Disclaimer: This work of fan fiction was created as an act of catharsis and tribute with no desire of profit. All characters contained within are the property of Dan Schneider and Nickelodeon

The bell rang in mute tones which were sweetened by their meaning. All around the classroom children popped up from their desks, eager to leave the classroom before the teacher could assign any additional homework. None of the students' paces to leave the room, however, matched that of the brown haired teenager who had spent the entire period stealing dreamy glances at the room's front door exit.

Freddie left the classroom with a smile on his face in spite of the ache he was feeling in his neck. Leaning his head on his left hand with his face angled towards the door hadn't been an ergonomic position. The simple explanation for his unusual stamina towards an ache that would have driven him to the nurse on a normal day was that he had made plans with Carly and Sam to go to the mall after school. Generally this wasn't a particularly inspiring event, but this morning Sam had fulfilled her duties as a troublemaker to the fullest, with a witness of the vice-principal variety standing nearby. Immediately after she had finished stuffing Gibby into a locker (a remarkable feat considering Gibby's size in relation to the locker) the vice principal had slapped her with an hour-long, after school detention. Rather than meet up with Sam after her punishment at the mall, Carly had decided that they would leave the school together after Sam finished her incarceration. This meant that he was scheduled for an hour of time alone with Carly.

As he hurriedly strode towards their designated meeting place, a stairway close to the classroom that Sam was due to be imprisoned within, he did his best to stretch out his neck. His odd movements drew a few perplexed looks from his fellow students, but he paid them no attention. Such was the power of his love for Carly: it could to purge his insecurities, leaving his thoughts and actions unhindered; like a sun piercing through a thick throng of clouds.

Carly heard Freddie before she saw him. He was whistling, "You Are My Sunshine" again. He always seemed to be whistling that song. She looked up from her algebra notebook just as he was rounding the corner, hooking her hair around her her right ear and favoring him with a bright smile which he immediately returned fourfold. He was such a silly guy, deriving immense pleasure from something as simple as her smile. Closing the book and placing it neatly on her lap, she asked, "Ready to blow another hour of our lives waiting for Sam?"

Freddie's smile widened as a thought took over his mind. "You know, if I get to spend an hour alone with you every time Sam gets detention, I'm going to have to start paying her for her services."

After a sharp laugh, Carly warned him, "You'd be broke within a week."

"Probably," conceded Freddie with a nod. He finished with a solemn expression, "It would be worth every penny, though."

Carly shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly. "If you say so." He was always saying sweet things like that, so it didn't have any sort of impact on their conversations. She scooted over, giving Freddie room to sit down next to her on the step. Freddie accepted her offer graciously, her very presence already turning his ordinary day into a glorious one.

Drifting lazily somewhere in the hazy border between dreams and reality, Sam barely heard the teacher's voice as a faint echo over a mist shrouded field announcing, "And that marks the end of your detention. I hope you all have reflected properly on what you have done to earn your seat here."

While Sam struggled to open her eyes, her fellow delinquents prepared to leave. Eventually it was the annoyance of the noise rather than any sort of willpower to wake up that brought her back into the realm of awareness. Even before her sleep-hooded eyes had adjusted to the light, she was shooting off warning glares at any moving object around her. After her field of vision had adjusted properly she focused it on a particularly noisy object directly in front of her, which she quickly hurled an eraser at.

The eraser bounced noisily off of the shaggy head of the behemoth who had been sitting in front of her throughout the detention. The over-sized senior had earned his detention seat after a football player complained that he had cut into the lunch line. Following his ejection from the lunch line by a tired-looking, hair-netted lunch lady, the detainee had pounced on the football player. After a brief scuffle that football player was carried to the nurse's office and the giant was given a one way pass to detention.

