“What… did… you… do… to… me?”
“I detached your soul. Well, your consciousness, really. From your body.” Dr. Fletcher delivered this solemnly, but then as if he just couldn’t help himself, his face broke into a huge grin. “Isn’t that cool?”
Sam sat down. She’d always thought it was dumb when people in movies and books couldn’t stay standing because they were so overwhelmed with freak-out, but here she was, her legs collapsing, her butt hitting the chair with a dull, fleshy thud.
Dr. Fletcher motored on in delight, not even noticing the heinie smackage.
“For the longest time, I didn’t even know it was happening myself! I’d do a sleep study on someone—a sleepwalker, always a sleepwalker, it doesn’t seem to work with the other parasomnias—and they’d come back with some outlandish tale about floating out of their body, and I’d be all, ‘Oh, twaddle, you’re obviously having a night terror,’ or ‘Sounds like REM sleep behavior disorder. Tell me, did you punch anyone?’ But pretty soon they were coming back with stories about floating out the window and meeting other people out on the street who were also saying that they had jumped out of their bodies and they were all my patients! How epic is that?”
Sam had spent the entire duration of this monologue trying not to drift any lower than the chair she was already in, but fighting the faint had been challenging. Even now, all she could manage was, “How…?”
Fletcher shrugged casually. “How does it happen? Oh, I don’t know.”
This incredible statement had the effect of a bracing slap. Sam’s lolling head shot up. “You don’t know?! You’re sucking souls out of bodies and you don’t know how it works?!”
Seemingly unfazed by her outrage, Fletcher held up a set of electrodes, staring at them reverently. “All we’ve figured out so far is that the electrodes we put on our patients to monitor their vitals seem to perform a different function in certain sleepwalkers, the ones who’ve had extreme episodes like yourself. For those walkers, if I set the system at a particular frequency, instead of receiving information, the electrodes appear to inject some sort of electrical impulse that stimulates the prefrontal lobe… well, this is getting super dull and technical, so all you need to know is some kind of jolt happens and the essence of the person just flings right out of their flesh, like popping a cosmic pimple.”
“That is not all I need to know! And, seriously? Gross.”
“It’s a stunning visual, though, right? Okay, so what else do you need to—” Dr. Fletcher stopped short, his face falling into a skin puddle.
Sam smelled Joanne before she saw her. The maple sausage melts were particularly whiffy.
“Oh, hey, Jo,” Fletcher said weakly, gesturing to Sam. “Look who’s here.”
Joanne regarded them so coldly, the steaming beverage in her hand was in danger of becoming an iced coffee. “How much did you tell her?”
“Hardly anything!”
“Not enough!”
Sam and Dr. Fletcher spoke simultaneously, gave each other dirty looks, and double-blurted again,
“Just the basics!”
“Basically nothing!”
“Good.” Joanne briskly handed Dr. Fletcher a wrapped sandwich, the paper so greasy it nearly slipped out of his hands.
“No! No, not good!” Sam was aghast. She stood for emphasis. “Let’s be crystal about this, okay? Last night I walked out of my skin! I was invisible to my mother! My dog thinks I’m Satan! There was a ghost outside my window who says he’s coming back tonight to introduce me to the other ghosts! And”—Sam pointed angrily at Dr. Fletcher, who already had a mouthful of maple sausage—“I have a doctor who’s inhaling a breakfast melt instead of explaining why!”
Joanne’s granite face softened just a squidge. “Samantha. I know this may be hard to believe, but it is the truth, nonetheless. We are helping you.”
“And you’re going to help us,” interjected Dr. Fletcher, holding up a greasy finger.
Joanne’s face hardened back into rock and she bit out, “Too soon!”
Fletcher groused back, “Better sooner than later!”
Joanne grabbed Fletcher’s hand and popped his greasy digit into his mouth. He sucked on it, pouting a bit, and Joanne turned back to the stunned Sam.
“We can’t tell you everything,” she said, her voice now gentle, “not yet. But one thing is certain: Your body will now be getting the rest it needs while your soul accomplishes its purpose.”
