Author's Note: Originally written for winter baby in the 2008 Yuletide Treasure exchange. No copyright infringement is intended and no profit is being made.

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The lunchroom's already loud and crowded when Sam exits the line, balancing a tray loaded with spaghetti, corn, chocolate milk, and an extra fruit cup that she took from some pimply short kid's tray when he wasn't looking. If making every meal count were a religion, Sam thinks, she would be its Pope.

Hmm, might be a good idea for the show, she muses, envisioning herself wearing a tall white hat and pretending to bless plates of roast beef and doughnuts. She wishes Carly were here to say We should totally do it! or No, too weird. But Carly's off doing one of her smart-person Carly things - a field trip for advanced science, boring - and Sam wonders where she's going to sit without her. She surveys the room, and finally spots Freddie's striped polo shirt and the back of his fluffy blow-dried head at a table near the far wall.

"Beat it, Kyle," she says to the boy sitting with him as she plops her tray down and swings one jeans-clad leg over the bench.

"Don't listen to her," Freddie says. He shoots a death glare across the table. Sam shoots one back, and Kyle crumples under the crossfire.

"I was done anyway. Later, Freddie."

"You can't tell people to go away whenever you feel like it," Freddie starts in as Kyle vanishes through the door. "You can't -"

"I can do whatever I want, Fredward." Sam rips open her milk and takes a big gulp. "God, what is that smell? It's like a cross between butterscotch pudding and feet."

"Nothing," Freddie says, suddenly looking shifty-eyed and sweeping a Tupperware container of something yellow and runny back into his lunch bag. Sam grins to herself and checks out the rest of his lunch, arranged neatly on the table in his usual anal-retentive style. Mrs. Benson doesn't trust the school cafeteria - she's probably on to something there, Sam thinks - and so she gets up before dawn every morning to pack her baby a low-fat, high-fiber, sugar-free meal, complete with a little note of encouragement written on the paper napkin.

Sam mocks Freddie for his mommy-lunches every chance she gets, but secretly it makes her a tiny bit envious. Mrs. Benson is the freaking mayor of Freakville, and if Sam had to live with her she'd end up in jail even sooner than everyone thinks she will. But at the same time, Mrs. Benson loves Freddie and takes care of him, in her own freaktastic way. And Sam has never been taken care of like that, ever. In fact, the only person who takes care of Sam at all, who is weirdly like a mother to her sometimes even though Sam is almost a year older (no thanks to that skunkbag Miss Erenkrantz, who made her repeat second grade) is Carly. Carly cooks dinner for her and nags her about homework and notices when she ditches a class. Carly hugs her when she cries. Carly is such an angel that Sam can kind of see why Freddie is so stupid about her.

This thought makes her frown, and she wonders if there's anything in his lunch she can take, just to show him that she can.

He scowls at her over his turkey and kale on whole wheat. "Don't even think about it, Puckett. Keep your grubby mitts off my lunch."

"I'm not gonna touch your lunch, Benson." She isn't sure this is entirely the truth - she has a reputation to uphold, and the oven-baked sweet potato chips don't look too gross - but it sounds good.

"Anyway," she adds, "it came from your house. There might be dork germs on it."

Freddie just rolls his eyes, and Sam stuffs her mouth with a huge mixed forkful of lukewarm spaghetti and corn. If someone tied her up and forced her to tell the truth, which is about the only way it would happen, she would have to admit that Freddie really isn't as much of a dork as he was when she first met him. He's taller now, and his voice is deeper, and he's not as easy to push around as he used to be either. Sam has a feeling that in another year or two, he won't put up with her crap at all, and it makes her a little sad, because if she isn't insulting him and taking his lunch and hitting him in the back of the head, then what will they have left to say to each other? It's not like he's going to fall in love with her or anything, and of course that's good because Sam would probably puke if he started giving her those puppy-eyed looks he gives Carly, but still ...

"What?" she asks through another mouthful of spaghetti, realizing that Freddie has just said something and is waiting for her to answer.

"I said I don't get you, Sam. What is it with you and food? If it isn't chili then it's ribs or cereal or beef jerky or meatloaf. You even eat stuff you don't really want, just to eat it. Why?"

Slowly, Sam finishes chewing and has another drink of milk to wash it all down. Then she leans forward and looks Freddie right in the eyes. They're kind of nice, warm and brown with long, dark lashes, but she ignores that and focuses on the eye booger in the left one. There's nothing like a good, crusty eye booger to keep your thoughts from going where they shouldn't.

"Do you really want to know?"

"Uh, yeah. I've been wondering ever since I met you and Carly two years ago. Come on, Sam. Solve the mystery of the bottomless pit for me."

He's making fun of her, and she almost changes her mind about what she's going to say, but then she thinks Oh, who cares, he probably won't believe me anyway and goes ahead.

"Fine. It's because when I was little I was hungry all the time, okay? My mom would leave me at home with nothing to eat, and I was too young to go out and get anything for myself. Sometimes I'd knock on the door across the hall and the neighbors would let me come in and eat dinner with them, but most of the time, I just sat in front of the TV and cried because there wasn't any food. So now, I eat what I can get when I can get it. Got it?"

Freddie doesn't exactly look shocked -- he's met Sam's mom, after all -- but for a minute he gets very quiet, the way people do when they hear that somebody died.

"Is that true?" he asks finally.

Her first impulse is to say Of course it's true, because it is. In fact, her earliest memory is not of normal kid stuff, like learning to ride a trike or getting a teddy bear for Christmas, but of being so hungry that it hurt. She remembers getting up in the morning, early, still wearing the overalls and T-shirt she'd worn the day before. She knows it was a Saturday because there were cartoons on TV, the giant TV that her mom had somehow managed to find the money for, even though it didn't work half the time because the electricity had been shut off. She remembers that she stopped for a minute in front of the big, bright screen to watch the Rugrats -- Angelica always made her laugh -- before heading into the kitchen, her stomach as empty as a black hole. And then she remembers opening the fridge, and all the cupboards she could reach, and finding nothing there, and how small and scared and lonely she'd felt.

What did you expect, kid? she always asks her younger self when she thinks of this now. Maybe you thought she'd gotten a personality transplant and gone out grocery shopping like a regular mom? I mean, it's not like you didn't walk past the bedroom door the night before and see her crashed out in there with some guy, is it? You ought to have known.

She thinks of telling Freddie all this, but there's a weird, unfamiliar expression on his face, and she realizes that this is an important moment. If Freddie knows this truth about her, this truth that she's never told to anyone else but Carly, then something will change between them. It might be a good change, and it might be a bad change, but it'll be a change, and she doesn't think she wants it just yet. She wants a little more time for things to stay the same, a little more time to call him a dork and punch him in the arm and yank his pants down in public. If she stops doing those things, or if he gets tough enough to stop letting her, then this sort of stuff is what will take its place.

Someday, she thinks, she might be ready for that. But not today.

"No, it's not true, you nub," she says, and laughs. "Oh man, I really had you for a minute! I wish I had a mirror so you could see your face. No, on second thought I don't. I wouldn't want the janitor to have to sweep up all that broken glass."

"God, Sam." He shakes his head, and the look on his face changes to the familiar, comfortable one of eye-rolling disgust. "You're totally impossible, you know that?"

"It's what I do," Sam says cheerfully, and fast as lightning, crams a double handful of his chips into her mouth just as the bell rings.

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