Feeling the soft object bounce off of his head, he whirled around with murder shining dully in his piggish, brown eyes. He was not expecting the cool, malevolent gaze of the girl whose head was barely raised off of her desk. The staring contest was brutally short, and in moments the juggernaut's glare had melted into a half apologetic, entirely terrified smile. He knew somewhere in the back of his mind that he outweighed her by at least 150 pounds, but a primal instinct honed from years of avoiding the gaping, deadly maws of carnivorous predators warned him that this girl was dangerous.

The sight of the gigantic kid meekly turning around, quietly packing up his belongings, and tiptoeing out of the room brought a satisfied smirk to her lips. Her head was on its triumphant way back down to her arms when she realized with a start that Carly and Freddie were waiting for her nearby.

The monitor looked on impassively as Sam hopped out of her seat and began to hurry out of the classroom. This one was one of the most frustrating students she had come across in her long teaching career: a bright kid with no ambition to do anything but cause mischief. The teacher, who had said a polite farewell to every student that had exited the classroom, merely exchanged stares with Sam as she passed her desk. The both knew that she would be back soon. It wasn't until Sam was outside of earshot that the teacher allowed herself a disappointed sigh.

In her excited state, Sam was dangerously close to skipping down the hallway over to the rendezvous point. These spontaneous trips to the mall were always fun. First and foremost, it kept her out of her house. An afternoon not spent yelling the same thing at the same person over the course of endless hours was inherently a good one, in her not-so-humble opinion. Secondly, Carly had a habit of buying food and drinks, taking a lone bite or a sip, and deciding that she didn't want them anymore. This was a situation that Sam always capitalized on. Last, but not least, these trips usually provided her with ample opportunity to torment Freddie. It was her fortunate circumstance that her easiest target was also her favorite one. Seeing him turn his distraught face in her directions felt so very right.

She found her friends engaged in a familiar position: Carly speaking animatedly about something and Freddie gazing dreamily at her. A shadow crept into her happy mood as neither of her two friends seemed to acknowledge her at first, but she knew just the way to brighten it again. She sauntered up to her friends, and was unsurprised when her arrival only caught the attention of Carly. Freddie didn't seem to recognize that she was there until she interrupted Carly's conversation with a, "What are you guys talking about?"

Carly's ears reddened slightly. She knew that it wasn't an appropriate conversation to be having with Freddie, but they had run out of things to talk about and she had started with the thing foremost in her mind at the moment. Keeping her eyes down, she answered, "I was telling Freddie about a cute guy in Biology."

Sam had to fight hard to swallow back the laughter threatening to burst forth from her mouth. He really made it far too easy, but it would sting more if she delivered this with a straight face. Her head angling towards her target, she asked, "So you're sitting here listening to her talk about another guy?"

Freddie could feel his own face burning up, but he refused to let Sam dampen his good mood. "We're friends. Carly can tell me about whatever she wants, and I'm glad she's sharing with me."

Sam took in his forced nonchalant tone with a narrowing of her eyes. It appeared he was going to make her work for it today. That meant that what she was going to say next was entirely his fault. "So you've come to terms with reality?" she asked with a sinister curling of the right side of her lips.

"What do you mean?" questioned the confused young man with a sidelong glance at Carly.

"Carly's never going to go out with you," uttered Sam with a fervency that matched a forsworn oath.

It had been a nagging thought at the edge of his consciousness for as long as he could remember. A building block of despaired dreams that was always most transparent when Carly told him about another of her crushes, like she had been doing moments beforehand. Its sudden materialization in the world outside of his doubts hit him like a physical blow, and Sam had the smug satisfaction of watching his upturned face crumple into a grimace.

Carly immediately went into damage control mode. The brunette girl bounced up from her seat and loudly announced, "Let's start heading towards the mall!"

Sam would have none of it, however. Turning towards Carly with a triumphant glean in her eyes, she insisted, "You would never go out with him, right?"

The brunette was fully prepared to ignore the blonde's question, but Freddie's face turned towards her, begging for an answer with large, doe-like eyes. Sighing inwardly, she looked at Freddie and repeated the standard, "I only see you as a friend, Freddie."

