Sam Saves the Night

by Shari Simpson

  It was a Breathe Right strip. A small bandage that problem sleepers placed over their nasal area to control snoring. How did Sam know this? Because she’d tried them, of course. She’d tried every sleep-related product on the market. As her eyes filled with tears, she wondered if tomorrow she’d be wearing a “Wake Me When It’s Summer” eye mask, courtesy of Jaida and her demonic disciples.

  “All right, who’s responsible for—” Bain’s would-be tirade was interrupted by a delicate tap on the door. And in she walked.

  Madalynn Sucret. There was a collective intake of breath and the seventh grade became one with an enraptured exhale. The golden ringlets, each in spiraled perfection; eyes so blue and wide you almost expected an airplane to do a flyby through the pupils; and the smile. The smile! Gleaming, glowing, with a blinding sparkle when sunlight hit her teeth. Madalynn’s smile was the stuff of legend, in large part because no one had ever seen it slip from her stunning face: a perfect, and permanent, fixture.

  “I’m so sorry to interrupt your class, Mr. Bain.” You could have dipped lobster in her voice, it was that buttery and melty. “I hope you can forgive me.” A couple of girls in the back of the class teared up; could Madalynn Sucret be more thoughtful and humble?

  “Mmmmflerbbbagggh,” burbled Mr. Bain. Madalynn had the same effect on teachers as she did on students. Oh, and principals. And guidance counselors. And janitors. And lunch ladies. Even Angry Agnes, who dished out death stares with her corn dogs, became positively gooey around Madalynn Sucret.

  “Principal Nussbaum asked me to visit all the classes to remind everyone about the anti-bullying pep rally on Tuesday. Remember, ‘We stand against bullying and that’s no lie, we’re all united at Wallace Junior High!’ ”

  The seventh grade broke into spontaneous applause. The two girls who had teared up just went ahead and wept. Sam, who had managed to yank off her Breathe Right strip and was in her own hypnotic trance of hero worship/post-Band-Aid-removal pain, tore her eyes away from Madalynn to sneak a glance at Jaida. Expecting a sneer, she was startled at the expression on her personal bully’s face. Was it… awe? Admiration? Could the meanest girl in school be actually acquiescing to someone whose trademark was sweetness? Distracted momentarily by Madalynn throwing kisses to the adoring crowd, Sam turned back around and that’s when it hit her.

  Even though she couldn’t imagine why anyone would look at Wallace’s own Angel of Mercy and Beauty in such a way, the emotion she had seen cross Jaida’s mug, however fleetingly, was obvious and one with which Sam was familiar:

  Fear.

  “Over here, honey!” Sam felt badly for cringing, but seriously, Mom? Sooo not okay to pick up your daughter from middle school hefting a chunky pug under your arm and wearing pajamas and a lace-front hairpiece from the Raquel Welch Celebrity wig collection. Sam hightailed it to the Toyota.

  Please let Jaida have some kind of after-school club, please let her not be coming out of the building right now—

  “Whoa! Looks like fashtastrophes run in the family!”

  —so she can tell the whole school that my mother is a “fashion catastrophe.”

  If Sam weren’t so mortified, she would have been impressed at how Jaida managed to always be in just the wrong place at just the wrong time. Her posse snickered, fist-bumped, and made raucous snoring noises as Sam broke into an outright run toward her oblivious mother.

  “I hope you don’t mind, honey, but Dr. Fletcher said to come prepared since we probably won’t be going home in between your intake and the sleep study, so I brought your pajamas, too—”

  Before Margie could hold up the raggedy nightgown in front of Wallace’s entire student body, Sam deftly maneuvered mother, dog, and sleepwear into the car and auto-locked the doors. There were so many things she wanted to say at that moment, from Were you ever a kid? to Please, please, trim the front of your hairpiece. The wig cap is sticking out, like, three inches, but she kept it to, “Mom, why did you bring Weezy? We’re going to a doctor’s office, for crying out loud.”

  Margie started the car and pulled out into traffic. “Dr. Fletcher said to bring him. He wants your sleep environment to be completely familiar and comfortable.”

  Sam sighed, patting Weezy, who was already curled up in a tight croissant and snoring at a heavy-metal-concert decibel. “Familiar, maybe. I don’t know about comfortable.”

