"Why would Sam change my grade, and make it better? She hates me!"

--Freddie Benson

i'M Sick of the Drama - Chap. ii

So after laying low for a while, I began to get worried. After all, Sam with reinforced tendencies for violence in my house, or more specifically my room, was probably something I should keep an eye on.

The door to my room being closed didn't make me feel much better. So it was with some trepidation that I slowly inched my own door open.

All the lights were off inside, leaving only the glow from my computer monitor. Sam was sitting there, looking distinctly sick and bored.

She didn't even look over at me, and I managed to sneak a peek at the monitor, finding that she was checking her email. Mostly, I just wanted to make sure that she wasn't purposely looking at suspect sites to get me trouble with my mom or something like that.

Being that she didn't even look like she was going to acknowledge that I was there, I started over towards the bed.

I got about halfway there when something hard collided with my temple, followed by massive pain and dozens of smaller objects falling around me.

"What was that?" I demanded as I fumbled for whatever had hit me.

Either she shrugged and I didn't see it or she didn't bother to respond at all. Muttering to myself, I began to feel my fever induced headache making a rigorous comeback, despite my person being heavily medicated with every brand of aspirin known to man and the Internet. I flipped on the lights.

"Aw, you threw my mug of pencils!" I groaned.

"Call the poets," Sam murmured under her breath as she shook her head, "We've got a tragedy on our hands."

"It's not funny, my grandmother gave me this," I growled as I picked the mug up, one piece at a time.

"She also gave you a fourth of your genes. She can't be that nice."

Yeah, this was the kind of stuff that I had to tolerate with post-Physical Science Sam. Since she actually had to pay something resembling attention in that class in order to pass eighth grade, her verbal diction has grown slightly more sophisticated.

But at least she was talking to me.

"I'm not going to take you throwing or hitting me with objects in my own house!" Okay, so I was whining, but bending over to pick up two-dozen scattered pencils did not mix well with pounding headaches.

"Get used to it," Sam practically threw my keyboard back into the desk slot, "And expect it as long as I'm going to be subjected to you like this. Because it's going to keep happening until I feel better or you bite it, whichever comes first."

"I'm not going to take ultimatums in my own room! You need to listen to whatever—"

Sam, the epitome of maturity, began making la la noises.

"And I'm—" So I did the only mature thing I could do and kept trying to talk over her.

Our voices kept rising until we both abruptly stopped. I sat down on my bed and Sam put a hand to her head.

"We should probably not do that anymore," I mumbled, my head feeling like it was doing a Sousa dedication.

"Yeah, probably not," Sam agreed. There a moment of restocking. "So, what's there to do around here? Your mom has every interesting website blocked."

I folded my arms. This almost sounded like the beginning of a civil conversation.

"I don't know. You want to play a board game or something?"

"What, your mom allows those?"

"Yes," I shot back, "I would think that since she's being so nice to you, you would at least try laying off her a little bit while you're here."

Sam raised her eyebrows. "Do you guys have Battleship?"

I angrily fidgeted. "No." It almost hurt to ground it out.

"Well." Sam rolled her eyes as she stood up.

"What?" I asked as I followed her. "It's a violent game!"

"So I guess no Clue either, huh?"

"And could you please at least pretend to be grateful to her?"

"I am. Seriously." She didn't sound all that serious at the moment, but I supposed I believed her. "Come on, let's break out the Parcheesi, or whatever she actually lets you play. Anything to keep thoughts of you in the tub out of my head."

"Hey!" I'd almost forgotten about that.

--

But she was nice enough not to let that even be a possibility for the rest of the day. Probably my life, if the trend persisted. I had to admit though, it really wasn't all that bad; I would just have to make sure that she never actually did see anything more of my anatomy, especially while she was staying here.

"Freddie ..." she started, in a slow, honest voice, "I think we've doing this long enough ..." She looked up in my eyes. "... For me to say that you just suck at Life."

Normally I would object to that sort of assertion, but I was man enough to admit when I was horribly losing.

I thought I had been good at this particular board game, but come to think of it, it was very possible my mom just let me win most of the time. I wasn't exactly sure how that was possible in The Game of Life, but then again I had never thought it would be possible to play the game completely wrong and come out better for it. It was like cheating, only even more annoying because she seemed to be playing by the rules, in a very un-Sam kind of way. Like seriously, everyone knew you went to college first. You didn't just pick career right away and end up with a job better than a college one. Well, unless you were Sam, apparently.

Sam spun the spinner and hit another number that was higher than eight and happily moved through another "Pay Day" space.

"Oh yeah, momma likes the green," Sam rolled over onto her back on top of the floor and her stack of blankets and pillows, counting the money out above her as she began humming something that sounded suspiciously like "Splish, Splash."

