6. Cellular Respiration
CELLULAR RESPIRATION
*Samantha*
A fter the day I’d had—after Tobias and his glossy photos, the threat to my academic future, and the three-hour marathon of grading half-literate premed lab reports—I was so tired that the edges of the world looked sanded down.
Yet, I couldn’t sleep. This was not unusual for me, but sleep had been markedly elusive for the last week. I simply lay there, arms at my sides, staring at the water stains above my bed, and tried not to think about Tobias’s threats. And Andreas. Again.
And if I somehow succeeded at pushing thoughts of the Kristiansens from my mind, my dumb brain would then remind me that my grandma’s savings account, the one I’d promised myself I would only ever touch in a real emergency, was now $708.63 lighter than it had been twelve hours ago.
Even with my scholarships, even with my TA hours and work-study paycheck, even with the elaborate system of ramen rotation and energy-bar rationing, grad school in Manhattan was like feeding hundred-dollar bills into a paper shredder.
The rent had cleared today, as it did every month, and I’d felt the click of it in my chest.
Grandma’s money wasn’t anywhere close to gone, but I hated using it.
When I closed my eyes, I could see her writing a check in perfect, old-lady cursive, with tidy, sweeping loops.
I never cashed her checks when she was alive, but in her will she’d left all her savings to me, making me promise, on her actual deathbed, not to use the money for “anything stupid or self-destructive, like revenge.”
I could take out student loans, but I really, really, really didn’t want to.
I knew fellow students—in undergrad, law school, and grad school—who’d had no other choice and were now handcuffed to their debt for life.
Becoming and being a PhD geneticist was a labor of love; no one in theoretical science and bench research was here for fame, fortune, or glory.
But it still cost an arm and a leg and a kidney and a liver.
Maybe I should’ve just practiced law for a few years first, made bank, and then returned to school. Too late now.
Shaking my head, I tried closing my eyes again.
Somewhere in the apartment, a radiator shuddered, then spat out a series of hollow clanks that perfectly echoed the arrhythmia of my thoughts.
I reached for my phone; the screen told me it was now just past 1:00 AM; I’d lain down at 10:30 PM.
There were no new texts. I checked my email.
A single line from my PI sent ten minutes ago: “Can you meet tomorrow at 11 to discuss sequencing results?” I marked it unread, like that would somehow keep the obligation at bay.
But I’d be there, if only I could get some sleep.
Rolling onto my side, I stared at the prescription bottle on my nightstand.
The sleeping pills were supposed to be for emergencies only, which my therapist had described as when my brain was actively hostile.
I’d made it almost to Thanksgiving this year, seven months since I’d last taken one, which was a new record.
But as the minutes slid by and my brain kept insisting I think about Andreas and money and my grandmother, I decided this insistence counted as hostility.
I popped the cap off the sleeping pills, shook one into my palm, and swallowed it dry. The bitterness spread across my tongue, a microsecond of revolt, and then nothing. Just the promise of oblivion.
To maximize my odds of making it to campus on time for the 11:00 AM meeting with my PI, I set three alarms—9:30, 10:00, and 10:30—in case the first two failed to breach the drug fog.
I double-checked that I’d plugged in my phone.
My sleep hygiene was a disaster, but at least my alarm game was strong.
I burrowed back under the covers and did the thing my therapist called “progressive relaxation.” First, the toes.
Then the calves. Then the quads. It was supposed to work like hypnosis, but mostly it made me hyper-aware that I hadn’t shaved my legs in four weeks, and that my calves were now 80 percent tension, 20 percent bone.
Somewhere in the process, the pill hit. Not like a sledgehammer. More like the slow and quiet dying of a fire. The next thing I knew, I was in a dream.
It was a room that could have been any room, but the walls pulsed with a kind of warm glow, like I viewed it through stained glass.
Sun through dust motes, the hum of an ancient fan, the thump of tennis shoes on hardwood.
I was twelve, I knew that for sure, because I could see my own knees, sharp and unscarred, poking out from a pair of cutoff shorts that used to be my favorite.
Andreas was there. Not the current, Roman statue version, but the kid I remembered.
Eleven years old, hair a dark riot, eyes enormous, always on the edge of either tears or laughter.
He was stacking pillows on the floor with a focus so intense it looked like he was planning the Normandy invasion.
A pillow fort. When he noticed me, he grinned, wide and guileless.
