Kill the Boy Band

by Goldy Moldavsky

  I don’t mean juggling figuratively; I mean he came onstage with three bowling pins. Let us be clear on something: There were millions of talents that Rupert P. did not possess. One of those was singing. The only reason he was lumped together with the other three boys was because his unimaginative parents looked at him when he was born and bestowed upon him the most common name in England that year. Being named Rupert was the luckiest thing to have ever happened to him.

  Their names may have been the same, but as they liked to reiterate in interviews, the Ruperts had their own distinct personalities.

  Rupert P.’s likes and passions began and ended with juggling.

  Rupert X. was the pretty boy/rebel.

  Rupert L. couldn’t tell time.

  And Rupert K. was … well, he was a life ruiner.

  Rupert K. was beautiful. He had ruddy cheeks, but the cute kind that looked like he’d always just come from running a marathon out in the cold. He’d had braces when he was twelve, so his teeth were straight and perfect. He had brown hair that he liked to keep short and that he was always pushing back off his forehead, especially when he didn’t want to answer a tele­vision interviewer’s question. He loved fantasy video games, folk music, and baking thumbprint cookies with his grandma. When he smiled, sometimes he would bite the inside of his right cheek. He had a beauty mark on the nape of his neck, right where his heartbeat pulsed on his carotid artery. It was the shape of California and the size of a pinkie nail. Recently, he’d taken to wearing porkpie hats on the crown of his head, something his fans were now copying. He wore sunglasses a lot because his pale green eyes were super sensitive to the sun. He had a tiny scar beneath his lower lip that he got when he fell off the jungle gym when he was six. And he seemed to take pleasure in ruining my life with how perfect he was.

  Like I said. He was a life ruiner. All of the aforementioned things would’ve been enough to have me melting over him, but what really put Rupert K. into the man-of-my-wildest-dreams category was something he’d said in one of the first interviews he’d done.

  “Happiness isn’t always easy,” he’d said. “But it’s a priority.”

  That resonated with me. It felt like he got me.

  “Let’s focus, girls,” Erin said, commanding even the attention of some of the Chocolateburg diners at the table next to ours. Erin was always commanding attention. “The boys will be here in a month. Is there any possible way to get tickets?”

  Tickets to Coming to America: The Ruperts Learn about Thanksgiving! were free and distributed online by a third party not affiliated with NBC. All 550 tickets were gone 2.7 seconds after they went up. You couldn’t even buy them on StubHub. It was the biggest crisis we’d ever faced as fans.

  “The only way to get tickets is if we find four fans willing to give them up,” I said. “So, we’re never getting tickets.” I didn’t know why we were even bothering with this group meeting, but I didn’t say anything like that.

  “We could offer to buy the tickets off them,” Apple said. She would suggest something like that. There were very few things in life that Apple’s parents could not buy her. Unfortunately for all of us, these tickets were one of those things.

  This is as good a place as any to give you some stats on Apple and her career as a Ruperts fangirl:

  Favorite member of The Ruperts: Rupert Pierpont

  Number of times she’s seen The Ruperts in person: 18

  Number of times she’s met (this includes getting anything from a selfie to a hug) all/a member of The Ruperts: 8

  Apple came from the outrageous ode to wealth and vanity that was Greenwich, Connecticut. She’d grown up there ever since her parents—an elderly, magnanimous couple—adopted her from an orphanage in Beijing when she was one year old. As the story goes, Apple’s parents were browsing the orphanage when they spotted the chubbiest baby they’d ever seen eating a piece of fruit out of the trash. I’ll give you one guess which fruit.

  Living all the way in Connecticut never stopped Apple from seeing The Ruperts in New York. Actually, she’d been to every performance of The Ruperts in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. (Once she even trekked as far as Montreal.)Erin and I met Apple at one of The Ruperts’ shows. It was an outdoor performance for the Today show and Apple had pitched a neon-orange tent as big as a circus in Rockefeller Center four days prior to the concert so that she could be in the front row.

  It got her on the news.

  A reporter interviewed her in front of her tent, asking, “Why are you so devoted to this band?”

  “Because,” she’d said, “I’m a Strepur for life!”

