At a Concert?!

It was so loud. The boomboxes blasted the music as the singer waltzed around the wide stage with one hand waving, the crowd mirroring her movements with their own raised hands. My ears almost exploding, I turned painfully around and struggled a little past the hundreds of teens and parents populating this dark place illuminated only by sky blue strobe lights. I hoped I yelled, “Excuse me!” and “Pardon!” faster than an auctioneer spits out his or her words to sell off the prized possession.  

Receding from such ear bursting sound, I tried to decide at one of the circular tables between the lemonade and other refreshments which red plastic cup was mine. I failed and huffed, deciding to grab my purse I left right beside the bag of someone I knew who was here. But I couldn’t find it. I scurried up to some security guards with black sunglasses shielding their eyes maybe from the bright lights highlighting the now head-banging, fist-pumping teens and whistling college students. Being smart, I didn’t waste time yelling or calling but simply tugged on one of the men’s sleeves. He turned and I motioned for his attention. He bent down and raised his eyebrows.    

I pantomimed losing my purse, but he just stared and went back to watching the concert-goers and hip-swinging singer. I gritted my teeth and continued searching amongst some more bags, but I soon clenched my jaw and pursed my lips. Where could it be? Then I remembered I might have stored it in the hallway closet when I had gotten here. Hoping Candace hadn’t stolen it, I dashed out of the crazy arena and, after crashing through the double steel handle doors, made a right. Extending my hands, I was ever so close to grabbing my purse when someone called my name.        

My fists clenched, I skidded to a halt.

No. Not now. I couldn’t face Candace and her excuses for why she ran off with my purse. But there was no way out with her. Not ever. So I let out an impatient sigh and jerked around. “Yes?”   

“I need to talk to you.”          

First, I scanned her silk shirt and skinny jeans. No purse hanging around or about them. I really wanted to just take her by the arm and put her back in the arena so I could open the closet. But I didn’t. So I reluctantly listened as she expounded upon the fact that my friend, her older sister, was looking for me. Not just said that she was. Explained, like it was an assignment I didn’t understand.  

Whatever.

“I just need to retrieve my purse.”

I tried ignoring the whole diatribe, but she kept insisting. I sighed and grumbled internally, Why can’t I just do as I need to? Why, whenever something pops up, do I need to listen to this boss’s demands?

I exhaled and crossed my arms. “Look, Cadence—”

“Cady.” She threw her chocolate-colored hands on her hips and jerked her head forward. “It’s actually Cady!”

I resisted rolling my eyes and snorted, “Cady, I need to get my purse. I have…” I didn’t want to tell her I had some minor assignments that were due next week that I had to finish. Or maybe start on. I shrugged and continued with this obnoxious thirteen year old. “Cady, I should be getting home. In order to do so, I need to get my purse.”

“Fine.” She swung around on a sneaker and marched back towards the blaring concert room. “I’ll just go tell Nicole that you’re leaving.” She opened the door, turned around and fired at me before letting it bang, “without her!”   

Slam! The door hopefully didn’t alert the guards and jolt the concert goers. I just noticed I was holding my breath and let it go. Twirling, I told myself to just focus and lunged for the doorknob. I whipped it open. A brown handbag gaped at me. A leather pouch stared at me. But no light blue purse with sequins outlining the front pocket was ready for me to pick up like a mother does her baby and cradle it in my arms. Then a thought struck me. What if Candace saw it from somewhere inside the concert?       

Every fiber of my being wanted to race in there and demand for Candace’s hands to stretch out before me with the stolen purse. But I didn’t want to be chased by security guards, laughed at by teens five to seven years my junior and for parents to spread stories on Facebook about how a nineteen year old acted like a total goofball by yelling out to a thirteen year old eighth grader to give her purse back. So… a thought asked me. What are you going to do? Get it from her, or keep looking?

I jogged back to one of the doors and creaked it open. Spying something under a seat, I dove for it and brought it back outside. Hoarding it against my chest, I told my purse I’d never lose it again. Then I sensed someone standing right there beside me. I slowly slid my eyes over and sighed a gigantic breath of relief.

“What are you doing?”

“Candace threatened to tell you I was leaving here without you.”                           

Nicole just narrowed her eyeliner-caked eyes and shook her thick fudge colored ponytail of braids and beads. She demanded whether I was going to return to the concert and actually enjoy the event she painstakingly tried so hard to reserve spots for.  

“Yes.” I nodded. I made myself let go of my assignments back at the dorm room and squeezed a smile right onto my lips. “Sure. I’ll go.”

But she shot a long nailed hand onto my blouse shoulder. “No. You’re not just going for me. I’ll stay here if you want to leave or whatever.” She looked diagonally down and swatted at her ponytail. “Candace can come with us, and I can drop her off at home. We live just fifteen minutes away.”