He said something, voice insistent, but the words were garbled.
I responded, and I could hear my own kid-voice, awkward and crackly, but again the words didn’t make sense.
The pillows rearranged themselves until the structure wasn’t just a fort; it was a labyrinth.
We built it higher and wider than any pillow and blanket fort had a right to be, stealing every pillow, every chair, every bit of fabric.
There was a sense of real urgency, like the whole world depended on our ability to barricade ourselves in.
At some point, the walls started to change.
The colors got brighter, the edges sharper.
Suddenly I was myself again, or at least the version of myself that existed now.
Twenty-eight, five foot eight, long limbs, pale skin.
Andreas was also older, though I hadn’t seen it happen.
One minute he was a kid, the next he was a giant in the six-thousand-dollar coat, arms longer and stronger, eyes the same improbable shade of green.
We were sitting inside the blanket fort, knees almost touching, and I could feel my face get hot with the knowledge of him. The knowledge that we’d once been children together, and now we were not.
He reached out, one big, careful hand, and cupped my cheek. His fingers were cool and dry, but his thumb was gentle as he brushed it along my jawline.
“I want to marry you,” he said, voice echoing. It was what he’d said in the café, but this time the words were softer, like an apology or an incantation.
“Why?” dream-me asked, hoping for something I couldn’t name.
“You deserve revenge,” he said, his tone sounding like an out-of-tune piano. Or perhaps it was the words. All I knew was, he’d given me the wrong answer. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how we were supposed to meet each other or be together.
I tried to pull away, but his grip was both light and inescapable.
“You don’t want me. You just want to use me,” I whispered.
His eyes were so open it hurt to look at them. “We will use each other.”
I shook my head. This man wasn’t Andreas. Andreas would never suggest something like this. He wasn’t that kind of person.
I tried to move, tried to push myself backward through the pillow wall, but the fort had become a maze, and every time I thought I’d found the exit, he was already there, waiting for me with those hands and those eyes and his sad, perfect patience.
“Let me go,” I pleaded.
He shook his head, slow and almost fondly. “I won’t.”
My hands were fists, my fingers fused together as one, and I couldn’t look at him. “But you did.”
He reached out again, fingers spreading, and he said, “Sam!” but his voice was wrong.
I opened my mouth to yell for help and he disappeared.
“Sam?”
I awoke to the sound of someone clapping. I stood in the middle of the kitchen, barefoot, one arm clutching my pillow like a flotation device. My hair was a nest, some of it in my face.
Diya hovered by the stove, her eyes wide and her lips parted.
“You okay?” Her tone sounded oddly soft and so totally at odds with the chaos of my dream that it made me want to burst into tears.
I looked around, tried to orient myself. The clock on the microwave read 5:06 AM. The only light was the under-cabinet LED.
“I—” My throat was dry. “How did I get here?”
Diya moved a step closer. “I was following you to make sure you didn’t walk out the door. You went into the living room, then back to our room, then back here.”
I sank to the floor, knees up, pillow still clutched tight. “Sorry. Sorry. I don’t usually—that doesn’t happen anymore.” I wasn’t awake yet, not fully. Between the dream and the sleeping pills, my brain felt impossibly foggy.
She sat down opposite me on the kitchen floor, cross-legged and wearing her favorite pair of tie-dyed pajama pants. “You were sleepwalking.”
I repeated, “Sleepwalking.”
“Have you ever done this before?”
Pushing my hair out of my face, I nodded. “I used to when I was a teenager, after my parents ...” After my parents died.
Diya knew my parents had passed away before I turned eighteen, but that was all she knew. I wasn’t a big fan of talking about my past. Better to focus on the present and future than dwell unnecessarily on old, unchangeable events.
I felt her study me for a long moment, then she asked, “Has something stressful happened recently?”
“No,” I lied, staring at my bare feet. “Just the usual.” I glanced at her.
She watched me, a doctor’s gaze, patient but also methodical. “You know, sometimes these things start up again when there’s a trigger. Even a small one.”
“Yeah,” I said, voice barely more than a whisper. “Makes sense.”
Diya was silent for a bit, then leaned over and gently pried the pillow from my grip. “You ever try talking about it?”
“About what?”
She gave me a look like, Seriously, dude? “Whatever is making you sleepwalk through the apartment tonight.”
I shook my head. “It’s nothing. Just dreams.”
“Bad dreams?”
