13 Little Blue Envelopes. Maureen Johnson
to be heard, so she just held up a finger to show that she wanted one ticket. He held up his hands and indicated eight. She dug around in her pocket and found one of the tiny five-pound notes and three of the pound coins and carefully pressed these through the slot in the plastic, and he pulled a photocopied ticket from a cigar box and passed it over to her. Then he jerked his finger, pointing her toward two red double doors at the end of the hall.
She was in a big, black basement room. It was a little damp. A few fake palm trees had been pushed off to the side. The seats were mostly empty and a few people sat on the floor or on steps in the back of the room. All in all, there were only maybe ten people in the audience. Most of them were smoking and talking to one another. She was the only person here who didn’t seem to know someone else. It felt like a private party in a basement.
She was thinking about getting up and leaving just as a girl appeared in the doorway near where she had come in and flipped off the light switches. Punk music started to blast from a few scattered speakers on one side of the room. A moment later, it stopped abruptly, and a light came on in the middle of the stage.
Standing there was a guy, maybe her age or just a little older, dressed in a green kilt, a Starbucks shirt, heavy black boots, and a top hat. A fringe of light reddish hair stuck out from under the hat, brushing along the top of his shoulders. He had a wide, slightly evil grin.
“I’m Jittery Grande,” he said. “I’m your host!”
He jumped closer to the audience, practically onto Ginny’s feet, eliciting a short laugh from a girl sitting on the floor nearby.
“Do you like coffee?” he asked the audience.
A few assorted affirmatives and one “piss off!”
“Do you like Starbucks coffee?” he asked.
More insults. He seemed to like that.
“Well, then,” he said, “let’s get started!”
The show was about a Starbucks employee named Joe who developed a crush on a customer. There was a love song (“I Love You a Latte”), a breakup song (“Where Have You Bean?”), and a song that seemed to be some kind of a protest (“Beating the Daily Grind”). It ended tragically when she stopped drinking coffee, and he threw himself offstage into what was supposed to be the Main Bean Supply. All of this was somehow arranged by Jittery, who remained onstage the entire time, talking to the audience, telling Joe what to do, and holding up signs that gave statistics on how the global economy was wrecking the environment.
Ginny had seen enough shows in her lifetime to know that this wasn’t a very good show. It didn’t actually make any sense. There were a lot of random things going on, like a guy who sometimes rode through the scene on a bike for no reason that Ginny could figure. And at one point, there was a shooting in the background, but the guy who got shot just kept on singing, so his injuries obviously weren’t that bad.
Despite all of that, Ginny found herself quickly and totally engrossed—and she knew why. She had a thing for performers. She always had. It probably had something to do with all of the performances Aunt Peg had taken her to as a kid. She had always been amazed that there were people who weren’t afraid of getting up in front of crowds and just…talking. Or singing, dancing, telling jokes. Flaunting themselves with no embarrassment.
Jittery wasn’t a particularly good singer, but this didn’t stop him from belting away. He jumped around the stage. He prowled through the audience. He owned the place.
When it was all over, she picked up a program someone had left on the seat next to her and read it. Keith Dobson—director, writer, producer—also happened to play Jittery Grande.
Keith Dobson was her artist. And she had 492 little burlap sacks to give to him.
The next morning, as she made her way down the long linoleum hallway to the little ticket closet, Ginny realized that her shoes were squeaky. Really squeaky.
She stopped and looked down at her sneakers. There they were, white with pink stripes, poking out below the heavy olive drab of her cargo shorts. She remembered the exact sentence from the travel guide that had caused her to choose these shoes out of all possible shoes: “You’ll be doing a lot of walking in Europe, so make sure to bring comfortable walking shoes! Sneakers are universally acceptable, and white ones will keep you cool in the summer.”
She hated that sentence now. Hated it, and the person who wrote it. These shoes made her stand out—and not just because of the noise. White sneakers were the Official Shoe of Tourists. This was London, and the real Londoners wore skinny heels or Euroshoes in weird colors or coffee-colored leather boots…
And shorts. No one wore shorts either.
This had to be why Aunt Peg said that she couldn’t have any guidebooks. She’d looked in one, and it had made her a squeaky, white-shoed freak.
Anyway (squeak, squeak), what was she supposed to do? She couldn’t just shove (squeak) the money at the ticket guy and run off. Well, she could, but then there was no way of making sure it would get to him. She could put it in an envelope and address it to Jittery (or Keith), but that didn’t seem right either.
She would just buy the tickets quickly and anonymously. It was the best way. Tickets were eight pounds. Ginny quickly did the math in her head, then strode up to the window.
“I’ll take sixty-two tickets, please,” she said.
The guy looked up from his copy of War and Peace. He had come pretty far in one day, Ginny noticed. The Simpsons shirt was the same, though.
“You what?”
He had one of those stuffed-up-nose voices, which made the question extra questioning.
“Can I have sixty-two?” she asked, her own voice inadvertently dropping.
“We only have twenty-five seats,” he said. “And that’s with people sitting on the floor.”
“Oh. Sorry. I’ll just take…what can I have?”
He lifted the lid of a cigar box on the counter and thumbed through the two stubs inside. Then he shut it decisively.
“You can have twenty-three.”
“Okay,” Ginny said, fumbling through the wad of pound notes. “I’ll take them.”
“What do you want twenty-three tickets for?” he asked as he snapped a rubber band from a pile and counted them out.
“Just, people.”
There was a dripping noise somewhere in the hall. It seemed to suddenly get very loud.
“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