But we never actually got to do that.
What actually happened, according to Apple’s story, was this:
On her way to the ice machine at the end of the hall Apple saw someone already there, getting his own tub of ice. As fangirl luck would have it, it was none other than Rupert Pierpont.
I’ll never know if the series of events that unfolded next would have been completely different if it was any of the other boys. If it was Rupert X. getting ice on the eighth floor at the exact same moment that Apple was, maybe none of this would have ever happened. Maybe I wouldn’t be telling you this story. Maybe Apple would’ve just walked away. (Let’s be real—she wouldn’t have walked away.) But she didn’t. And what happened, happened.
Anyway, you can imagine her reaction.
You can’t?
Okay, let me help you out. Imagine a big blubbering mess of tear-streaked flesh and dry heaving. Apple did the only thing Apple could think to do. She ran at full fucking speed. Apple did not stop. Apple’s overwhelming desire to hug/touch/hump Rupert P. by any means necessary meant nothing was going to get in the way of her flesh touching his. She did not stop until she football tackled Rupert P. to the ground.
Rupert P. was out cold instantly. This was actually kind of a best-case scenario, under the circumstances, because a tackle from Apple could’ve very well killed him.
I should probably mention that Apple is a beautiful girl who is 267 pounds. I know her exact weight because she tweets about it every day. We all stanned for our respective boys in our own respective ways, and the way Apple worshipped at Rupert P.’s throne was by tweeting him on the daily in the hopes that he would tweet her back. As of today he had tweeted her back a total of zero times. She hadn’t stopped trying, though. Actually, she’d started a campaign to lose weight in order to get his attention. So far she’d lost sixteen pounds and he hadn’t blocked her yet. (So … success?) At five feet four inches tall and 267 pounds, Apple was the lolly to our pixie sticks. And at top speeds I could only imagine she was deadly.
So when I opened the door, Apple was there, just as I’d expected, but she was out of breath and holding Rupert P.’s ankle in her fist, the rest of him draped on the floor behind her, limp as the sack of coal Santa brings for the naughty kids.
“I found one,” she said.
And that was how my three friends and I came to be in possession of our very own boy bander.
So back to our second official group meeting, now with Rupert P. tied up in the other room.
“What are we going to do?” Isabel said.
We were in the room not occupied by the worst boy bander alive, and Isabel was pacing. This worried me. If Isabel was scared, that meant we should all be scared. Like I mentioned before, thanks to her family, Isabel knew of crime. And I was pretty sure kidnapping someone, no matter how irrelevant he was, was a pretty big crime.
I watched as she carved a path in the carpet around the bed, deep focus on her stony face, like a bull circling a red cape before charging. She seemed fine before, but I guess tying up an unconscious flop was one thing and listening to it make threats was quite another. Isabel was post postal.
“¡Mierda madre culo puta!” she said. “We need to think!”
When Isabel was mad she cursed in Spanish. I found this out when we were at the side entrance for Live with Kelly and Michael once and Isabel tried to sneak past one of the security guards when he wasn’t looking. He was too quick, though, and she ended up on their ban list. I’d never heard so many Spanish obscenities yelled so loud and all at once. But while Isabel might have grown up speaking (broken) Spanish, I’d aced it last year and knew that her curses never made any sense. Like now, for example, all she’d said was, “Shit mother ass bitch.” Isabel was a nonsensical Spanish curser.
She turned to me, nostrils flared more than ever. Truly, her transformation into an angry bull was nearly complete. “¡Que me miras, pendeja! Think!”
(Roughly translated: “Why are you just looking at me, asshole? Think!”)
“There’s nothing to think about,” I said. “We have to let him go, obviously.”
I didn’t think that would be such a revolutionary thought, but the way the rest of the girls stopped and stared, it was like I’d just announced that I hated The Ruperts’ last album. I mean, yeah, I helped tie him up when Apple dragged him into the room, but really, what else was I supposed to do? What if he woke up and got scared? He could’ve lashed out at us. It was so Rupert P.’s style to start swinging before he even opened his eyes. Plus, when everyone grabbed a pair of tights to tie around his arms and legs, I wasn’t about to be left out. Tying him up may have been a tad cray, but even I knew that keeping him crossed the line into all-out locodom. I thought of what Rupert K. would say if he were here to see this mess. I shut my eyes, and he was standing right next to me. “Not cool, love,” he said in his deep, vanilla-milk-shake voice. “You can’t very well keep him.”
I seriously don’t want to.
“Then you’ve got to let him go,” Imaginary Rupert K. said.
A noise a lot like a grunt penetrated the wall and knocked me out of my reverie. It was as if Rupert P. had heard my thoughts.
“We can’t let him go,” Erin said. Firm. Steady. She was so calm, she even found time to check her cherry-red manicure real quick. “If we do he’ll tell. And we don’t want that.”
It should’ve worried me right then that Erin was the only one among us who wasn’t totally tripping. But I chalked it up to that just being Erin: calm, cool, and creamily complexioned. Usually Erin’s levelheadedness in crazed situations was a relief for me, but more and more she was starting to freak me out. Who stayed calm when the biggest flop in the world’s greatest boy band was threatening to end you?