  “Excuse me?” the clueless newsperson said.

  “Strepur. It’s what Ruperts fans call themselves. It’s ‘Ruperts’ spelled backward.”

  The newsperson stared, blinked, smiled, and concluded the interview by asking a passerby how he felt about the growing population of Strepurs.

  “I’m all for strippers,” the man said.

  The clip was a mini viral sensation.

  Anyway, Erin and I had convinced our moms to let us leave for the city at two in the morning the day of the Today show concert so we could get a good place in line. (When I say “convinced,” I mean that Erin told her mom that she was going and I just waited for my mom to leave for her overnight shift.) By the time we got to Rockefeller Center, there must’ve been at least a thousand people there already. And there, at the front of the line, was that huge James and the Giant Peach of a tent. It was a lighthouse beacon, shining the way to the Promised Land. Erin grabbed my hand. Any time she did that it felt like she was pumping life into me. Because if you think about it, the only reason to grab your friend’s hand is when something big is about to happen. At first it was scary, but eventually I just started letting her take me. It was almost always worth it. So we waded through the sea of girls all around us, on a quest to reach the tent in the middle of Rockefeller Center.

  Apple was all alone in her tent and only too happy to share it with fellow Strepurs. Inside, the walls were wallpapered with posters of Rupert P.’s face, which would’ve normally been offensive, but I ignored it because it was warm, we were in the front of the line, and the tent got restaurant delivery service.

  We’d been friends with Apple ever since.

  “Do you think a thousand bucks would do it?” Apple asked, back at Chocolateburg. “Is a thousand too—”

  “No one is going to sell those tickets,” Erin cut in. “Not for all the money in your parents’ bank account.”

  “We could smoke some ticket holders out,” Isabel said. “Threaten to destroy their lives if they don’t give ’em up.”

  You think this is a joke.

  This is not a joke.

  Isabel had a certain cred on the Internet that stemmed from her massively followed and oft-suspended Twitter account. Oft-suspended because it delivered no shortage of creative (some might say shocking) threats to Ruperts haters or Ruperts celeb girlfriends. Isabel’s current favorite target was Rupert L.’s newest girlfriend, Ashley Woodstone. (Or, Ashley “Prancing in the” Woods, Stoned, as she was also commonly known.) Ashley was an actress with questionable new-age ideals, and even though she’d only just started dating Rupert L., Isabel already hated her more than she hated anyone else in her life. Which was saying a lot.

  Isabel’s infamous tweets ranged from the cartoonish and impossible:

  Im going to pull ur tongue out of ur mouth wrap it around ur neck n strangle u w it so hard ur eyes will pop out. i will pee in the sockets.

  To the quaint:

  Get ur fcking hands off him bitch i will cut u.

  #RupertLIsMine

  To the cryptically disturbing:

  I watch u in your sleep.

  I would never condone Isabel’s scary tweets, but you had to give the girl credit for managing to stay under 140 characters every time.

  At this point you may be asking just how much harm a fifteen-year-old fangirl could really do. That is the wrong question to
ask. People can do a lot of harm if pushed to the breaking point, and us fangirls lived at the breaking point. If the boys were involved in a scandal, we were at a breaking point. If they got haircuts, we were at a breaking point. If they smiled, we were at a brea … You get the idea. Boy band fangirls are a species that are more focused, determined, and powerful in large numbers than just about any other group of people I can think of.

  And anyway, Isabel wasn’t just any regular fangirl. She was kind of a legend on the Internet for being one of the most aggressive Ruperts stans out there. Also, her entire family was allegedly made up of criminals. Or maybe that was cops. I don’t know, we never really asked her, but either way, if they weren’t on one side of the law, they were on the other, and that meant Isabel came from tough stock.

  You may be asking why I would be friends with a death-threat-happy girl like Isabel. That one is a little harder to answer.

  The day I met Isabel was the day I’d skipped class for the first time ever.

  Erin met me in front of school that morning and tugged me away from it. “The boys are in town,” she’d said. “And I know where.”

  Obviously, I had to go.

  Cut to us sitting on the ground, leaning against the brick wall of a building on the corner of Avenue B in the city, no boys in sight. I was beginning to question Erin’s claim when Isabel came to stand in front of us.

