"My parents are getting divorced."
She plops the news down on you in the middle of lunch, much like the way the servers here plop baked beans on the lunch trays. One second you're minding your own business, and the next you get unexpectedly splattered with brown goop and are told to keep moving along even though now you're all sticky and an apology really would be nice.
You look up from your coincidentally slop-speckled hands just as Sam dumps her backpack next to her chair and sits. She unloads her lunch pack without a word - a roast beef and cheese sandwich, a package of Fat Cakes and some carrot sticks for show so she can pretend that she follows the Food Guide Pyramid to some extent. She doesn't acknowledge that she said anything, and you wonder if you heard her wrong, but then you eye her normal-sized-for-anyone-else-but-her meal portion and know that there would have to be a good reason for it. You imagine that your eyes have gotten several sizes bigger as the words have started to sink in and suck the air out of your chest.
"Oh, my gosh. Sam, that's...that's awful." You try reaching across the table to take one of her hands, but she's busied them by pretending to have trouble opening her sandwich baggie and mumbling about a lack of juice box. Sam's a keep-moving-along kind of girl, but that doesn't mean you can't recognize the hurt when you see it. She's slumped and quiet and not attacking her lunch like she hasn't eaten for several hours, and that's scary because it's just so un-Sam-like and you're not sure what to do.
"Is it, Shay?" she asks you when you're still stretching your arms as far as they'll go, steel blue eyes burning a hole in that place below your breastbone where it feels like you swallowed a block of lead. You get a chill just holding her gaze because that's the first time today she's made eye contact with you and she's brimming with hatred. "It makes an awful lot of sense to me. Lorene kind of has an alcohol problem, and Stanley really isn't around. Neither one of them is really all that nice to come home to - if they are home." She picks little crumbs of the edge of her sandwich and lets you taste the bitterness of the venom she's dripping with on the roof of your mouth. Your extended fingers ball into a fist which you allow to fall into your lap.
It's horrible that she uses her parent's first names instead of 'mom' and 'dad', but what stings is how right she is. On the few occasions you've visited Sam's house, the television set in the living room was always blaring as if it was angry that nobody was on the lumpy sofa to watch it. Lorene's bedroom door was shut and locked at times, cracked open in others. It depended, Sam had told you, on if she was indulging or not. Closed door, green light, go in without fuss and she wouldn't be out for a while. Open door, red light, oh god, she's up, could she stay over at your place tonight?
It wasn't as simple for Stanley. You aren't sure what he does exactly, but you do know he has to drive a while to get to work and that whatever his occupation is involved cubicles and paperwork and long hours with little pay. You recall that he was more of a shadow that appeared in later hours, coming home and digging in the fridge for ham and pickles after depositing his meager wages in the bank. He would eat at the table without sparing his daughter a passing glance, though she'd come over to stick a fork in the pickle jar every now and then. You swore after seeing them coexist like that only once that he wasn't anywhere close enough to being Sam's father, but then he saw you, and you saw that they shared the same icy eyes and odd eating habits. Just thinking about it makes you shiver sometimes.
"Still," you offer, and then find that there's not much you can say other than some clichés about life that you know Sam just wouldn't appreciate, and you're fighting to keep pity from radiating out of your pores because she'd like that even less. You take a long swig from your water bottle to buy time and train your eyes not to leave her face. You're panting by the time you're stomach starts to relent, and when you put the cap back on, the bottle is so much lighter than before. Frantic downing of liquids is one of your strange coping mechanisms, and Sam knows that, but she doesn't comment about how you're drowning your internal organs. She lets you catch your breath and raises her sandwich halfway to her mouth before she just starts staring at it, but it's not a lost-in-the-glory-of-food stare as much as it's a here-in-body-but-not-in-mind stare.
"Sam," you say, and she blinks once, gives the sandwich a once-over and puts it down. Then, you remember that you're supposed to say something, but you aren't sure what. You manage to find something. "Aren't you going to eat?"
"Nah." Her gaze flickers over what she brought with a disinterest you've only seen during class lectures. "Being told that your life is going to be turned upside-down, inside-out and backwards over breakfast is enough to kill an appetite for a while."
