Sam Saves the Night

by Shari Simpson

  But Dr. Fletcher tried to pretend everything was chill. “I’ll be able to tell you more once I assess your data,” he said. Then, with a dirty look at Joanne, “Or I guess you’ll just figure it out for yourself.”

  “But—”

  “But the main thing is, how do you feel?” He brought his face so close to hers she was temporarily sclera-blinded. “Tired? Or full of vim and vinegar?”

  “Um… somewhere in between, I guess.”

  “Good! And it will only get better, just like I promised.” He clapped his hands down on his thighs for emphasis; it made a rather harsh bony sound. “So get dressed and we’ll get you outta here! Jo, I hate to do it, but we’ll have to wake up Samantha’s mother. Poor woman probably hasn’t slept that well in years.”

  Joanne turned to go.

  “Wait,” the doctor said. “Now that I’m thinking about it, don’t wake her up. We’ll send Samantha home in a taxi.”

  Joanne looked at Sam. “You have your house keys, dear?”

  “Uh… yeah. You mean you’re really just gonna let her keep sleeping? In your office?”

  Dr. Fletcher seemed hurt. “Well, of course. What kind of parasomnia expert would I be if I didn’t care deeply about people’s rest?”

  “Oh. Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you,” Sam said, but Dr. Fletcher waved away her apology and slumped back into the control room, his head hanging. Confused, Sam turned to Joanne, but she was bustling about efficiently, collecting Sam’s things.

  “Joanne? What did I do?”

  “Oh, don’t mind him, dear.” She handed Sam her jeans and turned around, talking over her shoulder. “The doctor is just very committed to his work. Ten years of never leaving an office would make any man dotty—I mean, a little overly sensitive.”

  Sam paused with her pants halfway up her legs. “He hasn’t left the clinic for ten years?”

  “Well, I did say he was very committed to his work, didn’t I? Of course, there’s also the aquaphobia, but… Oh, I’m talking too much. Got everything?”

  Aquaphobia? Sam wasn’t sure why a fear of water would make a man a prisoner in a strip-mall sleep clinic, but she didn’t have time to question. Dr. Fletcher stuck his head back into the test area—

  “Taxi’ll be here in two minutes!”

  —and Sam found herself being bustled about, packed up, patted, hugged, and ushered into a cab with Weezy in her arms and a “Follow-Up to Sleep Study” sheet of instructions tucked under her chin. The driver screeched away from the clinic, making nauseating and completely unnecessary figure eights through the parking lot, but Sam barely even noticed. Because even though the taxi window was filthy, it wasn’t filthy enough to obscure a sudden blinding flash of gleaming teeth and golden hair.

  No way. There was just no way the owner of those pearly whites and bouncing ringlets was getting a fifteen-dollar mani-pedi or eating anything that could be found at a 7-Eleven, so why the heck was Madalynn Sucret walking through the Guttenberg strip mall on a Saturday morning at the butt crack of dawn?

  By the time she crawled into her bed that night, Sam had pretty much convinced herself she’d imagined Madalynn, the same way brain-baked travelers saw mirages in the desert. Crazy as that theory was, it made more sense than the actual eighth-grade goddess descending upon Fred’s Super Dollar closeout sale. Besides, Sam had other things on her mind. Like the back-to-back mega-lectures she’d received from her brother and mother for leaving the clinic with only a comatose pug as chaperone. And why her new doctor wouldn’t tell her if she’d actually sleep-organized his medical files. And what Joanne could have meant when she said, “Let the darkness do its work,” which sounded like a line from one of the survival horror video games Jax played endlessly.

  And why am I trusting some dude who hasn’t seen sunlight in ten years?

  Groaning, Sam flipped on her side and pulled Weezy into a spooning position, trying to distract herself by whispering the word “brachycephalic” to the tempo of the pug’s raucous breathing. She remembered when Margie taught her that word and that it meant the sweet little ball of fur her mother had brought home from the shelter was going to snore like an eighty-year-old man with a deviated septum. Jax had been outraged; Margie had gone to search for a dog who could protect Sam on her sleepwalking sojourns, like a German shepherd or pit bull. Instead, Margie had fallen for googly eyes and a face that looked as if it had been struck with a cast-iron skillet. When Jax had pressed her to explain her bizarre choice, Margie could only come up with, “He’s an oddball, just like… us.”

