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"Miranda Cosgrove is giggling like crazy, helpless against a wave of nervous laughter. The bersuccessful star of Nickelodeon&amp;#39;s iCarly knows it&amp;#39;s not funny. But she can&amp;#39;t help herself. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s super embarrassing!&amp;quot; she says.\n\nMiranda, who just turned nineteen, is seated at a chill West Hollywood restaurant\u2014dressed in a black, oversize Wildfox Couture sweater and about a million beaded bracelets\u2014talking about a typical rite of passage: her first fender bender. Seated behind the wheel of a brand-new Porsche Cayenne (the big one), Miranda and a friend had just hit up the drive-through at the local In-N-Out Burger when they spotted her friend&amp;#39;s crush. &amp;quot;We rolled down the window to say hello,&amp;quot; the actress says. &amp;quot;Then she wanted us to take off quickly\u2014to look cool! She&amp;#39;s like, &amp;#39;Back up!&amp;#39; I put the car in reverse and ran really fast into a pole.&amp;quot; There&amp;#39;s that giggle again.\n\nTrying to look cool has never been Miranda&amp;#39;s game. Why front when your own front is perfectly hip to be square? On iCarly, Miranda is the good-girl- gone-even-better, the quirky one who makes chicken soup in a toilet bowl, was poetic about spaghetti tacos, and &amp;quot;random dances&amp;quot; whenever possible. She&amp;#39;s a role model for the iGeneration. There&amp;#39;s a mystery boyfriend in her past\u2014one who still inspires her to write songs about heartache\u2014but no skeletons in her closet. Just some well-organized Rebecca Minkoff and Prada. But now, with the future of iCarly in doubt and Miranda heading off to college in the fall, a question bubbles to the surface: How do you keep maturing without leaving your fans behind? &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s weird when your biggest success is something that you&amp;#39;re also trying to break out of,&amp;quot; she says. Sometimes to look forward, it helps to look back.\n\nDiscovered at age three charming it up at a food festival, the Orange County girl\u2014who hung out at her dad&amp;#39;s dry-cleaning business\u2014quickly graduated from McDonald&amp;#39;s commercials to the smash movie School of Rock before landing her own series on Nick. Miranda, who was home-schooled, doesn&amp;#39;t regret a thing\u2014except missing the prom. &amp;quot;Maybe I should date a guy in high school?&amp;quot; she says, laughing. &amp;quot;I could get away with it now.&amp;quot;\n\niCarly launched in 2007 with a specific mission: to challenge Disney&amp;#39;s runaway hit Hannah Montana. The show succeeded; iCarly recently celebrated its 100th episode and turned Miranda into a PTA-approved Neutrogena ambassador on her own terms\u2014by using her gift for absurdist humor to appeal to both kids and adults, including self-avowed devotees like Brad Pitt and Emma Stone. Earlier this year, when People magazine&amp;#39;s former Sexiest Man Alive told a reporter, &amp;quot;iCarly is big in our house ... I know every episode,&amp;quot; Miranda&amp;#39;s phone started blowing up. &amp;quot;All my friends were calling, saying, &amp;#39;Can you believe Brad Pitt knows who you are?!&amp;#39; It was insane.&amp;quot;\n\nAlso awesomely insane? Miranda reportedly earns $180,000 an episode (making her the second-highest-paid teen on TV, behind that kid on Two and a Half Men); meanwhile, her debut solo album, Sparks Fly, hit the Billboard 200 chart at number eight. The first time she took the SAT\u2014yeah, she took it three times, so what?\u2014was at a random school in Washington, D.C. &amp;quot;I was getting ready for this event with the President, Christmas in Washington, so I had to take it there,&amp;quot; she explains. &amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s where I met Barack.&amp;quot; (First-name basis!)\n\nMeeting the president is a pretty stellar perk. So is using the iCarly wardrobe department as your own personal Net-a-Porter. Miranda cops to borrowing just about anything she wants\u2014as long as she promises to bring it back. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m constantly stealing these biker boots from the stylist,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;She&amp;#39;ll text me and say, &amp;#39;I know you have those boots!&amp;#39; &amp;quot; It&amp;#39;s not just about playing dress-up; Miranda&amp;#39;s own sense of style is evolving. For the 2012 Nickelodeon Kids&amp;#39; Choice Awards, she wore a royal blue Porter Grey minidress with an exposed back and Stella McCartney booties\u2014grown-up, for sure, but appropriately so.\n\nFinding her voice\u2014sartorial or otherwise\u2014is what being nineteen is all about, and it&amp;#39;s a perfect marker for this stage in her life. After flirting with NYU, Miranda plans to enroll at USC (her father&amp;#39;s alma mater) in the fall, where she&amp;#39;ll major in film. She&amp;#39;d like to follow in the footsteps of onetime child actors like Natalie Portman and Jodie Foster: brainy and beautiful types who went to college and conquered Hollywood.\n\nMiranda ultimately chose to stay in L.A. to be closer to the work. She&amp;#39;s in the midst of filming a fifth\u2014and possibly final\u2014season of iCarly. &amp;quot;We don&amp;#39;t know if we&amp;#39;ll do more episodes,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m looking at this as the last season. Though we said that last year.&amp;quot; If she had her way, Carly would sail off into the sunset with her as-yet platonic BFF, Freddie. And Tina Fey would drop in to play Carly&amp;#39;s never-before-seen mom. &amp;quot;I think she&amp;#39;s awesome,&amp;quot; Miranda says. &amp;quot;I love 30 Rock.&amp;quot;\n\nThe more pressing quandary, and the one every successful child actor has faced since prime-time immemorial, is this: What&amp;#39;s next? &amp;quot;I definitely think about that,&amp;quot; she says contemplatively, poking at the remains of her lunch. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s hard to find something that&amp;#39;s a little bit edgy but that everyone can still watch. I&amp;#39;m waiting to find something right.&amp;quot; (For the record, she wouldn&amp;#39;t say no to a romantic comedy with Channing Tatum. &amp;quot;I think he&amp;#39;s the dream costar of the moment,&amp;quot; she says.) She put her well-manicured toe in the water with an episode of The Good Wife, playing a booze-happy pop tart charged with attempted murder. When her character explains a recent round of partying, saying, &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s just part of the whole climbing out of the Disney ghetto thing,&amp;quot; the ache was palpable, if not somewhat autobiographical.\n\n&amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m not that rebellious,&amp;quot; Miranda says, smiling wide. &amp;quot;There&amp;#39;s a part of me that wishes I was that.&amp;quot; Is she looking for a rebellious guy? &amp;quot;I just want someone who lives in L.A.,&amp;quot; she says, brushing the shiniest brown hair out of her eye. Miranda has been on a few dates recently, but the prospects seem to be out-of-towners. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ll meet someone and they&amp;#39;ll be traveling all the time. Someone here\u2014that would help a lot!&amp;quot; she says.\n\nOK, but you&amp;#39;re not even a little, teeny bit rebellious? &amp;quot;Not other than running my car into poles!&amp;quot; she jokes. Talk to us after freshman year."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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