Paige Hardaway

**Paige Penelope Hardaway** is the supporting character who’s first introduced in the first season of ***Atypical***. She’s a student in the same year of school as Sam Gardner, who becomes Sam's practice girlfriend and love interest. Paige is portrayed by actress Jenna Boyd.

## Personality

Paige is a bubbly, stylish and intellectual student. She’s known for being “annoying” but those who know her well know that she has a kind heart. She is in love with Sam. Paige is willing to stand up for Sam, when the students in Newton High wrote mean comments about him in his yearbook, she asked who did this and lost her voice for it.

## Biography

### Season 1

In the first Season, Paige first appears when she tells Sam she likes his shirt. She later shows interest in him and asks if they can study together for an upcoming test in Biology. Sam accepts, and makes a list of pros and cons about Paige to see if she is suitable to be his girlfriend. On the next day, when Sam invites Zahid and Paige to his house for dinner, Paige secretly takes Sam's diary up to the bathroom and observes everything in it before realizing that the page with the pros and cons list was torn out by Zahid. She makes an etching to figure out what was written down. She later becomes offended by what was written down and sits outside. Sam joins her, apologizes and asks her out, to which Paige accepts. Sam and Paige then start dating with each other.

Paige and Sam both start hanging out as a couple, and she also develops a rule, which involves her giving Sam three cards and if he talks about Antarctica too much, she takes one away, until all three are gone. Sam invites Paige to his room, where he gets slightly overwhelmed by her presence and her repeatedly touching his stuff. Eventually, he locks Paige in his closet, until his father comes in and lets Paige out. Paige also takes one of Sam's favorite sweaters to remind her of him. However, after Casey discourages her, Paige returns the sweater and breaks up with him. Sam is at first happy to get his sweater back, but after a talk with Julia, realizes that he misses Paige and angrily chastises Casey about it. Following this, Sam walks into Paige's French class and tells her that he realizes that couples like to keep things to remind them of their relationships, and presents a penguin necklace that Zahid's girlfriend got him a discount for. Shocked by this, Paige stands up and kisses Sam in front of the class, which results in them getting a detention.

Later on, however, Sam thinks he likes Julia better and breaks up with Paige in front of her family during a dinner at Olive Garden. Heart-broken, on the Gardner's front lawn, an enraged Paige comes to scream at Sam for breaking her heart. She angrily dumps a box full of contents that remind her of him onto his lawn, including the A she got on her Biology test that she studied for with Sam, a detention slip after kissing Sam in French class, and a drawing for her locker. She tells him that she lost the penguin necklace that Sam bought for her, and she tells him that he is not taking away her virginity. She then takes out a large stuffed penguin that she was planning to present to Sam for Christmas, but she slits its throat with a knife in front of the Gardners and their visitors. She departs Sam's lawn to drive back to her house. As a result, Sam decides to find the penguin necklace by tracing Paige's steps from the day she lost it at school.

At the autism-friendly formal dance event, Sam is assisted by Zahid to retrieve the penguin necklace in a pool at the school's gym, getting himself wet. Sam meets up with Paige at the dance to return her necklace and he apologizes for what he did in front of her family at the restaurant. Paige kind of forgives him, they both kind of made up in an igloo, and she gives him a sexual handjob.

### Season 2

In Newton High School, Sam meets up with Paige. Unexpectedly, she creates new guidelines for them to stay as casual friends and nothing more. Sam approves of Paige's rules, and they both continue with their lives as before, aside from being romantic couples. When she witnesses Sam in the classroom closet with Baily Bennett, she gets jealous and as she chops each paper with a guillotine paper trimmer, she peels a part of her finger skin, making her bleed and passing out. This means that she still loves Sam.

Paige is still mad at Sam. However, towards the end of the second Season, she discovers some mean things said in Sam's yearbook about him. Because of this, angrily yells at all the students for it. She shouts so loudly that she is unable to talk and give her high school graduation speech. Sam offers to make the speech and he later tells Paige that he did it because he still loves her. They both get back together in the summer.

### Season 3

In the third Season, Paige is attending Bowdoin College. She keeps in contact with Sam via video chat.

At the Gardner's home, Sam and Casey both invite Paige, Izzie, Zahid and Gretchen for a couple's dinner. During their dinner, while Sam and Paige both talk about their experiences at their own separate colleges, Gretchen says that attending college is a waste of time and money for students, and that learning from the internet is useful and free in the real-world. This ticks off both, Sam and Paige. Sam and Paige both also begin to dislike her, and correct her about college being worth attending to pursue their dreams. The dinner ends with Gretchen leaving the Gardner's home.

However, Paige's life begins to fall apart, as she later becomes a dorm rat and throws a burrito at a boy in a fit of rage for making fun of her. She gets in trouble with the college board for this. However, she drops out of college and reunites with Sam, explaining how her life fell apart and she resorted to online shopping buying expensive things, such as a large canoe. She asks Elsa to mind all her plants while she gets a poor job working at a children's party place, dressing as a potato mascot for her corporate workplace. After a talk with Elsa, she drops Sam off at his college, whom based on advice given to him by Evan. She asks if everything is fine and she tells him everything. After Sam cheers her up, they have sex in the dorm room.