  Like me, you mean, Sam remembered thinking. You said “us,” but you meant me.

  She pulled Weezy closer; he protested by way of a prolonged and noisy fart. Sam’s eyes filled with tears, but not from the smell. Would the darkness do its work tonight? Would anything be different, like Dr. Aquaphobe had promised? Would she even be able to fall asleep, fearing the worst because she hoped for the best?

  But she did, eventually.

  Fall asleep.

  And did, eventually.

  Wake up.

  In the middle of the night.

  Standing at the door to her bedroom.

  And for a brief moment, she rejoiced.

  Because this was different. She had woken up by herself from her sleepwalking. She hadn’t done anything dangerous. She hadn’t even left her room. She could go back to bed and back to sleep without Jax yelling or her mother scalping herself, and without operating any power tools. So Sam turned around to do just that, to go back to bed and back to sleep without any yelling or scalping or sawing.

  Except there was one problem.

  There was already someone in her bed.

  Her.

  Her own body.

  Sam’s body, sound asleep, arms tucked around a snoring, skillet-faced dog.

  Standing Sam looked at Sleeping Sam and did what any Sensible Sam would do.

  She became Screaming Sam.

  A DREAM. A NIGHTMARE. SAM was pretty certain she’d never had either, so how would she know? She was screaming, she could hear herself screaming, but it sure didn’t seem to be doing a whole heck of a lot to wake her up. She suddenly recalled Dr. Fletcher’s words, “You were actually doing the thing you thought you were dreaming about,” and this made her scream even louder.

  Her caterwauling, however, fell on the deaf ears of the night. She was still standing by the door to her room staring at what appeared to be her body spooning Weezy and snoozing peacefully. She tried frantically to reason with herself: If this is a nightmare, I’ll wake up eventually and have a hilarious story to tell. This calmed her slightly, the idea of being able to share a funny dream story like normal people who, you know, actually dream. Dudes, you are so not gonna believe the nightmare I had last night, she imagined herself saying and laughing so hard it made everyone else laugh. I was floating outside my body and… and…

  And… that was as far as she could get. Because, first of all, she wasn’t floating, she was just kinda hanging out. And secondly, unless she made up a bunch of stuff like and then all my teeth fell out! or and then I realized I was totally naked! this didn’t really seem to fit the descriptions of nightmares she’d heard about. Oh, and don’t forget that you don’t have any friends to tell a funny dream story to, she reminded herself.

  On that depressing thought, Sam knew that she was alone, as usual, and was going to have to just deal.

  So, she stepped forward.

  It felt like a regular step, a human body in motion, so she took another, and another, approaching the bed. She leaned so far over that she could not only feel Sleeping Sam’s breath on her cheek, but also observe that Standing Sam’s bare feet were actually hovering about an inch off the floor.

  Her head and stomach started spinning in opposite directions, and she was suddenly convinced she was going to fall, fall through her own body, through the mattress, and the floor and the ground, and right into the center of the earth. She stood up quickly and nearly flipped over bac
kward, trying to gain traction on the air cushion under her feet; the room whirled, and that’s when Weezy began barking.

  At her. Standing Sam.

  He was looking right at her with his saucer eyes, and barking like a pug possessed. Sam instinctively put out her hand to shush him, stroke him to silence as she’d always done on the very few occasions that he was awake long enough to bark, except this time her hand went right through him. Right through his little, round head, her skin like a mist, insubstantial and unsuitable for petting.

  Sam felt another scream building in her chest, but before it could break out, the door opened and Margie dashed in.

  “Shhh, quiet, Weezy, quiet!” She rushed right past Sam, the misty, insubstantial Sam, and leaned over the solid, sleeping Sam. “You’re going to wake Samantha, silly dog!”

  She scooped him up in her arms and dashed out again, but not before Weezy managed to look back, right at Standing Sam, and howl a soul-shattering howl, as if he’d seen a ghost.

