AN: Hey all! My first GMW fanfiction. I was a big lover of BMW and this show is slowly starting to capture my heart. I've been hung up on this for a little while—unfortunately the second half of this chapter (the bay window scene) was lost and this rewrite doesn't have quite the same magic. Stupid glitches.

Set the Monday after Girl Meets Semiformal—may absorb some of Girl Meets Creativity as we go. An exercise in staying close to the characters while playing with a slow build to Lucaya. I, of course, own nothing but my own words and situations. Please F&R if you would like more. I'll post a second chapter if I get a good response.

Chapter 1 – Girl Meets Distraction

Lucas had never really noticed a girl's elbow before… then again, there was a lot he hadn't noticed before coming to New York. Like how quickly people could walk, or how high-rises made you feel when you tilted your head up towards the sky, or what gyro meat looked like before it was sliced for your sandwich. It was no wonder why he had never paid much attention to elbows when there was so much else to look at. But for some reason, he had spent the last hour of history class unable to move his eyes from the spot where her soft pink skin curved against his desk. He followed the arc of her arm to where it hid beneath her mane of gold locks. She was wearing blue again today.

He jumped, nearly from his seat, as Farkle kicked the leg of his chair. His friend shot him a look, eyebrows raised as Maya recoiled, leaning forward into her own desk.

"You see a rattlesnake, Ranger Rick?" The blonde teased, shaking off her own surprise effortlessly. The class sounded with laughter, and an exasperated Mr. Matthews stepped away from his blackboard and dropped his chalk on a stack of folders. Today, more than usual, he had been fighting to keep the attention of his class. The school halls had been buzzing all day with the news from semi-formal last Friday, and the students were far less interested in what their teacher had to say about the structure of the U.S. government than normal.

"Nah," Lucas smirked, "just thought I saw a spider crawling around in your forest of hair."

Forgetting her too-cool-for-school persona momentarily, Maya dropped her smile and ran a hand nervously over her waves before Lucas laughed, giving himself away. Out of the corner of his eyes, he spied Riley frown at him. He could have sworn it was the first time she had even looked at him that day.

"Since you're so attentive today, Mr. Friar, maybe you can tell me the answer?" Mr. Matthews asked good-naturedly. Lucas' blue eyes momentarily travelled to the chalk behind his teacher, searching the board for any implication as to what the question might have been.

"I'm not sure, sir," Lucas answered, coming up empty.

Farkle was quick to raise his hand. "The constitution ensured balance by granting the President the power to veto," he said matter-of-factly. Internally, Lucas groaned. He could kick himself for missing such an easy answer just because he hadn't even heard the question. What had gotten into him today? History was one of his favorite classes.

"Right again, Farkle, my boy," Mr. Matthews grinned, rubbing his hands together to remove any residual chalk dust. "Which brings us to your next assignment. I'd like you all to write three standard sized pages, double-spaced, Times New Roman, size 12," he paused, letting his eyes meet Maya's before continuing, "Well, you know the drill… pick any bill that was passed by congress that you would personally veto. Describe it to me, explain your reasoning. This paper is about what you think. Any questions?"

"Can it be a bill that was vetoed? Does it have to be current or could we go back to the very first presidential veto? What even was the first veto?" Riley questioned, not even bothering to raise her hand. She was always full of questions.

"Just pick something you are passionate about—something that you have enough thoughts to organize into three pages. As for your last question," Riley's father glanced at the clock on the side of the classroom wall, "that you can look up on your own tonight. Chapter 13, pages 42-66."

The bell rang, drowning out the chorus of groans following the announcement of their reading assignment. Still beating himself up about missing such an easy question, Lucas collected his books slowly. Mondays were always horrendously long.

"Twenty-four pages?" Maya complained, "Is your dad trying to kill us, Riles?" Pouting, the blonde stomped her foot for dramatic effect as she and the brunette slipped into the hall on their way to grab their book-bags.

"See you tomorrow," Riley said over her shoulder at the boys, who quickly found themselves the last two in the classroom.

"What's gotten into you, Lucas?" Farkle asked, his brow furrowed. "You know what a presidential veto is… not to mention you spent the last hour staring so hard at the back of Maya's head I half expected her to catch fire. Did she say something?"

"Aside from her usual niceties, you mean? Not really."

"I see… well, then what is it?"

"I dunno," Lucas said, because honestly he didn't. "I'm probably just tired."

"Okay…" Farkle replied skeptically, deciding not to push the issue. "You want to head to the library and finish this reading together? I want to pick out my bill early so I can claim my territory tomorrow in class."

"Sounds good," Lucas agreed, following his friend to their lockers. He still hadn't gotten the chance to check in with Riley about everything that happened on Friday with Charlie, and he had a feeling that he wasn't going to be able to stop thinking about what all this meant until they sat down and talked about it. Until then, Farkle was a welcome distraction.

"Maya, what am I going to do? What am I going to say? Today was so awkward. It was like, simultaneously the most awkward and horrible day all at once! What am I going to do about Lucas?" Riley exclaimed, pulling her knees close to her chest as she rocked herself on the cushions of her bay window. Today was the first day Riley and Lucas had even seen each other since her unexpected appearance at semi-formal, and it had gone just about as uncomfortably as everyone expected.

Surprisingly, it had been two days since the girls last discussed the Lucas situation. In fact, Riley had spent the majority of the weekend dissecting the boy that was Charlie Gardner. It was Maya who had found their southern friend occupying her thoughts. He had seemed so unfazed watching Riley dance with another boy. While Maya was no expert at relationships, she knew better than to think that was normal—whether the thing Lucas and Riley had was official or unofficial or whatever else.

