Her pen scratched away at the page, filling its void with the words that had previously fallen numb and withered onto her tongue. Each word, each metaphorical tear and cry dripped wearily from the newly opened bottle of emotions within which they had been encased. They dripped onto the solemn white of the paper and wet it with their weeping. They sobbed a blend of pain and relief across the page and released their owner from their hold. Gabriella felt her breaths again. Her windpipe no longer felt constricted and the cool gulps of air that flowed in and out of it were dizzying.

The feeling was dizzying: the thrill of her passion and the relieved pressure on her soul. The grief and mourning and tentative excitement spilled over her once blank page and the intense, searching blue of the ink was a warming promise.

She felt release; its syntax was awkward and foreign but it was there.

Verbs reacquainted themselves with adverbs, nouns grinned at their union with adjectives and the page filled with colour and life. Gabriella's cursive script wrapped the letters in its voluptuousness and chased her muse across line after line.

Cups were emptied, tables were cleared and soon she was the only customer left. She had barely registered Troy's movement as he cleaned the tables around her. The long-lost vibrancy of everyday had bathed Gabriella in its pacifying warmth and she had temporarily lost her grasp on its intricacies. It was only the sound of an apologetic cough from beside her that drew Gabriella from her page. Her eyes registered the emptiness behind Troy and Gabriella blushed upon realising that the rest of the customers had exited into the soft dusk.

"Do you mind if I take your cups?" Troy asked quietly; almost annoyed at himself from disrupting her. There was something about the sparkle of her eyes as she wrote that captivated him. It was electric and fascinating and its accompanying smile overwhelmed him. "I'm just starting to clear up and stuff," he added as a superfluous explanation.

Gabriella glanced at her silver watch and her eyes widened in shock. "Oh, goodness, I didn't realise how late it was! You closed almost half an hour ago! I'm so sorry!"

Troy set his basin full of dishes down on the table and shrugged; shooting her a disarming smile. "Don't worry about it: I can clean up around you. You just looked so – " He blushed at the plethora of words that his mind was daring him to voice. Reaching up to scratch the back of his neck, his blush only intensified. "And, you know, if you still want –" Troy's voice crackled with nervousness. "I mean, if you did want to head down to the park afterwards then, well, I thought that maybe we could just head from here." At her continued silence, Troy's rambling kicked into overdrive. "Because, well, the orchestra starts playing in an hour and a half and we should probably get there about half an hour beforehand and I don't know where you live but it might take you a while to go back and you don't have much stuff so it sort of made sense to me to head straight from here. But..." His words faded into silence when his eyes looked up from the spot on the floor that he had been addressing and met her flushed face.

Playing with the hem of her skirt, Gabriella took a moment to really consider what she was about to do. She had one friend in the city, one old school-friend who knew everything about Gabriella's situation and unintentionally continued to remind her of it. There was something so unfortunately familiar about Taylor McKessie that Gabriella could never shake from the background of her consciousness when they were together. They would talk and laugh, and yet weighing down on her mind would be her friend's connection to 'home': the knowledge that her Mother had always liked Taylor; the fact that Taylor had been so determined to replicate Maria Montez' Chicken Enchiladas Suiza that she had begged for repeated cooking lessons until she had mastered it. They were small things and Taylor didn't even have to mention her mother for Gabriella to feel the bristling discomfort of familiarity crawling all over her and keeping her numb to the outside world. There was something about 'this', about the newness of her acquaintance with Troy that Gabriella craved. She had never been the type of outgoing person who was able to walk into a room and start conversing with strangers. She had always been timid and cautious and sometimes so sensible that it became an aggravating flaw. A couple of years ago she might have deflected his attempts at conversation with a polite but firm smile that left no room for anything else to be said. She gulped and a shameful red painted a blotchy streak under her eyes. "I – This – " Casting her eyes to the ground, Gabriella had to frown as her feet fell upon his worn sneakers with different coloured laces. It was just another quirk that inexplicably drew her to this near-stranger. "I barely know you," she muttered apologetically. "I mean, I don't know anything about you and this is just – " A sad smile subdued her face as she gestured vaguely in an attempt to give voice to her feelings.

The curve of Troy's lips mirrored hers as he listened to her speaking. He was vaguely aware of the spontaneity of his suggestion. It was a whirlwind craziness that had coloured a lot of his actions since she had started visiting the coffee shop where he worked.

Pulling out a chair, he turned it around before sitting down on it and resting his chin on its back. "I get that," Troy muttered. "I know that this is a bit crazy but it's just two people getting to know each other." He smiled softly as he registered her dwindling reluctance. "We're not strangers. You know plenty about me..."

Gabriella hid a faint smile at the tender supplication in his voice. "I do?" she wondered out loud, feeling a wonderful tingling down her spine at the look in his eyes.