  Before I ever saw Isabel’s face, I saw her boots.

  They had too many useless zippers and buckles and straps—useless because the boots looked like they were falling apart. The faux leather tongue spilled over the laces, and the parts over the sides of her ankles folded over too, so that it looked like she’d stuffed her feet into two badly bruised bananas that were halfway peeled.

  My eyes swept up over the rest of her—the holey jeans, the cheap-looking denim jacket (it was too blue; the cheap ones are always too blue)—until they rested on her face, and even then I couldn’t see it. She was backlit by the sun, so I had to shield my eyes to look at her. Protecting myself from her, even then.

  “You guys looking for The Ruperts?” Her voice was deep, skeptical.

  It turned out that Erin and I were in the right place, but we would have never been able to get a good look at the boys if it hadn’t been for Isabel. She led us to an alleyway, climbed over a Dumpster and then up a fire escape, and when we followed her, Erin and I got our first ever glimpse of the boys. They were kicking around a soccer ball in a courtyard. Our view was partially obscured by a building in the way and they were far from us, but it was the best moment of my life up until that point. I felt so light, watching Rupert K. come in and out of view, that if a strong gust of wind had blown right then, I would’ve flown right off that fire escape.

  The prize for best fan went to Isabel, easy. She knew how to get to The Ruperts. And the truth was, we were lucky to have her on our team.

  Stats on Isabel:

  Favorite member of The Ruperts: Rupert Lemon

  Number of times she’s seen The Ruperts in person: 68

  Number of times she’s met (this includes getting anything from a selfie to a hug) all/a member of The Ruperts: 34 (often multiple times in one day and with a total disregard for school attendance records)

  “We can’t just threaten people,” I said in a hushed voice, hoping the other Chocolateburgers couldn’t hear me. “We’re just going to have to face the fact that we’re not getting into the concert. We can’t go.”

  “The fight hasn’t even started and you’re already tapping out?” Isabel said.

  “I’m not tapping out …” Maybe I just didn’t want to get my karate gi all wrinkled if I knew it was a losing battle. (In my mind, the metaphorical fight she was talking about was a karate match, not a wrestling one. Karate just seemed so much more dignified.)

  “You’re always too chickenshit to do anything,” Isabel said, rolling her eyes. “Your goody-two-shoes mentality is getting way tired.”

  “Isabel, kindly shut up,” Erin said.

  I loved Erin in that moment. Because nobody told Isabel to shut up. If anyone did, they’d probably end up on the floor, Isabel standing triumphantly over them with knuckles freshly bruised and bloody. But Erin wasn’t just anybody. Isabel curled her upper lip and went back to her phone.

  I squeezed Erin’s knee, a nonverbal thanks, and she, in turn, squeezed mine: no probs.

  “The boys will still be in New York, there’ll be other ways to meet them,” Erin said. She dunked a Twix bar into her milk shake and bit off the end of it, making us wait for her to go on. She fixed us with a smile, sly and satisfied, and asked us a ­question we already knew the answer to. “Where are they staying?”

  “The hotel!” All of us said it at the same time.

  We turned to Isabel. “Isabel?”

  “My sources won’t know where the boys will be staying yet, but I’d put my money on The Rondack.”

  Aside from threatening people’s lives every day on Twitter, Isabel ran the most popular Ruperts update site on the Web. She knew stuff about the boys before the boys even knew it themselves.

  “The hotel is our best bet,” I said, “but everyone goes there. It’s going to be packed.”

  “We could get a room at the hotel,” Apple said. “We’d be free to roam around, find out which rooms the boys are in, corner them in hallways, and force them to comply with our every whim.” She smiled to herself, lost in a daydream/the boys’ probable nightmare.

  “I don’t think a hotel is a good idea,” I said. “Maybe we could—”

  “I think a hotel is a fantastic idea, actually,” Erin cut in.

  I watched her, trying to interpret this new eagerness in her. Erin was never this gung ho about things. Her MO was cool and aloof.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “But we won’t be able to check into a hotel. We’re minors.”

  “I can get Consuela to check in for us,” Apple said.