“We should hold someone hostage because otherwise he’ll tell on us?” I said. “Are we back in grade school? What kind of logic?”
“Let’s listen to Erin,” Apple said. “Right now we have him. If we let him go, we’ll lose him. I’m not sure I like those odds.”
“That’s not how odds work, and I really didn’t say any of that,” Erin said.
“We should vote on what to do,” Isabel said. She stopped pacing. “Anonymous vote.”
“Why anonymous?” I asked.
“So that you don’t embarrass yourself.”
“Fine. Whatever. Anyone have a pen and paper?”
There was a moment of stillness as the four of us looked around, totally clueless. The only things any of us ever wrote with were our phones. And there was no way this was going to be a vote via group text.
“I see a pen,” Isabel said, going to the bedside table. “No paper, though.”
“Check the drawer,” I told her.
“There’s only a book in here.” She took it out anyway and flipped through it. “No blank pages.”
“Just rip one out,” Erin said. “We’ll write in the margins.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t r—”
But my words were cut short by the sound of pages being torn off the spine. Isabel handed a page to each of us and let the rest drift onto the bed like snowflakes. There was very little margin space, but I wrote around the heading (something about a Job). We all shared the pen. When we were done writing we crumpled all the papers and dumped them into Apple’s orange ski cap.
“Okay, so this is the vote for what to do with Rupert P.” It was put on me to read the votes, and the first piece of paper I pulled out was my own. “We let him go immediately,” I read.
The second paper only had one word on it. “Sex.”
We all turned to Apple. “Good suggestion,” she said.
The third piece of paper said, “We keep him until we figure out what to do with him.” I couldn’t help my own incredulous reaction creeping through my voice as I read. I didn’t like the way “what to do with him” sounded at all, but I kept reading.
The last vote was scrawled so severely I could barely make out Isabel’s handwriting, but ev
entually I got it. “Whatever Erin says.” I rolled my eyes. So much for the anonymity portion of the anonymous vote.
“It looks like we have a consensus,” Erin said.
“Literally, what the fuck?” I said. “Tying him up was one thing—we’re young and impressionable—but don’t you guys think we’re taking our stanning a little too far? I mean, people say all Strepurs are insane, and if we go through with this we’d be proving them right. We can still get out of this with minimal damage done. This probably happens to the boys all the time. I’m sure Rupert P. will understand that we let things get a little out of hand but that we’re really sorry. I mean, do you guys really want to go from crazy fangirls to literally crazy fangirls?”
I didn’t normally say so much at once. Usually I let Erin do all the talking. Most of the time I let other people convince me of something instead of me being the one to do the convincing. But this was important, and I could feel the gravitas of my statement as I looked around the room. I was the coach at halftime in every inspirational sports movie. My friends were the hapless team who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, but all they needed was one measly pep talk to turn things around and come out on top. People were actually listening to me. I’d never felt so much like a leader before. It was invigorating. No wonder Erin always took charge.
Their shadowed lids dropped low over their eyes as they got lost in thought, thinking this over. It was happening. I was getting through to them. This was working.
Isabel cleared her throat. “I’ve given it a lot of thought,” she said, “and I think this could be really great for my website.”
“Then it’s settled,” Erin said. “We keep him. For now.”
This was not the way inspirational sports movies went.
“This is some mechanical bullshit,” I said. “You guys can keep riding it; I’m out.”
I opened the door and walked out into the other room. Despite the blindfold, I knew Rupert P. could sense that I was there. He squirmed and squealed.
I really did want to do the right thing, but you have to understand who I was up against. Apple was never going to let Rupert P. go, Isabel was scary enough even when she wasn’t in full bull mode, and Erin was … Erin. I couldn’t turn on my best friend.
I didn’t know what else to do. So I left.
I now lived in a world where kidnapping a boy bander was as common as asking for his autograph. I always knew that Isabel and Apple were next-level crazy, but the fact that Erin still wanted in on this was the real shocker. And I just ran away, too scared to really do anything. Chickenshit, like Isabel said. But I wasn’t about to stay in that room, not when it required spending this much brainpower agonizing over the well-being of Rupert P. And the day I spent my time agonizing over the well-being of Rupert Pierpont was the day I officially couldn’t recognize myself anymore.
I needed to think. I went to the hotel bar.
I probably should have left the hotel (in hindsight, I definitely should have), but I stayed. I guess I was hoping that if I could find a place to cool down, the other girls would cool down too and we could talk about it like rational people. Or at least as rational as a pack of fangirls could get.
The bar didn’t have anyone posted at the lobby entrance to card me, unlike the street entrance, which I could see through the glass door was barricaded by a pair of buff bodyguards blocking the Strepurs outside from stampeding through. I’d never been in a bar before, and though I probably shouldn’t have been breaking any more laws that day, I couldn’t deny that I felt instantly cool perching myself on a bar stool while fancy people chatted around me. It was still early in the day, so the place was mostly empty, but I liked that. It felt less threatening somehow.
