Serendipity (Book 2)

Old Friends And Bookends by abracadabra94

Chapter 4

***

"What?" said Irene, looking up from the table she was scrubbing. I had just finished telling Ana about the first time Sam and Freddie met when she walked into the room with a soggy dish rag. "Just wiping down the tables," she said. "Go back to whatever you were talking about."

"Anyway," I said, a little uncomfortable now that Ana and I weren't the only ones in the room anymore. "After their first meeting, it seemed like Sam and Freddie just couldn't avoid each other, no matter how hard they tried. The next day was our first day of sixth grade, and Sam and I were surprised to see Freddie at our school. But the fact that we were all going to the same school wasn't the only coincidence."

August 22, 2005

"Come on, Sam. You have to come to school!"

"But I don't wanna!" Sam whined through the phone. "Too early!"

I readjusted the phone as I continued up the stairs and into the building. "If you come, I'll buy a whole ham just for you and I won't even complain when you eat it with your mouth open. How's that sound Sam?" No answer. "Sam?"

"I'm here!" a voice called behind me. I turned to see my best friend striding through the hallway, her blonde hair tangled and her body clad in a ratty old t-shirt and blue flannel pajama bottoms. Her feet were completely bare. "Where's my ham?"

"Sam, you live like ten minutes away by car! How'd you get here so fast?"

"I spent the night at your place."

"What? But I haven't seen you since you attacked my neighbor yesterday."

"Yeah, well. There was a sock on the door when I got home so I had to leave, and by the time I got back I was too tired from all the walking to deal with your nasty doorman. So I just slept in Spencer's car."

"You were in there the whole time Spencer was driving me to school?"

"Yep. Spencer flipped out when you called a minute ago and I answered. He thought the car had come to life and was angry with him." She laughed. "Good times. Good times."

"Wait," I said. "Why would your mom put a sock on the door?"

"Um..." Sam slung an arm around my shoulders as we walked toward our homeroom. "I'll tell you when you're older."

A minute later we took our seats next to each other in homeroom. Sam immediately unzipped her backpack and pulled out a pair of sneakers, a hairbrush, and a package of beef jerky. I gave her a questioning look as she bit into the jerky before tending to her bed head or bare feet.

"What?" she said. "I skipped breakfast." She hadn't even finished one stick when the thin, wrinkled hand of our new homeroom teacher snatched it away from her.

"No eating in class!" Ms. Briggs snarled and walked away. As soon as the teacher's back was turned, Sam reached into her bag and pulled out another package of jerky.

I rolled my eyes and faced the front again to see our other classmates starting to file into the room. I recognized a few people from the year that I lived in Seattle in the third grade and went to Ridgeway Elementary. The tall redheaded girl that smiled at Sam and me when she walked into the room was Wendy Schuler. And the chubby shirtless boy couldn't have been anyone but Gibby Gibson, possibly the strangest boy I'd ever met. He was always very nice though. He must have recognized me because when he saw me he waved emphatically. I waved back just as another familiar face came into the room. Two familiar faces, actually, but one of them wasn't a sixth grader.