Freddie quickly averted his eyes as his vision took on a blurry aspect. He experienced a flash of annoyance with himself for not being more resilient to that phrase. He had certainly heard it enough times over the years.

Sam only removed her eyes from the boy's defeated face after Carly added a foot stomp to her disapproving glare. As she hopped around on her left foot she pondered if she really had gone a bit too far. She hadn't seen his eyes tear up like that in a while. She had precious little time to chew on the thought since Carly redoubled her efforts to get the group moving towards the mall. As soon as Sam had taken her first steps down the stairwell, her mind had entirely shifted towards food.

Freddie flopped down into his computer chair with a lazy thud that seemed to hang in the air. His eyes lifelessly drifted towards the switched off computer screen as he went over the last few hours in his mind. The mall expedition had been ruined by Sam's cheap shot at his emotions. The shock had forced him into a mechanical state in which he agreed or disagreed when absolutely necessary, and completely avoided every other interaction.

Of course Carly had repeated the exact same phrase so many times before that it almost seemed like a mantra, but for some reason the words had hit him especially hard that time. He had to admit that when it came to putting him down, Sam had perfect accuracy. The content of his conversation with Carly along with the casual reflexiveness of Carly's rejection seemed to be a lethal emotional combination. Whatever the reason for its effectiveness, Freddie was now forced to think about his relationship with Carly. His heart and his brain were involved in a bitter dispute, and they refused to focus on anything else. His devotion towards the girl was unwavering; indestructible, but there was a nagging voice deep down that warned him that a guy like him never stood a chance with a girl like Carly.

Clearing his thoughts away with a vigorous shaking of his head, he instinctively reached out for the power button to his PC tower. His eyes closed as his ears acclimated themselves to the soft whirring of the computer cooling fans. The familiarity of the noise had a therapeutic effect, and before his operating system had fully booted he had returned to a normal emotional state.

He spent a few moments looking at his desktop background. He had scoured the Internet for a nice looking background for his newest science fiction obsession, and finally found one with the help of his fellow SciFi enthusiast Jeremy. Down the left side of the screen, bold silver letters spelled out the name of the show, "Starcruiser Odysseus". Set in an embattled engineering bay, the nerdy chief engineer of the spaceship had been knocked down the the ground and was looking up in surprise at the gorgeous communications officer who was offering him a hand as she smiled down on him gently. The damaged, darkened lights of the bay along with the colorful laser beams flying over the two characters' heads gave the whole scene an urgent, somehow romantic quality. Although he usually favored this couple over all of the others on the show because of how closely it resembled his own relationship with Carly, today he found he hated it. Television couples like that one were what filled him with false romantic hope in the first place.

Shaking the thought off, he opened up mIRC and immediately maximized the program, hiding the lying couple behind a blank, white screen. His hands went through the familiar motions of opening up his favorite Starcruiser Odysseus chatroom, Star Hub Odyssey, and surely enough there was SgtSneezy. He could always count on Jeremy to be online. Grinning, he opened up a private chat with him, beginning the conversation by thanking him for finding his background image.

They spent a good half hour discussing the latest episode of the series, then the rest of the hour predicting what the next episode was going to be like. Online conversations like this allowed Freddie to escape his thoughts of reality, and for the rest of the time he was on the computer he didn't think twice about Carly. It wasn't until his head was nestled comfortably in his pillow that the thoughts rushed back into his mind, wrenching his stomach into painful knots.

Spencer had just finished rounding a corner of his sculpture when he heard knocking emanating from the front door. His forehead knotted when he took a look at the clock and noticed the late time, but he shrugged the thought off and went to answer the door in full regalia. A quick opening of the door revealed a drowsy Freddie. Tilting his head, he questioned, "Bon jour monsieur Freddie! What can I do for you today?"

