Crash and Burn

Disclaimer: I don't own iCarly.

Chapter One

"Sam?"

My heart skipped in my chest, racing out from under my feet. I froze in the classroom. Yes. Yes, of course, that was my name--Sam. How weird it was to hear it again, after I hadn't in so long. I considered this a moment, the monosyllable, the little nothing that was my name. Its power over me. Even after a year had passed without it I still reacted to the sound.

So I looked up. I was Sam, wasn't I?

When I saw him I couldn't place him at first. Brown hair, stern eyes, chiseled jaw. Moderately attractive. Staring at me with a bewildered expression on his face.

Freddie?

"Sam, what are you doing here?" he asked, cocking his head to the side, leaning in closer.

I backed up unconsciously. "I, uh. Freddie," I managed. Could it be him? Could he be so changed in the time I had been gone? I looked down at my feet, breaking eye contact with him. My lip was quivering. I couldn't quite process the image in front of me, of seventeen-year-old Freddie Benson standing in front of me with some Abercrombie top and . . . was that aftershave? The smell was like an effrontery. It was unthinkable, this man-boy in front of me.

The last time I'd seen him he was still wearing those dorky golf shirts and cracking his knuckles anxiously every two seconds. This couldn't be him.

I realized he was still waiting for me to respond. "I'm in English class, same as you," I finally retorted, slipping back into my role--Sam Puckett, twelfth grader, rebel and bully--in mere seconds. It was easy. Easier than I expected, at least, but I suppose I hadn't been planning to act obnoxious when I returned to Ridgeway High. It just sort of happened in that moment. I was defenseless, staring at this new version of Freddie. It was like he'd pulled a gun on me and all I had to protect myself was a carrot stick.

Story of my life.

"But . . . " He looked about as frazzled as I felt. "You weren't here last year."

"No shit."

He scowled. "Excuse me for being concerned," he said defensively.

"Were you now?" I asked sarcastically. "Or did I imagine you ignoring me all of tenth grade?"

"But I didn't," he said, faltering a bit. His cheeks flared and he at once looked indignant. "I didn't . . . ignore you. We just never saw each other. And then you just disappeared junior year, nobody knew what to think--"

"Quite frankly I'm surprised you noticed."

Freddie rolled his eyes. "Oh, please, would you quit the drama queen act for two seconds? I'm just trying to be nice."

I let the words hang in the air for a moment, unsure of how to respond. He took it as a cue to continue. "Sam," he said, his bringing his voice down. The classroom was filling up and people were starting to stare. "You just left. Does Carly even know you're back? We were all worried about you."

I had to look away then, because my eyes started welling up. I didn't want to think about this. I had known that if I came back to Seattle there would be questions, but now that I was facing them I couldn't quell the familiar urge to bite back with some cruel, sniping comment that would drive him away. My mouth tasted sour just thinking of how he'd made me feel so stupid and insignificant a year ago and I wished I could just scrunch him into a little wad and throw him in the trash.

"Yes. Carly knows." I sat down in an empty seat and he was obnoxious enough to take the one next to me.

Even though I couldn't see him it was as if I could feel the hurt I'd caused him like a thickness in the air. He deserved it this time. "So how long have you been back?" Freddie asked.

The bell rang and I crossed my legs, turning my body away from him and toward the front of the room. My breath nearly caught when I spoke again. "Since yesterday."

I shoveled my way through the crowd after the last bell rang, passing so many familiar faces I'd pushed out of my mind in the past year. Some people stopped a moment, trying to place me, but I kept pushing my way past them all. Before most kids had left their classrooms I had jumped into the passenger's seat of Carly's ice-blue convertible (a little treat she'd gotten for her seventeeth birthday, the one I'd missed when I'd been away), anxious the get the hell away from the school as soon as possible.

It took Carly another five minutes to get to the car, so I burrowed into the seat and made myself inconspicuous in the meantime. I watched the people leave the school through the tinted windows, tried to judge them as they passed. A year really did make a difference in everyone. Gibby had thinned out a bit. Jonah, to my surprise and delight, had broken out in patches of most unsavory zits. That girl Millie from my Spanish class cut her hair extra short and dyed it black, and quiet little Shannon seemed much perkier and pinker than the wallflower she used to be.