The new setting helped to clear my mind. I hooked a finger into the bracelet on my left wrist and pulled it tight until it snapped against my skin. It was one of those bracelets made of white alphabet beads strung on a skinny elastic string. I don’t know why snapping it like that always calmed me down, but it did. It was kind of fitting too, since I’d gotten the bracelet to sort of commemorate my dad. It was nice to think that he had a hand in helping me relax.
“How did you get in here?”
I let go of my bracelet and looked up. The bartender in front of me wore fingerless motorcycle gloves and a diamond stud in his left earlobe. And it took me a minute of awkwardly staring at him to realize that he was talking to me. “Oh, am I … not allowed to be here?” My cheeks were red. I did not need the mirrored wall behind him to tell me that, but it confirmed it anyway.
“You’re allowed. I just meant, how did you bypass security?” He pointed his chin to the street door and the fans outside. “Girls have been trying to get in here all day. One made it past the door, but she was quickly escorted out. She cried a lot.”
“I have a room here.”
He scrunched his hairy eyebrows and watched me. He was hairy all over, with the hair on his head slicked and parted at the side and a beard that was neat but full. He was clearly one of those hipster guys who thought passing as a Civil War soldier was the height of cool. I pictured him trading his black button-down shirt and margarita mixer at the end of the week for a Union uniform and musket to keep fighting on the weekends. He would probably be one of those soldiers who played a somber song on his fiddle outside of his tent at night and wrote long letters to his faithful wife back home, her frayed, sepia-toned portrait tucked safely away in his breast pocket.
Or maybe he was just from Williamsburg.
“You’re a fan, though, right? Of the boy band that’s staying here tonight?”
Maybe he knew something about the boys. Maybe he could help me find Rupert K. I leaned forward. “Yeah,” I said. “I am.”
“And so you got a room here at the hotel,” he said. “Wow. I don’t know if that’s the most determined thing I’ve ever heard of, or just the saddest.”
I pictured a musket ball piercing his chest during battle.
“I don’t think it’s sad.”
“You’re spending all this money on a room, for what? So that you could maybe, possibly glimpse these guys—who don’t deserve your attention, by the way. They’re just regular boys, probably not unlike the ones in your own high school. They’ve got skid marks in their underpants just like any other person.”
“Wretched,” I muttered.
“What’s your name?”
“My name?”
“Yes,” he said. “What is it?”
I paused, but only for a moment. “Samantha Baker.”
“Okay, Samantha Baker, tell me, because I’m really interested,” he said. “You seem like a smart, nice girl. Why do you love The Ruperts?”
As if smart, nice girls couldn’t possibly like a boy band. I didn’t know if I should’ve felt offended or … Well, I was just plain offended. “Can’t I just love them?”
“Of course you can. But I want to know why.”
Why did I love The Ruperts? It was a fair question, and one that I got all the time from schoolmates, randoms on the street, concerned parent, but it was still a difficult thing to answer.
Was it their music? It was fun, and I listened to it almost exclusively, but even me, a die-hard Strepur, could admit that it wasn’t anything groundbreaking. I’ll be the first to defend The Ruperts when people say that their music is just bubblegum (who doesn’t enjoy the simple deliciousness of gum sometimes?) or that it didn’t merit any accolades because none of it was written by them (most of the greatest singers in the world don’t sing their own music). But I can also call The Ruperts’ music what it is: catchy, mindless pop.
Did I love them because they were hot? Because they were hot, minus Rupert P., of course. Rupert K. would always be my favorite, but the others had their charms. Rupert L. was a beefcake. A babe. One hundred percent bona fide. And Rupert X. may have been the most conventionally blond-pretty boy I have ever seen.
Did I love them because they were the only boys in my life who consistently told
me I was beautiful? Probably.
I loved The Ruperts for who they were, sure, but I mostly loved them for how they made me feel. Which was happy.
The Ruperts made me happy. The simplest thing to be in the world. And the hardest.
After my dad died, happiness was a myth. The Ruperts changed all that.
“You can’t help who you love,” I said, shrugging.
Civil War Bartender slapped a dingy white dishcloth over his shoulder and leaned forward, his hairy eyebrows rising and falling dramatically. There was wisdom about to be imparted, I could feel it. Bless.
“What you don’t even realize now—what you will only come to understand in time, but lucky for you, I’m here to tell you—is you’re not going to give two shits about this band in a few years. In fact, I guarantee that this group that you admire so much and that you are putting all of your love and dedication and devotion into will be nothing more than an obsession you will be immensely embarrassed of having had. One day you’ll be in college, maybe you’ll be at a party, and someone will say, ‘Hey, do you remember The Ruperts? How shitty was their music?’ and you will have a moment of crisis: Do you admit your former love for them, or do you concede, because you know in your heart that this person is right? And guess what you’ll say? You’ll say, ‘Yeah, their music was utter. Putrid.Garbage.’ ”
He leaned back again, looking way too proud of himself. I know what I said before, about the importance of being nice, but I have to say this guy was a total douchefuck.
“So, can I order a drink?”
If I had to sit through this lecture, maybe I could get a white wine to go with it. I’d heard white wine tasted better than red. Plus, it didn’t stain.
Kill the Boy Band Page 4