“What does that mean? I don’t understand!” Sam’s voice quavered, despite her best efforts to appear maximally straight-up livid.
“It means you have been given a great gift. The gift of two lives, a daytime one and a nighttime one. Two functional lives, instead of one desperate, exhausted life.”
With this remarkable statement, a vibrating silence took over the room, broken only by the crackle of sandwich paper as Dr. Fletcher dropped his melt in awe. Sam sat back down very slowly, digesting Joanne’s words. And as often happens when something is digested, her gut eased. It was utterly true—she had been living a life of desperation and exhaustion. Wasn’t it painfully obvious from all her sleepwalking insanities that her inside self had a different agenda than her outside? Sam had never thought about identifying it as her “soul,” but whoever it was building tree houses and decorating synagogues was still her. And maybe, just maybe, it was a her she needed to understand.
But, still… All I ever wanted was to be normal. Why the heck was her stupid soul fighting that?
“So! We good, Samantha?” This breezy question came from Dr. Fletcher, belying the plaintive look in his sclerae.
Sam sighed mightily. “I don’t know. I still have so many questions.…”
“Of course you do. Some you’ll figure out in the darkness and some we’ll be able to answer—in time.” Fletcher smiled reassuringly and crammed the remainder of the melt into his mouth.
“In time,” Joanne repeated soothingly, handing him a napkin.
“Just one last thing…” Sam swallowed. “If my soul, or consciousness, or whatever we’re calling this thing, is tooling around town at night, won’t it—I—it… get lost?” The thought made her goose-bumpy. “What if it just floats up into the sky, or falls into, like, some thirteenth dimension and can’t get back to my body?”
“Oh, no, that’s not possible,” said Dr. Fletcher. “Because of the silver cord.”
“The silver cord?”
“The invisible rope that connects soul to body. It can be stretched as far as you need it.” Delivered by Joanne in a firm voice, as if to end this line of questioning.
“And you won’t die unless it’s severed,” added Dr. Fletcher helpfully.
Sam’s mouth dropped open.
Joanne abandoned her professional demeanor, rolling her eyes, and even her neck, at Fletcher. “Really? Really? You’re gonna go there?”
“Can that happen?” squeaked Sam. “What would sever it? Are we talking a lawn mower rolling over it or something worse? Like some crazy evil spirit with, like, astral scissors? What the what, people?!”
“Oh, no, no, no, by St. Dymphna, no,” Dr. Fletcher backtracked quickly. “It would take something big—cataclysmic!—to sever the silver cord, Samantha, no worries, no worries!”
“Yeah? ’Cause you saying ‘no worries’ doesn’t make me any less worried!”
“Everyone calm down,” Joanne broke in, returning to her role as sleep clinic corraler. “There will be no silver-cord severing on our watch. Samantha, this is not something you need to be concerned with. Dr. Fletcher has been detaching souls for nearly ten years, and we’ve not lost one yet.”
“Ten years?” This somewhat diverted Sam’s attention away from the prospect of her own death. “Whoa. How many of these… SleepWakers… are out there?”
Peace restored, Joanne and Dr. Fletcher exchanged a proud look. “Well, of course, they’re not all mine,” he demurred humbly. “But I’d have to say—”
“Wait, what? Wha
t do you mean, they’re not all yours?”
Joanne put a friendly and forceful arm around Sam’s shoulders, propelling her to her feet and toward the exit. “Another story for another day.”
Fletcher followed, adding with a wink of his overworked eyelid, “Wait till you see, though. I hear it’s epic.”
Sam was so distracted on the way home, she couldn’t help thinking that it wouldn’t take a cataclysmic silver-cord severing to kill her; she was obviously going to ride her bike into a tree way before that. After narrowly missing a fire hydrant and coming this close to getting hit by a jogging stroller, she even stopped and slapped herself in the face.
“Pay! Attention! Idiot!”
And, of course, there she was—wrong-place-wrong-time Jaida with her bootlicking lackeys outside the Taiwanese bubble tea shop.
“Aw, Sam, you don’t have to do that yourself! We’d be glad to smack you upside the head,” trilled Jaida. Her parasites laughed uproariously, their bullying glee obviously fueled by the sugary caffeine in their giant plastic cups. Jaida didn’t have a drink; apparently, she was just running on mean.