So I rationalized that I probably looked different to them, too. I looked at my reflection in Carly's rear-side mirror and wondered at it. Had I changed?

Of course I had changed. I didn't feel like Sam Puckett anymore. I hugged my arms together and closed my eyes, trying to will her back, trying to feel the same way I felt when I liked Sam Puckett. When it wasn't such a terrible thing to wake up and see the walls of my dirty bedroom hear the shrill sound of my mom shrieking at me. When something as simple as a sleepover with Carly or a piece of ham could fix everything.

I opened my eyes to my reflection again. Sam was gone, but I was still here in her shell, wearing her clothes and breathing her air.

Carly was walking toward the car now, and I saw her push the main door to the school open, her hair flying out and framing her face. She was beautiful. I would resent her for it but she was my best friend, and she deserved it anyway. What with her little-miss-perfect in every way. Smart, funny, pretty, dependable. Nice clothes. My exact opposite in every respect. No wonder Fredward had been drooling all over her since the beginning of forever.

Which was what disconcerted me at once with the scene in front of me. Freddy walked out of the school directly behind Carly, and I expected her to turn around and acknowledge him, laugh at some little tidbit or joke that I'd been left out of in the time that I was gone. But she just kept walking. Freddy didn't even look up at her in that pathetic wistful way he used to. Carly headed toward me and Freddy took a left, headed toward his own car.

Ah. So more had changed that I'd thought.

She opened the door and I smirked at her, hiding my unease at once. "You're mad at Fredward!" I said bluntly, kicking my feet up on the dashboard.

Carly rolled her eyes, accustomed to me and my callous ways. "And you still haven't explained where you went last year," she said easily, putting the car in reverse and backing out of the lot.

"Touché," I allowed.

"Feet down."

I removed my Converse from her dashboard. "Looks like the shit hit the fan while I was gone. Did you see Amy Crawl and Jason Pickney with the disgusting PDA? I thought they were Mormon last year, but dude, now I feel like I'm going to get STDs from the water fountains next to their seventh period classes."

"Yeah, well, a lot's changed since you've been gone," Carly sighed as pulled out into the street. Freddie's car passed us in the adjacent lane, but he barely flicked his eyes over to our car before he drove past us.

"Oh, come on, what the hell happened? Freddie's in love with you. You live across the hall from him. What'd you do, shave off his eyebrows or--"

"So completely irrelevant!" Carly interrupted. She wasn't annoyed, but I could tell she was exasperated with me. It was a tone of voice I knew well, and I smiled slightly to myself hearing it. "You--you disappeared, Sam! One day you were shoveling ribs and Peppy Cola out of my fridge and the next day you were gone without a trace, your apartment vacated, all traces of you gone." Her eyes were watering, but I knew she was too focused on the road to cry. "And now . . . now you just show up, and God, Sam, I couldn't be any more grateful to have you back in my life again, but give me some sort of explanation. Throw me some rope here. Because I just don't understand."

I could tell she'd been dying to say those words since yesterday, when I showed up on her doorstep with a half-empty suitcase and absolutely no rhyme or reason for my sudden presence in her life. The smile on my lips slid down and I stared out the window vaguely, trying to look unaffected. "Ancient history. Don't feel like talking about it," I said, my throat tight.

"You'll have to eventually," Carly said softly. "Isn't there anyone looking for you? Your mom. Your sister. Is she out of prison?"

I shrugged. "I've pretty much been given free reign of my life, actually. I'm really only going to school for kicks. I don't think anyone's really checking at this point."

"Ha-ha," she deadpanned. Did she not realize I wasn't kidding?

For the rest of the ride we avoided all tense subjects by discussing crud that didn't matter. Carly gave me the lowdown on the classes I'd been haphazardly thrown into at school yesterday, told me about the school play auditions she was freaking over and the "outrageous" summer romance she'd had with some boy in California. It was comforting to hear her again. She was so solid, so unchangeable and familiar. I liked that I could leave for a year without her and let her back into my life so easily I might have only been gone for a day.

