The Audrey Hepburn Syndrome
Taylor McKessie is a smart girl. Ever since she was five, when she was the only one in her class to spell out all of the animals of the barnyard, her parents treated her like she was the new Einstein-child-genius despite a much older Taylor informing them countless times that Einstein was dyslexic and she was anything but. They bought her weird tapes and got her a chemistry set for her seventh birthday instead of the Barbie she had really wanted, with her ash blonde hair and a bright turquoise and orange outfit, which Taylor had drooled over for the two months since she first saw it in a small toy store in Santa Fe, on a family holiday.
But no one seems to know the real Taylor McKessie; of course Taylor is a smart, bright young girl who deserves to be President of the Decathlon Team and knows the chemical equations for respiration, photosynthesis and ionic compounds like the back of her hand. But there's a secret side to the sweet, smart girl that had partnered up with Chad in an attempt to sabotage Troy and Gabriella's attempts and becoming like a John Hughes classic, because high school wasn't like Molly Ringwald's celluloid stories of requited romance across the stereotypes.
But then, when hell came crashing down and a new East High was born, she and Chad had parted the psuedo-relationship they had sort of begun on the most eventual night of their high school lives, and she had begun to focus, or should she put, "re-focus" on college and her future as a scientist or an award-winning novellist (she hadn't yet decided but was leaning towards a mixture of both).
However, try as she might, she felt drawn towards the life which she had associated with Sharpay, their enemy-turned-sort-of-ally, with a wardrobe big enough to kit out several of the oprhanages she had seen in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, when she and her family had gone to visit relatives, with at least one decent outfit. She wasn't particularly fashion-conscious (she was sure that if she ever showed Sharpay or Ryan her own clothes in a chest of drawers and a wardrobe the size of a snack cupboard, the looks, a mixture of pity and disgust, would be straight on their faces quicker than Road Runner from Wile E. Coyote) but there was one major influence in her life.
It was a film she had seen years ago, back when she was still in elementary school and her mother had been channel-hopping and had come across it. "Taylor, honey - come and sit here with Mom." Taylor had leapt up from her second-grade homework of drawing a picture of her family in bright wax crayons. She had sat on her mother's lap, breathing in the scent of spiced pears and bananas from the grocery where her mom worked nine-to five on Wednesdays, Thursdays and every second Saturday, and had sat down to watch the film on the film channel on the small TV in the lounge. The film looked sort of in Technicolor, like some old films she had seen before, still shut up the plastic VHS cases behind the couch.
The film was about a rich socialite in New York City, a place which had seen both beautiful and almost terrifying to a young Taylor (the former because of a Statue of Liberty postcard she had in her room from an aunt in Brooklyn and the latter because her father had once put the 1933 version of "King Kong" on and she had had nightmares of the big ape and herself as a dark-skinned Fay Wray) and then the most fashionable woman in the world, as her mother had said it, had come on screen and Taylor had fallen in love with the very concept of Holly Golightly, and the idea of a smart girl who could combine brains with beauty with a side of taste.
She had hypothesised that she had fallen for the persona of Audrey Hepburn, or at least the idea behind the character. The belief that a girl could be smart without being a nerd and pretty without being a total slut (a word she had heard once on Passions and her mother had shut off suddenly).
And try as Taylor might, she knew she had a terminal case of AHS (Audrey Hepburn Syndrome) and you know what?
She liked it.
Fin