not looking like some stereotypical hot LA girl. They were all tan with perfectly even complexions, long bleach blonde hair, perfect bodies. I was attractive, I knew that, but not quite in terms of LA standards. But, then again, Colby wasn't from LA. He was from Kansas, and I was from Oklahoma. We sort of did the same thing, living in one of the most boring parts of the country before moving to one of the most renowned cities on the West coast. So maybe his criteria for finding someone pretty was different than other LA guys. He'd already called me beautiful, sexy, and hot. But I knew there had to be literally hundreds, if not thousands, of people dying to meet Colby Brock that looked a lot better than me.

I knew I wasn't here because of my looks, though. Not at all. Sam and Colby would never let someone join them on one of their sacred trips just because they were fun to look at. And if they were just using me as clickbait, they simply could have had me in their intro our outro, or even just put me in the thumbnail and not the actual video.

But that wasn't my only concern with the idea of dating Colby. He'd never even actually had a girlfriend, and he's 22. What if it just lasted for a month and then we had a falling out? I would rather stay friends with Colby for a long time than only date him for a little while then never see him again. However, I knew Colby was telling me the truth when he said I was different. I knew that he hadn't ever treated a girl the way he'd treated me. So if he ever did call me his girlfriend or ask me out, I would definitely be on board with it. If Colby had never had a real girlfriend, then he would probably wait until he was really sure that he wanted me to be his first actual one.

Why did I keep thinking about this so much? I was about to go spend the better half of a week in an abandoned insane asylum with some of my teenage-hood role models. So many people would kill for this opportunity. I needed to focus on the reason we were here. Not on my feelings for Colby. I wasn't going to let those get in the way of fully appreciating and experiencing the opportunity to go and do something that could literally change my entire perspective or understanding of life. This was going to be the most incredible few days of my life, and I could focus on Colby when we got back. Or maybe when we weren't in the middle of a séance or some shit.

Wait, would we be doing one of those? Would we be using a Ouija board? Oh, god. We probably would. Maybe Corey would bail out on it and I'd leave to go 'make sure he's okay'. I don't know. But I had agreed to come on this trip, and I knew the sorts of things they did, so I was going to give it my all. The idea seemed fine when we were back in LA, but again, being here was different. It all became more real. I 100% understood and believed what Colby had said at Taco Bell, that it was so different in real life.

I spent the rest of the drive researching the asylum and its history, as well as all of the awful things they'd done to the patients there. It was almost intriguing to read, and I could have spent hours learning about it, but it did make me feel incredibly uncomfortable.

Soon enough, we turned off of the main road and started driving down a bumpy gravel trail. We drove for probably a couple of miles, until we came up to a gate that had to be at least 15 feet tall, chain link with barbed wire at the top like a cliché prison yard. The fence wrapped around the entire area. We couldn't see the hospital—or the end of the fence. There was a long, curved road ahead of us with dense trees and vegetation on either side. It was beautiful, actually, but not when you knew that that luscious green forest was trying to hide.

Sam called someone on his phone, and about ten minutes later, a car that said 'Security' on the side drove up behind us. A man in uniform got out and walked up the Sam's window.

"Howdy, folks. How was the trip over here?" he asked. "My name is Officer Bates. You can just call me Bates, though."

"Yeah, hi, I'm Sam Golbach. We've been speaking on the phone for the past couple days," Sam said, sticking his hand out the window to shake Bates hand.

"Very nice to meet you. County speaks highly of your work and appreciates the attention you're bringing to the sector's tourism industry. Now, here's a list of the codes to get inside and the master key. There's about fifteen buildings around here, but I'd only recommend going into the first three, the only ones you can see when you first drive up. Rest of them are collapsing and unsafe to be in, but I'm not going to stop you from exploring wherever you want to go, as long as you folks will sign a consent form sayin' it's not our fault if y'all get hurt in there," Bates said. He handed a clipboard to Sam through the window, and Sam passed it over to Corey, who read it before signing and passing it back to Jake.

"Now, that supply deal all went through just fine. Sleeping bags and cots and whatnot are all on the footstep of the main building up the drive. Food and water's in a smell-proof animal bag on the steps up to the main area, too. That building's going to be the safest, so I'd recommend you sleep there. Like I said, the other two buildings on either side of it are also still stable. They've both got their titles right up top. There's the administrations office to the East, storage facility on the West, and the main asylum where the patients stayed in between those, which is the biggest building. Y'all got any questions?" Bates asked. The rest of us had read and signed the consent form before Bates had finished talking. "Oh, there's a Port-a-potty in between the asylum and the storage building."

Sam looked back at all of us. "Questions?" he asked. We all shook our heads.