"Sure you do. You know that I'm called Troy." He grinned at her chuckle. "Troy Bolton, in fact, so you've just learned something else about me. You know that I work in a coffee shop called Lily's, and you might have noticed that Lily is my grandma; she sometimes still works behind the counter when she's feeling chatty." Shuffling in his chair, Troy felt his bravery grow and inflate his chest ecstatically. "You know that I'm a student in New York and that I've read 'Sweet Thursday' by John Steinbeck. I've seen you almost every day for months now: that's more than I've seen my best friend, Chad, who comes from Albuquerque so we don't visit often during the vacation." Flummoxed, Troy found himself trying to think of what else he could use to convince Gabriella. "What else do you know about me?" he found himself wondering out loud.

He was surprised when she answered. "I know that you make an amazing Americano. I know that you read the newspaper back-to-front." Giggling, Gabriella elaborated. "Because you always flick so frantically to the front page..."

Troy shrugged. "I'm a bit of a sports' junkie: I can't not read the sports' pages first."

Silence washed over them again and the tension in the air was palpable. There was an unarticulated excitement and bravado levitating between their bodies and as their eyes met both knew what its outcome would be.

Clearing his throat nervously, Troy flicked his bangs out of his eyes. "I like peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches," he explained. "I think I'm quite talented at making them too, even if my grandma tells me it's the easiest thing in the world. I could make some to take with us tonight, if you want?" he asked and the question swayed hypnotically in the blank space enveloping them.

Gabriella ducked her head to hide the pink blush that returned to her cheeks. "Chunky or smooth?" she asked timidly.

"Smooth?"

"That works for me."

It took a moment for Troy to grasp her implication. Their eyes met again and all uncertainty melted away.

Hush, baby don't cry
Just get through this night
Overcome

Cuz all that you are
Is broken inside
But they'll never know
They'll never know

Don't think that they'll change
They push you away
Far from home

Cuz all that they are
Is broken inside
But they'll never know
They'll never know

Skyscrapers dipped their toes in an orange light that illuminated the thick, warm purple-sky as the perfectly harmonised notes played by the Philharmonic orchestra met and merged in a dance that coated the entire area in bliss.

It was a tentative delight that had received its initial spark from the shy conversation between the pair anchored to a picnic blanket towards the back of the park. There was a natural ease to their dialogue, something that neither could put their finger on. Everything was sparks and electricity and understanding flowing between them and the wires were coated in promise.

"So you're studying comparative literature with a minor in creative writing?" Troy asked enthusiastically. "And you're going into your...?"

"Second year." She left no room for expansion. "I've always loved reading and when I was in senior year I started to write. It was just short stories and poems but I found it to be an – " Gabriella stumbled over the world and uttered it in a nervous rush. "It was an escape. For a while, anyway. I figured it would be good to do something I really enjoyed at university and it was amazing to learn about what I did for fun and just, I don't know, understand and improve on what I was doing naturally."

A hesitant but intrigued smile painted itself over Troy's lips. He'd spent so long silently (bashfully) observing her and every word that she said filled the lines of his hitherto pale sketch of her with colour. They had side-stepped serious conversation ever since they had left the coffee shop. They had posed silly questions and recounted even sillier stories. There was a gaping space that they were avoiding though. He had understood the need to circumvent it and yet he felt impelled to highlight it. "Where do you come from?" he asked. It was an inquiry that he supposed he should have made earlier in the evening. It was one of the typical 'getting-to-know-you' questions that he would have asked anybody else almost immediately. That underlying 'something' had just made him implicitly aware that it might not be the most harmless of questions to ask this particular woman.

Her evasion confirmed his subconscious suspicions. "Where do you come from?" she asked with a grin that was angelic enough to almost entirely deflect his inklings.

"New York, born and bred," Troy acquiesced with a smile. "Pretty much all of my Dad's side of the family still lives in the same district that they were brought up in too. Gramma's had that coffee shop for almost fifty years." Gabriella's facial expression warped to display how impressed she was but Troy didn't give her the opportunity to voice her awe. "Now how come you know almost everything about me, whereas I only know your favourite colour and the fact that you only write on recycled paper?"

As the evening had progressed, the two had gradually inched closer to each other on the tartan blanket; at his quiet inquiry Gabriella had to strain herself to avert her eyes from his own searching ones. He had a subtly bewitching scent and she could still detect the aroma of fresh coffee whenever she inhaled deeply. It combined with his shining, luring eyes that were like trapdoors to his every thought and it made him utterly enthralling, too enthralling to look away. Even as her eyes fell to the ground, Gabriella could feel him watching her – unravelling her. The hairs stood up on the back of her neck and she didn't doubt that he could see right through her deflection of all topics relating to her life before this year.

She didn't doubt that he had sensed it from the moment that they had met.

Gabriella was good with words. She knew how they were supposed to combine and she knew the way to manipulate them into exhaling the emotion that she wanted them to. Gabriella was articulate and sensitive and yet when it came to her own situation she had no idea what to say. It had been almost six months and she hadn't spoken about the torment and the sadness and the interminable grief.

