III. Lycanthrope

All Carly could see from her spot on the staircase was Sam's orange-cotton back, but it was all Carly needed in order to know that she was on the defense. Or offense, being that it was Sam.

"Look dude," she dully said to Freddie, who had his strained and angry face fixed right on her. "If I woulda known you wanted to go -"

"But that's just it!" Freddie retorted. "You didn't even ask me."

"Well boo hoo!"

Carly took a careful step from the last stair and moved off to stand at Freddie's left and Sam's right, close enough to feel the tension but enough out of the way of the eye-daggers they were figuratively shooting at each other.

"Okay, what's going on?" Carly intoned brightly, only it turned out sounding just as bright as a black hole. "Because I know you guys aren't arguing on the night we're going to see Drake Parker."

"You mean the night you and Sam are going to see Drake Parker," Freddie huffed.

Carly let her eyes slip warily from Sam's rock-hard expression to Freddie's twitching, discontent eyebrows, and suddenly, she felt a lead stone the size of truck come driving up her throat.

Uh oh.

Carly didn't have to say anything after that; Freddie could see it in her face.

"Yeah," Freddie said, voice and arms crossed. "Forget something? Or should I say someone?"

It was probably worse, getting the expression on his face up close, because Carly saw in full view that even though it was disappointment there, he had been expecting it, like a kid whose dad always skipped out on his weekends with him when the kid was already packed and in the car.

"Look, Freddie," Carly tried, stepping in close. "We didn't know you even liked Drake Parker."

"That is untrue," Freddie pointed out matter-of-factly, his finger thrusting her way. "Remember that time I sung 'Makes Me Happy' at your sixteenth birthday party?"

Carly bit down on her lip and darted her eyes over to Sam, who just shrugged and slouched off to the kitchen.

God, Carly was an idiot. She should have known not to rely on Sam to remember it was three tickets and not just two, but she had just been so excited, especially thinking about Sam's cousin with the lip ring who worked at the box office and got them a special discount.

Freddie's face was challenging, his eyebrows twitching the way they do when he tries not to whine since it's not the 'manly' thing to do, and god, Carly felt awful.

"I'm sorry Freddie," Carly said sincerely, nothing more than scraps of plans that would have been sufficient maybe three days ago darting through the cracks in her mind. "Maybe if you wanna come with us to the Catalyst, there'll be someone there who -"

"No!" Sam shouted, slamming the refrigerator door shut and stomping back over with an extremely large and messy turkey leg in her hand. She violently chewed off a piece before she spoke, and it dangled from her mouth like her not-quite-so-pent-up rage. "He's not coming with," she said, thrusting the dismembered leg in Freddie's direction. "I can't listen to 'Makes Me Happy' if Makes Me Wanna Throw-Up is standing right next to me."

"Sam," Carly hissed, and when she saw that it would be extremely foolish to believe there was a way get them to stop glaring at each other, she made a quick gesture toward Freddie, moving in and pulling him toward the coat tree. "Look," she whispered defeatedly. "It was kind of going to be a girl's thing tonight anyway. You know, a screaming psychotically at singing rock star boys who wear really tight pants sort of thing."

Freddie grunted. Carly sighed.

"I'm sorry," Carly repeated, but this time it was more for the distinctly unfriendly thoughts swishing around in her head like cold water.

Carly had wanted to go to this concert with Sam and only Sam this time. It was a fact that the two of them never got to do this sort of thing exclusively together anymore, and this was their last chance before summer ended and Carly had to start thinking of things like projects and reports and the best deals on three-ring binders and keeping Sam from getting not only thrown in juvie for tipping over ice cream trucks but expelled from high school too.

"When we get back, we can get a smoothie," she offered apologetically.

Freddie grunted again, but it was less dark and broody and full of male hormones this time, like he was reconsidering.

His lip was all curled and secretive when he asked, "Just you and me? No Amazon Woman coming along to try and push me into traffic for looking at you?"

From behind her, Sam snorted loudly. "The way you stare it's like you're trying to melt her with your eyeballs."

"Hey!" Freddie retorted, leaning around Carly to thrust a finger Sam's way. "I never stare for over three seconds at a time."

"Dude, you got a three-second rule for lookin' at chicks?" Sam snorted. "Suave."

"Isn't the three-second rule for food you got off the floor?" Carly cut in curiously.

Freddie loosened, going easily into his teaching stance. "Essentially, but it still applies nicely when assigned to certain common courtesies - "

"La la la! This conversation sucks Freddie's mom's - "

"- Sam!" Carly hissed, scandalized.