You're now too appalled to find pity anywhere. "You just found out? Like, this morning before school?"
Well, duh, part of you retorts. She would have told you by now had it happened sooner.
"Yep," she affirms. "I was just sittin' there having some bacon, and bam, Lorene's like, 'We're getting a divorce'. I really should have known - I mean, Stanley hasn't slept at the house in weeks, and when he did, there was always complaints about the bills and arguments, and avoiding each other, and bottle-throwing -"
"Bottle-throwing?" you cut in with a slightly hysterical edge to your voice. You knew Sam's home life had much to be desired, but there hasn't been any mention of bottle-throwing before, so you're more than a little concerned now. Your thoughts begin to circle as you search your memory of any weird bruising or cuts that she may have acquired and blamed on something else, and then you decide that telling someone is probably more important before she says, "Well, yeah, but that was only one time. I needed to pee, and they were arguing right in front of the bathroom door. Screaming over them never works, and there just so happened to be a bottle at my feet." She shrugs. "Nothing too bad, since Stanley has good reflexes and ducked. The bottle didn't even dent the door when it broke."
You have to retrain yourself to breathe after she says that. Air in, air out. Inhale, exhale. When you trust your lungs to function thoughtlessly again, your first response is just to gape at her, but after about four years of friendship you've learned to repress that kind of reaction. Instead, you clarify what you're thinking in a slowly-spoken question with careful emphasis on important words. "You threw a beer bottle at your dad?"
"Well, not at him, specifically," she says in a tone that you suspect she thinks will make the act less punishable. "I was going for the door frame, but I couldn't aim properly with my bladder on the verge of explosion. So, yeah, that's kind of how it ended up."
Your school has a hands-off policy for a reason, and if Sam were more herself, you might just consider violating it via a very hard pinch or a punch in the arm. "Sam, that's awful!"
"I thought you said the divorce part was awful."
Oh. Right. "That too." You feel like you crushed her all over again because she's deflated even more after she said 'divorce' the second time. At least the delinquency was some degree of normal. The two of you exchange glances before turning attention to your food. You're a little apprehensive about the majority of what's on your plate - who knew what went into the hotdogs here, and you despise the baked beans even though it's the lunch ladies' fault for just dropping them on your plate and making a mess of you. Your apple looks okay, but a few bites into it and it's so sour your tongue stings. It's your own fault for deciding that you could afford to hit the snooze button on your alarm clock multiple times this morning, leaving you running too late to make a lunch.
Sam pushes her sandwich your way along with her Fat Cakes and carrot sticks, and you search her face for...what? A sign that she was kidding? Samantha Puckett didn't kid when it came to food. When you take her carrot sticks that she wouldn't eat anyway, she doesn't even appear to care. You chew and swallow, chew and swallow, because interacting with her like this is becoming an out-of-body experience and you don't know what else to do. And then the carrot sticks are gone, and she's still not going for any food even though you ate them at a ridiculously slow pace so she'd maybe be tempted.
You sigh and tell her, "You have to eat something."
In as close to what could be considered typical Sam at the moment, she takes a small bite of her roast beef. "There. I ate."
"You know what I mean. Come on - at least have half of your sandwich. Or the Fat Cakes." You're pleading with her now because the transition between getting angry at her for eating absolutely everything edible in the refrigerator and trying to convince her to finish a fraction of her lunch goes against all instinct for both of you.
And the world decides to keep turning even though neither of you are ready to move on. When the bell rings, chaos erupts as chairs scrape and droning voices grow louder, and you rise from your seat to avoid injury from passerby that might slam your gut into the table. Sam follows, though for a second you think she plans to remain sitting for the rest of the day, or an eternity or so. She pushes in her chair, squishes her sandwich until it's just a ball of bread and meat, and throws it in the paper bag.
"Roast beef is your second-favorite deli meat. Y'know, besides ham," you tell her as if she doesn't already know, and you put the bag on your tray. She slips her Fat Cakes into her pocket and shrugs, the former action being the most reassuring thing she's done today. You knew she'd never waste her precious processed pastries. Soon enough, it's just the two of you in the cafeteria, and the disconnection between you two is so palpable that you're afraid you'll disappear into all the empty space. Maybe you never actually existed. Maybe this is some kind of sick, really elaborate dream.