"I thought we were finally done stinking up the bay window with cow manure and rodeo smell talking about Huckleberry?" Maya groaned, tossing her head back. The blonde's first instinct when a friend came to her with a problem was to crack a joke. She'd always been rather proud of her knack for cheering people up. But fixing things? That was Riley's department.

Bypassing her friend's smart-mouthed quip, Riley jumped to her feet—too anxious to sit still: "I need to figure out where the two of us stand. I need to know what I'm feeling, and I need to know what I'm going to say to him. It's only going to be a matter of time before he asks me about Friday night. Or Charlie asks me… or my parents ask me… you never prepared me for two boys, Maya! I'm not even properly equipped for one!"

"I don't know how I'm supposed to help," Maya frowned. "You were so much easier when the only guy chasing after you was Farkle."

"I'm being serious, Maya. I need your advice before my brain explodes. If I don't figure this out soon then I just know that I'm going to go crazy, and then no guy will ever like me, or ask me to semiformal, and I won't ever become anything, and I'll end up living in a house full of cats. And not a house full of cats in the good way!"

"There's a good way to live in a house full of cats?"

"Maya Penelope Hart, you tell me how to feel right now!" Riley demanded, shaking her friend by her shoulders. The shorter girl quickly escaped her grasp, and sat her friend back down on the windowsill.

"How on earth am I supposed to tell you how to feel when I hardly ever admit my own feelings to myself?" Maya asked, staring Riley straight in the eye. The brunette opened her mouth as if to say something, before second-guessing herself and closing it. "You're the one who's good at fixing things," Maya continued. "You know what to do."

"But I know you figured something out about me when we all went through our identity crises… you have to tell me," Riley insisted, narrowing her eyes at Maya in an attempt to scare her into obedience. Instead, it looked as though the light coming in through the window might have been a bit too harsh.

"That's exactly it, Riles, I was only pretending to be you. Anything that I learned during my stint as a Matthews, you already know, somewhere deep, deep in that hummingbird heart," she said, gently poking her friend's chest with her index finger.

"You're my best friend. I need your advice."

"Fine then: my advice is to not take my advice. I break things. You fix things. Don't go messing with the cosmos because you're only going to regret it."

"Please, Maya, for once in your sad, horrible life of emotional numbness and hopelessness, will you please give me some real advice?" Riley begged, faltering under the blonde's withering scowl. "No offense," she squeaked, holding her hands up to hide her face.

"OH, you have so got a problem now," Maya said, crossing her arms over her chest.

Separating her hands so that they framed either side of her face, Riley gulped. "Ring power?" She suggested.

"Not this time."

"But there's nothing that ring power can't do!" Riley whined, dropping her fists into her lap. The pair sat together in silence for a minute. Naturally, it was Riley who broke first: "Uncle Eric's friend Jack told me a story about how the two of them were both in love with the same girl, and she loved them back too… but in different ways. She loved Uncle Eric like a brother, and because of that the two of them are still friends after all this time. He said they talk everyday."

The shorter girl turned to look at her friend, who continued slowly: "I still want to be Lucas' friend in fourteen years."

"You will," Maya said confidently. "I know you, and you'll do exactly whatever it is that you need to do to keep your friends close."

"I thought that Lucas and I would be together forever. Maybe it was silly, but when we first met… when you," Riley blushed, "shoved me into his arms, it was like seeing everything through a chrome filter and I just thought: 'we could be like my mom and dad'. You know, best friends married to our first kiss… but I guess all this time that I spent hoping for us to be Cory and Topanga, I didn't realize that we were really more like Cory and Shawn—"

"Hey!" Maya interjected. "I thought I was the Shawn to your Cory! I didn't sign up to be your Minkus, or even worse, your Angela—"

"Of course you are. You know that… I just meant, maybe deep, deep in my 'hummingbird' heart I knew that we were better off as friends. Maybe the back of my notebook was right," Riley tucked her head into the nook of her friend's neck. "You broke character when you were talking to Lucas, what did you learn about me?"

It wasn't fair for Riley to play like that… resisting the head tuck was as bad as denying the power of the bay window. Maya stroked the soft brown hair by her friend's temple. "I told you, I was only pretending to be you. It was all nonsense anyways! It doesn't mean anything if I felt brotherly love towards Huckleberry when I was acting as you. Because I wasn't you, Riley; I was just Maya in a brown wig."

"But it felt different than how you normally feel about Lucas? Not like you were in love with him. But like you loved him as a brother?" Riley asked, barely waiting for Maya's reply. She had gotten her answer and everything was starting to take shape in her mind.

"Yeah… I guess," Maya said uncertainly.

"Maybe that's how we'll stay friends… because we care about each other, we love each other, we're just not in love with each other. I think I've known since our date, since we kissed, but I just hadn't realized…"

"I don't think I'm the one who needs to be hearing this," Maya said, inching forward to kiss Riley on her forehead before turning to climb out the window. "You know what to do."

It was getting dark, and Maya knew that Gammy would have been expecting her back at their apartment ten minutes ago.

"I'll talk to him tomorrow. I really will," Riley promised, her words following Maya on her climb down toward the street. The path to the subway from the Matthews' place was familiar and she found her feet carrying her there instinctively as her mind echoed with Riley's voice:

But it felt different than how you normally feel about Lucas.

Thanks!

Please review if you want to see a second chapter

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