The sense of panic that engulfed Megan and I was crazy. It was 6:15am on Friday morning and we sitting outside on the icy cold concrete outside our local Ticketeck booth, waiting for it to open so we could get our hot (well actually numb from the cold) little hands on two One Direction concert tickets. We had been waiting for this moment for weeks now and our nerves had been escalating intensely too. We were the second people in the queue; the lady in front of us at the head was a middle aged woman with greying hair, wearing a charcoal grey coat and black leather gloves over her sensible brown boots. She was most likely a mother of a stressed out teenage daughter who was kind enough to wait out in the harsh conditions for her. Our mothers on the other hand had said that if we were desperate enough for tickets we had to be the ones to freeze our asses off and that they wouldn’t be doing it for us although they would pay for the tickets if we happened to get them.
“Kate,” Meg started, pausing to take a sip from the enormous thermos of hot chocolate that we were sharing in an effort to slowly defrost our insides. “I’m surprised that Tash and Bridget aren’t here in place of Claudia.”
“That’s a good thing!” I said. I had been extremely anxious and annoyed that they were going to take our idea and line up like us but I was thankful that they had wussed out and decided that they didn’t need the tickets as desperately as us.
We were both super tired so we had been taking it in shifts for having half hour pour naps. Megan was currently laying her head of dark brown curls on my lap that was covered in a blue and brown checked fleecy blanket. We were rugged up to the max, beanies, gloves, Eskimo jackets and all to keep warm, it was about 5 degrees that morning, frost covering the ground that we sat upon. I took my phone out of my pocket and tweeted a bit to pass the time a little until Meg woke up and we carried on our conversation about whether we shipped the ‘Niam’ or the ‘Larry’ bromance more.
By the time that 8:55 rolled around we were jittery with our nerves. There was only five more minutes until tickets came on sale and now the panic was really starting to settle in. We were both constantly checking the time on our phones, counting down the mere minutes until it was our chance to pounce upon two pieces of cardboard that held the keys to the best experience of our lives. We had been estimating our chances of getting them and we thought that the odds were in our favour with only the middle aged lady in front of us. That was until we saw three girls walking towards the lady at the head of the queue, the two shorter with mousy brown hair flanking the tall, slim, blonde one in the middle. It was the three girls who we least wanted to see right now. Claudia, Bridget and Tash.
“Hi mum,” Claudia said to the lady in front of us, giving her a kiss on the cheek. Of course she’d gotten her mum to wait in line for her, there was no way she was going to sit out here on a bitter morning, freezing half to death.
“Righto love, I’m off to work- good luck for the tickets and be sure to text me and let me know if you got them!” her mum said before the girls took her place at the front of the now massive queue.
It was now 8:59. We had been avoiding eye contact with them as if they were the plague. I was digging my fingernails into my sweaty palms out of anger and nerves as the clock on my phone clicked over to 9am and my heart suddenly tensed up. The tall man dressed in black working the ticketeck desk served Claudia first, working as hard and as fast as he could to get through as many people as possible before the ticket allocation was exhausted.
“Wooohooooo!!” Yelled Tash. Meg and I looked at each other, knowing that our nightmare had become a reality and that they had gotten them.
We rushed up to the desk and the man started to serve us as quickly as he could. I gripped my best friend’s hand so tightly that the circulation in it was about to cut off. His fingers continued to type on the keyboard quickly, working his way through the horrendous ticketeck system. He looked up at us, his expression as blank as a fresh sheet of paper.
“So, did we get them?” Meg asked.
There was no response.