I half leaned over the board from the sofa and spun a four. I would've groaned if my average for the game so far had been higher than two. But I did groan when that four brought me to another "Taxes Due" space.

"For real," I muttered under my breath. Sam's humming suddenly became too much. "Would you cut it out? You didn't even see anything!"

"Exactly," Sam shot back without looking up, "That's probably why you're having so much trouble procreating … among other things."

Resisting an illness reinforced urge to throttle her and her fancy scientific diction, I rolled over onto my back and tried to remember that Sam had been nice enough to let my game character get married, even though I hadn't been able to land on one of those squares to save my life. My mom had scribbled out the board's mandatory "Stop and Get Married Tile" and had randomly placed a few of them around the board. She said that helped me not to get the false hope that there was a guarantee of a girl out there who would be willing to marry me.

Yeah, thanks mom.

Sam had liked that so much we had played it like that for a while before she'd had pity on me.

My character also seemed to be having trouble producing children, so my little blue van was looking a little empty coming in towards the end of the game. Sam's van, on the other hand, was chocked full of kids. That probably said something, but so far I'd refrained from commenting on it. Why? Because I'm a nice guy and—well, actually I don't know why.

All I knew was I was growing tired of getting trounced in this game and trying to stay nice about it while she was just having a fine old time. In fact, it was really hard to remember that she had been feeling so sick not that long ago, and probably still was, when she was apparently having so much fun creaming me.

I blew a mouthful of bad tasting air out in a huff and turned my head over. She was going through her turn now, having rolled back onto her stomach and reaching over the board to move her piece. Her lips were silently moving as she counted out her roll, her face wearing a slight frown as she probably tried to see where she was going to land. She wore that kind of expression a lot whenever competition was involved, which usually by victim of circumstance involved me.

It wasn't like this was a brand new observation. I'd had the whole morning to do this kind of thing, and our whole friendship really. It was actually kind of weird to be spending not only this much time with her, but also this … kind of time this close to her. And not just with her in her pajamas, but without Carly or—well, anyone else really. Mom still hadn't come back yet.

Her eyes snapped back up to mine and broke my train of thought.

"You're up, Trump."

Har har. She just had to be so funny about my lack of money.

"This game's stupid," I suddenly blurted. No, I was not pouting, I was simply expressing what a morning's headache and a string of gross board game injustices had been building in me. She laughed at that and I had to resort to damage control. After all, she would probably think that I was pouting, quite mistakenly of course. "What kind of sick, immoral game has the player with the most money winning at the end anyway?"

She smirked in an almost not-sick Sam sort of way. "You know we are so playing Monopoly after this."

"I don't want to play anymore." Most of what could've been mistaken for pouting was gone by now. "You win. I don't think it's even possible for me to come back."

"You can't just quit."

I sighed as I stared up at the ceiling, "I just don't feel like playing anymore."

"Well, okay. Wanna watch TV or something?"

I turned my head over and discovered that she looked just as … accommodating as she sounded. So what now? This is what the wrath of Sam amounted to these days? One short lived pummeling, with a non-lethal pillow no less, and one projectile assault? Granted, Sam had become much more … amiable since the early days of iCarly, but this was almost too good to be true, depending on how you looked at it. If I wasn't so sick I was positive that my well-honed Sam-sense would be predicting some sort of elaborate set up right about now.

"I guess …" I managed, hoping I didn't sound as suspicious to her as I did to myself, "I mean—whatever you want to do." At the moment I didn't really care; I was actually more concerned with calculating whether or not it would be safe to take a nap.

She stood up, pausing for a moment, probably to let her head clear, before reaching for the remote and dragging her jumble of blankets and pillows up with her to the opposite end of the sofa, where she sat down on my legs.

"Hey!"

"Move over," she said a little testily as she flipped the television on and rearranged her blankets onto my legs so that she could lean over a little.

It took about a whole ten seconds of that arrangement for me to deduce that a moderate fever combined with both sets of our blankets on my legs would lead to eventual leg combustion. Leg hair or not. Muttering in annoyance I swung my legs around and pilled my pillows up so that I was half sitting, half laying.

"Would you quit moving," she did some of her own annoyed muttering as she lost her pillow support. Piling them up again, she scooted far enough over to pile them on my side.

"Would you?" I asked as I pushed some of the blankets off my arm, but decided that it wasn't worth much more effort than that. Why did movement have to be so disagreeable when you're sick? "Isn't there anything better on?"

There was a pause. "I'm too lazy to break your mom's parental lock," Sam murmured. I turned my head and was surprised to find just how close she'd gotten. Her eyes were already closed.

