Kill the Boy Band

by Goldy Moldavsky

  “He does not like dick!” Apple said.

  “Well, that settles it,” Isabel snorted.

  Erin walked up to Rupert P., and the way she was looking at him was the way a cat might look when you tossed it a shiny new ball of yarn. She swept an index finger along his jaw, down to his chin, and there was absolutely nothing sweet or romantic about it. Frankly, it scared me.

  “Is Griffin your boyfriend?” she asked, her voice so saccharine it made my teeth ache. “Do you want us to get him for you?”

  Why was she acting like this?

  Apple stepped in front of Erin. “Rupert P. and Griffin Holmes are just friends,” she said.

  “Sure they are,” Erin said. “Just like your always-a-bachelor uncle Patrick and his roommate Alistair are just friends.”

  “Uncle Patrick doesn’t like to live alone!”

  “Can we get back to the tea here?” Isabel said. “We have his phone.”

  It was then that we all realized, with the same instant force of clarity, that Rupert P.’s cell phone was an unearthed treasure trove. It didn’t matter that none of us except for Apple liked him. A person’s secrets were worth something. And a phone was nothing if not a keeper of secrets. I got what Erin meant about having all the power. I was starting to feel it.

  Rupert P.’s phone was everything we could hope to get our hands on.

  It was one hundred times more valuable to us than he would ever be.

  It was almost as good as meeting the boys in person.

  Almost.

  It was friggin’ comical how fast I dropped my resolve to release Rupert P. in favor of having all that info on his phone.

  But even though Isabel and Apple and I all lunged for it at the same time, Erin took a step back, keeping our new toy out of our overeager hands.

  She looked to Rupert P. “On behalf of me and my friends, I apologize. I think we may have accidentally caused a tiff between you and your boyfriend.”

  “Alright, alright, I surrender,” Rupert P. said. “I give in. You’ve had your fun now. Do you want to make a deal? Let’s make a deal!”

  “Do I look like a fucking game show?”

  “Please,” Rupert P. said. “You give me back my phone, I walk out of here and I don’t say anything to anyone.”

  “Don’t you have a girlfriend also?” Erin said. “Girls, doesn’t Rupert P. have a girlfriend?”

  “Michelle Hornsbury,” Apple said. “She’s quote-unquote nineteen, a quote-unquote university student, a quote-unquote model—”

  “Don’t forget beard,” Erin interjected. “She is also a very dedicated beard.”

  “Quote-unquote?” Rupert P. asked meekly, hopefully.

  “No,” Erin said. “She is very factually performing her duties as a beard.”

  “Wait, what’s a beard?” Apple said, stroking her jaw.

  Isabel cleared her throat and spoke in an authoritative voice. “A beard is someone who dates a gay person of the opposite sex in order to make that person appear heterosexual.”

  “What?” Apple said.

  I tried to explain it this time using simpler words. “It’s when a girl dates a gay guy, making him look straight.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Damnit, Apple, do we have to draw you a fucking Venn diagram?” Erin snapped. “Michelle Hornsbury is only Rupie’s pretend girlfriend so that he may maintain a straight image in the public eye.” She turned to Rupert P. “Am I warm?”

  “You know nothing about my relationship with my girlfriend!”

  “Quote-unquote.”

  “We met Michelle Hornsbury downstairs,” I said.

  “Ah yes, lovely beard, that beard,” Erin said.

  “You met Michelle Hornsbury downstairs?” Apple whispered fiercely. “Was she stunning in real life? Are the rumors true? Does she smell like cotton candy and the tears of Rupert P. stans?”

  “It would break her heart if she found out about Griffin, wouldn’t it?” Erin went on. “Or is she in on it? Oh shit, is it like an arrangement between you two? Why, I never.”

  “Walk me out of here with my blindfold on,” Rupert P. said, the desperation in his voice so thick you could spread it on toast. “Put me in the lift, I swear I won’t look at any of you. I don’t know who any of you are—you’ll never get in trouble.”

  “Fuck that,” Erin said. Behind me, Isabel giggled. No matter how often they were popping up these days, Isabel’s giggles never sounded quite right, and that was especially true now. Like spotting a clown at a cemetery.

  “Do you want autographs?” Rupert continued. “Is that it? Do you want me to sign something? A body part, perhaps? Your breasts?”

