Mixtapes & Polaroids | Sam x Deena

17

"It's been a week."

"Okay, so?" Deena responds with a shrug, and Kate deflates once again as she tried to keep her eyes on the road.

You see, Sam and Deena have barely spoken since the night of the game. At most, they'd say hello and maybe an occasional halfhearted, I kind of mean it but I don't smile from across different ends of the lunchroom. Sam also stopped sitting by her at literature, or at least she tried to until Mrs. Burnhill openly chastised her for messing up the seating arrangements. She says she hates having to look for Sam, so Sam goes back to sitting next to Deena in their deafening silence and awkward existence that Deena dreaded just as much as she did.

"Are you mad at me?" Sam snaps in the bathroom before lunch break ends, because she catches Deena in there all alone and the moment she walks in, Deena looks like her world has been crushed.

"What?" Deena stops in her tracks, and Sam hates how lifeless her voice sounds.

"Are you mad... at me?" Sam reiterates, trying to contain her frustration.

"Should I be?"

"I don't know."

"Then i'm not." Deena hums.

"But you are." Sam groans, because Deena barely even looks at her.

She walks into a room and Deena walks out. She's not seething or sneering, she's not glaring or barreling through. Deena kind of just started treating Sam like they were the same ends two magnets, just existing to repel. She treats Sam like the plague, like being within fifty feet was unbearable and Sam couldn't keep pretending it was nothing when she takes one step in Deena's direction and she disappears.

"I'm not mad, Sam." Deena sighs, and it's deep and strained like talking to Sam was the most tiring thing in the world and Sam's heart practically drops.

"So why are you avoiding me?" Sam pushes through her churning stomach, Deena still faced at the door and not at her.

"I'm not."

"Stop lying." Sam pleads, she's upset and she'd get on her knees just to end that stupid, unsteady phase they seem to be stuck in. If only the bathroom floors weren't so filthy, that is.

"I just wanted to give you space, that's all." Deena says, and for the first time in that entire conversation, she was shedding a bit of honesty in her words.

Because Deena spent all weekend thinking of Sarah's words, of her father's words, of the look on Sam's face in her car, of that stupid boy coming out of the bathroom at Turf's. She replays it in her mind like a broken record, spinning, spinning, torturous and harrowing like a monster that refused to leave her sight.

She remembers the fear in Sam's eyes, holding her with so much tremble in her fingertips it felt like an earthquake in her bones and as much as Deena wanted to remember it with tenderness, all she could think about was the way Sam wasn't afraid in that bathroom.

The difference was shining, so bright, too bright for her to ignore. Sam touching on her makeup, looking at the mirror like she didn't absolutely despise herself unlike when she held Deena.

No fear, no pain, no crushing doubt in her baby blue eyes. So Deena decided on a rainy Sunday night, that even if it hurt, even if she didn't want to go, even if the thought of Sam bled into everything she does, that she'd put Sam out of her misery.

"Space?" Sam asks, bewildered and heart pounding as Deena turns to look at her. Same pained smile, same sad eyes.

"Yeah. I think it's better that way." Deena says, and Sam is once again stuck in her own head, locked in a battle she never wins.