"Homemade anti-bacterial freezer pops," Sam grinned angelically, barbeque sauce around her mouth like blood. "What'd you think I was gonna say?"

Freddie's arms were crossed, eyes squinted into little sharp slits until he looked back at Carly. "So whatdo you say? You, me, mango tango smoothies?"

"As friends," Carly confirmed. Just to be careful, because Freddie always seemed like he wanted to get the wrong idea.

"Deal." Freddie smiled in a way that was contagious before throwing a triumphant, smirking look over Carly's shoulder, and when Carly turned around, Sam was slapping the bone from the turkey leg against her palm, glaring back menacingly.

"Oh, stop it," Carly half-grinned, trying to look stern. It didn't work, not when Sam was making that face.

"I would stop," Sam said, the corners of her lips stretching along the tracks of her teeth in a smile. "Only it's time to vámonos!"

Sam did a dangerous, limb-swinging dance all the way to the door that made Carly smile and then duck for cover when the leg bone flew out of Sam's hand and hit the ceiling, and Carly tried not to look at Freddie as he grumbled about having to play scrabble with his mom when the pieces were swathed in bubble wrap and she had a 54-paged list of words harmful to a teenage boy's psyche.

-

Carly wanted to ride the entire way to the Catalyst with her bare feet on the dash, no other reason but because this was Sam's car, and something about it made her want to toe her shoes off and spread herself out in a way she wouldn't have done riding with anyone else. Not Freddie, not even Spencer. The rusty old clunker meant freedom in some sort of epic teenage-ish way, and her muscles demanded her to flatten herself over the cracked leather and plastic and just feel it.

The speakers ground out a song all made up of strings as if they were almost choking on them, like they had swallowed dental floss in symphonious knots at their throats, but Carly still liked the way even that spun her favorite songs into something different. Like getting cotton candy from plain sugar. An expressive, mourning voice was singing about a girl and comparing her to various power tools, and it made something at the bottom of all the organs inside of her slop around like a cold fish gasping for air.

Carly pressed two fingers to the spot above her belly button just to make sure her guts weren't about to spill out.

"You gonna hurl?" Sam asked.

She could tell when Sam's eyes darted from the road for a few seconds to peer at her, even though her eyes were focussed mostly at the crack on the window that looked like a spiderweb, and Carly denied it with a quick shake of her head, the plastic guitar pick earrings hooked through her earlobes jangling like ridicule. Liar, they click-clacked.

"Then?" When the car crept to a halt at the corner of Hound's Estate, waiting for the old traffic light to flicker from red to green, Sam turned her head to fix her eyes right on Carly. She looked almost cramped behind the steering wheel, the seat pushed forward in order for her to reach the pedals. "What's been eating ya, kid, if it isn't something you've been eatin'?"

"Always thinking about food," Carly teased, allowing her hair to fall over her cheek when she tilted her chin downward. She hoped that prompt would pop up in Sam's mind in the form of a dangling carrot - or a dangling fat cake in Sam's case - and lead her far away from uncomfortable topics that Carly wasn't even sure of herself.

Only Sam basically just stared at Carly in that stony, "you bore me, kid" way she handled Freddie when he tried to tell them he was hitting his growth spurt soon. Unconvinced. Then Sam did something she would never do with Freddie. She let it go. She let it go even though Carly knew Sam was right on; Carly'd been weird for weeks.

"Skip ahead three songs, will ya?"

Carly reached her pale fingers toward the knob on the stereo and the inside of the car became full with a new song like there was a fog rolling in. The cars around them inched forward impatiently, and Sam turned back to the road as the red pitted into the stoplight died, giving way to bright green.

"The thing about being so malicious and rude," Sam expounded philosophically. "Is that you have to pay close attention. Kinda notice things about people."

"You pay attention to things that aren't food?"

"As a matter of fact," Sam said. "I sometimes even pay attention to things that aren't food at the same time I'm paying attention to food."

"Inspiring," Carly laughed sarcastically, relaxing back into the seat.

"Which is why I'm so good at hurting someone like Fredwad."

"Great. Thanks for sharing the tried and true method for bullying."

"I notice, Carls," Sam amended like it meant too many things, and all the while her voice dropped and Carly's stomach flipped so she thought the lost pitch somehow got in there and made her internal organs into pancake goo. "Look. You haven't been doin' that twirly thing with your hair lately or repainting your nails every time the polish on your pinky gets chipped a little, and you didn't even say anything last week when Spencer brought that hobo that he thought was his old kindergarten art instructor to dinner and he stole your helping bra. You're sulking."

Carly looked through the dirty glass and hugged her knees, tucking her shoulders into a half shrug she didn't release.

