Sam Saves the Night

by Shari Simpson

  “So… what? He taught all of you how to split kids in two?” Sam said.

  “In a way,” Dr. Hopkins continued with a small smile. “But to be honest, we’re still not completely sure why it works for us and not for others.”

  “Others? You mean other doctors?” Sam turned to Fletcher. “Dude, how many people did you try to recruit?”

  “Only the ones I thought would be able to handle the responsibility. It was safe, though. I merely, well, advised them on methods for the sleep studies of their most challenging cases. Then if their patients’ souls detached, I could ease the doctors gently into the SSSS. If not… well…” Fletcher’s face darkened.

  Dr. Hopkins got a bit misty-eyed. “Dr. Fletcher tried to help by intervening with the suffering children who didn’t detach. For his troubles, he was accused of trying to steal patients and banished from the AASM.”

  Dr. Thomas chimed in, “But he found the four of us. And we’ve been able to help so many.”

  Dr. Mahdhav chewed out, “This is all very heartwarming, but we need to tell Sam the rest, the part that’s not quite so kumbaya.”

  Fletch moaned and dropped his head into his hands. “Foolish! I’m so foolish! I should have trusted my theory, trusted my instincts!”

  “What’s he griping about?” Sam didn’t want to feel sorry for Fletcher, but she did, which was super annoying and inconvenient.

  Dr. Hopkins awkwardly patted him on the shoulder and said with great solemnity, “He detached Madalynn Sucret.” The rest of the S.S.S.S. sighed deeply, and Fletch moaned again.

  “Yeah? So what?” Sam barked defensively, not really wanting to know so what.

  “Everything about her sleepwalking episodes warned me, but I was taken in by her angelic daytime demeanor! I think she hypnotized me!” yelped Fletch.

  You and everyone else, Sam thought, and immediately felt like a BadFF. “What was so terrible about her sleepwalking? I mean, I did some crazy stuff, too—”

  But the members of the S.S.S.S. were already shaking their heads. “She was destructive, Samantha. Driven.” Dr. Hopkins pressed on. “She would sleepwalk halfway across town, and her parents would always find her in the same place, trying to break into someone’s house.”

  Sam’s heart started drumming so loudly, it felt like it had relocated to her ears. She had a sneaking suspicion if she asked Whose house? she was not going to like the answer. Instead she protested, “Big deal! I broke into a synagogue, people!”

  Joanne was grim. “Trust me, Madalynn was not trying to get into that home to light a menorah.”

  “I should have known!” wailed Fletcher.

  “It could have happened to any of us, Fletch,” Dr. Thomas said gruffly. “At least we know now and we’ve taken the pledge.”

  “Yeah, and a big fat lot of good it’s done us,” grumbled Madhav.

  Dr. Hopkins explained, “The S.S.S.S took a pledge not to detach anyone who exhibited anything aggressive or antisocial in their sleepwalking.”

  Madhav chomped furiously. “And yet the MeanDreams tribe keeps growing!”

  “I told you, Gopal, she is infiltrating the other tribes and gathering SleepWakers to her cause,” counseled Knavish. “We all know how manipulative Madalynn can be.” He gave Sam a sideways glance. “Did you see any Wakers from other tribes who seem to have been coerced into joining the MeanDreams?”

  The image of a girl in red flannel pajamas immediately popped into Sam’s mind. No! Kyra wanted to be there! She said it was better! Sam crossed her arms over her chest and pressed her lips together.

  Fletch sighed. “Loyal…” he mumbled to himself.

  Madhav was still on a roll. “I’m going to say it one last time, the numbers are off! Mad Madalynn might be soul-napping, but I’m telling you, we also have a rogue doc out there who’s releasing teenybopper misanthropes into the night!”

  Misanthropes? Dr. Hopkins intercepted Sam’s perplexed look. “Haters,” she said, with a jangle of bangles for emphasis. “Just a fancy way of saying ‘bullies.’ ”

  That word again. Rage filled Sam’s breakfastless stomach with heat.

