I felt this chapter was kind of rushed, but I found no way of fixing it besides rewriting it, and we all know how long that will postpone updates. So, this is how it turned out. Actually, I realized after going back and rereading the entire story, that I left out a key event in this chapter to begin with and had to go and write it back into this and the next chapter. So, yeah, I feel kind of dumb now... Anyways, enjoy!
Chapter X: What a Coincidence
How could he try something like this when he knew how important today was to me?
A solemn, and not to mention incredibly confused, Gabriella returned to her room to find Taylor waiting uncertainly at the door, with a look that resembled a spring ready to uncoil. The second Gabriella had the door open, she found her best friend with her arms flung around her own neck.
"I'm so sorry," were the words that rushed into her ear, while Gabriella's body stiffened. "I never meant for any of this to escalate this far… I've missed you so much! You have to tell me everything! I can't believe I'm so stubborn... Can you ever forgive me?" The words were a jumble, but Gabriella got the point.
"It's… fine…" she replied carefully, blinking in astonishment. "I mean, we're both really stubborn sometimes."
"I'll say," Taylor shook her head grimly, pulling Gabriella back inside their dorm room. "So, how was your day out?" It seemed she was dying for some sort of subject change. Strange as it was, how they had made up so quickly, it seemed to Gabriella that it the way best friends fight. Nothing seriously confrontational, just silence. It was the worst kind of silence. Maybe Troy had been right after all.
"It was good until the end," she tried to calm herself in front of Taylor's questioning gaze. "He… asked me what we could've been if we had never gotten off to such a rough start." The words came out so fast, they were more of a flood of syllables, but somehow, Taylor managed to catch all of them.
"So?" She raised her eyebrows. It was strange how awkward it had been in front of Taylor that morning, and now she was being herself once more. Well, to say the least, it was still a little bit awkward. Apparently, though, Gabriella was the only one feeling it.
"It's just… Both of us know what the initial goal was," Gabriella fell back onto the couch with her head in her hands. "It's so difficult… Why did he want to complicate things now?"
"It's only complicating if you look at it that way," Taylor smiled weakly, hoping to cheer her friend up. "Let's not think that way now. You have a big meeting to get ready for."
Gabriella glanced at the time. There was still plenty of time for her to get ready.
"I have tons of time, Taylor."
"Not on my watch," Taylor put her hands on her hips. "Now, go get dressed. I'll meet you in the bathroom. We can play catch-up talk later."
"But - " Gabriella began, shocked. Now, it seemed as if the entire silence issue had never taken place. To unknowing eyes, they could've been giggling over boys that morning, instead of strategically ignoring each other.
"Now," her best friend warned. That was all it took for Gabriella to walk into her bedroom and start filing through her closet.
There wasn't much to choose from, since she had two extreme forms of dressing: her normal every-day clothes and her dresses. She did own some longer skirts, but it was a nice day and discomfort was out of the question. So, since she decided that high heels were completely out of the question, she picked out a darker, yet newer, pair of Capri pants and one of her tank tops. Nothing extreme, as she had promised herself. It was just a meeting of two friends.
She realized this was a grave mistake the second she walked into the bathroom. It looked like Taylor's old bathroom had looked the afternoon before prom. The second clue she got was Taylor's highly disapproving stare she received once her best friend turned around.
"Do I really need to act like your mother again?" She asked as Gabriella, wide-eyed, wordlessly shook her head. "Well, I think I do, because you are not going in that."
"This is all I have!" Gabriella defended while Taylor ignored her and took her arm, pulling her best friend back to her closet.
After a few minutes of shuffling through the depths of Gabriella's closet, Taylor pulled away with a triumphant "Aha!"
"What?" Gabriella craned her neck when her best friend pulled the hanger out.
"This!" Taylor shoved the item into Gabriella's hands.
"No." She said defiantly.
"Why not?" Crooking her head to the side, Taylor gazed at the object. A denim skirt, fanning out a few inches down, that was a little shorter than knee-length. "You've never worn it."
