Carly's knees felt weak and everything around her seemed to swirl together except for the picture in the very center of the window frame. Her jaw had long-since dropped, and she had stared at them in wide-eyed disbelief long enough to know that this was real. Sam was kissing Freddie.
Carly turned from the window and leaned against it, trying to regain her balance. Swallowing, she realized that her mouth was dry. However, when she blinked, she found that her eyes were anything but. She pushed her hair back, more as a nervous habit than anything, and slid down the wall until she was sitting right below the window.
Anger poured inside of her. She felt like an idiot. Questions flooded her brain. How long had this been going on? What else had they been keeping from her? Why hadn't they told her? And most importantly, how could Sam not know?
Surely Sam didn't know, she told herself. Her best friend would never move in on a guy that she knew Carly cared about so deeply. Sam had a hard side, but this wasn't something she would do on purpose. This wasn't her brand of inflicting pain. Besides that fact, she would never intentionally hurt Carly, anyway.
Still, Carly couldn't fight away the accusing finger, pointing at all of her mental images of Sam. How could her best friend not know when she loved someone, let alone know who it was that she loved? What kind of best friend was that?
Suddenly, the finger in Carly's mental picture turned around and pointed straight at her. Her stomach twisted into a knot, and her lip quivered. How had she not known? What kind of a best friend was she, to not realize that Sam liked Freddie? Not to realize that Freddie…
Carly couldn't stand to finish that thought.
Maybe that was her answer; maybe she had been ignoring the facts for far too long, because of a hope she'd kept alive and burning in the sad remembrance of their time spent together. He had, in fact, been the one to break it off, right? Obviously he would be the one to move on first. It was always that way. She would date a guy and he would mean everything to her…and then something would happen, he would break up with her, and while she was still quietly mending her broken heart, she would see him with a new girl, more his type, smarter and much prettier than she was. It made pretending to be okay even harder than it already was.
This still wasn't quite sinking in. Carly mentally went through all of the time they had spent together recently, but was still utterly unable to come up with any minor hints that the two of them had been seeing each other – or even that they liked each other as anything more than friends (or even "frenemies"). She let out a small sob, realizing that there must be so much she didn't know about her best friends, if even this had eluded her.
Forcing the hot tears to stop coming, she stood up, and walked towards the girls' locker room. She needed to clean up her face before someone saw her like this, but the main bathroom would be swarming with students, and she just couldn't deal with them right now. Not yet.
All she had ever wanted was for them to be happy. And, like an idiot, she had thought that she was actually helping them all this time. Clearly, she hadn't been. But she was determined not to stand in the way anymore. She would back them on this one-hundred percent, if it killed her. She shoved the protests of her breaking heart down, determined to hide it - just one more time.