  “Okay, I think we’re done here. Usually I’m not one of those kids who’s like, ‘Oh, you’re old, you don’t understand my generation,’ but I’ll tell you one thing: I know bullies. Let’s just say I know them personally, ’kay? Bullies start fights for absolutely no reason and pick on people who haven’t done anything to deserve it. That’s not Madalynn and it’s not the Dreams. They have reasons, and I have reasons, and my soul, or SleepWaker Sam, or whatever you want to call that thing I am at night, is doing what it needs to do to fix stuff for the daytime me. None of you are out there, so you don’t really get it. So back off. Because I’ve found my tribe.”

  The tension in the room was so thick, you couldn’t have cut it with a full-tang ninja sword. Then Dr. Hopkins, a hand placed over her bracelets for maximum quiet, spoke in her devastatingly gentle voice:

  “If that’s true, then why haven’t you been able to be solid yet?”

  The flame in Sam’s gut was extinguished so quickly, it was as if a bucket of sand had been poured down her throat. She wheeled around and hightailed it out of the office, blinking back tears.

  Well, this is ironic.

  If Byron’s theory were right, tonight she probably would be able to become solid. Because her soul had never felt heavier.

  By some miracle, the security desk was empty when Sam arrived at school, which was a major relief. The formidable security guard, Claudia, who was known for her salty catchphrase of “Are you flyin’ on me?” was not someone Sam was up for tangling with this morning. She slipped past the desk and tore down the hallway, certain she was going to hear an “Are you flyin’ on me, comin’ in without a late pass?” over her shoulder at any minute. Somehow, she made it to the rear stairwell and paused inside briefly, waiting until her heart slowed down a fraction before attempting the steep stairs to the fourth floor.

  Madalynn had told her exactly where the old faculty restroom was, thankfully, because Sam couldn’t remember ever having been on the fourth floor of Wallace. Left over from a time when the school population had been bigger, and students and teachers were not as lazy and would actually climb four flights of stairs, it was now mostly locked up and used for storage. She recalled that for a brief period, the Banana Splits support group had met up here, but eventually it was decided that kids with divorced parents felt isolated enough, so gathering in a dusty, abandoned science lab was probably not the best thing for their mental health.

  Sam scooted down the eerily silent hallway to the farthermost corner, stopping in front of a door upon which some former class clown had done a bit of scraping, so that the Faculty sign now read Fa tty, the extra t having been added in with a Sharpie. As Madalynn had promised, the lock was broken, and Sam dashed inside, briefly turning on the light to get her bearings.

  It was every bit as disgusting as she’d expected a long-abandoned, tightly sealed, windowless bathroom-to-be.

  Don’t puke, don’t you dare puke, Sam ordered herself.

  Swallowing back the bile rising in her throat, she quickly took note of the double bathroom stall, taped shut with an Out of Order sign, then turned off the light, plunging herself into utter blackness. She felt her way over to the stall, took a shuddering breath, and crawled under the partition—don’t think about your hands touching the floor, oh God, don’t think about your hands touching the toilet—and stood up quickly inside the stall.

  Okay. Breathe. She had survived the initial launch into intel gathering. If Madalynn’s calculations were correct, within the next twenty minutes, Jaida and her band of brats would be cutting gym class and entering this exceedingly smelly room to plot out their next evil plan.

  It was the perfect location, since their deeds stunk to high heaven. Sam wallowed in her righteous indignation for a good few minutes; it helped to quiet the sneaking suspicion that what she was doing right now was not a whole lot better than
the crap Jaida pulled every day. And even though Margie had gotten her excused from school for the morning, it had been for “medical” reasons, not “vengeance” ones.

  When she finally heard the giggles and fumblings at the door, Sam started trembling like a poodle in a pen full of pit bulls. She quickly climbed up on the commode and braced herself, but the sudden brightness of the light and the nearness of her enemy was so overwhelming, she almost pitched off her precarious perch right into the putrid potty.

  “Don’t be an idiot, we can’t do that one unless we break into her house.” Sam immediately recognized Gina’s voice.

  “Yeah, but my sister knows her brother, so we could probably work it out.” That sounded like Amy, but— Wait. Are they talking about me? They want to break into my house? Now Sam was shaking so hard, she was certain the stall was vibrating. If only she could have done this in her insubstantial soul body instead of her quaky physical one!

  “Oh, that makes sense.” This sarcasm was definitely Jaida’s. “We’re gonna tell Daisy’s brother that we want the keys to their house so we can get in to mess with her. Super smart.”