We arrived at Carly's flat at the exact moment Freddie did. The elevator ride up was tense--she immediately stalked to the other side of the cramped space, facing away from him, leaving me as the awkward barrier between them. The entire twenty seconds I was torn between Carly's cold ignorance of him and the burning feeling of Freddie's gaze on me, unrelenting and unapologetic. We spilled out of the elevator on the fourth floor without a sound.

It was only as Freddie and Carly started to simultaneously jiggle the keys into their respective locks that I bit my lip, feeling my cheeks burn. I was wrong. Too much had changed, and I felt like it was my fault. Was it my fault the three of us were broken apart? Had I done something to make them hate each other so much?

I blinked the tears away rapidly, straining to remember. I'd been too wrapped up in my personal business, in the hell I'd been living a year ago, to think about Carly and Freddy. But looking back, I supposed it was the beginning of sophomore year, two years ago, when everything changed.

That week we hadn't done a broadcast. It was the first time in the history of iCarly that we hadn't done the show, and nobody had told me why. I remembered sitting alone in the flat, waiting for rehearsal to start. Neither Freddy nor Carly showed up, and I sat there for hours on the beanbag chair, eating out of a big bag of popcorn and trying not to cry. I couldn't do the webcast alone. I was too scared to cross that line.

I remembered feeling betrayed. Heartbroken. iCarly was all I had, all I looked forward to. And the two of them just took it from me that day.

Carly begged me not to ask questions when it ended, so I didn't. It was her webshow, after all. To make matters worse Freddy ignored me that whole year and the sting in my heart became an open sore. I still had Carly, but only barely; she was so busy, so driven in her activities that there was barely any time left for me. By the time I'd been forced to leave I didn't feel all that sad about it. I didn't think anyone would miss me.

Out of some false delusion I'd thought I would come home and everything would be alright again. I should have realized I didn't have a home in Seattle waiting for me anymore.

When Spencer walked in the door that evening he had a bag of groceries and a wide smile on his face. "Hey Carly, hey Sam," he said. "I come bearing ham and chili."

"Oh, thank God," I breathed, grabbing the bag from him and ripping open the plastic coating that separated me from my beloved meat. "I owe you my soul," I said, my mouth grotesquely full of food. I was starving. I realized I really hadn't eaten since yesterday morning, just before I'd run away and hit the road for Seattle again.

"Glad to see her appetite hasn't changed," Carly said wryly.

"Let's hope her taste in television hasn't either, because a new episode of My Life is Worse than Yours is starting in a few minutes," Spencer reminded us.

I perked up. "I haven't seen that in, like, a year--" Oh. Because I really hadn't seen it in a year. "Well."

Just then my cell rang. I jumped in alarm, hearing the funeral march ring tone. Specially assigned to the one and only creature Hell rejected and spat back up. My blood froze and the hairs on the back of my neck stiffened in fear. But he was miles away. He couldn't tell where I was. I was invincible here...

Carly snapped in my face, waving my phone in the air. "Sam, pick it up."

"Oh, uh. I don't recognize the caller. Probably selling something."

Carly frowned. "It's a Portland zipcode, same as my aunt's."

"Is it?" I wrenched the phone from her. Of course it was from Portland, what did she take me for? I kept my cool as I put the cell back in my pocket. "Don't know anyone down there."

Spencer and Carly exchanged a look. My cheeks flared in embarrassment, knowing that they knew me well enough to see right through my lies. I felt ungrateful so blatantly decieving them when they'd been nice enough to take me in out of nowhere last night, but I really didn't have a choice. If I answered he might figure out where I was--not that it took a genius. But of course he--Seth Greene, I suppose I forgot to mention, whose name is altogether more innocent-sounding than he is--wouldn't want to report my disappearance just yet. Only when it became a problem and a social worker came to "check on me" would he call the police or search for me. After all, without me there the checks still came rolling in.

Seth Greene was the man they put me with in foster care. Originally married to Angela Greene, the saint of a woman who had made me feel safe for all of two months before a car accident killed her.

She died. And from that moment on Seth Greene had made my life a living nightmare.

My phone vibrated and I discretely flipped it open, reading the illuminated text. Get your ass back here or yul regret it, it read.

Ah. But I already had so many regrets . . .