  Well, that’s that. I’m dead.

  She didn’t feel dead; it just seemed like the simplest explanation. Or then again, maybe she wasn’t fully dead, since that thing under the covers was breathing. Maybe she was having an… oh, what was the acronym again? An NDE, a near-death experience, like that story about the little kid who died in an accident, but then revived and said he’d been chilling with the angels.

  But there were no angels in her bedroom. No bright light, no feelings of peace and serenity, no dead relatives in white robes beckoning to her. She was hovering slightly, but not floating up near the ceiling. So… she probably wasn’t dead, or even near dead. And as far as she could tell, she wasn’t having a nightmare, a dream, or a hallucination. She was just… herself. Except in two places.

  Sam stared at the Sam lump under the covers. Holy crow, is that what I really look like? It wasn’t like looking in a mirror, when she knew how to smile and turn to just the right angle to make herself look her best. It wasn’t like a photograph or even a selfie, not that Sam ever really took those because, um, why bother? This was real seeing, the way other people must see her, soft and vulnerable and unfamiliar. And freckly. And asymmetrical. Seriously, why had she never noticed that the two sides of her face didn’t match at all? Like she needed any more reasons to hate her life.

  Sam forced herself to look away from the unbalanced weirdo under the covers and took an inventory of the room. Everything was in its usual disastrously chaotic place, and she marveled, not for the first time, that all her past sleepwalking “projects” never once included tidying her own space. Her eyes landed on a sheet of paper on the messy desk: It was the “Follow-Up to Sleep Study” sheet of instructions.

  Her heart (or the center of her mist body, at least) started to pound. Why had she not read this yet?! Distracted by the Madalynn strangeness, sure, and then exhausted from the Jax tongue-lashing about leaving Margie sleeping at the office of someone who was probably the New Jersey Slasher, but still. Sam walked/levitated slowly toward the paper, praying fervently it said something like 1. When you wake up outside of your own body, don’t freak. Not that she could have followed such a directive, since as soon as she tried to turn the paper toward her and her hand slid right through the desk, she was again very, very close to freaking out in a very big way.

  Sam drew a gasping breath and craned her neck over to read the paper sort of sideways:

  What to Expect After Your Sleep Study

  Oh yes, please fill me in, thought Sam in her most sarcastic inner voice.

  Once the sensors are removed after a polysomnogram (PSG), multiple sleep latency test, or maintenance of wakefulness test, you can go home.

  Where you will have an out-of-body experience and your pug will think you are an evil spirit, Sam thought, her irritation growing.

  You will not receive a diagnosis right away. Your sleep specialist will need time to determine if your disorder is a public or personal safety concern.

  Seriously?! This was obviously just a form letter, since it had been determined long ago that Sam’s “disorder” was not only a public safety concern, but a certified public menace. She wasn’t sure why the impersonal nature of the instructions was making her so angry, but if it weren’t for her unusable cloud hands, she would have torn the paper to bits and fed it to Dr. Fletcher in his Bollywood Grill takeout. Maybe I can spit on it. But would I have real saliva or would it be like invisible un-wet vapor? She leaned over to deposit whatever would come out of her mouth on the offending paper, and that’s when she saw it. At the end of the typed list of instructions, a handwritten scrawl:

  One more thing, Samantha: Be careful. The night has a way of revealing things. People show who they really are in the darkness.

  Before she could even begin to fathom what that could mean, Sam heard a voice.

  “Hey! Newbie!”

  Her misty body seized up in fear. There was a boy outside her window, and he was looking right at her. And he was super cute, with huge dimples and a shock of chocolaty hair. Unfortunately, this did not make him any less terrifying. She dropped to the floor and military-crawled/floated to the wall underneath the windowsill.

  “Oh, shoot. Sorry to scare you. I always forget that new Wakers are kinda nervous.”

  Why is there a super-cute ghost boy outside my window and what the heck are “new acres”? Sam curled into a fetal position, simply unable to process any more horrors.

  “Did you faint or something? Listen, if you just stick your head out, I can explain everything.”

