nothing ever changes.
It's just another Tuesday afternoon at Gibby's. The four members of the iCarly team are sitting around, laughing, eating. Nothing could be more normal. Nothing in Sam's life is changing.
"Hey, I gotta go," Freddie says, flashing a quick grin at them as he swings his backpack around one shoulder. "Catch you later."
"See ya," Gibby calls, shaking some customer's hand.
"Mmm," Sam says through her food. "Bye, Freddoi."
"Bye, Freddie," Carly says. A little quieter than usual, or so it sounds to Sam's ears. A little quieter, a little faster.
"Hey, we still on for studying later?" His eyebrows are raised and his eyes sparkle beneath them. She feels as if this should make her sick, but honestly she only wants to laugh.
Carly is a little red. Should Sam pretend not to notice? She sees Gibby's knowing look in her peripheral vision, but Carly doesn't. "Oh. Yeah. My house?"
"Actually," he pauses and does that little half-smile she used to think was so sexy, "actually, my mom has a meeting, so I was thinking we could study at my house."
"Okay. Okay, yeah, cool. That sounds good. Yeah, okay." Sam wonders if Carly's even conscious of the meaningless words tripping out of her mouth. Somehow, she doubts it. "I'll see you then."
He winks.
Frickin' cheese sticks, he winks and she doesn't care.
Sam, that is. Carly looks like she cares, cares enough to go floating away on some ninth cloud with angels and harps and sparkly unicorn rainbows, but Sam remains completely rooted to the ground and she kind of likes it.
Gibby is chatting with some old friend that keeps eying Sam in a way that she doesn't like, so she turns to her best friend. "So are you two officially together or whatever yet?"
A couple of months ago, she might have had to think that sentence out. Craft it. Carefully make it so that it seems like she doesn't care.
Dang, it's not like the situation surprised anyone. She'd been waiting for this to happen pretty much since the day she and Freddie called it quits. Actually, maybe even before that. Everything seemed so long ago, now. She'd just expected herself to care more, expected things to go back to the way they were before the lock-in, with her emotions all out of whack and Carly somehow not seeing any of it, and her forcing it down. Forcing herself to stomach the inevitable, the Carly-and-Freddie that everybody saw coming.
But her stomach isn't twisting at all. There are no tears, no irrational urges.
Carly chokes a little on her lemonade (ordinary, this time; Gibby had learned his lesson). "What? Us? What? Sam. No."
She snorts. "I'm not a dog, Carls. And why not?"
At some point during this, Gibby obviously surfaced from his conversation, because now he's looking from Sam to Carly with a look of rapt horror. Sam realizes that he doesn't quite get that she's over Freddie.
Wow. Since when were those words pleasant to think?
"Why not?" Carly sputters.
"Yeah." Sam takes a swig of her root beer. "Why not? You like him, he likes you, date him."
Gibby stands up, muttering something about a special order, and scampers off.
Carly's hair is falling in her eyes. She looks as if there are a million things she wants to say, but what comes out is, "I thought the idea of us being a couple made you want to puke up blood."
Sam stops short of her first response, and really looks at her best friend.
People around them are talking, she's sure, but it seems silent as the grave.
"That was a long time ago," Sam says, with complete honesty.
"Oh."
And Sam knows that Carly understands, because nothing with them ever really changes.