Chad POV
It's not hard avoiding Troy for the first part of the day, he's clearly avoiding us too. I meet Zeke and Jason by my locker before lunch to make sure we all know what we have to do. Once we're in the caf, though, Troy isn't. Troy has never been late for lunch. Looking around I see that Gabriella isn't sitting with Taylor and that crew.
When he finally walks in I try to wave Troy to the table but he barely even acknowledges me and just heads straight for the roof. He looks dead, I can't remember the last time I saw him so upset, or any time at all. We really fucked up.
I head over to Taylor and we head to a corner so we can hear over the general cafeteria din.
"Zeke, Jason, and I are gonna go follow Troy and see what we can do. Are you sure that you guys have a plan for Gabriella?" I know the wording is off, and normally Taylor would roll her eyes. Now she just nods.
"Your plan was just to remind Troy that basketball is important to him, ours was always to break Gabby's heart, even if we realize how badly at the time. I'm sure if you tried to talk to her she'd just think it was some plan by Troy." She sounds so sad, I'm sad too. Or angry? Angry at myself for hurting so many people in one go.
"I'll text you so we can meet up and discussing winning back over the Evans." She nods and I run up the steps to catch up with the boys before they hit the roof. Ryan isn't at his table, no one is really. At least not anyone I recognize. Maybe they are at practice?
Troy is sadly staring out over the balcony, holding what appears to be one single piece of bread? He's really in rough shape.
"Hey, um..." Troy looks at us clearly confused, I can only assume how we look, "We just had another team meeting."
"Oh..." He looks at each of us, "wonderful." I hate this, this guilt. I don't want my best friend to hate me. There have been tons of girls that he's done dumb stuff for, how was I supposed to know this wasn't the same situation.
"We had a team meeting about how we haven't been acting like a team," he slumps again, "I mean us, not you." Troy may have missed a couple practices for this but we all know he's still putting the work in. "About the singing thing..."
"I don't even wanna talk about it," yeah, me either really.
"We just want you to know that we're gonna be there, cheering for you," like we should have been doing from the beginning.
"Huh?" He is surprised that we want to support him, yeah I guess we blew that trust totally out of the water.
"If singing is what you wanna do," Zeke jumps in, thankfully, "we should boost you up, not tear you down."
"Yeah, Win or lose, we're teammates, that's what we're about," or what we're supposed to be about anyway. I am desperate to break the tension, "Even if you turn out to be the worst singer in the world."
Jason jumps on to the joke, clearly thinking the same thing I am, "Which we don't know, because we haven't heard you sing.
"You're not gonna hear me sing, guys," he's looking through us again, "because Gabriella won't even talk to me..." and looks like he's about to cry, "and I don't know why."
I don't want to have this part of the conversation, I don't want to tell him how gross we've been. I don't want him to know we did this to him. "We do."
"I baked these fresh today," Zeke juts out a bag of cookies, it seemed like a good plan when he decided to make them this morning, "You'll probably want to try one before we tell you the rest."
The anger is already in Troy's eyes, at least anger means he isn't sad anymore...right?
"What did you do?" Right now Taylor is probably having the same conversation, Gabriella. I can only hope it's going better.
"You have to promise you won't push us off the roof," I laugh but I'm only half-joking.
He doesn't say anything else as we explain it all, the ambush, the camera, baiting him into saying he doesn't care about Gabriella. How we got the decathlon team to make sure Gabriella saw it all in real-time. Well, with about a twenty-second lag. How we just wanted to make sure he had his head in the game, we didn't know this meant so much to him this time. How it shouldn't have mattered and we should have just supported him.
"I..." He doesn't finish the sentence, he barely started it. He just gets up and leaves, which is fair. I wouldn't wanna stick around either.
It's a few minutes of awkward standing before Zeke breaks the silence, "So what's your plan for Evans?" He pulls more cookies out of his bag and passes them around.
"What?" Jason and I answer in unison.
"I think the whole school could hear that fight dude. If we are gonna help Troy get into the musical you have to fix that too." I bite into my cookie, god they are so good.
"Wait what fight? Evans? Like Sharpay, you sneaking around on us too, Danforth?" Jason laughs and I just keep chewing.
"Not Sharpay," Zeke answers for me.
"Wait huh?" You can also smell the burning wire from Jason's brain>
"I got in a fight with Ryan," It's barely a mumble, I don't even know what's so embarrassing. So what if I'm, well was, friends with Ryan Evans. "I don't know how to apologize, I don't know what I did and he's not answering my texts."
"You have Ryan Evan's phone number, since when?" I don't think I hid this from them on purpose, but it's not like there weren't opportunities to bring it up.
"Since Halloween, that party," Giving this information feels like pulling teeth. I don't know why I'm being interrogated....Okay, I do, but I don't like it.