She hadn't spoken about it but what was worse was that she didn't even know how to. Gabriella was desperate to break out of the paralysing cage of her emotions and try to gain a grasp on her life again. She no longer wanted to be dragged along in an unaware daze because it was the only thing she could do to numb the pain that threatened to crack her ribcage open and drown her heart in the poisonous fluid of her tears. She wanted to escape but she didn't because that moment of flight meant that she would have to forget. It meant moving on and she just didn't know how that could ever be possible.

It was a fear that had spit its presence at her for months.

It was a fear that practically evaporated in the glow of his concerned gaze. One look into Troy's eyes, one palpitation of her heart at his smile, it was all that it took for her to breathe freely. Just being with him made her heart shrink back to its normal size and ease the crushing pressure against her chest.

If everything in life had made sense, then it was a realisation that should have been unsettling to Gabriella. But oh how well Gabriella knew that life didn't make sense.

"Where do you come from?"

"How come you know almost everything about me, whereas I only know your favourite colour and the fact that you only write on recycled paper?"

The questions rebounded from the distant corner that her previous obviation had banished it to and they demanded an answer. Looking up, bubbles of knowledge and 'something' formed in her throat and her eyes met his. Thousands of ineffable sentiments and contemplations radiated in the explosive glance and the words began to tumble.

"It's not exactly a happy story - my past, I mean. It's not stuff that people want to hear because they never know what to say. I'm not..." Tears welled in her eyes at the confession. "I'm not what people expect me to be. Nobody knows how to act around me; people used to look at me like a charity case. There was nothing but pity in their eyes and it was as if they couldn't wait to get away from me." Troy's expression didn't change as she spoke. His eyes still shone with concern and admiration and that something else; there was no pity lurking beneath the surface. "I was born in San Diego, lived there until I was seven and then my Father died of a heart-attack. We moved to Santa Jose, Fresco – where my Grandmother lives, and most recently San Francisco. I started my degree at USC but had to stop after my first year because...because..." Cracks shot from her voice box to the underside of her tongue and just articulating the rest of the sentence would have been like walking barefoot across a desert of fire.

Troy cocked his head to the side and Gabriella jolted when she felt him grasp her hand. His fingers were strong and warm. The sympathy and comprehension in his cool, blue eyes rehydrated her throat but more importantly they told her that she didn't need to say anything else.

"I'm sorry." They were words that so many people had offered up in an inadequate attempt at comforting her. He didn't mean them like that. "I'm sorry I pushed you. You don't need to tell me everything, not today, anyway."

In the background the music began to reach a crescendo and plummet towards its resolution. "I don't like talking about my past because I just feel so...broken..."

She felt so broken but they way that Troy was looking at her and making her feel promised that perhaps she wouldn't always be.

Leaning back with his weight supported on his free arm, Troy shook his hair from his bangs before sending a considered, insistent look in her direction. "You aren't broken. If people think that it's because they don't know how to read what they're looking at. You aren't broken, Gabriella." She gulped and his determination tugged her chin down to nod. "You're hurting but that's something that one day won't stop you from living your life." The smile that Troy sent in her direction should have clashed with the solemnity of his tone.

It didn't.

Gabriella found her own lips desperately willing themselves to curve upwards and a forgotten giggle seeped over their edges. "This is insane. You don't even know me."

She tried to hide under her eyelashes at the admission but Troy squeezed her hand and drew her eyes back to his face. "I know enough, Gabriella. I know that you hate Thursdays. Your favourite colour is blue and you have an embarrassing obsession with the Backstreet Boys. I know that you've read Steinbeck's 'Sweet Thursday' and that you pay enough attention when you do read to recognise when someone is trying to make themselves sound more interesting by stealing quotations from novels. I know that you drink strong, black coffee – and that's a key thing to know about somebody you're going to be friends with. I know that you're passionate, because you put so much into your writing and get so upset when your muse won't cooperate. I know that your smile is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen." He blushed and chuckled when her own face adopted a pink hue. "I know that you make me blush without having to say a word. You've moved around a lot and are lost, I know that. But I also know that you aren't broken because you are warm and because you're here with me tonight." He took a deep-breath. "I'm rambling again – you do that to me too- but I think the past is just something that's shaped you, not something that defines you. Most of all I know that I want to know more about you. I want to see you smile and laugh because I can just tell that's how you were always supposed to be. I know the important things."

For a moment the vast green of the park disappeared. The packed skyline sunk into the ground and the unobtrusive noise of the orchestra dimmed into silence. Gabriella looked up and she saw him.

She saw Troy and she finally knew that her past was just a history. It wasn't who she was.

It most certainly wasn't who she would be.

Don't you cry tonight
Rest your weary eyes
Cuz all that you are
Is broken inside
It's nothing you could change
It's nothing you could hide
It's nothing you could hide

Pink flowers and bows
That's all you should know
And summer days

Cuz all that you are
Is beautiful child
But they'll never know
They'll never know