If Opposites Attract, Then We Were Meant to Be

*** Sam’s P.O.V. ***
“Hello?” I answered the phone quietly.
“Is this Sam?” a male’s voice sounded into the receiver on the other end of the line. It was probably a cell phone since it crackled and popped as if it were a bad signal making his voice sound far away.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Jared, Jared Anderson, from the party. My mom told me you helped me get home. I was just wondering if I could uh thank you by taking you out to dinner sometime.” Of course it was him!
“Oh hi Jared. Um that might be a little hard since I’m back home in California. I’m really sorry but the thought was really sweet.”
“Oh right sorry. Yeah okay my fault. Uh well maybe I’ll see you again sometime, bye.”
“Wait! Rain check? I’d really like to go to dinner with you um… with you being in Minnesota that makes it a little hard though. Hey wait a sec! How did you get this number?!” I had been planning essentially a date with some guy who could potentially be a stalker, genius me for ya!
“Well I met up with those guys from the band you were with, Green Day? And the drummer gave me your number when I asked if they had seen you or knew how to get in touch with you, are you mad?” He talks really fast, I thought.
“Oh Trè, okay. No it’s fine I’m not mad a little weirded out but not mad,” I replied thinking about Trè. Why on earth would he try and set me up with some guy I only met once?! Disregarding the fact that he was totally wasted when we met, sharing only the fact that we were both puking in the bushes.
I took a chance. We agreed to meet in between, whatever is there. I would leave Berkeley and he would leave Minneapolis and we would drive to the exact middle, the same distance from each place and have a date right then and there. I have to move on, I didn’t risk anything; I didn’t leap off the bridge and hope I landed in the water. I let Billie Joe go; now I need to go…

It’s been six months, five days, seven hours, eighteen minutes, and forty seconds since I left tour and spoke to Billie; but who’s counting? He’s called but I screen them or have my dad say I’m not home or something, which now is true. I am all the way across the country. I started going to college four months ago and life is good. I have a new boyfriend; I’m doing well in school, and no Billie. I don’t contact him because I’m afraid, afraid that if I even hear his voice I’ll slip up and fall back into that ‘Billie Joe Armstrong doesn’t love me’ depression. It took a while to get over and I don’t want to go back. I know deep down I still love him, I can’t stop but I’ve moved on and I’m fine with that…I think…
“Hey Baby!” Jared’s voice was cheery with his usual morning pep. How he could be so alert without coffee still baffles me. I love when he calls me as a wake up call. Almost every morning he calls, I could set an alarm but having my boyfriend wake me up is so much sweeter.
“Hi Jared.” I answered. Yawning I got up with the phone and began to get ready for class while talking to him.
“So how’d you sleep?” he always asks me that, a routing that works for us.
“Good, well for the most part. I had to study all night for an exam in chemistry.”
“Oh well you’ll do perfect, you always do.” I could picture his wry little half smile that he always did. I didn’t get to see him much but every other weekend I had off I flew to Minnesota and visited him. His parents gushed over me like my own dad did. I visited so much that I had my own room at their house; I even kept some of my clothes there. The Anderson’s were like my second family.
I had come back to the room after my final class with Lizzie. Lizzie had a very ‘Don’t care. Wait what? …No I don’t care’ attitude. I met her in my modern art class. She doesn’t live on campus she lives with her friend Amber and her German Shepard, Missy. Lizzie has long thin black hair with blond underneath, she doesn’t have bangs she just parts it down that middle. Her right ear is pierced four times and her left three, actually she has a variety of piercings. Her right eyebrow and her belly button are pieced as well. Her style is pretty Goth-rock I guess, she has tattoos of barb wire around her wrist, a skull and cross bones on her upper right arm, and a few stars on her ankle. She always talks about getting more though she told me she got this stuff to make her parents mad. A little weird fact about my blue-eyed friend is that she’s a tiny bit obsessed with a few of my friends who happen to be in a little band called Green Day. She ran away to California and saw them at The Gilman while they were still Sweet Children. It’s a little creepy when she asks me questions about them. Some of them are a bit personal, and then there are the ones that they probably couldn’t answer about themselves.
“Well, well, well look what we have here.” Lizzie was rifling through my closet while I lay on my bed typing a paper for homework. “I must say Ms. Kratzer these are quite different from your usual style. They are totally risqué! Will you wear them form me so I can see that you can actually try to be like I don’t know…over-sexed. Yes that’s the word I was looking for.” She held up a couple of revealing and tight outfits that I kept in a bow with a few other things.
“Oh,” my face tinged pink at the sight of them. “Someone gave them to me.”
“No WAY! Was it that guy, Billie Joe, the sexy guy that sings and plays guitar for Green Day?!” she asked ecstatic. This is why I can’t forget him.
“Um, no. Those were birthday presents from Trè Cool. He wanted me to wear them and ‘keep him from being naughty’,” I blushed.
“He’s the drummer, right?”
“Yeah he is.”
“Hey I bet if I put on one of these I look even sexier than I do normally.” That’s Lizzie for you, always thinking she’s like the sexiest person in the world, (not that she’s like bad looking)!
“Go for it.” I waved her a hand to give her permission.
“Nah I better not, you’re smaller than me and it probably would be too small for my gorgeous curves.” She sighed looking through the box again. “Ooh what’s this?” she asked excitedly pulling out a box I hadn’t looked at for at least a year. She honestly can’t focus on one thing for five minutes.
“Uh I don’t know. You can look through it I guess.” I answered not looking up, knowing she was already going through it before I could say “Uh”.
“Wow who took these? All the boys I like are in them with a certain friend of mine in a few.” She waved a stack of photographs in my face as she danced around the room. “Hey! Were you guys ever an item?!” she questioned stopping on a certain picture.
“Uh, what are you talking about?”
“This,” she stuck the photo under my nose. It was a picture from junior year. Billie had gotten a terrible hair-cut and I made fun of him but he made that face where you pretend to cry, you know the one, so I came over and gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Surprise, surprise Trè had snapped a picture of it since he was playing with my camera.
“No. I had been making fun of him so that was my apology.” I sighed remembering.
“Huh, sounds dirty.” She stated continuing to flip through pictures. “Ah ha!” Oh God, Lizzie had found my yearbook for senior year…which come to think about it I hadn’t looked at!
“Are you sure you guys weren’t a couple?” she raised an eyebrow at me and showed me a page that made my jaw drop.
On that pages devoted to the superlatives there was a whole page for cutest couple, a few pictures for every grade level, the seniors getting the biggest photos due to the unwritten seniority rules. As tradition the couples were all people who didn’t know they were being photographed. The senior couple was Billie Joe Armstrong, with his crooked smile, and Samantha Kratzer, me, with my shy smirk. The largest picture was of us at prom dancing. Of course! I thought I had seen a camera flash and the editor promised me pictures of prom would be in the year book, though I thought he meant of the fight not of us!