"Are you okay?" you ask her, and you sound so loud when you say it without hundreds of other voices to drown you out but this is the one thing you should have been asking from the start. You see the weight of your inquiry press down on her, and perhaps it's too vague or too loaded to answer. You draw in a breath past your lips like it'll pull the question back on the tip of your tongue while a storm brews behind her eyes. Sam hasn't ever been easy to read, but right now she seems so beyond her twelve-and-a-half years of age, and you get the sense that she knows so much more than you will ever understand.
"I'm just fine," she replies in a contradictory voice. "Just fine." Then she turns around and starts to leave just as your fingers come together. You don't think she does it on purpose because you were just barely brushing fingertips, but your nerves still tingle with her absence and that's why you're so unsettled when you come to your senses and realize she's slipped right through you.
Your last class of the day is English, and after a period of deciphering algebraic equations, it's nice to be working with a language that doesn't combine numbers and letters. When you walk into the classroom and find a stout, middle-aged man by the door instead of Mrs. Briggs, you swear that a patch of light breaks through the dismal Seattle clouds outside the window. You're supposed to be the good student who doesn't keep tabs on these coincidences, but sometimes it just happens, and your mood lifts a little. Good student or no, you can't look at Mrs. Briggs anymore without getting an image of her trying to bust a move on Randy Jackson after you accidentally caught her staring at a photograph of him with a look in her gaze that said she wanted to do some very x-rated things to him, which is quite disgusting with her being the dinosaur that she is.
You did have to agree with her a few days ago, though, when she decided to combat her much-too-chatty students with an unexpected seating arrangement that you'd forgotten about until now. Miraculously - and guilt plagues you from the moment you see her - you also managed to forget about Sam's situation in the midst of parabolas and coordinate planes.
You can't miss her stare because she's in the very front row next to the door, and those eyes are like the opposite poles to yours. You have to look at her. It cannot be avoided. She must get the same idea because you see her turn her head at the same time you do, and the polarity keeps you momentarily grounded. She glances down at her desk, and since there's no longer anything holding you there and you don't want people to look at you funny, you resume towards your seat. It's on the other side of the room, one row back from the front so Sam would have to turn noticeably in her seat if she wanted to even see you. Mrs. Briggs has some very intelligent yet irksome tactics.
Gibby sits in front of you now, and when you sidestep past him to get to your desk, he flashes you his boyish smile. Your lips twitch in a wavering imitation because you're not focused on anyone or anything but Sam anymore, but he doesn't seem to notice, spinning in his chair so he can talk to you.
"I heard," he says in a low voice that isn't all that low because Gibby's always been too dynamic for whispers, "that Mrs. Briggs is going to be out for a while because she's getting botox done on her face for her wrinkles and plastic surgery on her boobs to make them smaller."
Being the supposedly good student that you are, the first thing you think is that it's another absurd rumor, but then you note the truth in it because that woman's biological clock is kind of screwed and it's not like you haven't made cracks about her boobs before because really, how can you help it when those things are practically dangerous weapons?
It's enough to make you almost laugh. Almost. When you ask him where he heard that, Gibby proceeds to list Reuben, Wendy and the entire boys and girls basketball teams before he nails down a possible culprit. By the time he gets there you've figured it out for yourself, but that doesn't make his memory any less impressive.
"Sam didn't tell you?" He's rightfully taken aback, but then all guys expect girls to have ESP with their best friends. You shrug. "We were discussing other important things, I guess. It never came up." There's no guessing involved, but there's no lying involved either, so he buys it. You and your classmates then listen to the soft-spoken substitute teacher at the front of the room, or try to, anyway. He's got this weird way of slurring his words together that makes you suspect that he either has a speech impediment or that he'd fail a sobriety test. You hope it's the first one, but when he lifts his arm to scrawl your assignments on the white board, the sweat stains underneath advise you to have less faith. Weren't schools supposed to screen these people before letting them into classrooms?