“Wow, we are a true fashualty today!”
Fashualty? Oh, fashion casualty. Sam suddenly noticed that she’d biked over to the clinic in her pajama pants. Which, of course, made her want to slap herself again.
Jaida’s flunkies minced over and surrounded her bike. Sam didn’t know all of their names—she wasn’t even certain they all had names other than “Jaida’s fan”—but it was obvious they knew her name: Target.
“So, we were talking about you and we had a couple of ideas about why you snore through all our classes,” Jaida said with a faux-thoughtful look on her face.
Sam’s stomach lurched. This is how it always happened; she and Jax and Margie would move to a new town where no one knew about her sleepwalking, but before long someone would figure it out, either from her bizarre daytime behavior or by simply googling her name and finding all the newspaper articles. And then would start the long downward spiral of people gossiping about her, being afraid of her, requesting a special police committee to monitor her, and then, finally, driving her out of town with pitchforks and torches. Okay, maybe not quite that medieval, but almost.
“Amy says you’re so stupid that you sleep to hide the fact that you can’t answer any of the questions,” mused Jaida. A girl peeked out from under her designer sunglasses and giggled.
Amy, I presume, thought Sam.
“Gina says you’re just a loser, and losers snooze,” continued Jaida. Sam didn’t need anyone to tell her which girl was Gina; she had been calling Sam a snoozing loser from her first day at school. But just in case Sam had forgotten, Gina treated her to a long, loud snore sound accompanied by the L-shaped hand gesture on her forehead.
“But I think you have narcolepsy.” Jaida got right up in Sam’s face for this, her voice low and deceptively gentle. “You a narcoleptic, Sam? Hmmm?”
Suddenly frozen with fear, Sam stared back at her accuser. Too close. This was too close to the truth.
“What’s narcolepsy?” a piping voice asked. Jaida flashed a death look at the tiny, dark-haired girl, who promptly spilled her bubble tea in alarm. She had a flower name, Sam remembered. Was it Daisy? Jaida then resumed her menacing facial position two inches from Sam’s nose.
“It’s a brain disease that makes you fall asleep in the daytime, like, even when you’re walking,” said Jaida.
“Brain disease! Sammy’s, like, sick in the brain!” chortled Gina. The gaggle of giggly girls erupted, elbowing each other.
“So, tell us which one it is,” Jaida continued in that smooth voice. “Stupid, loser, or narco? Just tell us the truth and we’ll be on our way.”
For a moment, just a moment, Sam considered fighting back. For just a moment, she thought about actually telling the truth, actually asking, What did I ever do to make you hate me this much? But that moment passed into knowing that a truthful question would only earn her double the hatred, with a side helping of scorn. So…
“Loser,” Sam croaked. “Just your average loser.”
The girls shrieked with laughter, but Jaida stared at her for a long moment. Then her lips parted in a slow, knowing smile. “I don’t believe you.”
Sam’s eyes burned with hot tears. Cue the pitchforks and torches.
And then, just as quickly as it had started, it was over. Without warning or explanation, Jaida turned on her heel and walked away, followed shortly by her confused tea-sucking posse. Sam realized that she was clutching the handles of her bike so tightly that her knuckles were drained of color. She let go and rubbed her sleeve across her eyes, hiding her face in the crook of her elbow until her breathing returned to normal.
It wasn’t until she put her trembling hands back on the handlebars and slung her leg over the seat that Sam saw what had probably spooked her trolls.
Madalynn Sucret was standing in the doorway of the Kwik Kustom Signs and Banners Shop across the street, oh so casually running her hands over a sign that said Bullies in a red circle with a big slash through the word. She toted the sign over to a waiting convertible with two impossibly gorgeous, near-albino-blond parents and climbed in. As they drove away, all three smiled, the sunlight glinting off their blindingly white teeth.
It was an unseasonably warm day, so Sam wasn’t sure why she suddenly shivered.
THE FIRST THINGS SAM SAW when she opened her eyes were streetlights.
