"Okay… Yeah, I see that it's doing well… Mm-hmm… I get it, yup… Yeah, I'm fine… Yeah, I just have to go, you know, just came in from work and all… No—not Spencer! Carly, you know I don't have the ti—Hey, Spencer! How are you and Gibby's mom kicking it? That's cool, I knew you would get over your fear of her face sooner or later… Yeah, I'm totally eating. Hah! Ham, always. Okay, well I have to… wait, let me say goodbye to Carly, you dope! … I'll call you later, Carls. Ugh. For the sixth time, I am doing fine. Okay. Later. Goodbye."

Sam puts the phone on its base and tosses her car keys on the table near the door before walking down the narrow hall of her apartment to her room. She sheds her jacket when she passes the living room and forgoes turning the light on in her dark bedroom, pulling her clothes off before climbing into the bed. She pulls the blanket up to her chin and forces her mind blank.

Sleep does not come easy.

It had been nearly two years since Sam had left her hometown of Seattle and decided to settle in Austin, Minnesota after a few short months of idly searching for nothing, for a new life away from her life. She had walked into a women's shelter with nothing but the clothes on her back and a cell phone that had long since lost signal from unpaid bills, and after getting all the help that she needed, they had her relocated to this small apartment.

Sometimes it was too quiet, this place. Despite the fact that it was a building with six apartments, Sam can say that she only ever saw two of its inhabitants. There was Earl, who lived on the same floor as her, right across the hall. He was balding and thin in his mid-sixties with lips as dark as street pavement and skin looking as thin as paper. He smiled at her every time they bumped into the hall, and always tried to engage her in conversation. On the days that Sam took his invitation to go into his apartment to hang out, she always came out smelling like burnt, sweet-smelling paper with a small baggie or two in her fist.

Those were the nights where she let her pulse slow and allowed her mind to wander in the air just as the smoke would.

Then there was Skylar. Sam would find her in the desolate parking lot sometimes, scraping thin tree branch across the cobbled ground. She'd smile that sweet, innocent smile that she had which made Sam's defenses go down, and many times, Sam finds herself sitting beside the little girl on the swing set, listening as she prattles on about her church and fighting parents and that little boy at her school named Timmy that she hates, and Sam has to put her hand over her mouth to hide her smile because she knows for a fact that this Timmy who always pokes her and pinches her on her leg and shares his fruit with her is harboring one hell of a crush.

Skylar takes her away from her mind sometimes, and the distraction is good.

Besides those two that she feels that she can safely call friends, and the few friends she left back in Washington, Sam has no one. The only other people she exchanges words with on a nearly daily basis would be her boss, Dino, and a few of the patrons she has no choice but to communicate with at the dingy diner halfway across the city.

So, a lot of the time, Sam's life is deathly quiet.

She tried on many of occasions to spice up her life, once by attempting to date a high school senior, and when that didn't work out, she allowed herself to be wooed by his older, college-bound brother. Both Jordan and Rick had proved to be sleaze bags who had only wanted her for what she had underneath her jeans. She tried picking herself up by buying the car that she now drove, but the novelty had worn off too soon after she had taken Earl for a spin and 'randomly danced' on the hood of the car with Skylar a few times. She bought a huge entertainment system for the living room, complete with a stereo system that barely fit in the tiny room, and sometimes she would throw a party for herself. If she had a good day at work, she would bop along whatever's playing while cleaning her apartment. If she had a bad day at work, she would force herself to sway away the depressing feelings and thoughts. When she was high—which happened to be more often than she felt safe with it being—she would let the volume reach its peak and zone out, her body sprawled half on the couch.

On this night, after a particularly bad day at work, Sam didn't feel up to listening to music. All she wanted to do was to sleep and let a new day wash away the bad memories.

She pushed her head deeper into the pillow and folded her legs so that she lay in a comforting fetal position on the bed. Still, sleep did not come easy.

::: ::: ::: :::

A scratching noise woke Sam up out of her sleep late the next day. She got up and, bleary eyed, walked to the door and opened it. Skylar flashed her a guilty smile before standing up from her low crouch outside of Sam's apartment.

"What?" Sam grunted, then spotted the pocket mirror the little girl tried to hide behind her back. "Were you trying to spy on me?"

"No, honest!" the girl said. She wilted under Sam's hard stare, though, and admitted, "Yes. But I was only trying to see if you were up. You were sleeping, weren't you?"

Sam yawned.

"Well, it's a good thing I woke you. The mailman just came by!"

"Okay," Sam heard herself say as she stumbled sleepily to her kitchen, leaving the door open so that Skylar could let herself in.

The girl did not disappoint, and sat in one of the kitchen chairs as Sam splashed her face with water from the sink.

"You don't remember, do you?"

Sam patted her face dry. "Remember what?"

"The third week of the third month? You have a package waiting for you downstairs!"

Sam nearly dropped the mug that she was filling with instant coffee. She had forgotten about her and Carly's ritual for every third week of the third month. She had made a promise to her best friend of eleven years that she would send a video tape or snapshots of her life to her at the set date. They started this shortly after Sam left the shelter and called Carly, crying, when she had torn open the package that Carly sent her and saw pictures of everything she missed. Carly, Spencer, the studio, Gibby, her mother, even Lewbert himself. She tried not to think about how she stuffed Freddie's pictures to the back and never gave them a second glance.

It had carried on as a tradition, and although Sam's videos and scrapbooks were filled with nothing but shots of pavement and sky and video diaries, Carly's was always full of life. Full vividness of smiles and crazy people, and of Spencer's son, Gabe, taking his first steps, never failing to put a smile on Sam's face.

How could she forget?

"Shit," she said, and sent a half smile at Skylar when the girl flinched.

"I knew you would forget."

"Oh? And why is that?"

"Because you're always sleeping. Or working." At that, Skylar pulled a face.

Sam laughed. "Work is what keeps me living like I do." She took a sip of her coffee and walked into her bedroom, where she pulled on a pair of shorts and a loose-fitting sweatshirt. She grabbed her camera off the top shelf of her closet and walked back through the living room and into the kitchen where she found Skylar counting the silverware in her drawer.

Sam smiled. Sometimes a little weirdness from this girl was all she needed.

"Got my camera," she sing-songed and waved it.

Skylar shut the drawer and bounded over to the front door. "Yay! Now we can show Carly my new sticker collection!"