His handwriting slopes downhill so badly that he has to erase his handiwork and try again. It's just busy work - reading in anthologies and responding to questions, some vocabulary, all things that aren't worth the groans from your peers.
But once you find your notebook and get into your anthology, you find that you're not enjoying literature from the Romantic Era on the whole today. Trying to wrap your mind around the styles of these authors is spinning your brain into cotton candy and making the text blur on the page. You aren't in the mood for Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickenson's punctuation just makes no sense at all, and someone needs to teach Nathaniel Hawthorne what a run-on sentence is. You nod with certainty as you close your book, and your head finds it's way onto your desk.
There's a vibration against your thigh that makes you jump, and you shove your hand in your pocket and switch it on silent in one motion. Only when you're sure that just a few surrounding students noticed do you pull out your cell phone and open up the text message, typed in horrendous chat speak that has no place in English class.
'U dnt look so good' it reads, and you look over at the sender just long enough to acknowledge her before you hide your hands under your desk to reply.
'Headache. Cant focus.'
'Thats not like u'. Sam's expression across the room feigns shock. You notice that she's completely turned around in her chair and think that she would be the first one to take advantage of a substitute as long as they neglected their duty.
'Oh, ha, ha. Dont get yourself in trouble.' You hit send and curse the fact that there's no way to add an apostrophe when you text.
'Ur gonna get in trouble if u dnt do ur work shay. y dnt u & me skip?"
This makes you raise an eyebrow. 'How do we skip in the middle of class?'
'ask sweaty ovr there if u can go 2 the nurse. leave the rest 2 me.'
The nickname, despite the juvenile aspect, would make you smile if it didn't ring so truly. Just the thought of having to stand anywhere near him is enough to make your stomach roll, which may have been Sam's point in having you go up there but that doesn't mean you want to.
As always, when you make your way up to Mrs. Briggs desk, your footsteps become so many decibels louder than they should be because you've got this phobia of being up in front of the class even when you aren't public speaking. The sweaty substitute has a book in his hands, but his head is lolled too far forward for him to be reading the pages unless he can do so through closed eyes. "U-Um," you start, and he jolts, bewildered until his surroundings start to make sense again and then he sees you.
"M-May I go t-to the nurse?" you ask too quickly because the sensation of having everyone's eyes on you even when they don't isn't pleasant. Then, you add, "I have a headache," and the shakiness in your voice just might be what makes him regard you with pity as he searches for a blank pass. "Name?"
"Carly Shay." You swallow hard and hope you aren't blushing because you do that when you're afraid of being caught in a lie or partial truth.
There's cool fingers on your forehead just as you're taking the signed slip, and that's when you know Sam's snuck behind you invisible-ninja style. "You're warm, cupcake," she murmurs into your hair, and then you're certain that you're blushing.
"May I go with her?" Sam asks in her perfect blue-eyed blonde voice that so many teachers mistake as innocent. "She gets migraines sometimes, and I want to be there in case she feels faint." You press into her automatically, your head on her chest just enough for her to notice, and instead of moving away all too fast like at lunch, she twirls a lock of your hair around her index finger. She has a strange fetish with your hair.
The two of you clutch your hall passes: Sam between two fingers and you with yours balled in your fist because you're still amazed you pulled it off. Sam shuts the door to your classroom like your classmates wouldn't appreciate a little outside interruption, and you breathe for the first time in several minutes. "Wow."
"All in a days' work." She beams cockily at you, and your knees are still trembling but a bit less so now. "So, where to? I think Wendy has a cooking class this period, and she might be able to sneak us some food if we're lucky."
Even though this is Sam and you should really know better, you're kind of baffled. "Aren't you supposed to take me to the nurse?"
"I'm supposed to, but that takes the fun out of skipping," she explains, and you suspect that had anybody else but you asked that she would have enjoyed making them appear like an imbecile in some way. Good thing you're such an amateur at this. She studies you for a second. "If you really are sick, we can drop by the nurse if you want."
"No, no, I'm fine," you confirm with a shake of your head. "I mean, I have a headache, but it's nothing to worry about."
"Well...do you want to just wander the halls, then?" She's not quite convinced because, let's face it, headaches make you miserable, but getting out of that stuffy classroom made an improvement.
