Layla Vicks had the best possible thing happen to her at the worst possible time. Winning two tickets to her favorites band's last concert was a dream come true. But reality hit when the concert turned out to be a state away right before senior prom...
The phone that had been mounted to the break room wall at Chuck's Convenient Store was cascaded in what had once been the flickering of the cheap fluorescent lights, but was now all of Heaven's glory. Never mind the wear from so many teary I quit phone calls over time. The phone was now a holy relic, and Layla will always hear the angels sing when her thoughts wander to that phone. The words that crackled through the college radio station's poor signal were still fresh in her mind.
'Congratulations! You are lucky caller number ten! Tell us, what is the name of the lucky winner of two tickets to Downtown @ 3:00's last concert?'
And then:
'Come on down to the station, Layla to collect your prize. And again, Congratulations!'
Layla thought that she would faint right then and there. She thought that a fellow co-worker would find her, two hours later, as she lay there, knocked out on the floor, in her khakis and standard issue black polo that had Chuck's embroidered onto the left breast pocket.
But she didn't.
Somehow she had managed to stay standing on her own two feet on the scuffed up tile found throughout the whole convenient store. And here she was now, staring at the rough-around-the-edges phone on the break room wall.
Someone pushed open up the break room door.
"I swear if I have to scan one more thing today." Wren said with a slight raise to her voice as she walked over to her locker and pulled out her sack lunch.
Wren. She was one of those coworkers that you would want to have the same shift as. She always voiced how miserable she was and, somehow, it made the time that the rest of us employees had to spend at Chuck's more bearable.
Layla shook her head to escape her thoughts causing a strand of her brown hair to fall out of one of its pins as she turned away from the wall.
"I could take your spot at one of the registers and you could clean the bathrooms for me." Layla said hopefully, walking over to join Wren at the cheap 'wooden' table that sat in the middle of the room.
"Is it sad that I'm a little bit tempted with that offer?" Wren asked as she dug into the bag of potato chips that she had brought for lunch.
"To anyone that works here, no."
"It's just the beeping noise that happens when you scan something . . ."
". . . It's like I hear it everywhere I go." Layla added, taking one of Wren's potato chips.
"Even when I'm trying to fall asleep . . ."
This time both girls shook their heads in order to escape their thoughts on the phantom beeping.
Wren scooted her chair back causing an unpleasant scraping sound to come from the chair's forced contact with the floor. Popping her feet up on the table, she asked Layla a question that reminded her of something very important.
"So, is your mom still obsessing over every little detail for prom?"
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"In no way, under my roof and on God's green Earth, are you skipping prom for some rock concert!" Laura Vicks shouted as she flitted throughout the house collecting stray scraps of fabric, spools of thread, beads, buttons, and the like.
Layla's mother was a seamstress and had the tendency to drag her work up with her from her workshop in their home's basement. It turns out that the most important thing that she had forgotten about when she called the college radio station to win those tickets was that the concert was the day before prom and in the next state over.
"For the millionth time," Layla started with a sigh, "They aren't a rock band. They are a -"
Layla's mother cut her off, "Sweetie, I don't care if one of them plays the banjo while the other blows air into a bottle. Either way, no matter what, you aren't going."
Layla could hear the finality in her mother's tone even from her spot in the kitchen.
"Besides," Laura continued, "Your father would have had to have taken the last of my sense in the divorce for me to even think about letting you go the next state over just so you could get trampled on in a mosh pit."
Ms. Vicks left the living room where she was picking up her mess, and met her daughter in the kitchen. Layla wanted to roll her eyes at what her mother was saying, but knew that that would not help her case. She gave her plea one last go.
"Then what am I suppose to with the tickets?" She asked, picking the tickets up from the kitchen counter and then holding them up for her mother to see. Hoping she would understand how important the concert was to Layla when she saw them.
Layla's mother put all the odds and ends she had picked up around the house and placed them in the plastic tub she had brought up from the basement. Laura picked up the tub and said something to her daughter that Layla felt was the equivalent to her mother using her heart as a pin cushion.
"I don't know, Sweetie. Put them in a scrap book. Toss 'em in the trash. Sell them to someone, and put the money towards prom." Laura's voice got farther away as she made her way to the basement, away from Layla.
