Mona’s landline phone rang. She was so used to keeping her cell on vibrate that the jangling sound of the ring struck fear into her. She’d been dozing on the lone chair in her apartment. She’d been sleeping a lot lately—but anywhere other than her bed. Though her apartment had been “cleared” by her landlord, she knew from Kerri and her obsessive Wikipedia searches that a bedbug’s lifecycle was twenty-one days. If there had been eggs in her room and they had survived the noxious gas the exterminators used, she had twenty-one days until she’d know about it for sure.
Until then, she was still hesitant to sleep in her bed. Getting only three hours of sleep here and there had worked for a while. It made the dreams stay away. She’d gone a week and a half without feeling paralyzed. She’d treated