  “I also have your body pillow and your eye mask. Oh, honey, I don’t know why, but I just have such a good feeling about tonight! Don’t you?”

  “Did Dad ever go to a sleep specialist?’ The question was so startling to both of them that Sam clapped a hand over her mouth and Margie nearly veered into a parked Zipcar. They never talked about Don Fife. They never even talked about the fact that they never talked about Don Fife. It was just a given that Don Fife was a forbidden topic and usually Sam went along with this unspoken agreement to preserve her mother’s scalp. But today was different, somehow; maybe because Sam was so many layers of tired, she couldn’t seem to control her thoughts, or because last night she sleep-operated a power tool that could have cost her a couple of arms and legs. All Sam knew was that her sleepwalking was getting increasingly limb-threatening, and she needed answers.

  Margie’s hand strayed off the steering wheel, headed for her real hair underneath the fake. Her voice trembled slightly as she said, “Um… maybe we could talk about that with Dr. Fletcher? Not right away, of course, but maybe… eventually…”

  Sam’s heart started to pound. Not wanting to mess with this fragile moment of progress, she gently guided her mother’s hand back to the business of driving, shrugging casually.

  “Okay. Whatevs. Just wondering.”

  Which is the understatement of all time. Yep, just wondering about her dead dad and if he ever tried to prevent being dead so that she could prevent being dead, too. So, yeah, whatevs.

  “We’re here!” Margie nearly shrieked this news and Sam jumped. Here? She looked around in disbelief. They were pulling into the Guttenberg strip mall, less than a mile from her school. Two run-down nail salons, a 7-Eleven, and a Fred’s Super Dollar were the only oases in a desert of empty buildings, and the Fred’s sported a Going Out of Business! banner. “I know, it doesn’t seem like there should be a clinic here”—Margie gave that wedged-hairball laugh again—“but sometimes good things come in odd packages, right?”

  Sam’s heart was now pounding for an entirely different reason. “Goin’ rogue” was one thing. “Goin’ slumber party in a sleazy strip mall” was something else entirely. Margie pulled up in front of a bleak storefront with a handwritten sign, River Sleep Clinic. The door opened to a man whose appearance caused the words “mad scientist” to flit through Sam’s mind. He was six and a half feet tall and on the south side of 150 pounds, with unruly gray hair and huge eyes coupled with tiny pupils. There was so much white eyeball showing, in fact, that it gave him a look of perpetual astonishment.

  “By St. Dymphna, it’s good to meet you, Sam!” he shouted from the doorway.

  This was Dr. Baptiste Fletcher.

  Her supposed sleep savior.

  DR. FLETCHER AND HIS ASSISTANT were both staring at Sam, but Joanne didn’t freak her out as much. The middle-aged woman’s crisp uniform and shiny stethoscope made Sam feel like this might actually be a legit medical establishment and not a place where her liver would be extracted and sold while she slept. Also, Joanne’s stare wasn’t quite as, uh, piercing as the doctor’s.

  Almost as if he could read Sam’s mind, Dr. Fletcher said, “Would you prefer if Jo started your intake? Most of my patients feel more comfortable with smaller sclerae.” Sclerae? She glanced at her mother, but Margie looked as blank as Sam felt. “By St. Dymphna, I’m sorry!” Dr. Fletcher smacked his forehead. “I have to stop using medical terminology! My gaze tends to be off-putting to some people due to the abundance of sclera—er, eyeball white.”

  Sam felt a little guilty. It wasn’t Dr. Fletcher’s fault that he had creepy peepers, and s
he knew what it was like to be judged for something you just couldn’t help. “No, it’s all right. You can both ask me questions, I guess.”

  Joanne and Dr. Fletcher exchanged a meaningful look. “See?” he whispered to her, beaming.

  “Insubstantial,” Joanne whispered back.

  “Empathy is an indicator!” he whispered, rather passionately this time.

  “But not conclusive!” she hissed.

  “Fine! Fine!” Dr. Fletcher whisper-pouted, then turned back to Sam with a bright, “So! Do you have any questions to start out, Sam?”

  Um, yeah, dude, what the heck was all that about?! What she said, however, was, “Who’s St. Dymphna?”

  Dr. Fletcher looked gobsmacked, for real and not just because of his startled eyeballs. “Why, the patron saint of sleepwalkers, of course!”

