Serendipity (Book 2)

Old Friends And Bookends by abracadabra94

Chapter 5

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"Oh, No! She didn't!"

Ana and I glanced over at Irene, who was now leaned forward in her seat, all pretenses gone.

"Irene," said Ana, "Would you like to join us at this table?"

"Oh." Irene straitened in her seat and crossed her arms. "Nope. No thank you. I'm just fine over here."

I rolled my eyes but had to smile. Irene definitely wasn't anything like I originally thought. She tried her best to act like she didn't care, but she was horrible at it. I was starting to see why Ana had grown to like her.

"So what happened next?" asked Ana.

"Well, nothing for a while. Literally. I didn't even see Sam the next day. Or the day after that. After three days with no sign of Sam, Freddie and I started freaking out. That was when Freddie had the idea of tracking her down with her PearPhone ID."

"You can do that?" said Irene.

I nodded. "Apparently."

"Well? Where'd you find 'er?"

I glanced at Irene, who had once again forgotten to pretend to be disinterested, and shrugged. "Troubled Waters Mental Institution."

April 2011

I guess I expected finding Sam to solve all our problems immediately. Deep down, I think I knew she wasn't going to just come home with us and live happily ever after with Freddie, but I can't say I wasn't still disappointed when things didn't go well.

At first, Sam was angry and didn't want to leave. Then, after we finally talked her into coming home with us, the nurse at Troubled Waters wouldn't let her leave. A few hare-brained schemes and one cross-dressed Spencer later, and we were filming iCarly from a crazy house. But the people at Troubled Waters were almost sane compared to the events that went on that night.

"How I feel is important too," Freddie said, halfway through what should have been a video chat with a fan but was instead some plan of Freddie's. Whatever he was up to wasn't going well.

"Okay Benson, we get it," said a clearly annoyed Sam. "You want to humiliate me on the web in front of millions of people, go ahead and just do it. I don't care! Get back at me for all the mean things I've—"

Sam never finished her sentence, but Freddie finished his plan. It worked out better than any of us had expected.

Present

"Hookin' up in a crazy house." Irene let out a breathy chuckle. "Well if that ain't the damnedest thing I've ever heard."

"Tell me about it," I said. "That's just the kind of thing they would do, too." I couldn't help but smile a little bit. "No one ever said my friends were normal. But even crazier than how they got together was the fact that they stayed together. Don't get me wrong; there were plenty of bumps along the way – many of which I was dragged right into the middle of – but, for the most part, they got along better than I ever imagined. There was only one time when I really thought they weren't going to make it. Some stupid argument about how Sam messed with his application to tech camp before they were even dating. Freddie was pretty mad, but even that blew over." I paused, looking down at the table sadly. "I never dreamed that I would be the reason they finally broke up."

October 2011

It was cold in the apartment when I woke up. I rubbed my eyes and glanced out my bedroom window to see the window covered in a thin layer of frost; the temperature had dropped overnight. It was a struggle to force myself to throw the cozy comforter off of my body and let my feet hit the cold floor, but it helped to wake me up. Pulling on my robe and slippers, I made my way to the kitchen to make some coffee.

When I pulled the top off of the coffee container I was met with the disappointing inside of an empty red jug. Spencer had forgotten to pick up coffee again. There was no point in asking him to go get some more; Spencer wouldn't be up for another few hours, and I couldn't drive his motorcycle. With a sigh, I closed the container and called the elevator. There was a space heater in the studio that Freddie's mom made us keep there in case the heat ever went out during a webcast. (She couldn't risk Freddie getting hypothermia. It seemed crazy at the time, but the little heater had actually proven to come in handy from time to time.) The elevator arrived on the top floor of the loft and the doors slid open.

Instead of being met by an empty room as I had expected, I walked into the studio to find a sleeping Sam curled up on a red beanbag, still wearing the clothes she had been wearing the day before.

"Sam."

No response.

"Sam," I repeated, nudging her shoulder with my toe.

"Unnnngggggggg," she groaned, burying her head further into the beanbag.

I sighed and knelt down by her ear. "Bacon," I said.

"Hm?" she said, jolting upright, her eyes still droopy as they searched the room for her snack. When her eyes found me, they stopped darting around and became fixed with a look of disappointment. "There is no bacon, is there?"

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't know how else to wake you up."

"You could have at least made me some real bacon," she grumbled, crossing her arms over her chest.

"I'll make you some now," I laughed, grabbing the space heater from behind Freddie's tech cart and calling the elevator again. I glanced back to see Sam standing in the middle of the room, staring blankly into the distance. "Coming?" I asked.

"Why did you wake me up?" she asked, ignoring my question. I thought I heard just a tiny bit of bitterness in her voice.

"You were sleeping on a beanbag chair in the same clothes you wore yesterday."

"So?"

"The last time you did that was the night after your dad left."

Her eyes fell to the floor. "So…how 'bout that bacon?" she said. I walked over and put my arm around her shoulders, leading her to the elevator.

"So?" I said when we were in the kitchen, Sam sitting at the bar while I rummaged through the refrigerator for a pack of bacon. Luckily, we did have that. I grabbed a frying pan from a cabinet and proceeded to prepare the breakfast meat. "What happened?"

"Freddie and I…" she started. "I broke up with Freddie."

"What? Why?" I asked. "Was this just another stupid argument? Because you know you could have come to get me. I'll talk to Freddie today and we'll straighten this whole thing out, just wait and see."

"No, Carls," she sighed. "It…it wasn't like that. It was…peaceful."

"Peaceful? We are talking about you and Freddie, right?"

She rolled her eyes. "I'm serious. We…it just wasn't working."

"What do you mean it wasn't working? You and Freddie seemed fine last night."

"Please, can we stop talking about this now?"

"I just don't see why –"

"I said drop it! Okay?"

I felt my jaw snap shut. "Fine," I said, and turned my attention back to the bacon.

It was Freddie who finally told me why they broke up when I saw him at school on Monday.

That day, I decided never to give anyone relationship advice ever again.

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