Later, Paige drives Sam, Casey and Abby to find Zahid after he revealed that he was eloping with Gretchen. After Zahid and Sam reconcile, Paige gets a request, stating that someone wants to buy her canoe, which calms her down and results in her driving normal. The mysterious buyer is revealed to be Sam.

### Season 4

In the final Season, Paige remains in a relationship with Sam. Paige attempts to spend with Sam together on a date, except for the fact that Sam is preoccupied so much with attempting to receive over 9000 dollars to take a plane to Antarctica. Therefore, Sam skips Paige's date, causing her to complain to him later on.

In the Gardner's home, Paige angrily tells Sam's audience that he can't survive in the arctic area due to his inexperience, after Sam is done with presenting his slideshow for the audience to donate money for his Antarctica trip. Sam becomes saddened by this, and he leaves his house to enter a cold storage room at Paige's workplace. Paige tries to say sorry to him, but Casey refuses to let Paige do so, making her leave the house.

At Sam's apartment, Paige bought gifts for Sam as an apologize from earlier, but Zahid and Casey both didn't believe her story and Casey gives her strange tasks to complete in order to win back their trust. In spite of that, Sam easily forgives her. Regardless, she accepts Casey's challenges, and she almost completed all of her tasks, until she had enough with being dictated by Casey to stand on Sam's snow boots that are stuck on the floor for 3 hours. Therefore, she forfeits the final challenge.

Later on, Sam and Paige are both shocked to discover Gretchen, Zahid's ex-girlfriend from the previous season, in the apartment with Zahid.

While Paige is trying to figure on how to get Sam to pay attention to her, Gretchen provides advice to Paige about showing her sexual body part to him, similar to how Gretchen does to Zahid in their relationship. Paige listens to Gretchen's advice, and she takes a picture of her butt, she accidently sends the picture to Sam's parents, rather than to Sam himself. She becomes embarrassed by this accident, so she tries to apologize to her parents, who both approve of her apology.

In her workplace, Paige gets sick of being the potato mascot, even if she’s the top employee. She decides to quit, but not before she vandalizes her workplace's property by kicking a sign down and flipping off her boss with her two middle fingers. She leaves her workplace forever, being happy that she’s no longer enslaved by her job.

Having enough money for his trip to Antarctica, Sam finds Paige to be the most suitable candidate to take care of his pet turtle, Edison, since she’s able to take care of her pet pig well. She’s willing to look after it, while he’s away. On the other hand, Sam entrusts his pet turtle to Zahid instead.

At the very end of Season 4, within the Olive Garden, Sam says goodbye to Paige and he breaks up with her temporarily, when it comes to both of them living far apart from each other. This is her last appearance of the show.

## Appearances

### Season 1

* Julia Says (S1:E3)
* A Nice Neutral Smell (S1:E4)
* That's My Sweatshirt (S1:E5)
* The D-Train to Bone Town (S1:E6)
* I Lost My Poor Meatball (S1:E7)
* The Silencing Properties of Snow (S1:E8)

### Season 2

* Juiced! (S2:E1)
* Penguin Cam and Chill (S2:E2)
* Little Dude and the Lion (S2:E3)
* Pants on Fire (S2:E4)
* In the Dragon's Lair (S2:E6)
* The Smudging (S2:E7)
* Ritual-licious (S2:E9)
* Ernest Shackleton's Rules for Survival (S2:E10)

### Season 3

* Best Laid Plans (S3:E1)
* Cocaine Pills and Pony Meat (S3:E3)
* Y.G.A.G.G. (S3:E4)
* Only Tweed (S3:E5)
* The Essence of a Penguin (S3:E6)
* Road Rage Paige (S3:E8)
* Sam Takes a Walk (S3:E9)
* Searching for Brown Sugar Man (S3:E10)

### Season 4

* Magical Bird No. 1 (S4:E1)
* Master of Penguins (S4:E2)
* You Say You Want a Revolution (S4:E3)
* Starters and Endings (S4:E4)
* Dead Dreams (S4:E5)
* Are You in Fair Health (S4:E6)
* Channel the Cat (S4:E7)
* Player's Ball (S4:E9)
* Dessert at Olive Garden (S4:E10)

## Trivia

* Paige enjoys making things into a rap to help her remember what she has studied.
* She was born in Newark, New Jersey. Queen Latifah was born in Newark, New Jersey, and in the episode "That's My Sweatshirt", Sam tells Bob that Paige "was born in New Jersey in the same town as Queen Latifah."
* She’s a sleepwalker - once she even cleaned both bathrooms in her house fast asleep.
* She became Valedictorian of her senior year in high school.
* She got detention for kissing Sam when she was in the middle of French class.
* She's known to be smart and hyperactive.
* She’s known to have road rage when she’s in her car, which earned her nickname 'Road Rage Paige'.
* She likely has intermittent explosive disorder.