A/N: Okay, I realized this when I finished the chapter: in all of my stories, Troy has a different job, while I usually keep Gabriella at bay with writing… At one point, Troy was a photographer, another time he worked for a magazine, and now he's an artist. :) I'm sorry for the inconsistency. I just have this tiny fixation with his career possibilities, as I've never seen him as the NBA type. Just my… opinion, I guess. Anyway, I suppose this note serves very little purpose, but consider it a fun fact. -love- Desireé
Lizzie- You do have a point. :) But don't worry, this story isn't going anywhere.
Real Fun Fact: I just watched The Departed for the second time. I'm totally pro-peace and everything, but Leonardo DiCaprio is just so good at making everything he does (in this case, shooting) so… hot. Okay, this fun fact also serves little purpose, I just like inserting them every now and then.
Chapter Three, Hot Chocolate
How many times do I have to try to tell you
That I'm sorry for the things I've done
But when I start to try to tell you
That's when you have to tell me
Hey... this kind of trouble's only just begun
-'Why,' Annie Lennox
Like New York, New Jersey had cold winters, too. Gabriella felt a chill run down her spine when she walked down the stairs into the shop one morning sometime in the early December days that followed the night of the conversation Harris and Arielle had. Ginny followed her unofficial owner, mewling like she had nothing else to do. In Sampson, this was most likely accurate. "What is it, Gin?" Gabriella cooed maternally as she drew the curtains across the front windows of the Witching Hour. Flipping the sign from closed to open, she stood back to survey the outlet. Still just as erratic as always.
The front door opened minutes later, and while she expected to see Oliver, instead she saw an unfamiliar face. Small town, she mused silently, I know everyone. Who is this? "Good morning," the person, a tall woman in a pea coat, said brightly. "My husband and I are driving through town, and I heard this is quite a wonderful store. I'm glad I stopped by, the name outside was quite interesting."
"Ah," Gabriella responded blandly. She didn't feel like socializing. "There's a lot to choose from, not much organization, though. If you need anything, I'll be at my desk." She resumed to the dusty wooden chair in the corner, blowing off the layer of grime that had collected over the years of neglect. Paperwork surrounded her on both sides. Where to start first? "Bottoms up," she mumbled.
TYWY
For Arielle, the lone picture of Gabriella gave little satisfaction. As the holiday season prolonged, she was granted a new idea to further her investigation of the woman's past and life with Troy. When she told Harris the plan, his jaw clenched and his face paled slightly. "It isn't a good or even likely scheme," he warned her, grimacing as she daringly picked up the phone and let the dial tone moan for a second. "Ugh, come on, Ari, it's Sunday, don't bother them, they're probably busy."
These words didn't faze Arielle. She flipped through her father's address book, ignoring the celebrity contacts recorded in Cassandra's loopy penmanship. "Danforth, Danforth… Ah! Here we are. Chad and Taylor Danforth. You know, they were so nice to us when we were younger. Why didn't we invite them over more often?"
As his sister dialed the Westchester number, Harris glanced out the window tentatively, tapping his fingers against the glass. Troy was still saying goodbye to Cassandra and her parents, two older people who seemed especially impatient at the constant paparazzi flashes coming from the bushes. They would be gone for two weeks, away at some expensive resort that hadn't interested Troy. "Ari, seriously I doubt Dad is going to be too thrilled you randomly called up his friends from high school. I mean, it's like an invasion of privacy."
This was also ignored by Arielle. She covered the phone's mouthpiece with her hand and squealed, "It's ringing! It's ringing!" She bounced on her feet for a moment and beamed. "I haven't seen them in ages. You think they're any different?"
Before Harris could yet again express his distaste for the situation, the line finally picked up; it was the message machine. "Hey! You've reached Chad, Taylor, and their fuzzy pet chinchilla, Skittles! Neither of us are home, and Skittles probably can't work a phone, so leave a message and we'll get back to you!" This, obviously, from Chad, but it didn't end there. Soon Taylor could be heard. "Goodness, Chad, delete that monstrosity of a message now. What if my family calls and—" Beep.
A moment passed where Arielle wasn't sure what to say. She bit her lip and stared at Harris, who waited to see what would happen. Finally she spoke, "Um, hi, this is Ari Bolton. You probably don't remember me—I'm Troy's daughter? I, uh, just had a question, if you could call me back, that would be great. Um, thanks again. Bye." She hung up and her eyes lit up. "This might work, Harris! I think they can tell us about Mom!"
The scene outside progressed. The boy frowned at his day so far. It was barely noon and already Arielle was carrying out her duty of causing mayhem. "Stop calling her 'Mom,'" he sighed irritably. Looking down at the street, he saw Cassandra & Co. finally pile into her limousine, the horn tooting as they drove away and Troy waved. "I think I can speak on behalf of Dad when I say Gabriella is not our mother."
"Then who is our mother?" Arielle shot back, tapping her foot expectantly. "I can't call Cassandra my mother—you can't either, and you know that, Harris, just as well as I do." The front door opened and Troy entered, looking particularly tired and certainly in no mood to learn of his daughter's antics, which was fine with her.
In spite of his fatigue, he smiled sincerely. "Well, Cass and her parents will be gone for a while. What do you guys feel like doing?" The phone rang as he finished his sentence, and with a glance at the screen, confusion set in as he raised his eyebrows. "What area code is—"
"I've got it!" Arielle screamed, darting past her father and seizing the phone from his hands. He watched her go as she ran down the hall, into her room, closing the door behind her. The ringing soon stopped.
Troy eyed Harris. "Anything going on that I should know about?" he asked. The black-haired boy smiled with a doe-eyed expression, rocking on is feet as he nervously shook his head.
"Nothing," he said anxiously, twiddling his thumbs. "Probably just a boy from school." Stupid, stupid, stupid, Harris chastised himself. No one at school would drive out all the way from Westchester.
A laugh came from Troy, and his son sighed with relief. The man bought it, somehow and some way. "Oh, right. I forgot she's thirteen now and she likes boys." He winced at the thought of his little girl dating. There had been several household—er, lofthold—arguments on the romance-policy; Cassandra advised Troy have Arielle wait. This had profoundly upset the girl, who put on her angry face and gave everyone the silent treatment for a week. Sometimes fatherhood still scared Troy, even though he had fifteen years behind him, half of those years on his own. No one was perfect.
"You all right, Dad?" Harris asked, seeing the feeble expression of the other's face.
"What? Oh, yeah, I'm fine. Just tired," Troy offered. "Hungry, too. You hungry? Maybe I can make you some lunch."
His eyes filled with interest, Harris followed his father into the kitchen. "Since when do you cook, Dad?" he asked.
Watching her all those years, Troy thought, his heart's stitched wounds splitting free again. "Oh, I just picked up a few tricks here and there," he finally said. "So, you like chicken or turkey?"
Arielle has a speakerphone call with Chad and Taylor.
There was hesitance in Chad's voice. "You know, Ari, maybe you should ask your dad these things. We're not exactly A material here. I'm sure Troy would know a lot more than we do."
For what seemed like the tenth time, Arielle sighed. "But that's why I'm calling you guys. My dad acts like Gabriella, our real mother, never existed. But I know she did! I have a picture of her! And the back has the date, and it says 'Autumn Social.'"
A gasp came through the line, this time from Taylor. "I remember that," she said softly. "Kelsi took the pictures with her dad's old Polaroid and gave them out to everyone. She—Gabriella, I mean—s-she's wearing a red dress, isn't she?"
"Yes!" Arielle exclaimed. "And she's looking off to the side, at someone. It's my dad, isn't it? She's looking at him and smiling."
"I-I don't know, but I think so. Gosh, they were always together, so it wouldn't be a stretch to say it was Troy." Taylor hummed quietly. "They were inseparable."
There was a moment where Arielle felt almost sick. How could something that sounded so wonderful, so harmonious fall apart? Was it destiny, or did someone have to decide, with their own free will, to ruin the magic? "They really were in love, weren't they?" she asked, her voice nearly inaudible.
"Yes," Chad replied. "They were." He sounded penitent.
"Well, what happened? Where did she go, why did she leave?" Arielle asked, her words trembling. "Did she love Harris and me, too? Did she want to leave us?" Several questions rambled through her mind, begging to be answered after so many years of silence.
There was faint arguing between Chad and Taylor for a minute. They whispered gently, letting Arielle wait, wanting and wishing. Finally, a voice came through. Taylor. "Honey? Listen, Ari, I'm the last person you'll ever know to invite themselves anywhere, but this is a long story. D-do you think—do you think we could drive out there to meet you? You may want to sit down for this."
TYWY
It was, one could say, a father's job to be suspicious, as it was a teenager's to be nosy. Troy glanced tentatively at his daughter as she reemerged in the living room, holding the phone with a smile on her face. "Who were you talking to?" the man asked her, peeking at his watch out of habit. The second hand was approaching the twelve.
Arielle shook her head and set the phone down on the counter, thankful she had remembered to delete the Danforths' number from the recent call log. "Oh, Daddy, it was n-nothing, really. Um, actually—it was a boy, f-from school." Sibling telepathy, perhaps? Thank goodness. "And I was wondering if, possibly, I could g-go out with him to the movies tonight? Please?" Okay, so it was very much a lie, but she was still asking permission to go out. That had to count for something, right?
Troy squinted. "Do I know him?" he asked. Certainly he had seen all the prep students whenever he picked up Arielle and Harris after school. Granted there were always paparazzi snooping around, especially when Cassandra was with him, but of course he had seen the people his children knew good and well. "Is he a boy in your class?"
The two children glanced at one another. Arielle scratched her chin and shrugged. "He's just a friend from school," she said. "You probably wouldn't recognize the name."
"I'll go with her," Harris suggested. "Just to be safe. I can invite one of my friends and then it'll be a group date. Come on, Dad, we won't be out long. What time will you guys, uh, meet, Ari?"
"Five o'clock," she replied, staring at him with a balmy expression. "Please, Daddy?"
The sad thing was that Troy couldn't even tell they were lying, although there were several eminent context clues that hinted their fabricated story. For instance, both teenagers mentioned 'friends' several times, as if they had many, however they remained among the outcast society at the prepatory school Cassandra had recommended when they first began looking for junior highs. In spite of the famous family background, the children didn't mix well with snobby upper crust crowd. Arielle always insisted it was because their 'true parents weren't from that world of bad attitudes.' "Well," Troy said, swallowing, "I guess if you guys go as a group, it will be all right. But keep your phones on at all times and stay together. Okay?"
They declined his offer to play chauffeur, insisting they could walk. Some part of Troy was crushed as he watched them throw on their coats and scarves before Harris grabbed his lonely loft key and walked out with Arielle. Their father watched them from the loft's front room, calling as they got on the elevator, "Look both ways before you cross the street!" They waved slightly as the steel doors slid shut, and the elevator light turned off.
A coffee shop seems like the perfect place for Taylor and Chad to reconnect with the Bolton offspring.
"Oh my gosh!" Taylor exclaimed when the teenagers, taller and leaner and older than they had been since she had last seen them, came into view. She ran and enveloped them each in a hug, declaring how different they looked. Arielle smiled and twirled in a circle, while Harris blushed and stuck his hands in his pockets. "You're so grown up!" she raved, hugging them for a second time.
The wind quickly died down and the sun peered out from behind the clouds. "Good to see you guys," Chad said warmly as he came up behind his wife. "Wow, you both look more and more like Troy and—" He stopped shortly, his eyes sweeping from Harris to Arielle and then back to Harris. Taylor cleared her throat and looked to her husband, patting his chest with a gloved hand before she smiled at the children.
"Well, it's certainly chilly out here, let's go inside and get ourselves some hot cocoa, yes? I think I'll have mine with marshmallows." The woman took her husband's hand and walked inside the café, taking a cozy corner booth for the four of them. "I haven't been to New York for so long. I think the last time was…" Her voice faded. The last time had been after Gabriella left, when Troy was a little, well, unstable.
Harris seemed slightly uncomfortable, but Arielle launched into another explosion of questions right away, talking animatedly with her hands and facial expressions. "Did you know our mother?" she asked, and silently noted her brother did not correct her this time. Maybe he was getting used to the idea. "In high school? What was she like? Was she a jockette, a geek, an artsy hippie? Was she popular? Were she and my dad a cute couple?" Harris nudged her and told her to slow down when she spoke. At this, she blushed, but the people across the table only smiled.
The waitress stopped by to ask if they needed anything. Chad ordered a round of hot chocolate while Taylor carefully evaluated her responses to the questions. "Yes, we did know Gabriella in high school," she said, clasping her hands. "We were actually best friends. I met her after she was the new girl in school; oh Gabriella was very smart, very talented, very personable. In fact, Chad and I worked against breaking her and Troy up at one point. But that was the very beginning of the story, when we all had a considerably little idea of how truly in love they were with one another." She sighed blissfully. "We were all quite tightly packed as friends. But after high school, things began to change. Chad and I migrated east, just like they did, but we settled for a more suburban area in Westchester and they liked New York City."
A tray of mugs was set in the middle of their table, and each of them reached for their respective drink. Chad picked up the story. "Troy got interested in art after they moved out here. He was a huge basketball hotshot back in the day. I was, too, I guess," he added when his wife smirked at him, "but he was the star of the team. Give him ten basketballs, he'd make the shot every time from anywhere on the court." A smile spread across his face, as he looked out the window, grinning reminiscently at his past. "Well, granted Gabriella wasn't there to watch. The first time she came to cheer for us at practice, he missed every basket. His dad—your grandpa Jack was our coach, see—kept yelling at him to get his head back in the game, but Troy went all Shakespeare on us that day and said his head was in the clouds, and would forever stay that way. I guess all things changed, though." He sipped his drink ruminatively and leaned back against the seat.
"How did they meet?" Arielle asked, leaning forward. "In high school, of course, but what happened? They must have been just the cutest sight ever, right?" Harris flicked her arm and she stuck her tongue out at him.
"Yes," Taylor said, her lips warming up to a smile. "Well, actually, they met before that, on vacation. And, coincidentally, she ended up being transferred to our school the next semester. But at that point in time, we were all adamant about cliques remaining within their cliques. Gabriella was the brainiac, and Troy was the jock. It should have stayed that way, we thought at first, but we were shown differently when they auditioned for the school musical."
Eyes widened, Arielle smacked her brother's shoulder, and he mimicked her, face shocked in feigned delight. "They were in a play together!" she squealed and he rolled his eyes. "So what happened, did they play lovers or something?"
Chad smirked. "Let's rewind for a second," he said. "It was all an accident, Troy insisted, they just were singing and the drama teacher liked what she heard. They competed against the Evans twins for the roles—"
"Sharpay? We know her! She's worked with Cassandra before!" Arielle cried, getting more and more excited by the second.
"—and in the end, Chad and I realized the error of our ways by trying to split them up," Taylor finished fondly, smiling at her husband, "because that meant splitting us up, too." She turned to the children. "The play was the first major severing of cliques. Gabriella and Troy were, basically, legends for what they did and because they remained themselves after dating. She still liked math and he liked basketball. And they still loved each other."
The fascination was striking in Arielle's crystal blue eyes. She rested her chin and her palm and let out a sigh. "Why did she leave, then?" she asked. She hesitated before asking, "Did she stop loving our dad?"
"No, that would be impossible to do," Taylor replied. "There is a point in life when a person loves someone so much, there is no way to ever go back on that emotion, regardless of what happened between them or to them. I think Gabriella loved Troy very much, she just couldn't—she couldn't stick around to see what would happen."
Now Harris looked up. "What do you mean?" he inquired, wiping off some whipped cream from his chin.
"It's just that he was still playing basketball and she was still writing, and they were trying to figure out what to do with their lives," Chad explained. "He discovered art and she co-owned a little boutique in Times Square, but I guess she wanted more to be done in a shorter time. He, honestly, couldn't give her what she wanted, but Troy didn't realize that until she left."
Both children were quiet. Arielle unfolded and folded her napkin over again, before looking back up at the people sitting across from them. "Did she—" Her voice cracked, and she paused for a moment to take a breath. "Did she love us?"
Taylor looked at Chad and Chad looked at Taylor, their mouths open slightly as if they each were trying to rally some sensible words. "Honey, we weren't really… We weren't really in touch with Troy and Gabriella after they had Harris. They were having some disagreements, and we were in college, out in Westchester," Taylor said, "But I know they were very happy when Harris was born. And I'm sure they were happy when you were born, too." She reached over to rest her hand on Arielle's, and the girl looked at her with glossy eyes. Glossy, aqua eyes.
The waitress asked if they'd like anything else. Chad mumbled for more hot chocolate, and no one at the table protested. Arielle reached into her bag and rummaged through its contents for a moment before picking out the Polaroid. Chad's face went a shade whiter, and Taylor gasped. "It's her," she whispered softly. "Oh my god, it's her, Chad."
"Don't you have any pictures of her?" Harris asked, thanking the waitress as she gave them the second round of refreshments.
"Of course, so many pictures from being best friends in high school. But I've had them all these years, nothing new. That's why this—this is special," Taylor said, taking the picture from Arielle's hands. "I remember this night so clearly."
His arm around her shoulder, Chad grinned. "Yeah, I remember Ms. Darbus was the only school chaperone that really gave a damn about the rules," he laughed. Taylor ran a finger beneath her lashes and sniffled, carefully cradling the picture as if it were a lost treasure, delicate and antique.
"I missed her when she left, I still miss her now," she said with a regretful tone. Handing the picture back to Arielle, she smiled. "So I assume your father doesn't know you two are meeting us here." The teenagers shook their head. "Well, let's keep it that way. I think Chad and I should get back to knowing him on our own terms."
"He thinks I'm on a date right now," Arielle explained, "And Harris is 'supervising.'" She put finger quotes around the last word.
This time Chad laughed. "His dad did that to his sister April, despite the fact that Troy was a year younger and wouldn't have the means to pay attention to anything," he said, his lips curled up in a smirk.
"You guys want to see a movie?" Taylor offered after a silent moment. "It's only been forty-five minutes, I'm sure your father is smart enough to realize a date would be longer—a good one, at least." Arielle smiled and Harris did, too; it was uncanny how much one looked like their father and the other Gabriella.
As Chad paid for the drinks, the children and Taylor filed outside. "Thanks again for coming to meet us," Arielle said pleasantly. "I felt like I was in the dark for so many years, especially after our dad married Cassandra." She made a face and the Danforths looked at one another before shrugging slightly as their response.
While they got in line for tickets, Arielle turned to her brother and murmured, "I can't believe Dad never told us any of this! He acted like he and Gabriella hated each other, but it was the opposite!"
"We don't know that," Harris said pointedly, rocking on his heels.
"Oh, I don't see what's your problem, you emotionally incompetent ape," Arielle said with a sneer, but she smiled again. "Don't you care that Dad played basketball? All these years, you could have been shooting hoops with him! Instead of learning about historical paintings." She held up her nose as if an obnoxious fume drifted around them.
"Ari, I don't have one athletic bone in my body," the dark-haired boy replied, watching Taylor speak to the theater employee through the window. "I couldn't even play handball in the third grade when we had the big tournament."
"But you could have. Maybe with Dad as a coach, like Grandpa Jack was his coach, you could have been a huge star, like he was. And if Gabriella stuck around," Arielle added, "maybe I'd be smart and talented like she was."
Harris put his arm around his sister. "You are smart and talented, Ari," he told her.
She shrugged beneath his grip and sighed. "Yeah, but I wish she could have been there to tell me that, too. You're my brother, you have to say it. With her… I guess I think it would have been a little more genuine."
A/N: Phew! I think that's the longest chapter I've ever written. Sorry it revolved mostly around Arielle and Harris. I'm aiming for a more Gabriella/Troy centre by the next few chapters. Thanks guys for sticking with me. The story should pick up very soon. Reviews, friends! -love- Desireé