Uh-oh.
She was standing at her window and it was most definitely dark out there. Most definitely, night. Which meant—
She turned slowly, bracing herself. Yep. There was a Sam body in the bed, curled around a pug that was snoring at a decibel level comparable to a Boeing 747 takeoff.
It was official. She was a detached soul. An essence escaped. A consciousness done broke free. I’m a SleepWaker.
“Hey, Newbie! You’re up!” Gorgeous Ghost Boy was right on cue. Sam turned back to find the grinning teenager outside. “Come on out!”
You are so stinkin’ cute. The thought came unbidden and it was super annoying. Seriously, how shallow was she? Her soul had left her body and was about to embark on possibly the adventure of a lifetime, and all she could think about was some dude’s dimples and light brown skin?
“Uh… how do I do that? I can’t open the window. My hands don’t, you know, work.” Sam held up her useless appendages.
“Yeah, I know, you don’t know how to be solid yet. S’okay, just walk through it.”
“Walk through the glass?”
“Come on, Newbie, we don’t have all night. Just trust me.”
Sam’s misty heart skipped a couple of beats. Only a cataclysmic event can sever the silver cord, she tried to reassure herself. Like being chopped into a million pieces from jumping through a window for some cute-ical on my lawn. But then she remembered that last night she had stuck her hands right through a barking dog. So maybe…? Ooookay, here goes.
It was the most peculiar feeling ever, like all the molecules in her pretend soul body shifted just enough to accommodate the window’s molecules. Like walking through a grater and she was the cheddar, except she somehow reassembled into a solid cheesy block on the other side. And suddenly, there she was, outside the house and standing next to her amused fellow SleepWaker.
“Weird, huh?” Ghost Boy laughed.
“I… I felt it. Like, through me,” Sam whispered in awe.
“Yeah. That’s good, actually. It means it’ll be easier to teach you how to be solid.”
“What does that mean, ‘solid’? I’m assuming it’s not like ‘do me a solid, bro,’ right?” Whoa. She definitely sounded more sassback than she meant to. Especially since this was the longest conversation she’d ever had with a person of the male species who wasn’t a medical professional or a disgusted brother.
“Simmer down, Newbie. We’ll get there. I’m Byron, by the way. At your SleepWaker service.” This, with a little bow that was somehow both gen
uine and mocking.
“Sam. Samantha, I mean. Being that I’m a girl.” Oh, come on, dorkus. She might be nothing except an essence, but apparently even an essence could turn red in the face.
He flashed his ridiculously deep dimples. Seriously, you could hot tub in those things. “Okay, Samantha. You ready?”
Sam shivered. Even though she had obviously been outside in the middle of the night about a kajillion times, she’d always been, you know, asleep. And only awake when someone was yelling at her or arresting her. She’d never been out in the quiet of night. The silence was a presence, promising awesome and terrible things. The darkened houses whispered stories, the trees were witnesses, the parked cars potential monsters.
“Depends on what I need to be ready for,” she mumbled.
“You’re gonna meet a few of the tribes,” Byron said. He turned and walked (floated? hovered?) off. Sam forced her misty legs to move after him, even though the feeling of the air in between her bare feet and the ground gave her immediate motion sickness.
Can a soul puke? She forced her focus up, level to Byron’s retreating back, willing her nauseated cloud body to follow.
“Tribes?”
“Yep. We’ll start with the ones in this sector. Don’t think you’re ready to hyper-cross,” he tossed over his shoulder.
“Uh… yeah… ‘hyper-cross’ definitely does not sound like something I’m ready for,” Sam’s voice wobbled. “Since I’m having trouble with just… non-hyper-crossing…” As if to prove this point, the upper half of her soul body got ahead of her lower half and she started to tip forward, her legs helplessly spinning through the atmosphere. “Byron…!”
He turned around. “Whoa! Okay, use your arms. It’s a little like swimming, so, uh, I guess, backstroke…?”
She flailed her arms backward in wild, klutzy circles and her soul body righted itself. Byron’s lips twitched. “Well, that wasn’t pretty, but don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it.”
Sam Saves the Night Page 4