I tried to go back to watching whatever show was on—I didn't even recognize it—but found it difficult to focus. Suddenly a nap had become inevitable.

But it had come again, that nagging sense that this whole undiscussed topic that was hanging between us needed to be discussed—or even at least acknowledged. I made the vague connection that this seemed to happen whenever I was about to fall asleep, when the idea that she might not be there when I woke up, that she really could leave at any time was suddenly so real.

"Sam—" I faltered a little.

"Don't even tell me you're sorry again," she mumbled, more than a little irritation in her voice.

"I wasn't." I didn't have to lie about that. "I just—could we talk …about you know … maybe a little later?"

There was a short pause. "I don't know."

"Please?"

"Just be quiet."
"Will you if I am?" I asked.

"Yeah, yeah." She said it in such a way that I wondered if she would even remember this conversation when she woke up. "Whatever you say."

"Okay." And that was good enough for me, because things were coming in broken fragments that didn't make sense, and I knew I was already halfway asleep. I knew, because Sam making that weird, excited, ridiculously overdone sound she sometimes did on iCarly didn't really have much in common with slinkies ... and chocolate covered bunnies ... and ...

--

I barely registered and probably didn't even acknowledge when my mom returned, all in a fit of happiness because my testing had come back to show that I only had the flu, and all in a tizzy of distress because my testing had come back to show I had the flu. By logical deduction she deduced that was probably what Sam had as well. I did distinctly remember her wondering out loud why Carly hadn't caught it as well. That was one mystery I hoped she would never solve.

Then I went back to sleep.

My mind blearily logged in maybe a half dozen more times of me briefly waking up to adjust myself or Sam waking me as she moved.

It wasn't until I really woke up an indiscernible number of hours later that I realized the full extent of the position I found myself in. And I felt worse again, maybe even a little worse than I had last night. Like my head had been coated with insulation and stuck in a toaster for a few hours.

I longingly eyed my mug of life giving ice water on the coffee table, only a few feet away, but it may as well have been the length of the Sahara.

At what point she had moved up to my shoulder I had no idea. That wasn't so bad though. That was almost understandable. The arm around my chest wasn't.

Her hand was actually sort of resting on one of my elbows. That constituted skin on skin contact in my book.

Swallowing in my present condition was impossible, but I tried anyway.

It wasn't a big deal, right? Just an innocent, sleep guided arm around the chest. All I had to do was carefully extract it, hope she didn't wake up, and rehydrate myself.

I had to admit that if it were that easy, if there had actually been a slim but believable chance that I could do it without waking her up, it wouldn't have been all that big of a deal. But given how the majority of her was resting on me, at least her top half, there was no way it was happening. I could hardly move my head around without her mop of curly frizz getting in my face. She apparently hadn't had much inclination towards tending it today.

But dang it. There was the other whole not-wanting-to-disturb-her factor to contend with. She just had to look almost peaceful. She just had to.

And there was that whole other thing that I didn't usually like to bring up. She just smelled the way she did. It wasn't a big deal. Usually anyway. Like when she wasn't laying on top of me, with her hair all over the place, centimeters from my face.

"All right," I muttered, or croaked really. For whatever reason, maybe that maddening smell, maybe not, I surged forward, doing it in one quick motion without thinking about it any more. I ignored the angry murmuring behind me and my sudden fit of dizziness as I drank and drank deeply. It was almost too cold. I leaned the mug against my face as I summoned up a little bit of courage and turned around.

She was half glaring at me and muttering something unintelligible. I thought I might say something, but instead I quickly walked away.

I should be used to this sort of thing by now, I really should. Having two girls as your best friends has its up and downs. One of the ups was getting to be around girls a lot; the other was having to be around girls a lot. It didn't help with my apparently lawless hormones on the loose and the fact that neither of them were ugly by any stretch. Yeah, my hormones had to be pretty lawless if they were persisting with this whole Sam thing, since that was pretty much what Freddie Benson's rule number one consisted of. She was my friend, and it was dishonest to keep thinking like this, not to mention potentially lethal. Things seemed to be okay now, even after the whole lip incident and now this, and I couldn't risk sending her any more wrong signals while I was treading on thin ice. More like juggling dump trucks on thin ice, but there really wasn't much need to get too descriptive with my metaphors.

I had no clear plan; mostly I just wanted to get away from her for a little while. And away from her potential for dishing out physical abuse and disconcerting trends of pleasantness and fascinating smells and—ugh. Yeah, I just needed to get away for a while.

I had been making for the kitchen, but quickly changed destinations again as I realized my mom was in there. Wishing that my life wasn't filled with so many complicated women, I strategically fell back to my room. I was slowly being cornered in my own house.