Silence hung in the air while the boy with one foot in dreamland adjusted to Spencer's outfit. Like all of his costumes, it appeared as though he had put a lot of effort into it ... for about ten minutes. That would be enough time for him to grow bored with the endeavor and move on to the adventure that he was dressing up for. Today he had managed to toss on a bright yellow, plastic apron emblazoned with a four-leaf clover, a white hat that resembled a puffed up mushroom at the top, and an outrageously fake mustache that was so outrageously fake that his mind almost mistook it for being real. But that outstretching mass of handlebarred hair couldn't be real because he would have notice Spencer growing it out, wouldn't he?

Spencer hopped backwards, slapping at Freddie's right hand which had moved to touch the mustache seemingly of its own accord. "Hands off ze mustache!" When consciousness seemed to return to the boy's eyes, he repeated, "What are you here for?"

"Came to see Carly," mumbled Freddie, his eyes still focused on the twirled mustache.

"She eez upstairs, most likely awake," announced Spencer with a dismissive wave of his arm towards the staircase.

Freddie halted his march back into the kitchen by asking, "What are you working on?"

"Ah, step into ze kitchen, young man," commanded Spencer as he stepped back, allowing Freddie his first glimpse at the monstrosity sitting on the kitchen within a focused implosion of kitchen utensils, a mixture of opened, empty, and full packages of meat, and used pots and pans was a basketball sized meatball. The meat had not been cooked yet, so it stood there in its raw redness, threatening to fall apart at any moment.

"So it's a meat sculpture?" asked Freddie as the thought popped into his head. It was actually more of a statement than a question.

Spencer moved forward suddenly, holding his arms outstretched to give his piece of art a human frame. "Zis eez much more zen un simple meat sculpture!" exclaimed the artist with a voice over-saturated with false indignation. "Zis piece eez un statement!"

"That meatballs need to be bigger?" questioned Freddie with a shade of rascal to his grin.

"Non, non, mon ami. Look inzide ze meatball." He indicated a nearby knife with another wave of his hand and a generous wink.

Freddie did as he was told, cutting a small chunk out of the globe of meat. He found that after the first few cuts, the consistency of the meat changed considerably. The chunk of meat fell away after a few more cuts, revealing a different kind of meat filling, a more pinkish, sandwich sliced kind. Squinting at the new meat, he guessed, "Is the statement that meatballs are hammy on the inside?"

"Non, non!" exclaimed Spencer, his hand waving as though he were clearing the air of smoke. "You zink too zmall. Zis meatball represents ze world's thoughts about food. Zey zink zer eez un overabundance, but zat view eez full of ze baloney!" He punctuated his sentence by grabbing the baloney that Freddie had cut out of his sculpture and popping it into his mouth. He wasn't prepared for the uncooked portion of ground meat beef that was sticking to the back of his snack.

As Spencer made a face and spit the baloney back out onto the counter, Freddie turned his attention back onto the meatball. "It is pretty impressive, but wasn't it expensive to fill this thing with baloney?"

Spencer's eyes turned away from the boy suddenly before he added in a much lower voice, "Eet may also be full of ze styrofoam."

"Wait, what was that last thing you said?" asked Freddie as he leaned towards the childlike adult.

Sighing, Spencer turned towards Freddie and announced, "I couldn't afford 20 cubic centimeters worth of baloney, so I cheated a little bit with a sytrofoam ball." He paused to take an admiring glance at his work. "Eet eez magnifique, no?"

Freddie nodded his agreement. Spencer always did things on a grand scale. As his head tilted and his eyes took in the great meatball from a new perspective, he pondered, "So what up with the French accent?"

"Eet eez not convincing?" asked Spencer as he twirled his mustache between his right thumb and pointer finger.

Turning his head, and his attention, back to Spencer, Freddie said, "It's a decent, fake, French accent, Spencer, but didn't the meatball come from Italy?"

"Of course it came from Italy," answered Spencer reflexively before the realization of his error hit him. "Oh..." escaped from his lips, and in moments he had stopped twirling his mustache. His eyes turned towards the ceiling as he scanned his memory for the constitution of an Italian accent.