“From the college?” She never told me she lived so close to our school—just that she lived in the same vicinity. I’ve always been out of state and, therefore, never been used to being around people living within proximity to somewhere. Or something like that.

 “Ye-ah!” She punched me on the shoulder and cocked an eyebrow. “And don’t even think about wondering whether you can stay over. My house is always open—especially for you.” She held out her oversized white sweatshirt arms and threw them around me, me responding in kind but first ensuring my purse was with me. She stepped back and laughed, “You’re the best friend I could ever think to have, Rain!”    

“Wow, Nicole.” I grinned, but she slapped me on the back and commanded I make a decision.

“I’ll…” I slapped my hand on…nothing. I jerked around, eyes then back on Nicole, wide. “Hey—where’d—”

But she had already shot inside the concert hall, her beads clacking together and her sandaled feet smacking the tiled ground as she, I gaped in terror, zigzagged through teens’ circles and past parents’ upheld cameras. My eyes bulging, I bolted, striving to keep an eye on Nicole but finding myself actually fixating on Candace.  

I couldn’t believe it—a nineteen year old stampeding towards a triumphant thirteen year old waving my purse above her ponytail braided head like she had just won a prize. Prize for best thief at a concert! I whizzed right after Nicole, shouting for her to stop running behind the stunned, leering singer and tell the guards some girl stole her friend’s purse. Nicole whipped her head back and started lunging over the stairwell as she collapsed onto the ground feet first and scampered after a whooping, hollering Candace who was bragging she’d put all of this hilarity on YouTube. I didn’t dare tune into the hysteria I faintly heard from almost all of the teens and the cameras flashing in my direction. Worse, the college students amongst them were going to spread everything on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pin Interest once they got back to their dorm rooms tonight.

Suddenly, after almost colliding into the stairs Nicole had leapt over, I stopped dead and stared wide-eyed at Nicole, panting. She stared right back, slowly shaking her head. I just knew her thoughts: This happens again, and I’m not talking to Candace for the rest of my life. She’s already dead as it is. I slowly turned around and studied the scene. The singer had dropped her microphone, whipped her cotton candy of hair behind her and thrusted a long, painted fingernail at us. “There!” She jabbed in Nicole and my direction amidst a dead silent room. “They’re the culprits.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Her security guards came towards us, grabbed our arms and circled handcuffs on our wrists. “You’re coming with us.” One of them simultaneously yanked Nicole and me towards the Exit. I searched for Candace and yelled for her to return my purse to me, but she was too busy laughing hysterically and rolling on the floor. I stumbled a bit and knocked into a person taller than me as we girls were dragged between the tables and some antisocial concert goers. I told my guard I needed my purse to get back to my dorm room.    

“Shut your mouth!” He now grabbed my left shoulder and Nicole’s right one and steered us towards a couple of flashing blue lights. A police car was taking us to jail? I jerked my eyes to Nicole’s averted ones as the second guard thrust the doors open. As my guard pushed a hesitating me outside, I watched a silent Nicole. Her soft brown eyes spilled tears while she just let the emerging cops put her away into the backseat. That was when I submitted, letting a huge hand roughly push down onto my braided head as I climbed awkwardly into the backseat as well. The door slammed shut, and we were on our way. To jail.

While the police men drove us, Nicole sniffed and breathed a sigh through her nose. I switched my sight the instant I lay them on her. I didn’t want to see her crying. I didn’t want her upset. I wanted Candace to stop being so malicious. Where did she get this behavior? Sure, Nicole could be sarcastic with her at home (and did once back in middle school). But to make her older sister and her best friend want to smack her silly from having to chase her throughout a concert? One that was thousands of dollars?

Unbelievable.

I opened my mouth but decided it’d be best to say nothing. Because there was nothing to say. What could we do? Command our driver to call Candace and tell him to tell the security guards to handcuff her too and that we should just get dropped off at my dorm? I just sighed through my nose, too.

“I’m so sorry I had to chase Candace to get your purse back.” Nicole startled me with her sudden voice in the dark car. It was fragile, like it was singing a tune that, if possible, could shatter like glass should someone’s ugly voice interrupt it. Unfortunately, that ugly voice had been Candace’s cackle.

“Sorry you had to get your own sister to stop stealing my purse.” I almost threw out that she shouldn’t have been there, but I knew Nicole knew Candace would have come anyway. Sneak in like she had done at Nicole’s thirteenth birthday party at the horse barn, causing all the frantic horses to stampede towards the fields and the chickens to dash for and then panic inside the chicken coop. I shook my head. What would tame Candace? What would make her stop being the troublemaker?

“Sorry Candace is such a—”

“We’re almost there.” The driver murmured.