"Okay." You let her lead because when it comes to you and Sam, you fit better walking in her shadow. At least as far as irresponsibility goes.
You let her talk, too because it seems like she's come out of whatever funk she was in before, and conversation flows just like it should except there's an elephant in the room that you have to make an effort to step around sometimes, like when she mentions her mom's new bikini.
"What's her obsession with those?" It's a question that's sat in the back of your mind for a long time but you weren't sure you wanted to hear the answer. You still aren't.
"She likes the freedom of them," Sam responds, and that plants a myriad of thoughts in your mind that you didn't need, but, hey, you asked for it. "Plus," she adds, "they make her feel beautiful, and it's not like Stanley's ever done that."
You didn't ask for that, though, and you have to swallow the lump in your throat in order to let the small "Oh," out. And as you again you find yourself struggling for consolation, Sam offers you a Fat Cake out of the package in her pocket which you decline and she devours in point-seven seconds approximately. She gets to talking about the Mrs. Briggs rumor (which she did unsurprisingly start), and you laugh accordingly when really you're just coming to the realization that Sam's always hinted at tension between her parents and it's taken a formal announcement for you to notice.
But you're consoled by the fact that the world hasn't ended by letting bad news resurface after just a short expanse of time, and that means something. You've worried about Sam before, but only when she plotted illegal things or threatened a random stranger for their lunch money. She's gone through tough times before, and now that you think about it, there's a lot more pros than cons in this situation.
The bell rings, and subsequently kids start pouring out of classrooms like a flash flood because it's Friday, after all, and who wouldn't? You aren't the pushing and shoving type, so when a door nearly collides with you, instinct tells you to hug the wall until there's less risk of being trampled.
But that's why you have Sam, who pulls you close and whispers, "Hang on to me and try not to look so helpless. We'll be out of here in no time."
Helplessness goes against your feminist beliefs in every way and you're about to protest, but Sam's got an arm snaked around your side in such a way that forces you to walk with her, close to her, and as she picks up the pace you really are as helpless as it gets.
"Outta my way, people, or I'll pulverize you and have you cooked into mystery meat for Monday's lunch!" As empty as Sam's threats usually are, they're also effective in clearing the hallway. You see this not only in Sam's unlucky victims, but even some kids you're sure you've never met before, and Sam doesn't know many people you aren't familiar with.
In record time you've reached the double doors, and the autumn air is crisp when you get outside. You notice that Sam doesn't have a jacket and is in short sleeves. "Aren't you cold?"
"Nah. It's a nice day." And it is, but you wouldn't say it was that nice, and it's kind of freaky the way she doesn't even have goosebumps on her arms.
"You're insane."
"I know." She's proud, too. "What do you say we blow this popsicle stand?"
"Sounds good to me." And then you remember: "My stuff! We never went back for it after we supposedly went to the nurse's office!"
She laughs at you, and it's not like you'd expect any concern over pens and notebooks but you would have appreciated her pretending school was important for once. "I love how you just had to say the 'supposedly' part."
"Sam, I don't want weirdoes going through my backpack or anything."
"Well, do you have anything any weirdoes would want?" She raises an eyebrow in suggestion, and you stare at her. "No...I don't do those things."
"Right." She draws the word out and winks. "Look, Carls, your backpack is right in Mrs. Briggs' room, and I'm sure she'll keep it around or put it in Lost and Found or something. No one's going to go after your precious gel pens, either."
You splutter because she's kind of right in guessing you'd be worried about them. "They're nice pens! But beyond that, I don't want my homework getting lost."
"Well, too bad. You're keeping me warm and therefore I'm not allowing you to leave me," Sam informs you stubbornly. "And I'm walking to your apartment, so either you cooperate or chew off your own arm."
You realize all this time you're still wound up in her and that those are your only choices. So because you value each of your arms, you start moving. "I thought you weren't cold."
"Not with you here," she says and grins. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes sparkling as you roll your own. You're annoyed by the sheer fact that you can't even be annoyed with her right now because she's so Sam.
But Sam is exactly what you want, and if you have you redo your homework in study hall on Monday, then so be it.