Hey everybody. Just a short note here. Have any of you seen Samantha Who? the new ABC television show (if not, its online, so you should check it out). I don't see it lasting much longer than a season but I think it's really cute. Anyways, I thought that would be an interesting concept to apply here. Sharpay gets into a horrible car accident and ends up with amnesia. She doesn't remember who she is, let alone the fact that she was the schools Ice-Queen. Will she again fall into her preexisting role, or will she forge a new social position for herself?

Mysteries Unknown

Prologue

Troy sat in his car exasperatedly drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. "Every day," he sighed. Every weekday at 2:30 in the afternoon, two hundred East High students could be found attempting to be the first to leave the school parking lot. It never seems to occur to them that the role of first out is severely limited. Troy sighed again and turned his music up.

Twenty minutes and half a Radiohead album later he finally reached the parking lot entrance. Excitedly, he turned his right blinker on and proceeded to turn onto the main road. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye he saw a blur of pink and heard the distinct sound of screeching wheels. Before he even had a chance to process the situation, there was a deafening crunch and he was thrust forward into his now inflated airbags. It all happened so quickly and yet he felt it would never end.

Troy just sat there for a moment smelling the burnt rubber now smearing the ground and telling his heart to beat at a normal pace. "Holy Shit," he said, more so to fill the subsequent silence than anything else. He felt something drip and realized that his nose was bleeding. After a quick assessment, he came to the conclusion that, other than some nasty bruises and a couple welts from the seatbelt, he was virtually unharmed.

Shaking and angry, it finally hit him, 'Some moron just ran into me'. Fuming, he got out of his car to exchange information and, more importantly, give this idiot a piece of his mind. But what he saw next stopped him dead in his tracks.

The pink convertible belonged to Sharpay Evans. 'I should have known" was his fleeting thought before going over to inspect more closely. The front end of the car was crushed accordion style with the hood sticking up far enough to block Troy's view inside the car. The windshield had shattered, leaving broken glass everywhere, both inside and out of the car. Nobody had emerged yet. In fact, Troy couldn't sense any movement from within the car at all. He walked over to the driver's side door and froze. Sharpay was covered in blood, hair a mess and body sprawled over the passenger seat. Troy couldn't tell if she was breathing but he was too afraid to look, dreading the worst. Instead, he just stood there, unaware of the circle of students that had begun to collect, daring to speak only in hushed voices. One of those students must have called an ambulance because before Troy could even force a more positive thought through his brain there was an onslaught of Police, Firefighters and EMT.

At some point, Gabriella arrived on the scene and attached herself to the still silent Troy's side for support as they watched the Firefighters expertly peal the totaled car from around Sharpay's body. But Troy hardly noticed his girlfriend's presence. He just kept hearing the awful crunch of impact and feeling an overwhelming sense of regret for any bad thought he'd ever had about Sharpay.

Finally, Sharpay was loaded into an awaiting ambulance and it sped off, siren blaring. At that point, an EMT worker approached Troy and convinced him to go to the hospital to get examined for any internal injuries. Troy knew he was fine but he complied because he didn't want Sharpay to be in the hospital alone. Later, a doctor informed Troy that Sharpay "is still breathing", but it didn't provide much comfort when Troy saw all the medical equipment needed to accompany that statement.

Troy's examination was short. Just like he thought, a little banged up but nothing critical. Sharpay, on the other hand, was not nearly as lucky. The doctor explained it was because she experienced the collision head-on. Troy didn't care about the reasoning, he just knew that he and one of his classmates, albeit the "ice-queen", had been in the same accident, but she hadn't woken up from it.

The next few weeks would find Troy spending all his spare time in Sharpay's Hospital room. His friends would rotate in, each trying to convince him of his innocence – "You didn't cause the accident. She did." – but nothing could change his convictions. At one point even Ryan told Troy he needn't stay but Troy could tell his presence took away from some of Ryan's own guilt and pain. And so, the next three weeks passed in a haze of beeping machinery, harsh lighting and few spoken words correlating to a newly forged bond.

Yes, this is my first story, so we'll just see how it goes. But, if you read it, please drop me a word. It will do wonders for my self esteem, I expect.