“Yes, sir.” We said in unison, looking at each other whenever some of the streetlights scanned over us.

 “Sorry Candace can’t control her own self.” I whispered, feeling tears come on as I sniffed hard. I was a crier—ever since Bryan proposed to me a couple of weeks ago. Bryan—what was he doing? Would he know? I mentally slapped myself. Of course. Everyone on campus would announce it all over the place. The teens back in the concert arena were probably uploading our video—

“We’re here. We’ll let you out.” The car lurched to a stop, and both driver and passenger got out, slamming their doors and then whipping ours open. They pulled and we stumbled out onto the pavement and then up onto a sidewalk with a fence of evil-looking barbed wire bordering the building. We almost fell but kept our composure—and our sanity. Staring up at a black building with lights in many windows, I groaned and heard Nicole sigh.

With all this nighttime darkness, I wished it wrapped around us the way we girls wrapped ourselves around our favorite blankets at my house on weekends whenever we were told we weren’t invited to the popular girls’ sleepovers.

“Come on.” A faint voice was heard, and then my shoulders were pulled forward. “Let’s go—Rain.”

Nicole must’ve told them our names and then said that we were not guilty—Candace was. After one of the policemen asked who Candace was, Nicole looked him right in the eye—the lamplight shining in her eyes—and assured him she was just trying to retrieve my purse. She looked at me, and I bobbed my head up and down, speaking up about Candace’s bratty attitude.

Suddenly, a phone rang. “Yes?” The policeman grabbed it off his huge belt and jammed it to his ear. A long silence and then, “Yes. She’s here.” After he punched a button and shoved it back on, the policeman told Nicole her mother was coming to get her. Without Candace.

“No—why was Candace let go?” Nicole almost panicked. Her eyes dashed to and fro, anger shining through them. Candace was the culprit. So why were we forced to know she got off the hook? I voiced this infuriation.

“Because,” the policeman pointed to the right, “of this.”

I looked and saw the singer strutting towards us with a twisting, yanking girl of thirteen slamming the ground with her small white sneakers. Spitting hurtful comments and threatening to chew through her own shirtsleeve if she had to in order to get away, Candace yanked once more. The singer clutched onto her ever tighter and snapped at her to stop. Candace obeyed but still twisted and tried to rip free.

“She’s been the culprit ever since. She needs a talking to.” The singer pushed Candace towards a policeman and he removed Nicole’s cuffs onto her wrists. Once a raging Candace was bribed into getting a candy bar from the on-campus convenient store by a glowering Nicole, the singer switched to Candace’s sister. A broad smile replaced the singer’s shock, dismay and fury her eyes had undoubtedly held up on stage.

“Thanks!” She told us. When we both looked at her like we didn’t know what she was talking about, she continued, “I had heard you speak up about this stupidity, so I grabbed Candace as soon as she was slipping out the door. Once I had her in my hand, I dragged her all the way here. Now,” she looked warily at Candace, whose pleas for that candy bar went completely ignored, “she’s going to jail.”

Huge grins shone as Nicole and I let that truth soak in. Then I shot out my free but sore hand and shook the singer’s own. “Rain.”

She raised her eyebrows at me. “Reign. How’s it spelled?”

Before I could answer, she looked over. Looking at Candace’s profile, I told him to hold on tight, and he, I hoped, nodded, commanding her to be quiet. She snapped at him, but all rebellion fell away when Nicole threatened to call Mamma.

“R-A-I-N.”

“R-E-I-G-N.”   

My face fell, and I apologized, “Sorry you weren’t such a queen up there tonight. All the nonsense—”

“Stop apologizing.” She tossed something at me, which I slung over my body.

“Thanks.”

“Hey.” She shot the finger towards my purse. “I stuck a business card in that thing. Next time you want a concert, call Bob, one of the security guards. He’ll help you out.” I caught someone waving, and waved back.

“I can’t believe it. I wanted to go home, but now, I’m befriending a celebrity.”

But the singer only shrugged. She smiled at me, and told Bob to take a picture of us two. He did so. Then Nicole and I told everyone we’d be good getting home from here. “Besides,” I told her as Reign blew me a kiss, “I’ll never forget her.” After we hugged, she mentioned her upcoming concert.   

“Can you make it?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Hope so!” I returned the smile and strode over to a shocked Nicole, her grin hanging open. But she would spread this new friendship all around campus. As we walked and talked, her iPhone rang.

“Yes?” She spoke into it for a while, and then her shoes scratched to a complete stop.

“What?” I quit walking.

Her jaw hung open before she spat, “Candace got away, and is nowhere to be found.”

“What?!”       

Nicole stuffed the phone away, snapping, “Don’t get it, Rain!”