His presence completely forgotten, Freddie escaped up the stairway as Spencer stood still muttering phrases like, "That's a spicy meat-a-ball!" and "It's-a-me, Mario!" under his breath.

Carly sat in her comfortable, multi-colored bean bag chair hugging a yellow pillow close to her body as she half-heartedly watched whatever happened to be on television at the moment. Her eyes followed the police officers chase down a fleeing suspect, but her mind was focused on the relationship between her two best friends. She sensed at the very least that Sam was attracted to Freddie. There was no other explanation for why she went so far out of her way to bother him. It would also explain the triumphant gleam she had in her eyes whenever she had his attention.

Freddie on the other hand only had eyes for her. She couldn't remember a time when he wasn't trying to earn her favor or sneaking furtive glances at her when he thought she wouldn't notice. To that day, he had been the only boy to ever profess his love for her. She believed that he meant what he said, and she was very flattered but ...

A knock on her bedroom door interrupted her thoughts. A quick peek at the clock told her that it was 11 pm. "What do you need, Spencer?" shouted Carly.

A closed door-muffled voice announced, "It's Freddie."

Carly jumped out of her seat. What was Freddie doing here at this hour? On her way to her bedroom door, she glanced at a mirror and confirmed that she looked fine, albeit in an unmarked, old gray t-shirt and white-striped, pink pajama pants. She opened her door and found that Freddie was in a similar state, although his flying fish pajamas included a buttoned up top. Something didn't seem right about his face, though. It looked ... slackened. Cocking her head to the side, Carly asked, "What's up, Freddie?"

Freddie's eyes dropped to the ground for a second before raising steadily to meet her own eyes. In a toneless voice that matched the quality of his face, he asked, "I need to know, Carly."

Carly's brow furrowed as her thoughts reached a confused state. Unable to understand what he wanted, she simply parroted, "Need to know?" Freddie had been walking towards her since being let into the room, and he didn't stop until she found him standing with his face mere inches from he own. The closeness forced Carly to look up slightly to look into his brown eyes. When had he become so tall? The face she was looking into and the faint whiff of whatever medicine his mother had forced on him that night all belonged to Freddie. She wondered why it felt so weird to be standing close to him.

"What you said earlier. What you always say," he finally continued after stopping himself from falling into her dark eyes. He looked at her with naked abandon as he unleashed the question that had denied him months of sleep over time, haunting him as soon as his head hit the pillow. "Is it the absolute truth? Will you really never go out with me?"

They both knew that this was a turning point in their relationship. Carly's mind quickly ran through the possible scenarios of either of her answers. If she said it wasn't, she would be salvaging Freddie's feelings for the short run. Unfortunately, she would also be filling the poor guy with false hope. She would never see Freddie as anything other than himself. When she caught sight of him, her heart wouldn't start fluttering uncontrollably like it did when she saw someone she had a crush on. Well, today was a special instance because he had never before stood so close, staring down at her with intense, passionate eyes.

If she told him the truth, she would probably break his heart then and there. He would mope around for an indeterminable amount of time, performing all of his duties as a student and as a tech producer adequately, but with no spirit. Given time he would lift himself out of the funk, however, and possibly even move on to other girls. He would have a real chance at a relationship, not one of those fake things he began with other girls just because he knew they were interested in him first. Maybe Sam would even have a shot with a guy that Carly knew she thought about from time to time when she was alone. Carly certainly never thought about him when they were apart. Well, she did, but just in a general well-being kind of way. She would think about what he was doing, if he was okay. Not about how tall he would eventually become, or how piercing his eyes could be up close.

Inexplicably she found herself gripped by those thoughts at the moment. She again brought her gaze up to his eyes, and almost immediately after making eye contact averted her gaze as she felt her face begin to heat up. What was going on? This was only Freddie. It shouldn't feel weird standing so close to him.

