Lost & Found (a Harry/Niall fanfiction)

II: Falling

The next day, Megan wakes me up by a graceful bound onto my bed, directly onto my sleeping self. I scream, unexpectedly aware of her intrusion, relief flooding through me when I see her; her hair loosely tied into a messy bun, wearing a Union Jack top, striped red, white and blue, eyes subtly lined with black eyeliner, the dab of pale lipstick onto her full lips.

“Megan,” I groan, turning over into my bed, hoping to block out her high-pitched voice, “It’s ten in the morning.”

“Exactly,” she chirrups, full of enthusiasm. I hated her. “We’ve got a whole day ahead of us, and girl”-she pauses, putting on a fake accent-“we’re going to need all the time we have for me to teach you about One Direction.”

“I’m a fast learner,” I protest, sitting up in my wrinkled sheets. “Why start so early?”

She sighs, shaking her head in irritating pity. “Laura, Laura, Laura. What you don’t realise yet, is there is much to learn, if one is to become a ‘Directioner’.” She closes her eyes, crossing her legs over one another, hands flat against each other in a praying motion.

I couldn’t help but snort. “Stop it!” I nudge her, and she falls off the bed in a yelp and tangle of limbs. When she emerges from the floor, her hair’s a tangled mess, and she does not look amused.

I bite my tongue, hoping it’ll suppress the laughs that beg to come out of me. “Okay, I’ll get up.”

“You better,” she growls threateningly.

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Stage One involved Megan sitting me down, flipping open her laptop and showing me every possible piece of information about all the boys, until the details were seared into my brain permanently. I learnt their names: Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and...and him. I refused to look at him on her laptop screen. It hurt to see him, in a position of power, and success, while I was just another ordinary person, a screaming girl in the crowd. And he left me.

Megan forced me to repeat the facts, something which I did in a ridiculous tone. However, when we reached Niall, my mouth clamped itself shut. She could sense something was wrong, as she asked me, in a gentle voice. I didn’t reply to her, so she hurriedly moved on.

Stage Two of our ‘project’, (something of which I wasn’t happy to be a part of, but went along with in reluctance), was obtaining tickets to their concert.

“This is going to be the hardest part,” she explains to me, while we sit in a cafe, sipping at steaming mugs of coffee. “Tickets often sell out quickly, and the rarer the ticket, the higher the price.”

I raise an eyebrow at her; a girl who struggles to talk anything seriously, talking in a business-like tone, shoulders squared, expertly cupping her mug of coffee. “Date?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she mumbles, avoiding my eyes. “The boys have refused to release details about ticket sales until next week, but there are ways of extracting information...” With one hand, she scrolls through her phone, her fingers tapping at random. Inwardly, I’m full of disbelief. All this hype, people acting like they do in warfare-cunning, strategic, planning ahead- just for five boys who they’ll believe will change their lives. Except they won’t, I think bitterly. They’ll just ruin it.

“Megan...” I exhale, trying to find the right words, but struggling. “Maybe we should just forget about it, and-“

“Got it!” She screeches triumphantly, thrusting a fist into the air. She earns dark glares from people sitting nearby, and mutters an apology. “I’ve found something on Tumblr which will help us,” she hisses to me, showing her phone screen. The text thin, spidery, making me eyes squint to read it, I manage to catch a sentence: May 15th.