Prologue

"Sharpay, the phone's for you!" Evangeline Evans called to her daughter from the front of the limo.

"Thanks, Mom!" Sharpay picked up the phone and heard a lot of people talking at the same time. "You guys, I'm getting kind of tired of the six-way phone calls we always have. We never get anything accomplished." She smiled to herself when she heard five other voices shout:

"SHARPAY!!!" Sharpay laughed and went on.

"Hey everybody!"

"Sharpay, I miss you so much!" "When can we see you again?" "So much has changed around here with out you!" all went off at the same time.

"YOU GUYS! SHUT UP!" everyone stopped talking. "Thank you! I cannot understand everyone at the same time. I've only been in New York for a month; you can't miss me that much already!" Sharpay said stepping out of her limo when it stopped. Ryan spoke up:

"We all miss you so much, Shar! We want you to come home."

"Wow, you guys…" Ryan, Troy, Gabriella, Chad, and Taylor all heard the doorbell ring at the Evans house from where they were sitting in the living room. Ryan got up and opened the door. "You know I couldn't possibly come home." Sharpay smiled and everyone ran up to her as she set her bags down on the ground.

Gabriella gave her a big hug first: "Oh my god! I can't believe your home! This is so exciting!"

"Gabi, I can't breathe." Sharpay tried to push the brunette away. After a couple of minutes, there was only one person that Sharpay had not said hello to. At the back of the group of her friends, a taller, dark-headed guy stood silently staring at her. She stared back at him for a moment before looking around at everybody standing around.

"Okay, Shar, we can take a hint." Ryan said to his sister. "Come on, you guys. Let's go out back." Once everyone had gone out the back, Troy began talking.

"I can't believe you, Shar." Was all that he said. And it was all that he needed to say for Sharpay's eyes to start watering. She took a step towards him, just as he took a step back.

"Troy, please just let me explain." She said, her voice slightly shaking.

"Explain what Sharpay?!" Troy raised his voice in anger. "Explain why you never said goodbye? Explain why the morning after we slept together for the first time I woke up to find a stupid note where you had been sleeping, and you gone?! Go ahead and try and explain that." He waited a moment just looking into her eyes, but when she didn't respond, his heart broke all over again. "That's what I thought. You have no explanation." Troy pushed past her and left, slamming the door on his way out.

Sharpay stood there; the only sound was her quiet sobs. She ran up the stairs and ran through her bedroom door, slamming the French doors in the process. For the first time in her life, she couldn't bare looking at her bright pink walls or the pictures of her and Troy on her night-stand. She placed them face-down before covering her head with one of many pillows that were on her bed.

A few minutes later, she heard her door being opened and someone sitting down next to her. Assuming it was Ryan, she looked up, finding the whole gang staring back at her. She tried to calm down a bit but the steady breathing was just making her cry harder. Ryan took her in his arms and just let her cry.

Sharpay's eyes fluttered open. She shocked herself at first, not even realizing that she had fallen asleep. When she looked sideways to her alarm clock, it read 7:30 PM. She drug herself out of bed and looked into the mirror, realizing she looked like absolute shit. Her eyes were read and puffy, along with her nose and her clothes were crooked and wrinkled. She glared disapprovingly at her reflection.

Throwing on pink sweatpants, a white t-shirt, a matching jacket, and white flip-flops, she walked slowly down the large marble staircase that led into the entry of her house, or rather mansion. Her house never seemed so big before, and it really intimidated her in her state of vulnerability. She walked through the foyer, the living room, and finally wound up in the massive kitchen where her mother and one of their house-maids were cooking dinner. Evangeline Evans turned around and gave her daughter a sympathetic smile and walked towards her with open arms.

"How are you feeling, honey?" She lifted her chin so that Sharpay was looking right into her eyes and she knew she couldn't lie now.

"Like shit. I am the worst person on the face of the earth." She leaned her head into her mother's shoulder and Evangeline tenderly wrapped her arms around her.

"It will all turn out okay. I promise."

"That's just it Mom. What if it doesn't? Troy won't even talk to me! What am I supposed to do?" her eyes welled up for the second time today and she could feel tears threatening to spill. Evangeline suddenly had a great idea.

"Go to him." Sharpay gave her a confused look. "Go to his house and talk to him. And God knows that the make-up sex after a fight this big has got to be great." She joked, but at the same time, not really joking.

"Mom!" Sharpay turned a deep red as Marie, the house-maid, almost fell over laughing.

"I'm not stupid, Sharpay. I'm a psychologist for God's sake; I can tell what the changes in your behavior mean. Just like when I figured out that you were-"

"MOM! Stop talking, now! That was a long time ago and I don't do that anymore!" Sharpay's face was getting deeper shades of red by the second.

"I know. Now you have someone to do it for you." Just then Ryan walked in and, after hearing that statement, walked right back out screaming "la, la, la" and covering his ears.

"Thanks to that last statement, Mom, I am leaving and going to talk to Troy." She paused in the kitchen doorway. "Oh, and why couldn't you have been a dentist or something so you could only figured out when I had a cavity instead of details about my sex life?" Poor Ryan, once again, walked in at exactly the wrong moment and ran back out of the kitchen again with the same routine, only louder.

Sharpay walked into the foyer and pulled her jacket tighter around her small body. She walked outside and the cold Albuquerque late November air hit her in the face. She quickly jumped into her Range Rover, the cold seats causing her to jump a bit when she sat down, and drove the three minutes to Troy's house.