I shrugged. “Not really. Just ... weird. Nostalgic, I guess.”
There was a pause, and then Diya handed my pillow back. “If you need to talk, just let me know.”
“Noted.” I hugged the pillow to my chest again, trying to will my heartbeat into something resembling normal.
Diya started to say something else, but then stopped herself. Instead, she stood, stretched, and flicked the light off.
“Good night, Sam,” she said, and padded back to our room.
I stayed on the floor a few minutes longer, just breathing and trying not to cry. Eventually, I shuffled back to my own bed, still clutching the pillow, and lay there in the darkness, counting watermarks and waiting for the silence to take shape again.
* * *
I awoke with the 9:30 AM alarm and to the distant, muffled sound of my roommates’ voices.
The memory of my sleepwalking episode from last night kept me in bed even though I had to pee like a racehorse.
Eventually, I flipped back the covers and ran to the bathroom, hoping I wouldn’t have to stand outside the door doing the pee-pee dance for very long.
The fates favored me because the bathroom was empty. But after completing my business and as I washed my hands, I caught sight of my hair in the mirror over the sink. Sleep-matted and greasy at the roots, it was approaching “self-aware ecosystem” status.
When was the last time I showered? One of life’s unanswerable questions.
Yanking my hair back in a high ponytail, I washed my face and brushed my teeth.
Then, feeling moderately more human, I stumbled into the hallway.
Blinking at the too-bright world, I stretched as I walked into the little kitchen, Diya’s and Nakita’s low, conspiratorial whispers ending abruptly at my entrance.
They were both sitting at the tiny two-person rectangular table that doubled as extra counter space.
“Morning,” I croaked, voice two registers below normal as I shuffled past.
Diya looked up from her mug, eyes doing a quick scan of my form. “Hey. You slept in.”
Nakita, by contrast, didn’t bother with the subtlety. “Why are you sleepwalking? Diya said you used to when you were a kid? Why? Because of your parents? Did something happen?”
I glanced at Diya. She’d lowered her forehead to her palm, her face turned to the side toward Nakita, presumably to give our roommate an intense stink eye while mouthing, Shut up!
And this, ladies and gentlemen, was one of the reasons why I didn’t talk about myself, or my past, to anyone.
While wracking my fuzzy brain for a deflecting joke, I poured a glass of water and sipped it. “I sleepwalk when a storm’s a comin’. Some people have knees that hurt when it rains, I sleepwalk.”
Diya exchanged a look with Nakita. There was a silent communication there, a kind of backchannel that only develops between people who gossip both before and after breakfast.
“So,” Diya said, “any plans for today?”
“Meeting with my PI at eleven. Then lab stuff,” I said. “Might grade some reports. Why?”
She hesitated, then asked, “Do you have any days off planned? Maybe a weekend at your friend Kaitlyn’s mansion in the Hamptons?”
Kaitlyn had invited me to her family’s place in the Hamptons, right on the beach, it was true.
But the house was a two-bedroom cottage, not a mansion.
It had belonged to Kaitlyn’s grandmother, who’d been a physicist in the 1930s and ’40s.
Kaitlyn’s family tree was like a who’s who for notable US scientists and politicians.
“Yeah,” Nakita chimed in. “You should take some time off, you seem stressed.”
I put my hand over my mouth and yawned, hard, then leaned against the wall for support. “Yeah, okay. I’ll think about it. Are there any of my eggs left in the fridge?”
Diya set down her mug, her expression gentle. “You know, sleepwalking is super rare in adults. Like, one or two in a hundred.”
“Guess I’m special.” I tried to smile, frustrated that my roommates wouldn’t take a hint and drop the subject.
Diya opened her mouth again, likely to press me further, but the apartment buzzer went off, sounding like an electrified goose. All three of us jumped.
“And now I’m fully awake.” My hand flew to my heart and I closed my eyes, laughing.
Nakita, closest to the entry, stood. “I’ll get it,” she said, and vanished around the corner.
I bent and peered into the fridge, spotting two hard-boiled eggs in a glass dish. “Can I eat these?” I lifted the dish and gave it a little shake.
“Go ahead, I boiled them this morning.” Diya took a sip from her mug, watching me over the rim.
In the background, I heard Nakita at the intercom. “Who is it?”
A voice crackled back, slightly distorted but still perfectly recognizable. “Andreas Kristiansen, here to see Samantha.”