(A Lifetime of Mean Reds)
(New York and Albuquerque)
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Sharpay stood in the center of the studio, dressed in faded jeans and an old t-shirt. Her hair was swept up behind a bandana, and around her wrist was tied a canvas rag. Logan stood nose-to-nose with her, dressed similarly. They held the pose while pages flipped in the background.
"Okay," Kelsi said. They relaxed and stepped away from each other. "Let's go again."
Logan walked back to a wall, with Sharpay on his arm. "Do we have a set dialogue for this?" he called out.
"Not really, just the gist of the whole thing," Sarah replied, before bending over a notebook with Kelsi. "Make it up, Logan, you're an actor."
Logan pulled a face at her, and Sharpay smiled. They started ambling back to the center. "Maybe you could come with me," Logan said, according to his makeshift script.
"Maybe I could," Sharpay said, and they both grimaced at the horrible line. It was a good thing this was only workshop, or else they'd both give it up. Logan paused.
"Hang on," he said, out of character, "do I stop or does she stop?"
"You stop," Sarah directed.
"Okay." Logan slowed to a halt, bringing Sharpay with him. "So...what, do I just pop the question right there?"
Sarah rolled her eyes and looked to Kelsi.
"Hesitantly," Kelsi replied. "It's not..." Sharpay raised an eyebrow at the writer. "Just...it's not what the two of you had planned on," she mumbled quickly.
"Okay," Logan said again. He extracted his arm from Sharpay's, and turned to face her slowly. "I," he began, slipping back into character, "I just...I want to remember this part forever. I, I want to remember you, standing there, and this..." he gestured to his side at empty space, "this pond, and, and the breeze. I'm going to miss you." Behind him, Kelsi nodded, and scribbled more specific notes.
Sharpay smiled softly. "I'm going to miss you, too." They stood closer, until she had to cross her eyes to look at him. "What are we going to do?" she whispered.
Logan paused, took a deep breath, and plunged his hand into his pocket. "Marry me," he said. He tried to pull out an imaginary ring. "Damn," he muttered. "I hope I'm not wearing jeans onstage when we do this," he said to Sarah, his fingers caught under the seam. Sharpay laughed. "Aha. Got it."
"Okay?" Sharpay asked.
"Yeah. Alright." Logan inhaled deeply. "Marry me," he said again.
Sharpay's mouth opened, her eyes widening in shock. "I..." she started to say, but Logan lunged forward, capturing her lips with his.
"Say yes," he whispered when he pulled away. "Please, please marry me."
Sharpay closed her eyes. She said, quite clearly, "No." Sarah frowned, and Kelsi stopped scribbling.
Sharpay said, "Hang on," and stepped away. "Does she say no? It's the ending, so whichever..."
Sarah sighed, "I don't know. We still have a few more months to work on the choreography and the dialogue, tightening up some of the music, and really, it's just a matter of—well, it's not that hard to fix if we want her to say something different."
Sharpay shrugged. "Okay."
"What do you think she'd say?" Sarah asked.
"I don't know. I'm not the writer."
"But you're her," Kelsi protested.
Sharpay rolled her eyes. "When does Michelle get to come in?"
"Yeah," Logan cut in, "when's Michelle getting here?"
"She'll come in next week, I promise." Sharpay's stomach growled, and she grinned at her director. "Fine, we'll call it a day. At least we got through the whole thing."
Logan stamped his foot and clapped his hands. "Awesome. Hey Shar."
"Yeah?" Sharpay pulled the bandana from her hair and started unwinding the canvas strip from around her wrist. Sarah and Kelsi gathered their notes and headed out of the studio, discussing the dialogue and music for this new production.
"You wanna go get something to eat? Let me." Logan reached out and tied the cloth. "Better?"
"S'a little tight." She waited for him to unwind and retie it. "Better. Let's go." She snagged her purse from the table and lead Logan out to the sidewalk, surrounded by dingy buildings. "I know a place—"
"Near here," Logan finished for her with a smile. "You always do."
"I do," Sharpay said indignantly, walking confidently. "What gave you any idea otherwise?"
"Nothing." She strode with purposeful steps, fully aware of her entire environment. "God, if anyone was ever in love, you're in love with this city."
Sharpay said, "I'm in love."
"Hey," Logan said, drawing her hand of the crook of his elbow. "You okay?"
"Sure." He looked at her intently. "What?"
"You're...well, 'chelle told me you had like a meltdown crisis a few months ago, and I haven't seen you in—you're different, a bit." Sharpay scoffed. "Or maybe not."
"I'm just waiting to get to the rehearsal stage. When, y'know, when my character is set, and her words are there, and I know the score, and...ugh, workshopping is just so exhausting." Logan didn't avert his gaze. "What?"
"You're getting old."
Sharpay pushed him. "Hey there, Rip Van Winkle."
Logan became serious. "But really. What would she say?"
Without hesitation, Sharpay said, "Of course she'd say yes."