"Because every time I sit down, you can see right up it!" Gabriella waved her arms around wildly, like the world would end if someone were to see up her skirt. Taylor rolled her eyes.
"Then don't sit down."
"You're not helping."
Taylor simply grinned, returning to her rummaging of Gabriella's closet. In a much shorter amount of time than it had taken her to find the skirt, she produced a modest navy blue shirt with some intricate beadwork on the front.
"Better?" She asked bluntly, raising an eyebrow. Gabriella nodded slowly, still a little hazed from the idea of actually wearing the skirt.
Without a word, Taylor put the shirt in her friend's hands and left. Reluctantly, Gabriella changed into her given clothes, thinking briefly of ways to escape through the window. When each idea consisted of falls from various heights, she stopped thinking about it altogether.
With a last glace toward the window, Gabriella walked slowly from her room and turned into the shared bathroom with a sigh. This was going to be interesting...
--
"I'm a genius, aren't I?"
One hour, three hairstyles, two arguments, and countless refusals later, Taylor eyed Gabriella's transformation into what she called 'date mode.' Gabriella, her mouth almost dangling open, was staring at the girl in the mirror, whom she refused to admit was her reflection. She honestly hadn't expected such a transformation when Taylor had turned the chair around earlier.
"If you keep your mouth open like that, you're going to drool and get it all over your skirt," Taylor said, watching in half-amusement as her best friend abruptly shut her mouth. Gabriella was still heavily transfixed on the curious stare of the girl in the mirror.
This girl was most certainly not Gabriella Montez.
Her shirt, though with a small neck, clung to her and accented her torso in all the right places, also making the exposed skin of her arms glow in comparison. The skirt, even as displeasing the idea of wearing it was, accented the tan on her legs. But the most amazing of all, was her face.
Two deep eyes gazed back at Gabriella, with supported only a thin layer of eyeliner and a shiny layer of lip-gloss. Improvising for the rest of her make-up was her hair. Thick curls tumbled down the side of her face and to her shoulders – much bouncier than she would usually fix them. To top it all off, a shimmering layer of hairspray was still drying, promising to keep the curls in place no matter what.
All in all, it was the dressiest 'casual' look that Gabriella had ever sported.
"Well?" Taylor waited impatiently for a response.
"You have a promising future as a cosmetologist," was the only response that she could come up with. It was still too hard to look away from the mysterious girl looking back from the reflection.
"Ew, no," Taylor wrinkled her nose. "I am not going to be a forty-year-old woman with insanely tall hair and an obnoxious chewing gum habit."
"Not all of them are," Gabriella replied in their defense, finally tearing her eyes away from the mirror and strolling out of the bathroom to sit down on the couch. She shifted uneasily, pulling the skirt down a little lower to help cover more of her legs.
"I know," Taylor nodded, ignoring Gabriella's attempts to make the skirt modest, "but that's what usually happens."
Gabriella shrugged before leaning back to rest her head on the couch.
"Careful!" Taylor hissed when her best friend started leaning back onto the couch. Gabriella shot up, eyes growing wide. "That hairspray can hold through rain and snow, but don't you dare test it against weight!"
There was a second of silence that it took her best friend to let the words sink in.
Finally, Gabriella's shoulders relaxed a bit and let out a sigh of relief, "You didn't have to scare me like that, you know. The way you said that made it sound like I was about to sit on some ancient artifact, not screw up a few curls."
"I worked long and hard on those curls, thank you very much," Taylor huffed.
"And I do thank you for that," Gabriella reassured with a pleased sigh. "Maybe having a motherly best friend isn't so bad after all."
All Taylor could do was laugh at the statement. She fell down on the couch beside her best friend.
"It's good to have you back," she sighed. "No matter how much I don't like the way things are going, I really can't risk losing my best friend over it."
Gabriella pulled her friend into another hug. "I know. I worried about it constantly."
"Nice to know I'm not the only one prone to overreactions," Taylor sheepishly smiled as they pulled apart.
"In fact," Gabriella noted, "I fell asleep at the movies because I was thinking about this whole ordeal all last night."
