Anticipated:

Certain things, I anticipated daily: my mother constantly trying to douse me in anti-bacterial lotion, being called upon as an example in school, my mother standing over me after school while I did my homework (although I was eighteen-years-old and a senior in high school she still treated me like a child), and Samantha Puckett's smile.

Usually, I got a glimpse of it when I pulled into the parking lot at school. She would be waiting by her car with a stack of books that she insisted I carry because, "If I am actually going to do my school work, then someone needs to carry my books." I would carry her books to her locker for her and she would thank me with that smile of hers. I would blame it on the pact Carly and I made about helping Sam as long as she was trying at school but I would have done it anyway if it meant seeing her smile.

Something I'd never anticipated was to feel this way about the girl who I'd spent my preteen years arguing with and who beat me up. It was an intense feeling that developed sometime between our first kiss and the end of my first real relationship with someone who wasn't her. This feeling could not compare to when I was infatuated with her best friend, a crush that passed with time. The past few years in high schools seemed to be a dance back and forth, neither of us wanting to truly admit our feelings. We were afraid to find out what happened after those words left our mouths. Still, I looked forward to seeing her smile, sometimes accompanied by a laugh, every morning.