This one's a bit shorter. It was another that was originally part of a much longer chapter that I broke into two parts. Hope you enjoy.
Sharpay knew that she had to take action immediately, so she hurried to her room, changed into more comfortable shoes, and slipped out of the house and into her car. Soon, she reached Chad's house and was extremely pleased to find that no cars were in the driveway, so she got out of the car and went around the house to his back porch. Over spring break, Chad's family had taken a vacation to visit family, and Ryan had housesat for them. From this, she had learned that the Danforths kept a key under their back doormat.
Making sure that no one was watching, she quietly bent down and was delighted to find the key. But before entering the house, Sharpay paused for a second. She had done some selfish things in her life, and particularly in the past couple weeks. But not only was this morally wrong by any and every standard, it wasn't even legal. Just when she thought she might turn back, the words that Chad had said at the mall echoed in her ears, and she didn't care about anything else but making him suffer. For a few minutes she even forgot that this was really just a small part of a larger plot to win Troy's affections. All that mattered was finding something to prove her suspicions about Chad's hidden sexuality, and then using that to torture him as much as she possibly could.
After confirming that the house was indeed empty, Sharpay found Chad's room and creeped in. She looked in his dresser drawers and under his bed, but found nothing out of the ordinary. And then she saw his laptop sitting on his desk, and somehow Sharpay just knew that this was promising. After turning on the computer, she went to his internet, and looked in his history file. Unfortunately there was nothing unexpected to be found there, mainly just some random sports sites.
So she decided to check in his e-mail inbox, after realizing that he was already logged in. Though most of it was uninteresting junk mail and what appeared to be discussions with various members of the basketball team about organizing workout sessions over the summer, she saw one email that intrigued her. She didn't recognize who it was from, but the subject line said Re: Doubts. Deciding this was as promising as anything, Sharpay opened the email, and quickly saw that it was exactly what she needed. Just from scanning the email, she could tell that it was actually an onoing conversation with the first email being from a few months ago, even before he had started dating Taylor. Though the emails didn't say how they had met, the recipient seemed to be a college student that had come out of the closet a few years ago. Most of the early emails involved Chad asking how the other boy knew for sure that he was gay, and how he had shared the information with his friends and family. From there, things only got better. About a month into their correspondence, they each included a picture of themselves in the email, and in the next e-mail Chad complimented the other boy's attractiveness, not showing very much restraint. Chad's embarrassment at the idea of other people seeing something so incriminating made Sharpay happier than she had been in months.
From there, the emails turned more serious. It seemed that Chad had decided that he was gay but was still not ready to come out, so the other boy proposed that he find a girlfriend to hide things for a while. Sharpay noticed that this email was written about the time of the callbacks for the Winter Musical, so it had to have been just before Chad asked out Taylor. Chad's most recent email was perhaps the best. It described, in fairly explicit detail, a new crush that Chad had developed, and how this was making it even more difficult to pretend to be interested in Taylor. The email didn't mention the crush by name, but from the description Sharpay was positive that he was referring to Ryan.
Sharpay decided that these emails were more than what she needed to bring Chad down a few notches, so she took screenshots of some of the more incriminating emails, being sure to keep his computer's wallpaper (the East High basketball logo) in the background on some of them. But disaster almost struck just as Sharpay was emailing herself the screenshots. She heard the sound of the front door opening, and the voices of who she thought were Chad's father and stepmother. Quickly closing the laptop, Sharpay knew that she couldn't go out the back, so she would have to climb out the window. Thanking every deity that she could think of for the fact that Chad's room was both on the first floor and contained several decent sized windows, Sharpay got rid of any signs that she had been in the room and opened the window as quietly as possible. After climbing out of the window and shutting it behind her, Sharpay went as quickly and quietly as she could to her car, which she had parked about a block away from the house, and was very pleased with her foresight, since there would have been no way to get to her car without being noticed if she had left the car in front of the Danforth house. She knew that she wasn't totally safe, even as she started driving back to her house. She hadn't replaced the key, and the back door was still unlocked. But those were small details. She could easily replace the key tomorrow morning as she still had it with her, and hopefully his parents would just assume that they had hoped to lock the door. But even if they did notice something was amiss, Sharpay knew that it would be worth it.
Sharpay returned to her house at about one in the morning, finding the party to be slowly winding down. There were still quite a few people there, but the dancing had stopped, and most people either looked like they would be leaving soon or had passed out from too much excess and it appeared that they would be there for the night. Normally, the idea of a dozen or so people sleeping in her house without invitation would have infuriated Sharpay, but at the moment she didn't care about any of that. After all, Chad Danforth's secrecy and dignity now lay in her inbox.
Hope you liked it, let me know your thoughts.
Thanks for reading.