Her carefully planned, filtered thoughts flew out of her mind in another rush of heat. They were soon replaced by very uncharacteristic thoughts about Freddie. Confused more than she had ever been in her life, she answered with the first thing that came into her head.

"So what did she ... Ah choo! ... say?" asked Jeremy (the boy who was also affectionately and unaffectionately nicknamed Germy) his eyes bulging out of their sockets as he leaned forward so much that he was threatening to fall off of the picnic table bench he was sitting on top of.

Freddie's eyes continued to focus on students in the distance, tracing the profiles of random students with his vision. After a deep breath, he answered with the same lifeless tone that he had used throughout the entire retelling of the story, "She said, 'Yes'."

"Yes!?" exclaimed Germy suddenly, his perpetually stuffy tone risen to near clear levels by his excitement. Something was off. For a few moments, he wondered why his friend wasn't hopping off of the seat. Then his mind deciphered the code and he sunk back into the picnic table until his back was pressed against the table top. Tentatively he asked, "Yes is ... Hah chee! ... bad, huh?"

Freddie finally turned his head towards his friend for the first time since they sat down at the table, which was located a few feet from a side-entrance into the school. Germy had caught him moping as he was about to enter the school and asked him what was the matter. Freddie had responded with the entire story, starting from Sam's detention. He felt bad for dumping all the story on his currently snot wiping friend, but he needed to share it with somebody or it was going to tear him apart from the inside. The only other person he could possibly tell the story to was Sam, and she was more likely to pour salt on the open wound than lend a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. His face displaying a wan smile, he pondered out loud, "Maybe it's not such a bad thing."

Jeremy attempted to figure out how getting turned down cold by the girl of your dreams could not be a bad thing. His inability to come up with anything better produced a ponderous silence. The seconds turned into minutes, varied only by the procession of students into and out of the school.

Freddie finally saved his friend from the futile turning of his brain by stating, "Maybe I can start dating other girls."

There was a sneeze of indignation from the heavier boy before he accused, "You've dated other girls already."

"Those didn't count," said Freddie with conviction. "Even when I was going out with those girls, my heart still belonged to Carly."

"So it ... Aaah keeh! ... doesn't anymore?" doubted Germy with a matching twist to his words and his eyebrows.

Freddie's eyes shifted back to his friend, but even though Germy could see Freddie's eyes looking in his general direction, he knew they were focused on a thought in his mind. Freddie would get the exact same look whenever he was working on any kind of problem. Finally, in a voice not much louder than a whisper, he said, "It can't."

The look on Freddie's face suggested that he doubted his own words as much as Jeremy did. Aware that he was directing the conversation onto rather painful grounds, the stuffy-nosed teen attempted to alter the mood by asking, "So what kind of girl are you looking for?"

Freddie shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly before turning his attention back to the nameless students. "I'm not picky," he confided after an extended pause. "Someone's who's into the same stuff I am would be cool."

"You should look for a girlfriend in Star Hub!" blurted out Germy as soon as the thought popped into his head.

Both of the teenagers burst into uncontrollable laughter after Jeremy's ludicrous suggestion. Each of the boys knew that out of 100 visitors to the chatroom, maybe two were from the fairer sex. And that was on a good day. Or a "sexy day" as the other chatroom members would joke.

The meaning of their laughter flew over the head of the girl who had been crouched behind a nearby tree. A smile was on her face, but it had more of a demonic gleam to it. After all, the plan that was beginning to form in her mind that had produced the smile had similar characteristics.

If she could only find out where this "Star Hub" place was.

It was dark by the time Germy finished up in the AV clubroom. He had been editing a video for use in a Starcruiser Odysseus fan video. The video was a joint project with Freddie, but the lovesick teenager had been so out of it that Germy had sent him home hours ago. It had been the noble thing to do, but Germy found himself regretting his decision. The lights were still on in the school and he knew that there were janitors cleaning up some section of the building, but the sight of halls that were overcrowded in the daytime being empty was inherently creepy on its own. Add to that the fact that he had felt like he was being watched over the past couple of hours and you had one supremely paranoid teenager.