  As tempting as an explanation of this insanity might be, at the present moment Sam was more in the mood for mind-numbing silence. She would have put her hands over her ears, except they would probably go right through her skull into her brain. The thought made her whimper.

  “Well… okay. Don’t worry about it. I’ll come back tomorrow night and introduce you around. Later.”

  Sam heard no steps walking away, but then again, do disembodied hot guys’ feet make noise? And introduce me? To who, exactly?

  She just wasn’t up for finding out the answer to either of those questions, so she tightened her pretend body even more. And as she tried to disappear into her own mist, Sam could only come up with one thing: If the darkness really did reveal who a person was, Ghost Boy appeared to be a helpful (and gorgeous) new acre, and she, Samantha Fife, was a coward with a warped face and, apparently, a split soul.

  THE NEXT MORNING, SAM WOKE up, jumped up, and shrieked “Evil twin!” all at the same time. Her heart drumming, she laser-focused downward. From the looks of the pale legs tangled in the sheets, it appeared that she was in her bed again, but her eyes flew over to see if there was a second Sam haunting the space beneath the windowsill.

  Empty.

  Apparently, Sleeping Sam and Standing Sam had reunited. And both of us are confuddled, she thought. Just call me the Combo Sam of Confuddlement.

  “Good morning?” Margie stood in the doorway, holding a tray of breakfast, except it was really just a plate of food, silverware, and a shaky glass of orange juice balanced on a coffee-table book since trays were too much to pack when you were moving houses every six months. “How are you feeling, honey? I made you some waffles?”

  Two out of three of those questions really should have been statements, but Sam couldn’t fault her mother’s tentativeness when she was feeling so unsteady herself.

  “Thanks, Mom. I’m hungry.”

  Which was true, surprisingly. Her confuddlefication had seemingly not affected her appetite.

  Maybe because I’m eating for two now.

  Sam grunted. Her inner voice was really starting to piss her off.

  “You didn’t walk last night.” Finally, a statement from Margie.

  Sam swallowed hard, focusing her concentration on syrup application. There just was no way she could come up with a response that wouldn’t have Margie dialing up yet another person of the psychiatric persuasion.

  “I’m not trying to jump the gun or
anything, but, I’m just saying… you didn’t sleepwalk. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Okay.” Sam was now adding tiny drips of syrup to each waffle pocket.

  “Just an observation. Just putting it out there.”

  Sam nodded, using her knife to rejigger the flow. She fought off the desire to encourage her mother with an “I know! Right?” since it would have to be followed by a “But I did possibly sleep-levitate.”

  Margie responded with a half nod/head tilt, clearly showing that she wanted to do more than just put the information out there but couldn’t with someone so obviously consumed with perfect syrup distribution.

  “Well… we can talk more later. Enjoy!” And she was gone.

  Five seconds later, Jax walked in and examined her plate. “Substandard syrup dispersal.” He grabbed the waffle, jammed it in his mouth, and strolled out.

  Sam sighed. Yeah, we can talk later. Way later. Like, after I interrogate Dr. PsychoStare about what he did to make me a double me.

  Not that it would be easy to judge a look of surprise on the face of someone with perpetually astonished eyeballs, but Dr. Fletcher was clearly expecting her. At least it seemed so by the way he yanked her inside the clinic door.

  “We have to hurry,” he said by way of a greeting, “Joanne went to get us maple sausage melts and the breakfast guy at Seven-Eleven is super speedy. She doesn’t like it when I explain too much.”

  “Explain too much? How about explain at all?” Sam nearly shouted. “What the heck did you do to me?!”

  “Language, young lady.” Fletcher peeked nervously through the window. “It’s just going to take a little getting used to. After a week or so, you’ll fit right in.”

  “What? Fit in with who?”

  “Why, the SleepWakers, of course. Didn’t you meet any of them?”

  “I—uh…”

  Hot ghost boy. What had he said? “New acres are kinda nervous.” No, not new acres. New… wakers. Sleep… Wakers. Whatever the hot ghost boy was, the doc here knew all about it.