  Daisy? The same Daisy from the bubble tea shop? What had she done to piss off Jaida’s posse?

  “Oh. Right.” Amy again, sheepish now. “Too bad, though. For serious, you have to see this.”

  Sam heard a video start to play on someone’s phone and resisted the impulse to peek her head over the top of the partition to watch.

  “Oh, come on!” Amy groaned. “The reception sucks in here.”

  Jaida sounded bored and irritated at the same time. “Well, duh, Ames, it’s a school. You think they want us watching Netflix between classes? Just tell us what it was, and we’ll see if we can pull it off.”

  “The site’s called Mad Girlz Prank, like ‘girls’ with a z, which is kinda uncool, I know, but they did this great one where they put plastic wrap over the doorway of the sister’s bedroom and then made this freaky loud noise so she jumped out of bed and ran into the plastic wrap ’cause she couldn’t see it, so she bounced off and fell on her butt—” Amy was laughing so hard by this point, Sam could hardly make out the words, but she got the gist: This was a humiliating and painful practical “joke.”

  Gina barked an obnoxious guffaw, but Jaida’s voice was dismissive. “It’s pretty good, but not for Daisy. She needs something a little more, like, obvious. She’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier.”

  “Is that why you’re mad at her? Because of her stupidality?” Gina said this casually, but Sam could hear the burning curiosity beneath her breeziness. So even the minions themselves didn’t know why one of them had been axed.

  “Really none of your business, G.” Jaida sounded just as casual, but her underneath tone was “back off or suffer the same fate.”

  “Oh, no, I know! I didn’t mean—”

  Jaida cut Gina off. “Chill.” Apparently, Gina obeyed this command, because Jaida continued on, her voice thoughtful now. “So, we need something else for Dumbsy, but you know who this prank would be perfect for? The Snoozing Loser.”

  Amy and Gina went completely nuts with “OMG, totally!” and “Yes, YES!” while Sam clapped a hand over her mouth so as not to outright scream.

  “Too bad we can’t pull it off. Oh, well, life is full of disappointments,” Jaida said flippantly, as if not being able to break into Sam’s house to torture her was on the level of your mom forgetting to buy your favorite cereal on her grocery run.

  That’s it. Any guilt she’d felt about eavesdropping was gone; Jaida deserved whatever she got. Sam wished she’d checked her phone before entering the Toilet of Terrors; then she would know how many hours before she could spill everything to Madalynn. I don’t know if I can wait that long. There was so much rage and hurt bubbling inside her, it threatened to boil over into the world’s longest ALL-CAPS text—her fingers twitched and quivered above the phone in her pocket. But there was no way a text was going to do this whole terrible scene justice.

  Justice.

  There was that word again.

  And now Sam couldn’t wait to see it done.

  UNFORTUNATELY, BY THE TIME SAM was a soul hovering in front of the enemy’s abode that night, she wasn’t quite as fired up.

  There were a number of reasons for the drop in her enthusiasm level. One was her conversation with Kyra, or lack thereof, when the Dreams showed up. Kyra was still wearing her red flannel pajamas, but even the bright color didn’t stop her from blending into the tribe, much more so than the night before. And when Sam tried to talk to her, Kyra didn’t have much to say. Or anything, really; she just slid farther and farther into the mass of bodies until Sam almost couldn’t make out her shape. And when Sam tried to peer in, Bree played gatekeeper with a most unfriendly beige smile.

  Another thing that cooled Sam’s avengement rage was the discovery of Madalynn’s plan for the evening.

  Queen Dream, tonight decked out in a vivid purple chemise with matching marabou mule slippers, put her arm around a short boy whose bucktoothed face was freckled with zit cream. “Meet our new Prank pal, who’s going to help us out tonight. Arthur, this is Sam. Sam, Arthur.”

  “S’up?” Arthur whispered, scratching his head, which was immediately almost obscured in a glitter bomb of soul dandruff.

  “Help us with what exactly?” Sam asked, trying not to sound as apprehensive as she felt.

  Madalynn smiled and held out her manicured mitt, in which rested a container of plastic wrap and a roll of tape. “Who’s going to be the Snoozing Loser tonight?” she purred.

