Wow, I haven't updated in a long time.

Anyways, I was in a writing mood and decided to get back to this. I hope you like this story. It's not like anything I've done before, but I hope you still enjoy it!

Gabriella liked pickles.

Gabriella was the only girl he knew to read both Danielle Steel and Trotsky as they were two "completely different writers on the scope of the literary and publishing world."

Gabriella liked telenovelas.

One of Gabriella's hobbies was buying Christmas presents and adorning them with teddy bear wrapping paper.

And she loved rainy days. And the thinness of a snowflake. And Van Gogh.

And the color yellow because she depised the color pink.

But she hated cheese and ice cream because after eating a whole tube of Rocky Road after her dad died, she threw up all of it and was later diagnosed with bulimia. And she had "ailurophobia," which was a fear of cats.

But Troy hated pickles and didn't know who Danielle Steel or Trotsky was. He couldn't even remember the last time he actually attended English class. And hated rain because once after his father made him play for 5 hours in the midst of precipitation, he became sick in bed for a week and a half with pneumonia….

He didn't know much about wrapping Christmas presents since he was Jewish and he wouldn't know about snowflakes since he lived all his life in freakin' Albuquerque while Gabriella traveled every millimeter of the whole Earth.

Another point?

Troy never watched anything but ESPN…

And for some reason, all he could watch was the "Spanish Channel."

She couldn't even remember the last time she had seen Dancing with the Stars. Or American Idol. Or anything in something she could understand because all Troy could watch was Rebelde. Now she saw it so much, even she was anticipating when Miguel would recover from his coma and finally get back together with his true love, Mia.

"Troy….."

"Shhh…," he put a disgustingly unmoisturized hand in front of her face to quickly avert his eyes back to the fuzzy grayness of the flat screen TV.

"Shhh… I think Miguel is going to wake up soon…"

"Troy, there was a tornado warning. You have to turn off the TV, anyways. You can hardly see anything."

"Okay, espera. Espera."

"Yeah, I'm not going to understand you. I'm not doing too hot in French right now, anyways."

"You should change to Spanish, then."

"Nah, I don't want to start over at Julliard. I'd have to change my whole schedule and I couldn't take my Music Theory course which is a requirement."

"You're at Julliard, now?"

"Troy, you knew that."

"I thought you went to Albuquerque."

"I got accepted last semester. Troy, listen to me. You knew I left."

"Oh…"

Troy glanced back at her disappointed face and smiled his trademark smirk. "Sorry, I must've forgotten."

It wouldn't be the last time.

She couldn't remember the last time there weren't pickles with the hamburgers that Troy grilled for her on their "date nights," every time she came home to visit Albuquerque during her senior year.

"Troy, I hate pickles."

"You told me that was your favorite food."

"No, I told you my favorite food was caviar and grilled cheese with truffle oil."

"But I thought you said Julliard always served pickles."

"Which is why I never ate at Julliard and never ate on-campus ever again after freshman year…"

"Oh…"

Tears were happily gliding from her face once she saw the man of her dreams finally propose to her on a midnight evening at the park. It was right after her Broadway debut and after the celebratory dinner and frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity's.

It would have been utter and absolute perfection until he would open the velvet box and find a square cut, 6-carat yellow engagement ring with the finger size of a baby. Who had fingers that small anyway?

"When I saw it, I thought of you…" Troy lovingly said once he attempted to slide the ring on her fat fingers.

"Oops, I must've gotten the wrong size. So much for perfect, right?"

"Right," she muttered.

"Troy, are you going to help me? I can barely walk!"

"Oh, sorry, Ga-…honey…"

She handed him the large box of diapers. Exhausted, after helping movers adjust to the new nersury that was annexed into their luxury penthouse overlooking the lights of Manhattan, she sat down, lovingly rubbing her belly. She sighed, dreaming…she had never pictured being a mom, especially being pregnant with the baby of Troy Bolton. She couldn't wait every night to close her eyes and dream of a little blond baby with cobalt eyes, dancing in a tutu and asking her mommy for ballet slippers.

The glowing mother awoke from her dream to find Troy lugging in several gallons of ugly mustard yellow.

"Troy…, Troy baby."

She struggled to stand up, her swollen fingers were clenched to the handlebars of the new rocking chair they had bought at "Bed, Bath & Beyond."

"I thought I told you to paint the nursery pink…"

"Baby…" Troy grinned his trademark smirk, and as usual, it melted Sharpay's bloated ankles. "We don't even know what it is, yet. Yellow is a much more neutral color anyways. I thought you liked the color yellow."

"No, I don't."

"Yeah, you do. You told me that when I was 16. You told me yellow was your favorite color because ever since you saw the sunset in Granada, Spain, you told me gold was the color God used in his palette of colors to spread all over his new creation. It was meant to inspire you for better things and to always believe.."

"To believe in what Troy? To believe in what? Because you know what the funny thing is…? If you said I told that to you, how come I don't remember it? How come I never remember anything you say you know about me!"