---Summer After East High Senior Year
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Sharpay walked into her darkened house, and began methodically turning on every light. She kept her movements quick, sharp, mechanical, because emotion wasn't an option here. She wasn't a Method actor, and didn't need to savor this feeling, this horrible, awful feeling that the world was going to swallow her up like she wanted it to. She collapsed at the kitchen counter.
Her entire life, her entire life was built up in these next six years, and that idiot, that...god, Chad just had to go and ruin it, with a ring, a ring! A damn ring from Tiffany's. She hoped he could return it; it looked expensive. It was expensive. And she'd said no, because...because what the hell, people didn't get married when they were 18, they didn't, it always ended badly.
The choice was already made, she knew. It was made a long time before Chad was even part of the picture, and he was just a side detail, a hitch in the machinery, that she wouldn't get married, not ever, and even if she did, it would be later, later, later. But this was Chad, and no matter what she did, it was always the fact that it was Chad that got her, like he was exempt from every rule and restriction she'd set on her life.
Ryan came home within an hour, ran around turning off the rest of the lights, and sat across from her in the kitchen. He said, "You okay?"
Sharpay felt numb. "I'm numb," she said. "But I'm okay."
"You're always numb."
"Exactly."
"What are you doing after this?" Ryan asked.
Sharpay wondered how innocent he meant that. "I'm going to AMDA, Ryan," she replied, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.
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Chad had cut his face shaving. A large, rusty looking gash dressed the right side of his face, and as if on cue, blood sprang and sprung and leaked. He sighed, craned his neck, and washed the wound away.
The answering machine, filled with five blatantly apologetic excuses, had finally shut up. With a towel against his chin, Chad glared at the machine as if IT had cut his face.
"Hi, Chad, you know your cell phone's off? My flight's late, but I'll definitely be home by nine this morning. I'll see you at Simon's Restaurant for lunch in a few hours! Love you! Bye!"
"Hey, Chad, I'm in the lab now, my flight went well, there wasn't a lot of people, something about Tuesday mornings. I'll see you at lunch!"
"Honey, I am so sorry, I know we have lunch at 2:30, but—"
"It's me again—it's 4:00, I'm trying to get off, I wish you'd answer your cell phone—are you home? What time are you leaving tonight?"
"Chad, call me back, please, let's talk before you leave for Houston—"
Chad sat down on the edge of his bed and stared at the clock. His manager was an hour away, and he had a flight for a game in two hours. The last few weeks were consumed with practice, photo shoots, conferences, and signings.
Rachel liked chemistry. Calculus. Labs. Science. She watched medical operations for fun and absorbed herself in extra lab work when Orlando Bloom went on hiatus. Rachel was a biochemist, and thusly had married work instead of Chad Danforth.
Chad liked basketball. Sports. Really old films. Language. Sharpay. He married Rachel for the wrong reasons, and he knew his current position could only be his own fault. He missed Troy, he missed Albuquerque, and he was, quite frankly, tired of coming home to an empty apartment. Marriage, if anyway, had made him lonelier than ever.
He imagined Rachel felt very similar. She often returned home to an empty household with tired eyes and a throbbing headache, cursing the extensive hours in the lab and the long distance meetings she had to fly to every other week. Her coworkers were all much older than she was, and the gym she had joined as an attempt to meet people closed down a month ago. She was, frankly, more miserable than Chad was.
They had decided, on a rare occasion when both had the same day off, that having children would not happen for at least five more years.
The upside of their situation was their finances. Both had more money than either had ever expected. They were extremely financially stable, but Chad could've cared less, and Rachel had nothing to spend her paychecks on except one half of a vacant apartment.
As Chad finished shaving, he knew he was upset. He did miss Rachel, and he had wanted to see her badly ever since she'd left for her meeting yesterday. The lunch was an apologetic restarter, and now that it had been canceled, Chad didn't know what to do. How do you restart a restarter?
Chad sniffed awkwardly and pressed a towel to his face, soaking up the water from the sink.
As he walked back into the room, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed Troy's number.
"Hey, man," Troy answered, and Chad relaxed as heard Troy's voice.
"Hey, you busy next week?"
Troy was clearly trying to cook dinner while talking to Chad, because he could hear the oven going off in the back. "Just work. I was thinking of taking a couple days off, anyway. What's up?"
Chad clicked off the TV, which he had turned on an hour ago. "I was thinking of visiting Albuquerque for a few days."
He heard Troy drop the utensils he was cooking with. Troy said, like a little boy again, "Are you serious? Man, DO IT! I'll take the entire week off!"
Chad laughed. "Good. Then it's settled. Let me look online for tickets, and you tell me the days you're free. God, I miss Albuquerque."
"It misses you, Chad," Troy said encouragingly, and the two 26-year-olds grinned through their phones like high schoolers again.
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AN TehFuzzyPenguin: So...this musical. I don't know what it's going to be about. except I know exactly what I'm going to do with it. We'll see. And Troy cooks! aawwwwww...and now we're out of cushion chapters (although I'm the one who's supposed to be writing now). Thanks for seeing us through all this!
Star Vitamin: Woo! Chad's seeing Troy, and Sharpay's gearing up for her musical! Thanks again to everyone who's stuck with us over the months (our irregularities with updating are annoying, I know).