Eleven O'Clock Number

MUSICAL #10: ONCE

10: SURPRISE, I'M DRAGGING YOU TO A BROADWAY SHOW TONIGHT!

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"ALLISON!"

"WHAT NOW?" SHE sighs without even turning around. Allison has no trouble recognising Toby's voice, even before she turns to face him. Honestly, she doubts anyone else on the planet is capable of having that kind of brightness to their voice, anyway.

"Guess what?" he says, near yelling with excitement as he skids to a stop in front of her with wide eyes and an even wider smile.

"What?"

"Guess!"

"Toby."

"Okay, okay, fine," his chest still heaving from exertion, Toby swings his backpack around in front of him, unzipping the smallest pocket and extracting two rectangular pieces of paper from it.

"Guess what these are," his voice has now gone from being amplified by excitement to muffled, and he poses the question in a hushed tone.

"I wonder," Allison says dryly, because it's pretty obvious what they are.

"Tickets!" Toby squeals, and there's the loud voice she's come to know and not really love. "To Once! On Broadway! For both of us!"

"Great," she replies. "But I'm late for class."

At this, he deflates immediately, the hand holding the tickets up in the air dropping to his side. "No need to sound so excited," he mutters, but the sarcasm is has little to no effect when one looks at the impossibly dejected look on his face.

"I thought we'd covered that it's going to be very difficult to get me excited over musicals?" Allison points out, walking past him and continuing on her journey to her next class.

"Still!" he protests, and she can hear the thuds of his feet on the linoleum overlap each other slightly as he moves with uneven speed to catch up with her. "I got us tickets to a Broadway show!"

"What's it even about?" she inquires, curiosity seeping into her voice before she can stop it.

"This guy," and suddenly, Dejected Toby has gone back to Excited Toby without even so much as a bat of the eyelid. "And this girl. And they're musicians."

"Well, that sounds lovely," they've reached Allison's classroom now, one that she knows for a fact is not Toby's. "When is it?"

"Tonight," Toby says airily, and Allison wouldn't be surprised if her eyes popped out of her freaking head, because –

"Tonight?"

"Yeah."

"And you didn't think to mention this earlier?" she asks in near-fury.

"Uh..." It is clear that Toby did not think to mention this earlier. She almost feels stupid for asking.

"Dear God," she runs a hand over her face, but not too thoroughly, because she actually put some effort into her makeup this morning. "I don't even know why I bother."

"I don't even know why you're bothered," Toby retorts, and Allison has no doubt that somewhere deep inside that body filled with endless optimism and visions of rainbows and bunny rabbits, he is quite pleased with that particular play on words. "It's a Friday, right? Good night to go out."

"Not to the theatre," Allison mutters, but she keeps it under her breath because she doesn't particularly want to hurt anybody's feelings and by extension subject herself to an entire remainder of the school day filled with crestfallen puppy dog expressions from Toby Martin. She lets out a sigh.