  “Oh. I didn’t know we had our own saint,” Sam mumbled, feeling like a dope.

  “Me either,” piped up Margie, obviously trying to de-weird the entire conversation. “Guess we should have been praying to her all along!”

  Of course, this, along with her wedged-hairball laugh, managed to make the whole thing about a thousand times weirder. Joanne shot Margie a stern look, and Margie shrank down a bit, fingering her bald patch.

  “I have a feeling,” Dr. Fletcher said, shaking his head, “that you’ve been fed a lot of nonsense about your condition, Samantha. Have you ever been told that sleepwalking is the result of an immaturity in one’s central nervous system? Malarkey!”

  Sam’s mouth fell open. Margie’s eyes widened to the point of showing some extra sclera herself. “But… what?” Sam said faintly. “I thought that was, like, proven science or something.”

  “Proven science is highly overrated,” sniffed Joanne.

  “True!” Dr. Fletcher blared. “There is a staggering lack of humility in the scientific community. We all think we know so much. We know nothing! Zilch! Zero! Bupkus! What do we know, Jo?”

  “Zip,” Joanne said flatly.

  “Zip!” Dr. Fletcher echoed.

  Okay, totally not inspiring a lot of confidence here. Sam shot her mother a nervous look. To her surprise, Margie was nodding fervently. Great.

  “And you’ve probably been told that your sleepwalking shouldn’t affect your daytime behavior, yes?”

  Sam gulped.

  “Flummery!” Dr. Fletcher grabbed a piece of paper covered in scrawled notes and waved it wildly. “Everything your mother told me about the daytime you—the poor grades, detentions, moodiness, listlessness, and hopelessness—what do you think all that is? It’s called exhaustion, Samantha. The kind of exhaustion that would make anyone wacko! The kind of exhaustion that would turn Gandhi into a machete-wielding despot!”

  Sam’s spinning brain spat out one coherent thought, Google “despot” when I get home, and then whirled into sputtering white noise. “But—I—they—all the doctors, they—I always thought—”

  Dr. Fletcher put a bony hand on her shoulder. “Deep breath.”

  She took one.

  “Good. Get some oxygen to your brain, because I have one last sleepwalking myth to debunk and it may make your gray matter explode.”

  Sam took a huge breath and held it, reserving as much air as possible for the mind blast.

  “The medical ‘geniuses’ say that sleepwalking has nothing to do with subconscious desires.” Dr. Fletcher paused for dramatic effect, then stuck his sclerae right in Sam’s face and blurted, “TWADDLE!”

  Unintentionally inappropriate-sounding expletive aside, Sam was lost. What on planet Earth was this dude talking about? It took Margie to put it together. “Are you saying”—her voice trembled a bit—“that the things Sam does when she’s sleepwalking actually mean something? That deep down, she wants to, or needs to, do them?”

  Dr. Fletcher breathed it out softly. “Darn tootin’ she does.” He then leaned back and fanned himself furiously with the page of notes, as if speaking truth made a person very sweaty. Joanne silently poured him a glass of water, which a dazed Margie picked up and drank instead.

  Sam felt a little faint, both from this momentous news, and from the fact that she was still holding her breath. She finally exhaled, a huge rush of air accompanied by a rush of an unfamiliar emotion: relief. Was she finally going to get some answers about the long list of crazy? She opened her mouth to start her barrage of questions.

  “Well, that’s enough questions for now!” Dr. Fletcher hopped up and grabbed the receiver of an ancient, honest-to-God rotary telephone. “Let’s order some dinner! Do you like Indian? I have Bollywood Grill on speed dial!” He stuck a skinny digit in the finger wheel of the phone and started turning it rapidly, giggling at his own joke.

  As Joanne attached the sticky electrode pads to her head and chest, Sam fought mightily against burping up the chicken vindaloo she had unwisely chosen for her meal. Normally she would have picked the blandest dish possible, as numerous doctors had warned her (with data and graphic PowerPoint presentations) about the connection between spicy food and sleepwalking episodes, but since Dr. Fletcher was actually hoping for some midnight action, Sam had thrown caution to the wind. And speaking of wind, she thought, there’s gonna be some breakin’ tonight. Her stomach rumbled a rim shot.