"Babe, calm down. You're pregnant."

"Damn it, Troy. I know that! I know that! But I'm not pregnant, am I, Troy? Because to you, it's someone else that's pregnant! To you, I'm still freakin Gabriella Montez even though she's now a corpse who is resting all the way in freakin Albuquerque, New Mexico!"

"Honey…"

"Call me by my name! You don't anything about me! I'm the one you knocked up, not the girl who died a decade ago!"

"Relax.."

"No, I'm not going to relax! Say it!"

"Say what?!"

"Say you still love her!"

"No! You know why? Because you're acting like you're mentally insane!"

"Say it or I will leave you, Troy Bolton, like I should've done a long time ago! Why didn't you just let me go?!"

"Because I love you, Gab-"

"Oh my…"

"No. It was a mistake. I don't mean…."

"No, no, it's not that…"

She breathed, hard and fast, and she felt her heart pumping, and the heart of the innocent, little being inside of her. She felt it pump so fast, she struggled to breathe and focus on the cruel world that was now closing in on her broken life of perfection.

"What's going on? Wait, let me call an ambulance. It's too early! You're still just 6 months!"

"Troy, just hurry, please," she pronounced slowly in a haunting whisper. And all she remembered was complete and total blackness.

She hadn't cried in 10 years, ever since the death of a dear friend who lost her life in the most cruelest and unfortunate of ways.

Now she couldn't remember not crying. All that came from her body were wracking, heart-wrenching sobs. Her brother looked at her with remorse, her mother with disappointment, and her father, with sadness that he couldn't replace what just happened to his little girl with something of material value.

And all she saw from Troy was emptiness, because what was once the bumbling body of a beautiful little girl (she had finally found out from her doctor after the surgery), was now nothing. And now she felt nothing. And what Troy had hoped to replace the dark black hole that was still unopened and stabbed from the death of a friend long ago, had grown deeper with the loss of a daughter.

The long night after, when her OB/GYN finally divulged to her that she could go home, she packed quickly before Troy could say one word to her.

"Here, I got you something from that diner place you like in Brooklyn."

"You drove all the way to Brooklyn?"

She couldn't ignore the starvation lurking in the empty pit of her stomach, so she hungrily opened the Styrofoam box to find of course, a pickle, decorated beautifully atop the fries.

"Troy, I need to tell you something."

She took his hand and for a moment, her eyes returned back to the ugly engagement ring he had proposed to her with, now adjusted of course, but still a little tight, due to Troy forgetting her ring size again. The funny thing was, she was okay with it. She had always been okay with it…

"I'm moving to Paris to join Taylor, and we're sharing an apartment there until I can get back on my two feet again and start rehearsals for Wicked next January."

"Wow, it looks like you planned this out long before last night."

"No, it's just something I conjured up that I should've thought of long before. I got married too young and too fast to you because I believed in this fake lie of a fairytale. I thought you were it. I thought that after long nights of you sobbing and sneaking out to her grave, after long nights of you getting the wrong flowers, the wrong foods, everything, that we could start fresh. And somehow, I was always okay with it, because I believed you move on and love me just as much I love you because that's how you acted for so long. But it was a lie, you were a lie, our life was a lie…"

"Look, listen to me… it's not like that, at all. You're just distraught from the miscarriage. Look, let's just go home and rest on it, tonight. Then we'll talk, later."

She let go of his tight grasp on her hands and slowly removed the ring from her finger. "If Gabriella hadn't left her dorm in a rage and driven off after you guys fought that night, you would still be together. She would've been the one wearing the dress and the ring and having the baby. She wouldn't have lost it like I have. Because I'm messing with fate. It was fate for you two to be together. We were never the couple in the storybook."

"I can give you all that. Let me, let me fix it. Let me start over with you. Your favorite color's pink and you like old movies like Casablanca and-"

She smiled a little bit. "Close, it's Gone with the Wind."

"See, I'm getting better. Let me marry you all over again, let me take you to Paris and the Caribbean and we'll have another baby. We can still have everything because I love you…unbelievably so with every aching part of my body, as much as you with me…"

It was tempting, the offer as she stared at his cloudy, sincere eyes. But that was Troy Bolton: veiling his emotions and hiding his true self from the world. He did it with everyone, ever since high school and the only person allowed underneath the veil was one curly-haired woman who liked pickles, and mustard yellow, and Rebelde, and a woman, a dead woman who still had the love of a boy she would never be good enough for, no matter how hard she tried.

And with the strength she had long mustered up and kept inside for a decade, she leaned in and hauntingly whispered: "Hopefully, you'll find a beautiful woman whose favorite colors and movies you can memorize."

And with that, the girl grabbed her rolling suitcase and spoke: "And I'll hopefully find the same."

And finally, the girl stared at the mirror behind Troy's shocked expression. And no longer could she see the hazy image of curly black hair or dark eyes, all she could finally see was Sharpay.