  Consuela worked as a housekeeper for Apple’s family, but while that may have been her official title, her role in Apple’s life stretched much farther than that. Consuela was Apple’s chaperone when she went to Montreal to see the boys in concert. Consuela was actually the one who stayed in the tent at the Today show for the first two days before Apple got there. And Consuela was the one who’d nearly gotten herself arrested at Toys “R” Us when she smacked a fellow holiday shopper with her purse trying to get to the last limited edition Rupert Pierpont doll that Apple needed for her collection. Consuela was basically an honorary Strepur, whether she wanted to be or not.

  “How much money is that going to be?” Isabel asked. “Because I can’t—”

  “I’ve got it covered!” Apple said.

  “We’ll all chip in for a room,” I said. Erin pinched me under the table and Isabel shot me a dirty look, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t fair to make Apple always pay for everything. Apple grinned at me, and that settled it.

  “We’re getting a room!” Erin said.

  The day of The Ruperts’ Thanksgiving spectacular, even the city felt more alive than ever. I thought we’d miss the madness of the big parade, since that was in Midtown and we were all the way downtown, but everyone who’d spent the morning perched on Thirty-Fourth Street must’ve migrated a couple of miles south, because the streets of SoHo were buzzing with life. That is to say, more so than usual. There were people everywhere, shouts and car horns overloud and pulsing in my ears; for all intents and purposes, New York herself was an excited fangirl that day. And her heart, where I could swear everyone in the city was heading to or coming from, was The Rondack.

  It was the swankiest hotel in SoHo—maybe the swankiest hotel in all of NYC. Even before everything went down later that night—when the hotel got bathed by helicopter beams from overhead and swarmed by hapless cops on the ground—the place was already crawling with chaos. It was the epicenter of all the action. And my friends and I were poised to make our entrance.

  My friends and I and Consuela.

 
; Check-in was at 3:00 pm and we got there just in time, but getting to the front doors was a trip, and not only because Apple’s overnight bag was big enough to fit a person. Literally. (I’ll come back to that later.) The hotel entrance was congested with people, paparazzi, and a throng of girls just like us, except clearly much less dedicated in their stanning. Because while waiting outside in the cold for seven hours straight until you see your idol had its merits, nothing beat shelling out for keys to the castle.

  There was no point being a fan these days if you weren’t willing to go the extra mile for your idols. It wasn’t enough anymore to send them fan mail and kiss the posters above our beds. These days you weren’t a true fan until you engaged in Twitter death threats and endless stan wars. The fandom landscape was peppered with land mines, and there was no other way to navigate it but to walk until you hit one. You come out the other side a little crazier, yeah, but you’re also stronger. You are a true believer. You will do anything for the object of your affection.

  Because the truth is, it isn’t worth loving something if you aren’t going to love it all the way. Apple told me a story once about a couple of girls she met in the pit at a show The Ruperts had at MetLife Stadium. Apple had gotten pit tickets too (which must’ve set her parents back a couple grand at least), but she said she was worried for most of the show that she’d have to go to the bathroom and lose her prime spot in front of the stage. These two girls next to her told her that they didn’t have that problem; they were wearing Depends.

  No, you aren’t a true fan until you’ve wept for your love. Bled for them. Threatened lives for them. Relieved yourself in adult diapers at their concert without ever leaving the bone-crushing discomfort of your two-thousand-dollar-a-piece spot.

  Because what else does it mean to be crazy about someone?

  Plus, being a fangirl was just fun. Aside from all the Internet stuff, with fics and gifs and stan wars, there was fandom outside the Internet too. Like the times when Isabel and Erin and Apple and I went for proper stalk sessions. The times when the boys would whiz past us so quick that seeing them was only as brief as catching a whiff of something. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but those few seconds of dizzy excitement were worth it just for how alive they made you feel. Tingly and jittery and crazed—in the best way. A natural high, truly. Even the anticipation that came with waiting for them was part of the fun. It was butterflies—the best kind. We might see the boys and we might not, but the hours in between, spent waiting, or racing down streets, or investigating; it was fun. We filled Instagrams and Twitters with it. We formed lasting friendships. We were a part of something.