13 Little Blue Envelopes(14)
“Well, I’m not arguing,” he said after a moment. “You a student?”
“Not here.”
“Anywhere.”
“High school? In New Jersey?”
“Student discount, then. Five pounds each.” He pulled out a calculator and punched in the numbers. “That’ll be one hundred and fifteen pounds.”
This discount left Ginny with a problem. She’d need more
tickets. Lots more.
“How many can I have for tomorrow?” she asked.
“What?”
“How many for tomorrow?”
“We haven’t sold any.”
“I’ll take them all.”
He eyed her as she slipped ￡125 through the slice in the
plastic, and he slid over twenty-five tickets.
“What about the next night?”
He got up and pressed his face against the window to look at her. He was really pale. She guessed that was what happened if you spent the summer in a basement, sitting in a closet next to a bucket.
“Who are you with?” he asked.
“Just . . . me.”
“Is this some kind of joke, then?”
“No.”
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He retracted and sat back on his stool.
“No shows Thursday,” he said, his snufflyness increasing.
“The martial arts club is giving a belt test in the space.”
“Friday?”
“That’s the last show,” he said. “We’ve sold three of those.
You can have the other twenty-two.”
One hundred ten pounds more passed through the cut in the plastic.
Ginny thanked him and stepped over the bucket and
counted out her tickets and remaining money. Seventy tickets.
One hundred forty-two more pounds to benefact.
Behind her, she heard a noise. The liberated ticket seller stepped out of his closet, nodded to her, and carried the cigar box of money down the hall, upstairs, and into the light of day. She noticed that a hastily scrawled sign had appeared in the window.
It read: SOLD OUT, FOREVER.
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Bright Ideas
It was only when she was back up on the street with all of the tickets to Keith’s show in her grasp that Ginny realized that there was a flaw in her plan. Yes, she’d given him money—sort of. But now no one would see him perform, starting immediately. She’d purchased him, lock, stock, and barrel.
She went into such a panic that she forgot where the tube stop was and circled the same block three times, and when she finally did find it, there was only one place she could think to go.
Back to Harrods. Back to Richard. Back to the same chocolate counter in the food hall because at least she knew they had a phone and the guide there. Richard dutifully came down and escorted her to the Krispy Kreme. (Yes, Harrods had a Krispy Kreme. This store really did have it all.) “If you had to give out seventy tickets to a show called
Starbucks: The Musical,” Ginny began, breaking her cruller in two, “where would you go?”
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Richard stopped stirring his coffee and looked up.
“I can’t say it’s ever come up,” he said.
“But if it did,” she said.
“I suppose I’d go to the place where people were waiting around trying to get into shows,” he said. “Have you actually purchased seventy tickets to something called Starbucks: The Musical ?”
Ginny decided it was probably better not to answer that
question.
“Where would people be looking for tickets?” she asked.
“The West End. You weren’t far from there yesterday. Covent Garden, Leister Square—that’s the area. It’s where all the theaters are, like Broadway. But I’m not sure how successful you’ll be. Still, if they’re free . . .”
The West End was not as bright and in-your-face as Broadway. It lacked the three-story-high billboards that sparkled and revolved and had gold fringe. There were no massive, illuminated cups of ramen noodles, no skyscrapers. It was much more subdued, with only a few posters and signs marking out the territory. The theaters were stark, serious-looking places.
She immediately knew this was not going to work.
For a start, she was American, and she looked like a tourist, and it kept starting to rain and then stopping. Plus, the tickets weren’t the official computerized kind—they were just unevenly cut photocopies. How was she supposed to show people what the show was, where it was, what it was about? And who was going to want to know about Starbucks: The Musical when they were waiting in line to get tickets for Les Misérables or Phantom of the Opera or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or some other normal 66
show at a normal theater that sold commemorative sweatshirts and mugs?
She stationed herself near a massive brick theater off Leister Square, right by a kiosk filled with theater information. For the next hour or so, she just stood there, biting at her lower lip, clutching the tickets. She occasionally stepped forward when someone lingered by the posters, but she couldn’t manage to coax herself forward to try to convince them to go and see the show.
By three o’clock, she had only managed to give away six
tickets, all of them to a group of Japanese girls who accepted them politely and appeared to have no idea what they had just taken. And she’d only spoken to them because she had a pretty good idea that they had no idea what she was saying.