The Queen and I
(Author's Notes: Yeah, I'm pretty sure I actually got the dyslexia idea from a different fic. Honestly, it makes sense to me. There's a difference between being a slow learner and reading at a first grade level in high school.
Warning: this is eventually going to be a Chyan fic, so if you don't like boy/boy stuff, you may as well turn back now, instead of being unpleasantly surprised later. Don't say I didn't warn you. :)
Also, I know very little about dyslexia, fashion, and dance. So why the heck am I writing in Ryan's point of view? I guess I like a challenge.)
Overture
Sharpay and I have always been a single unit. We were apart for those eight minutes after which she'd left the womb and I hadn't. Then, I followed her for the first time (which she has never let me live down), and we were henceforth inseparable until our last year of high school.
When she starred in her first performance at age four (a series of wails into a pink plastic microphone in front of our parents and their friends, roughly set to "I Just Can't Wait to Be King"), I was right behind her, twirling merrily to the music.
And when I was diagnosed with Dad's dyslexia at age six, she stuck by me and refused to let my failings bring her down. She read every school book out loud to me with gusto and flair—to this day, I still carry the memory of Shar with a book in one hand and a stuffed pig in the other, draped in a tangled mess of yarn as she passionately reenacted Charlotte's Web.
When she was turned down by her first crush at age nine, I blew off baseball practice just so we could go out for sundaes together. Then, we both skipped our nightly practice at the Children's Theatre and held a brother-sister karaoke night instead. When she started nit-picking my singing, I knew she was going to be all right.
When I was kicked off the baseball team at age twelve and everything in Newport became awkward, she was the one that convinced Dad to move the family back to the office in Albuquerque. To this day, I've never found the courage to ask her how she pulled that off.
We spent our childhoods giggling over Disney princess movies and dreaming of one day becoming King and Queen of the World (That is, until we realized that would mean we'd have to get married. To each-other. Ew.) We spent our preteen years cooing over the hottest teenaged boys in Newport, Rhode Island. We went into our teens blazing a trail to stardom so bright that the rest of East High just had to pay attention to us. She was my confident, charismatic (when she wanted to be) starlet sis, and I was her dependable, daydreaming Broadway bro.
I guess what I'm trying to say is… she's not a bad person. In fact, she's a wonderful person, but it takes a little digging to find it. (Yeah, no one believes Zeke when he says that, either.)
By our junior year of high school, we were co-presidents of the East High Drama Club, school icons when it came to fashion and the arts, and a notorious force to be reckoned with both on stage and off. However, Sharpay was dependent on the approval of others for her own self-image, so she tended go into histrionics anytime someone as much as suggested that her power over the student body wasn't absolute. As for myself… with the incident in Newport on top of my dyslexia, I didn't have much self-confidence to speak of. I was constantly second-guessing myself, I needed regular validation from Sharpay, and I don't think I said three words to anyone outside the Drama Club for four years.
But we were happy. We ruled the school in our Evans Twins way, and it worked well for us. Everyone else had their own plebian little cliques, following their respective leaders like mindless drones while we looked down at them from the drama table. It worked, and we were on top of the world.
And then, like the Good Witch, Gabriella floated down amongst us little people, and all hell broke loose in Oz.