"No way," Taylor's eyes widened. She received a nod from her friend. As she saw Gabriella's mouth open to begin explaining more, she saw the clock mounted on the wall and gasped. "Gabriella! You need to go!"
She, too, glanced at the clock and bolted up. They had been so caught up in the moments and they had taken longer than originally thought. Taylor shoved Gabriella's purse into her friend's shaking hands as she pulled the door open and hurrying with her friend out the door. There was no time to be anxious now, she just need to get there, and fast.
"I'll ask for the details later," Taylor concluded when they reached the bottom of the stairs in record time. The main doors of the dorm building were busy on the Saturday afternoon, with guests and family milling around the reception area, while students went to meet them.
"I assumed as much," Gabriella giggled. "If things go well, I'll call and see if you want to come to dinner later, okay?"
"Sounds like a plan," Taylor agreed before giving her friend one final shove out the door. With a wave, Gabriella was off. She pushed through some of the crowds, who didn't seem to move quiet fast enough, until she reached the door.
Outside in the warm, sunny atmosphere, she had time to think. In this case, thinking time was very, very bad. Her mood instantly changed – from eager anticipation to nervous worry.
Her feet guided her along the snaking pathways on the campus, taking step after step without much connection to her brain. Could it really be that she was nervous? Anyone would be nervous, really – this was the friend in the opposite sex that she had always wanted – but was this sinking feeling going to ruin everything? Would she really bolt off in the other direction if her feet would listen to her brain?
Every 'what if' question she could conjure up – especially the bad ones – drown her mind in the horrors of what might await when she reached her destination.
What if he was much older than her? What if he thought her skirt was too short? What if he didn't even show up, again? What if she wasn't what he expected?
The biggest question, though, was what if he was already taken? There might already be a girl out there who had been lucky enough to catch him available.
Gabriella had lectured herself during the hour-long bathroom imprisonment with Taylor that she shouldn't expect anything right away. They hadn't even seen each other face-to-face! She couldn't expect to pull and Juliet and fall into some man's arms that she never really knew. Still, she would feel so much more comfortable if he was single. Outside relationships could complicate things, and she had already received her fair share of drama in high school.
Which, somehow, in all of this, brought her back to Troy Bolton. How he tied into this complex mess was a mystery, but Gabriella knew that he was in her life now. The lines and boundaries that usual friendships consisted of didn't seem to apply to them – it was like they had known each other for years.
The clearing came into view and Gabriella's stomach flip-flopped, and her breathing became unsteady. Her mind was a jumble, and it was clear it would stay that way until the moment of truce arrived. Yet, another, more agonizing 'what if' came to mind.
What if he wasn't the person that he had acted towards her? Could he really be a fake? He knew so much… she didn't know how someone could pull off such a convincing lie and get away with it for so long. Sure, she had always been a trusting person…
Gabriella swallowed hard when the reached the fountain. Not one person was in sight, so she took a spot to stand at the base of the fountain, following Taylor's earlier advice to not sit down in the skirt.
She purposefully didn't look into the waters – she still couldn't believe that she really was the same person as the reflection – and her eyes wandered around the cobblestone paved circle, lined with benches. A bicycler passed by a few moments later, nodding in Gabriella's general direction. She saw nothing about him that could resemble he was Baskethead.
The one thing she was looking for was a book – A Rose for Melinda, to be exact, like last time – which he had promised to bring to distinguish himself. No little pink book was anywhere on the biker as he rode off in another direction.
Suddenly, Gabriella felt someone's presence. It was very instantaneous – one minute she was alone, one minute she knew someone was there.
It must be him.
Her heart hammered in her chest, so loud that she hoped that he didn't hear. The butterflies sped up
She saw a long shadow approach behind her, revealing a tall figure as they walked toward her. Before she could turn around, before she could speak, or even before she could perceive the event that was taking place, a familiar voice came to her ear. It was a low, sweet voice that chuckled as it began.
"Well, well, what a coincidence."
Yeah, I know you guys hate me. But if it cheers you up, the next chapter is ridiculously long ;)