But the little bit of relief that I got from my empty and wholly Sam-less room couldn't do much against the—what? Disappointment? Boredom? Whatever it was, I was sick, felt like liquid feces, and didn't really want to be in here. But where else was there?

It was only a little after one o'clock by this time, and I spent the next two or so hours on my computer, doing what little work for iCarly's online stuff that I could scrounge up.

My mom checked in a few times or so, apologizing profusely that she had been busy and that it had taken her so long to get back from the pharmacy. She said something about having to wait until the new supply truck had arrived because they'd run out of supplies. She also brought a battery of things I had to ingest in various forms, and she had to take my temperature as precisely as possible. I felt kind of guilty about yelling at her about that, but did she really have to insist on where I had to get it so loudly? There were no more than two mere walls separating me from Sam and eternal humiliation.

But these were fairly brief visits, and didn't amount to much beyond routine for both of us. At the tail end of the last one however, my mother had paused and mentioned in a failed-attempt-at-nonchalance kind of way that Sam was awake in the living room watching television. And I should really be paying more attention to my guest.

I had made some kind of noncommittal sound.

Then she'd left.

Guilt steadily built up for the next half hour or so.

I sat there trying to concentrate, and pounding on my keyboard when I couldn't. It ended up being something resembling a steady rhythm.

Was I afraid? Yes. I knew that, but of what? It wasn't just talking to her, of juvenile fears of her being mad at me or doing something to me. Or was that all there was?

I threw my hand through my hair in frustration as I leaned over my desk. Why did it have to feel like I was missing out on something important? I saw her everyday. She was probably going to be staying here for a while yet anyway. Why was it so hard?

Even when I finally stood up it wasn't an assured thing. But once I started walking it wasn't hard, never as hard as it seemed like it would be.

I slowly walked down the hall, half expecting to hear the TV, but I hesitated somewhat when I heard a small bit of laughter.

I heard my mother say something in a fast, giddy voice, and Sam quietly agree.

When I turned the corner I froze in something resembling shock. And not just because my mom and Sam were sitting peacefully on the sofa together, smiling.

The object that probably best summed up my most embarrassing moments of life was cradled in my mother's lap as they both sat there, slowly flipping through the pages.

"Mom!" I couldn't help it. I just couldn't help being angry; it was a natural reaction to fear.

"Oh, Freddie, you're up," my mother looked up at me with a smile. I didn't even need that sentence from her to know that she had told Sam that I had been sleeping.

"Mom, what are you doing?" I lunged forward and yanked the scrapbook out of her hands before she could think about stopping me.

"Sweetie, I'm just showing Sam—"

"Well don't! I told you not to!" I stepped away from her even as she made a token reach for it. I sent the look I'd been sending her a lot lately with every bit of force I could muster.

She took the hint.

"All right, I'm sorry, I didn't think it would hurt anything." She stood up a little shakily. "I'll just put it back ... then—" And she held out her hand as though she wasn't sure if that would be okay.

I gave it back and she quickly stepped back into the kitchen with it. Sam merely looked at me.

I found that it wasn't hard not to feel guilty. I'd told her. It was something else entirely when she was just talking about showing it to other people, like previous girlfriends, when I already had a plan to get around it. But it was different when she actually did it, especially to someone like Sam. Especially Sam.

"What?" I asked her as I plopped down at the opposite end of the sofa. She was just staring at me.

"You've been doing that a lot, you know." She paused. "To her."

I glared but didn't say anything.

"We weren't looking at pictures of you naked or anything," she continued.

"That's not the point."

"Is there a point to you acting like a jerk?"

I folded my arms, blatantly remembering why I'd come out here in the first place. I waited a few more moments, when I thought that it would be safe.

"So what do you want to do?" I asked.

She rolled her head back onto the couch. "Pretend that my stomach isn't doing jumping jacks." She turned over and looked at me. Before I knew it, she slid a hand through my hair. "What have you been doing, playing with your battery collection?" She put another hand through it before I could manage to swat her away.

It was crazy. She shouldn't be doing that. She really shouldn't be doing that. It almost produced a sort of giddy feeling. And something else as I stared at her as she calmly looked back at me.

I ran an indignant hand through my hair, discovering that it was kind of a mess. Well, she was one to talk. I kind of wish she had combed—brushed—whatever she did with her hair; at least it would be normal then, and not so ... fetching.

But that was the end of it, and we sank into idle chatter that didn't mean anything, almost like usual. It was more or less what I'd hoped she'd want to do when I asked her, not that she would ever say something like that, but I still couldn't help but feel let off. Like I would enjoy it if she ran her hands through my hair all day.

I sighed. Stupid hormones anyway.

But this ... this was new. Why was she being like this?