"Maybe I'm just not in the mood for twirls. And I outgrew my helping bra before school let out last year," she added as an afterthought.

Sam raised a mocking eyebrow at Carly's vest-clad chest, and Carly quickly pressed her knees closer into her skinny body, reaching over to pinch Sam in the arm, which made Sam almost run down an old lady wearing a straw hat and riding a segue, as she attempted to swat Carly's hand away while making a sharp turn into a parking structure.

"Learn to drive!" Sam screamed from her window.

Once they were parked, the gears clicked into place before she killed the engine, sliding her seat back so it clicked loudly in the metal track, and twisting at the waist to stare at Carly.

Sam reached out very suddenly and took Carly's wrist, pulling it close to her face to inspect something, and Carly felt as if she just got into a staring contest with the sun, her cheeks overheating and her mouth going parched all the way down to the pit of her stomach, and god, it was weird, really weird, because it was just Sam in front of her.

And it wasn't the first time it had happened like that. That was a week ago when Ms. Benson had insisted on taking her, Sam, and Freddie to Kid's Day at the community pool in an attempt to convince herself that Freddie had stopped aging at ten.

While Freddie played Red Light, Green Light in the shallow pool with seven-year-olds, she and Sam sat off to the side squirting the extra tubes of sunscreen Ms. Benson had brought into each others' hair, and when Carly leaned over to slap a glob across Sam's bare shoulder, she had felt, frankly, like she was going to throw up, so she fled fast and locked herself in one of the pink stalls that were off to the side of the womens' locker rooms, waiting for the sick feeling to crawl out her throat and die at the bottom of the toilet bowl, at the same time realizing that somehow that wasn't the problem at all. Sam's feet had shown up under the stall door a few seconds later, the scent of sunscreen and chlorine all around like a sharp confusion.

Carly snatched her hand back too quickly, rubbing the spot Sam had touched with her thumb as if she were rubbing Sam or the sunscreen from a couple of weeks ago off.

"You've been biting your nails," Sam stated, throwing an arm over the steering wheel and lifting an eyebrow so it shaped itself like a little open umbrella.

"N- so? Is it a federal offense to bite my nails now?"

If Sam knew anything about nail biting being in law books, she didn't answer to that. "Look, if this is about that school thing still." Carly's stomach churned. "No one's gonna touch or say anything to you, got it?"

The rest of the sentence wafted unspoken between them.

Or else.

Carly peered into her lap and saw her hands intertwined there like foreign objects, suddenly so odd and outside of herself.

She looked away, and Sam didn't press her, and suddenly Carly just felt extremely bad, because that wasn't what was worrying her at all.

Put simply, Carly was obsessing over something no one else even brought up, even remembered, which made her feel like an alien or something because of it. It was weird and random, but she could still fee Duke's sister's fingers around her wrist like five cigarette burns. Something bothered her about the entire thing, something that made all those moments from that day on magnify and then travel constantly through her mind like beggars, over and over, only instead, 'Spare some change?' became, 'Spare me a thought.'

And then there were times when, rolling it around again and again inside of her head, she even started to get scared that maybe she felt so uneasy about Duke's sister and her club table was because, despite how great Spencer had raised her, she had somehow mutated into a secret bigot or homophobe like her great aunt who lived somewhere in Florida.

And Carly hated it. She felt like the inverse of that stupid cliché in teen movies, where the geeky girl makes a transformation into a hot cheerleader over a summer in France, only it was Carly's insides that were shifting against her and without her permission, like she was a lycanthrope growing fur and a snout and her entire soul was building a tiny hut for itself on the full moon to live.

She tucked her hands under her legs, imagining claws, and what Sam said next made Carly sure that she took the silence all wrong.

"Look. Tonight you forget about that, kiddo. I'm gonna make sure you're gonna have the best night ever, hands down."

Sam was being entirely serious, too; her blue eyes burned holes right through her, and Carly smiled too thin. Hating that everything had suddenly gone so serious in less than half an hour, she glanced down at her feet. Long toes with purple-painted nails like polished marbles. No transformation, just her plain skinny feet that were too white.

Carly sucked in a calming breath, like the ones she always saw Ms. Benson take when she looked like she realized she was about to go crazy (which probably wasn't saying anything good about Carly) and toed on her slips-ons like it was a form of agreement before grinning back toward Sam.

"Okay."

"There ya go!" Sam encouraged and then leaned forward and put her hand out for a best friends fist-bump. After Carly obliged, Sam turned to thumb up the metal peg on the door and then flung it wide open.

It would be okay. It would, and most of her uneasy feelings tonight were probably just jitters over the concert. She was fine.