Germy hustled to his locker at a world-record speed walking pace, sneezing occasionally not out of necessity but out of the comfort of hearing his sneeze echoing off of the hallway walls. The familiarity of the sound eased the tension out of his shoulders, and by the time he arrived at his locker he was completely relaxed. Completely unprepared for the flashing mass of blond energy that exploded from its hiding place across the hallway and pinned him up against his unopened locker.

As the boy struggled to maintain his balance and his handle on reality, he heard words growled out in the following order, "What is the 'Star Hub'?"

Germy had realized by this point that his assailant was none other than Sam. Rather than relaxing the boy's tension, it built on top of it. This was, after all, the closest a girl had ever come to him. Ever.

Sam soon came to a realization of her own. Germy was too stupefied at the moment to answer her question. She attempted to bring him out of his daze using the only method she was familiar with: intimidation. Holding his shoulders pinned against the cold, metal lockers with only her right forearm, her head tilted downwards until her hair fell forward, shrouding the entire upper half of her face in a tangle of curly blond hair and shadows. The only defining feature Germy could make out were her lips, two thin lines which slowly moved apart to reveal even, white teeth in a half smirk that promised pain for non-compliance. His nervous gulp was halted halfway as she aggressively whispered, "Tell me what I want. Or else."

"It's an mIRC chatroom for Seattle based fans of the show Starcruiser Odysseus!" answered Germy with such speed and volume that he didn't have the breath to sneeze. Which was just as well because they both knew that if Germy sneezed on Sam's face he would be purchasing a one-way ticket to the nearest emergency room.

Sam released Germy and began walking away. The released boy immediately took in great gasps of air as his lungs enjoyed their non-compressed state. Just as he had fully recovered, he heard Sam shout over her shoulder, "Tell Freddie that we talked, and I will turn your underwear into a hood. Instantaneously."

Germy nodded rapidly to her back. He had no doubt that she was capable of pulling off that feat, since he heard that Gibby had suffered that exact same fate about a month ago. Sam was really ridiculously strong, like Captain Rose from Starcruiser Odysseus. She had held him against the locker so strongly. Her breath had smelled like turkey on rye. He felt a blush growing on his cheek as he remembered how close her face had been to his own. His right hand reached up to touch the quickly bruising spot on his chest where her forearm had connected.

Sam had noticed none of this, already dumping Germy from her thoughts. The demonic grin reappeared on her face, as she began to skip down the empty hallway. An internet chatroom was perfect. It was time for the ultimate prank. Freddie would never know what hit him.

Author's Notes: Once upon a time, I was a fan-fiction newbie who was searching the web for romantic stories involving my favorite couple. One day, I found a story that created a love triangle that involved my favored couple and another girl. The story was a masterpiece. By the end my heart had been run through a rather demanding emotional gauntlet, and while my favored couple did not "win" in the end, I was extremely thankful for having been able to read it. It was so good that it drove me to start writing stories of my own.

The reason for this author's note is to let you know that it has always been one of my goals to write a love-triangle as compelling as the one that started me on this writing path. Anyone familiar with my other fan fiction stories will know that I began and abandoned a Hannah Montana fan-fic based on a similar triangle. The reason for its abandonment were fundamental shifts in the Hannah Montana canon; things I couldn't reconcile with my story without major reconstruction of both the characters and the plot. Dan Schneider has a long track record of not changing the characters and their circumstances on a whim. I have high hopes that I will achieve one of my first goals with this story.

Hopefully I have managed to keep a few of you interested throughout this entire marathon of a first chapter. I will gladly admit that I already have a significant amount of this story planned out, just waiting for me to take breaks playing World of Warcraft to flesh it out.

See you next time, and thank you for reading both my story and my thoughts,

Falling Further