  “As you know, while you sleep, these sensors are going to be recording your brain activity, eye movements, heart rate and rhythm, and blood pressure. Comfy?”

  Sam nodded, reaching down to unwind the snoring Weezy from a wire attached to her foot. “Um… so what happens to all the stuff if… when… I walk? Won’t it just all, like, rip off?”

  “Oh, you leave those worries to the professionals, dear.” Joanne smiled coolly. “We have our methods.”

  Well, that’s pretty dang scary, was what Sam thought. What she said, however, was, “Oh. Yeah. Sorry. You’ve probably done this a thousand times.”

  “Yes! But every time is just as new and exciting!” Dr. Fletcher bounded into the room with puppyish exuberance. “Are you ready, Samantha?”

  “I guess.”

  “Excellent.” Dr. Fletcher waved to Margie, who was watching from the computer control room. She waved back and immediately resumed yanking out all her right-side hair by the roots.

  Sam lay back on the exam bed, and that’s when something strange happened. Well, you know, stranger than all the previous strange stuff. Dr. Fletcher and Joanne leaned over her, and their faces went all tender and sympathetic.

  “When you wake up,” Dr. Fletcher said softly, “everything will be different, Sam. I promise.”

  She felt a little confused because, Isn’t this just the test part? How could monitoring her sleep patterns make any difference at all? But if it were possible to read a person’s sclerae, Sam would have bet on Dr. Fletcher’s. Because everything in the whites of his eyeballs made her a solemn vow.

  IT SEEMED LIKE ONLY A moment ago that she had drifted into the night on the sound cloud of Weezy’s labored breathing, but now sunlight was streaming into the clinic and Joanne was sucking down a Double Big Gulp of 7-Eleven coffee. Sam blinked a few times. Weird. She felt some kind of internal hum, a strange sensation of unforced awakeness. No alarm clock, no Jax yelling that she had five minutes to get her sorry butt out of bed, no Margie staring at her mournfully from the doorway. Just, like, awake. From, like, sleep.

  Sam examined herself; except for one errant electrode that was now glued to Weezy’s corkscrew tail, everything seemed to be just as it had been last night. Could it be possible? Had she really stayed in bed the whole eight hours like a normal human being who heeded the National Sleep Foundation’s recommendations?

  “Good morning, sleepyhead!” Dr. Fletcher crowed from the control room, then loped into the test area, narrowly missing banging his head on the door lintel.

  Sam had to smile. “No one’s ever called me that before.”

  “Well, it’s a brand-new day, Samantha, and a brand-new world. As every new day should be.” He started detaching the electrodes. “Wh
ich reminds me, I want to say thank you for rearranging my files last night. Jo always tells me that I should put all my info onlie—”

  “Online, not onlie. Although your word is probably closer to reality,” Joanne interjected, peeling the electrode off Weezy’s tail.

  “—but I do everything the old-fashioned way, including having a very messy file cabinet, like any mad professor worth his salt. So—”

  “Wait, wait… what?” Sam felt her heart sink right into her bare feet. “Did I… sleep-file?”

  Dr. Fletcher and Joanne exchanged a look that could only be labeled as Mysterious. “What do you remember about last night?” he asked gently.

  She thought hard. “I… think I had a dream. I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a real dream before. There were times I thought I was dreaming, but then it always turned out to be true. Like, I know normal people will dream things like they’re in school with no pants, but they always wake up, you know, with their clothes on. Whenever I woke up…”

  “You were actually doing the thing you thought you were dreaming about,” Dr. Fletcher finished her sentence.

  Sam nodded. “But last night… now I do remember something. Like, moving some papers around and stuff. So that wasn’t a dream?” She fought against the thickness in her voice, the sudden suppressed tears. “I really sleep-organized? Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  Mysterious Look #2 passed between doctor and assistant.

  “We should tell her—” began Dr. Fletcher in a loud whisper.

  “Absolutely not,” Joanne loud-whispered back.

  “But it might help her tonight!” he shout-murmured.

  “Or it might cloud everything!” she yell-murmured.

  Then he muttered in so loud a mutter, it actually had to be considered full voice, “I just think—”

  “No! Let the darkness do its work!” Joanne super-mega-muttered.

  Well, that was bizzawkweird.