  Sam stared at the items, confused. “But—”

  “But what?”

  “When I texted you…” Sam was trying to make sense to Madalynn, but she was also trying to sort out in her own head why she was having to state the obvious. “I told you how mean that prank would be. That’s why I was so upset. Because it’s, like, really… mean.”

  Madalynn looked at her curiously, like Sam was speaking a foreign language. “You’re still not understanding ‘recompense,’ are you, Sleep Sis?”

  Sam’s mist stomach dropped to her floaty feet. This time she was hearing that word differently; this time she heard wreck-ompense.

  “Oh, I get it! You’re worried because she didn’t actually do it to you,” Madalynn continued.

  “No, I—”

  “Just ’cause she didn’t do it don’t mean she didn’t wanna do it.” Bree had lumbered into their conversation and was now staring Sam down with her freakily colorless eyes. “It’s the same. Don’t matter who did what first. Backward and forward, it’s the same, and deserves the same.” Sam was struck once again by how very vibrant was the venom of this virtually vanishing girl.

  Madalynn obviously thought everything was settled, because she motioned for Sam to put her hand out for the goods. Feeling helpless, Sam complied, but the tape swished through her skin, hit the ground, and bounced away, striking the side of Jaida’s dark house with a sad little thwunk.

  “Sorry,” Sam mumbled.

  Madalynn sighed deeply, conveying all the angsty responsibility of being a highly attractive mentor to a deeply dull apprentice. “Don’t stress it!” she said perkily, then turned to Arthur. “Prank, counting on you to pick up the slack!”

  Arthur looked like he might just expand the capabilities of a released soul by physically vomiting. He disappeared through the wall and opened the window from the inside. Bree passed him the plastic wrap and tape, and Zac reached in to noogie Arthur for good measure.

  “Dreams, tell our friend Sam that she’s got this,” Madalynn commanded.

  “You got this, Sam,” the Dreams all spoke together.

  “Tell her she’s going to feel the justice.” Madalynn patted her heart on the word “feel.”

  “You’re going to feel the justice, Sam.” The Dreams patted themselves.

  “Say ‘Avenge yourself, Samantha!’ ” Madalynn crowed.

  “Avenge yourself, Samantha!” they repeated.
>
  “A comeuppance for the oppressor!” Madalynn was getting seriously worked up.

  “A comeuppance for—”

  “Hey, guys?” Sam jumped in. “Uh… good enough. Thank you.” She attempted a confident, avenging smile and slipped through the wall into the oppressor’s bedroom.

  The room was shabbier than it had appeared through the window, and even without a body, Sam could tell that it was cold. Because under the thin blanket, Jaida was sleeping in her coat. The sight made Sam feel queasy and uncertain, so she forced herself to focus on Jaida’s face, hoping to find evidence of the usual arched eyebrow and nasty curled lip. Unfortunately, all Sam saw was Jaida’s breath making little clouds of condensation in the chilly air.

  She turned away sharply and glided over to Arthur, who was almost finished taping long sheets of plastic wrap over the outside of the bedroom door.

  “Hey… it’s not gonna actually hurt her, right?” Sam whispered, glancing back at the window to make sure Madalynn hadn’t sneaked in to witness her avengement wimpiness.

  Arthur also took a preemptive peek before he muttered, “Nah… least I don’t think so. She’s s’posed to just bounce on her tailbone.”

  The thought of her nemesis ricocheting off her coccyx did not help Sam’s jitters. She willed her brain to conjure up images of Jaida’s multiple abuses, particularly her enemy’s desire to play this very same practical joke on Sam. It helped a little; as long as she didn’t have to turn around and face the abuser herself, looking all shivery and vulnerable in the narrow bed.

  Arthur put the last piece of tape on the doorframe. “Oh, almost forgot.” He dug around in his pajama pocket and pulled out a small index card. “Madalynn says you’re s’posed to put this on her bed for after.” He held it out to her.

  Sam gritted her teeth and pawed at the paper helplessly. “I can’t—”

  “Oh, right, I forgot. ’Kay, I’ll just do it.” He went to tuck it back in his pocket.

  “Uh… what is it, anyway?”

  Arthur shrugged, then held out the card for Sam to read: