Beware, a pretty decent chapter awaits you, lol. I honestly don't think it's that bad, which is saying something since I'm basically my biggest critic...

I usually don't do this, but this chapter is dedicated to Jelsi4Life, for reasons that are between him and I. All I've gotta say is, thank you. You're the reason this chapter was completed :)

Chapter 22 – Another Confrontation

"Aww, Kelsi! That looks amazing on you!"

Kelsi stepped out of the dressing room, her head down and her feet shuffling forward in little baby steps. She gripped the silky fabric of her ivory ball gown nervously at the ruched hips, biting her lip and looking over the ruffles that were exposed on the left side. The other was draped with a smooth satin overlay that led to the strapless head of the dress. The puffed out hem of the gown came just above her slim ankles, showing off the bright and sparkly silver heels that she was also sporting. The pretty brunette adjusted her black glasses and kept her green eyes on the floor.

"I don't know," she whispered, twisting around in it a little. "Are you sure that the strapless look is for me?"

Sharpay rolled her eyes and scoffed. "Kels, this is me that you're talking to. I can't see you in anything else right now."

Gabriella nodded and added "Yeah, you're invisible self-esteem is starting to show."

Kelsi's shoulders dropped as she switched her eyes from the tiled ground of DEB to her small bust. "I'm serious. I've also got invisible boobs, so what if Jason and I are in the middle of dancing and it slips down?"

Taylor came out of the neighboring dressing room in a sleek and smooth floor-length gown. The sparkly corset that led to the flat black skirt that reached the floor, flowing out around her like a frame for her dazzling legs. "Sweetie, the bra-cups have wires. You'll be fine. Now this, on the other hand," She turned so that her awe-struck friends could view the ensemble completely. "Is something to worry about."

Sharpay's rounded face cocked to the side, checking out the thin material. "It's not that bad, Tay. Just be sure not to twist too much or move too fast. Other than that, it has your name written all over it."

"Oh," Gabriella added again. "And make sure that Chad doesn't get handsy. You know how he gets when he's nervous."

Taylor smiled sarcastically. "Thanks. I'll be sure to remember that."

Kelsi took a brief break from mentally criticizing herself and looked up at Gabriella. "Gabby, why aren't you looking for dresses? Didn't you drag us all out here to begin with?"

Gabriella recalled her conversation with her mother after she had come home from school that day. "My mom showed me her old prom dress that she wore and offered to lend it to me for the night." She smiled at some unknown memory to her friends.

Sharpay's eyes narrowed in curiosity. "Have you tried it on?"

"Yup."

"Give us a summary." The brunette rolled her eyes internally as she heard the unheard words that were really going through Sharpay's head. "How long ago was your mom's prom? I want to know if I can tell people that I personally picked it for you."

Gabriella then sighed dramatically, plopping down on a nearby stool and started her description. "It's a curve-hugging tube that's floor length. The color scheme is definitely for me: black and grey. From the top, the stripes come down diagonally to about the knee and then fade cleanly into black. Honestly, Shar, it's beautiful."

Sharpay's head was still cocked to the side, her eyes looking up at the ceiling the way she always did when she was thinking something over deeply. "Hmm," she finally said. "Looks pretty good…"

"Better in person."

"I'll be the judge of that, Miss Montez." She smiled coyly, making Gabriella mentally shudder at her seemingly unhealthy obsession with fashion. "No doubt about that…" She murmured, averting her gaze back over to a still uneasy Kelsi. "Seriously, Kels, you look stunning. Jason will love it."

Kelsi looked up from behind her naturally long lashes and flashed a small, stunning grin. "Thanks, Gabs. I'm sure you look great in yours, too."

"No problem." The brunette's phone beeped from inside her jean pocket, alarming her in the unusually calm atmosphere of DEB. She flipped it open and read the short, yet confusing text from her brother.

"Do I make a left or a right at the Hilton to get to KP hospital?"

--

Brandon slammed his foot against the brakes of his jet black Honda Accord and stared up at the building that used to be his second home, back in the days when Troy would always send him there. He was agitated with himself for having to ask Gabriella for directions; shouldn't he have already memorized the way? How could he have possibly forgotten? Maybe that was another form of realizing that he'd changed since last year.

The senior stepped out of his car and swung the door shut, taking a deep breath of self-reassurance before stepping towards the square hospital determinedly. It was strange, having to walk in here to visit someone versus it being the other way around. Maybe this was what his mom felt like every time he came home with another broken bone.

When he reached the main desk, he braced his weight on the edge of the black table and smiled kindly at the elderly receptionist. She looked up through her glasses and blinked a few times, inhaling a sharp gasp. "H-hello. Can I help you, young man?"

"Hi," Brandon grinned, "can you direct me to the ICU, please?" He flashed his straight pearly whites again, knowing that they were working the Montez charm against the flustered woman. Once again, his father's extremely attractive genes ceased to disappoint him.

"Do you have a specific patient in mind?" she blushed.

Brandon, as discreetly as possible, inched his already-rolled sleeves further up his thick bicep before pressing his palms back against the desk and pushing down, flexing his broad, muscular arms like he was doing a push-up. "Yes, ma'am. Gabriele Stealcrow? He was admitted just a few days ago."

"Are you a…um…a r-relative?"

Brandon dejectedly sighed, shaking his head slowly. "I'm sorry, I'm just a friend."

The woman's eyes dimmed, almost as if she were disappointed that he would have to leave. "Oh, I'm so sorry. He requested that only family members visit at the moment. Again, I'm extremely sorry." She sounded as if she were sorrier for herself to let this piece of sweet eye-candy go. Brandon seemed to be one of the only good-looking teenagers in the place, aside from the deformed who lost their good looks to stupid accidents, like drunk driving.

Brandon lowered his eyes to the surface of the desk, bowing his head so low that his long, shiny midnight bangs fell in front of them. He then brought it back up by only a fraction of an inch, looking up from his lashes to stare deeply into the nurse's wide brown eyes. He didn't blink for a long while, just slowly watched her internally fall to pieces at his feet and agreeing to the question that Brandon didn't even have to ask. His voice was as low as his head, deep and seductive. Isabelle's soaked, bikini-clad body flashed in his mind suddenly. The bass projected further, proving to his unconscious mind that he was definitely more willing than ever to just throw the blonde down onto his bed and slam the locked door shut.

Stop it, you idiot! He cursed himself. It takes two, remember? She was already half-raped…

"I honestly do think that he considers me family," Brandon whispered. "and I'll just be a few minutes. There's something that I really need to discuss with him, for a while now, actually. Please, just five minutes and I swear I'll be out of here."

He could nearly hear her screaming in her mind, "No, you don't have to go!" She swallowed and, still locking her eyes on his, pointed to the hallway that lead around the corner. Biting his tongue to keep from laughing too hard, he heard her murmur "Fourth door on the left."

"Thank you," Brandon cracked one last smirk before quickly winking and following her directions. He sighed. Sometimes it was just too easy.

However, all humorous thoughts fled from his mind when he crossed the line between the hallway and Gabriele's room. He took a deep breath, expecting the paranoid screams to immediately come his way. The nurses would come pouring in and, after hearing Gabriele's insane cries, have security haul him away without hesitation. That would bust his whole plan. Maybe if he could convince the sophomore to let him talk for just two seconds. Surely James's name would halt the screaming for a few moments.

Oddly enough, the silence was what brought Brandon out of his thoughts and caused him to look up from the tiled floor of the hospital room. His eyebrows flew up when he realized that his presence had gone unnoticed by the battered blonde laying on the white bed, his eyes glued to the flat screen TV on the wall. The remote was curled in his slightly trembling fist, which had a dark green cast wrapped around the forearm. A collection of signatures were already decorating it, which made Brandon suspicious of whether or not he was really accepting only family right now. His thin face was coated with various bandages and band-aids that hid his pale cheeks. They had a translucent feel to them, allowing Brandon the privilege to view the blue veins inside his skin and the hollowness that caused it. His white, polka-dotted hospital gown, hidden from the waist down from the thin blanket, exposed his lean chest and abdomen with a thick medical wrapping around it. In all of Brandon's experience with hospitals, he knew that Gabriele had broken a few bones on each side of his rib cage. His eyes then traveled up to Gabriele's, both damaged and looking extremely painful. He didn't blink for a reason. The left eye was violently bruised and swelled completely shut while the other had a crimson red and yellow coat, the veins poking out through the eyelid and the eyeball red and bloodshot. His chin was being held together by multiple stitches and to finish it off, Gabriele's lip was split from his nostril all the way down to his lip, just like James's. Brandon gave a tiny grin as he thought of them as some kind of friendship scar. He wandered if they were there before they started fighting.

"Wow, you're still alive?"

Gabriele's head swiveled around to face Brandon in the doorway, his eyebrow held high on his forehead and his mouth agape with awe. The tension in the room rose dramatically on the blonde's part when his eyes locked on Brandon's. Brandon just stood there, staring at the victim and waiting for him to overcome his slight shock. After about a minute, Gabriele's surprised eyes glittered into a hateful glare. His jaw locked and his chest tightened, showing off small, skinny pectorals that held nothing against Brandon's puffed-out muscles. "Why? Do you want to finish the job?"

Brandon looked at the ground, ashamed, and pulled up a chair from the wall. When he was about three feet from Gabriele's bed, he placed the chair backwards and plopped down, folding his arms on top of the headrest and sighing. "No, Gabriele, that's not why I came here."

"Then what do you want?" Gabriele spat, his finger discreetly hovering above the paging button. Brandon's eyes flashed to that hand, but ignored it. He wasn't about to say anything to set him off.

"I came to talk about James. I want to learn more about you two."

Gabriele's hand didn't move. If anything, his pointer finger flinched closer to the button. "Then why not just go talk to him?"

"He stopped and talked to me when I was on my way home a few days ago. He told me about the fight that you guys are in right now." From the corner of his eye, Brandon watched Gabriele's hand inch away from the paging button and fall onto his mattress.

Gabriele rolled his eyes and turned away from Brandon. He picked up the TV remote again and looked up at the flat screen, flipping the channels to make himself look busy. "Fantastic. Of course he would gloat…"

Brandon looked to the floor again and tried to think about what to say next. Obviously Gabriele thought that some of this was somehow Brandon's fault and wasn't getting the vibe that Brandon was trying to put out: he wanted to help. However, he thought, maybe it was too early to even try. "He told me about Crystal being in your room." he decided on.

Gabriele's red eye cringed painfully at the girl's name. But nevertheless, he kept up his iron shield. "So?"

"Was she his first girlfriend?" Brandon asked.

Gabriele chuckled lowly and grinned evilly, as if enjoying some kind of private joke. "First and last."

Brandon nodded knowingly and let his eyes wonder over to the wall, then back at the sophomore. "That explains why he didn't notice you were on the wall."

This caused Gabriele to slowly turn his skinny head over to his visitor. For the first time since Brandon arrived, he looked at him without glaring vilely. The anger didn't totally disappear, though. "You don't believe him?" he whispered cautiously.

Brandon shook his head confidently. "You were practically getting raped in your own house. I can see right through that kind of stuff."

"Good," Gabriele turned back to the TV, "at least your not entirely dumb…"

Ignoring the last comment, Brandon continued. "Didn't you tell him what really happened?"

Gabriele huffed and turned his head back to Brandon. "You don't think I've tried? James is hard-headed. He sees something and doesn't try to get all sides of the story. It's like when he first saw you and Troy fight in the hallway two years ago. He was insulting your dad and you beat the living shit out of him. He saw you as Superman. You're his only role model in this world. What you say, he says and what you do, he does. If you told him to swallow a grenade before jumping off a bridge with weights tied to his feet, he'd be dead before he could blink. He sees you as God, Brandon."

Brandon sat there, too stunned to reply for a few moments. He knew that this information should've been expected, since James had already summarized his dreams of becoming just like Brandon some day. He shook his head and softly laughed to himself. "That's not too smart. I'm not even close to perfect."

"I know," Gabriele glared at him again. "That's what I told him. His motto is 'What would Brandon do?'"

"Unless he wants to be a nosy, over-protective know-it-all with an addictive personality and bad temper, he'd be better off just being himself." Brandon rattled off most of his bad qualities in the blink of an eye, considering how high his self-esteem was at the moment.

Gabriele looked over at him with cold, knowing eyes and muttered "Told him that, too…"

Brandon gulped, biting his lip as Gabriele flipped the channel one last time before setting the remote down for good, laying back in his bed and closing his eyes. "You wanna know what I think?"

"Sure…"

The sophomore smiled, flashing his rows of nearly perfect teeth and showing Brandon that the only flaw would be the chipped left front tooth. Brandon held in a gasp when he recognized the injury belonging to James, too. "You're overrated, Montez. Everyone sees you as God's way of coming back to Earth when in reality, you're just like James. Spoiled, arrogant, and self-centered. That's got to be the only reason that you dated Amy Hartzler for all those years and hang out with Troy so much. You can't stand the feeling of being alone and try to cover that fact by showing off your so-called perfect life. And yeah, I know that you saved your girlfriend from getting raped, but who wouldn't have? It's called an adrenaline rush, or more like a cage match for people like you. Troy refused to fight you as long as his cousin was in town, so you had to take out your unnecessary rage on someone else; why not the captain of the football team? The rape just gave you an excuse, didn't it?" The blonde flipped his head to the side and bored holes into Brandon's stunned mocha orbs.

Gabriele's narrowed as he opened his mouth one last time to say "I see right through you, Brandon. If you don't fight anymore, it's just because there's something even worse about you. Trust me; people don't change."

Brandon's mouth had long since closed by then, giving him the opportunity to transfer all of his feelings into his eyes and stare right back at his opponent. Things remained silent, even Gabriele's heavy breathing didn't ring in Brandon's ears. He was entirely too focused on this mental competition dwelling in between the two students. However, as attentive as he was, Brandon surrendered first. He averted his eyes to the ground and exhaled through his soft lips, the words in his throat not falling from them for once. He shuffled his feet a little as Gabriele rolled his eyes and turned back to the TV. "I knew it," he nearly incoherently sighed, "you might as well just get out of here before they see through you, too. Whoring your way into places never lasts for more than ten minutes."

After another moment's hesitation, Brandon slowly nodded and turned on the balls of his feet to step over the wretched line again, letting his hand pause on the doorframe for one more moment. He drummed his fingers against it twice before turning back around. "Can I ask you one last question?"

"Make it quick." Gabriele replied flatly.

Brandon softly chuckled and stepped forward, digging his large hands into his jean pockets. He looked down upon Gabriele's still body and took a deep breath of unneeded reassurance before stating what was on his mind calmly.

"If you want to know what I think – which I know you probably don't – I think that if you take a minute and step down from way up there on your little pedestal, you might see what's really going on in my so-called perfect life. I bet the only reason that you think people don't change is because you never gave them a chance to. When you talked to James, you probably didn't try hard enough or gave up too soon and let him walk away from you. I know, I did the same exact thing. James isn't arrogant or self-centered or any of those things that you said. If anything, he's the exact opposite of spoiled; he's deprived. James is hurt, Gabriele. But like I said, you're too far up in the clouds to even realize that."

Gabriele's eyes hardened into an even stronger glare. "This isn't about James, it's you."

"You know as well as I do that it's not, but if you must be right 24/7, let's make it about me. And guess what? I'll prove you wrong on that, too."

His blonde eyebrow cocked and his mouth curved into a violent scowl. "Go ahead, do your worst."

"Fine, you asked for it. Remember my girlfriend, Isabelle?"

"Blondes were the trend last year, so yeah. She's the plastic Barbie that you managed to trick into liking you."

Brandon nodded slowly, never skipping a beat. He continued casually. "Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of her father's death. Perfect people get perfect sleep, right? I stayed up with her all day and all night on the phone just listening to her cry and inform me on what kind of person he was. Turns out that we would've gotten along perfectly, since he was apparently so much like me. She was eight and her sister was only four, who barely remembers anything about him. Think that sucks? Try having to be their mother, telling her kids that their father was shot in the head five times because he took the last open parking spot in a crowded mall. Then, a week later, telling them that the baby she was four months pregnant with died in her depression-caused miscarriage."

Gabriele's eyes were semi-wide with shock, his mouth dropped and frozen into an "O" shape. His breath appeared to be stuck in his throat as Brandon rattled on.

"And that's not all. Yesterday was also the ninth anniversary of my uncle's death and today is when my dad had the first beer that led to an eight year battle with alcoholism. Next week is their divorce's birthday, too, around the time when my sister and I were split up for a year. Then, a day after that, is the one-year checkpoint of me stabbing my best friend and putting him in a coma for a week. But, I guess me running to my dad's like a little girl who just got out of rehab counts towards my perfect life, right? I got away with it scotch-free."

Brandon just stood there with his arms crossed and tried not to laugh at the sight of Gabriele trying to reply. But he couldn't help it for much longer; he laughed again.

"I'm sorry that the only way I could get through all of that without killing myself was leaning on my girlfriend and best friend, who tried his hardest to kick my ass for five years straight, just to save my life in the end," He whipped his arm around showed the frozen teenager his scarred forearm. "Too bad the end doesn't come without a very painful bullet wound from your insane gym teacher." Brandon dropped his hands back into his pockets and sighed. "Wow, you're right. I'm not sure that could get any more overrated. Just typical stuff that every single high-scholar has to go through, right?"

All hope of Gabriele uttering even the smallest word was tossed out of the window the second Brandon started talking about Christian Johnson's horrific death. Every word that he said about it was true: Isabelle called him in tears the second he got home from school and he didn't hang up once until four in the morning when she ended the call. Gabriella lied for him and said that he had a doctor's appointment for the first two periods, when he was really snoozing so that he could get at least four hours of sleep in. He was pretty much high off of energy drinks the entire day, not even knowing how he managed to drive over here on the freeway. Maybe that was how he forgot the way…

When he finished thinking, he found that Gabriele was still at a loss for words. Brandon grinned again and looked up at the clock on the wall, raising his eyebrows and pursing his lips. "Hmm, eleven minutes," He looked down at Gabriele again and smirked. "Might as well get out of here before the whore in me runs off. I'll see you at school, Gabriele."

With that, Brandon turned his back on the ashamed sophomore and stepped back out into the hallway. Not even stopping his stride to confirm his suspicion, he could've sworn he heard the light murmur of "Bye, Sherlock…"

Although I'm not too sure about the ending comment, I didn't think it was too horrible. Hopefully you're a little more informed on what went down between Chase and his alcohol abuse and (in case you didn't figure it out before) where in the hell Isabelle's dad is.

REVIEW!!! Thnx :)

~Rachel :)

P.S: As I said before, if you're reading this, thanks for not being mad at me, Jelsi4Life (Peter). You're really an awesome guy :)