  “Ew, no.”

  “Wretched.”

  “Child, please.”

  “Quite frankly!” Apple squealed. She pulled on her shirt, but I stopped her before she got the whole thing off.

  “We should take the deal,” I whispered to Erin.

  “Don’t be such a spaz.” She held up the phone, her eyes blazing but leaving me feeling suddenly cold. “We have all the power now, remember? We can make him our bitch.”

  She turned to him and said, “Time for you to start bargaining, cowboy. Think that’s something you can juggle?”

  “I’ll give you whatever you want. Just please don’t go through my phone. That’s private.”

  He told her not to go through the phone, so of course she had to. The first stop was his gallery. As much as I knew this was wrong, as much as I felt bad for Rupert P., whose posture was suddenly stick straight, his head high, his ears perked—a puppy who thought it heard a noise at the door—I couldn’t not look at his phone. I was weak. Don’t judge me.

  We all crowded around the phone and Erin started scrolling through the pics, the minutes filling with our excited squeals every time we saw one of our boys in photographs from backstage on tour. There was a series of shots of Rupert L. bench-pressing with his shirt off, and all the orifices of Isabel’s face went round: her eyes got extra big, her mouth formed a silent O, even her nostrils flared with pleasure. “Iconic,” she whispered.

  There were a few hidden camera–style shots of Rupert X. playing with his hair, and then a few more where he was looking directly at the phone with a pressed expression on his pretty face.

  And then there were the pics of Rupert K.

  In a lot of the pictures he was posing for selfies with Rupert P., smiling, happy. I was looking at never-before-seen pictures of Rupert K., and it was starting to hit me that we truly had unprecedented access to the boys. Somebody send help.

  But then Erin stopped scrolling. At first I couldn’t make out the image. It wasn’t an image at all, actually. There was a PLAY button in the middle of the screen, surrounded by an eye, lips, an elbow? Then I realized what it was.

  Isabel’s eyes lit up. “What a time to be alive,” she said.

  “That’s not real. That’s photoshopped,” said Apple.

  How to explain that you couldn’t photoshop videos?

  “Jackpot,” said Erin. “The boy planted his own evidence. Quelle surprise.”

  Erin’s red-nailed finger clicked the PLAY button, and we all watched as Rupert P. made out with a guy. Definitely Griffin Holmes.

  Erin stopped the video before it could get any further.

  There was the sound of a whimper, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if it came from Rupert P. or Apple. I patted her shoulder in a show of support anyway.

  “You and Griffin make a cute couple,” Erin said. She actually sounded sincere for once. “I don’t know why you’d try to hide your love.”

  Rupert P.’s head fell forward and his shoulders slumped. “Why do you all hate me so much?” he said. “What have I ever done to deserve it?”

  “Well, there was that time The Ruperts canceled their second American tour because you said you had mono when you were actually seen all over Vegas gambling hundreds of thousands of dollars for four weeks straight,” Isabel said.

&n
bsp; “He has a debilitating gambling problem!” Apple said. “It’s nothing to joke about.”

  “Or that time you held a private juggling performance for that dictator’s son’s birthday party,” Erin said.

  “He had to pay off his gambling debts somehow!” Apple said.

  “There was the famous nose-picking incident at the Video Music Awards,” I said.

  “The fact that you’re a Roman Polanski sympathizer,” Erin said.

  “The time you punched that baby in the finger,” Isabel said.

  “That baby had it coming!” Apple said.

  “The time you drunkenly called in to that radio station and spoiled the ending to Game of Thrones.”

  “Everyone had already read the books!” Apple said.

  “The time you threw up on the entire first row at the Berlin concert,” Isabel said.

  “He had bad shellfish!” Apple said.

  “Bad shellfish and a bottle of absinthe.”

  “Do you realize how much effort it takes to get every single person in the front row?” Erin asked. “Green slime everywhere.”

  “All of those girls agreed it was really easy to wash out of their hair!” Apple said.

  “The nudes.”

  “Come on,” Apple said. “Everyone and their grandma has leaked nudes these days!”

  “The racism.”

  “The ageism.”

  “Not to mention the sexism.”

  “The well-documented hatred of your own fans.”

  “The bordering-on-disturbing Troll doll collection.”

  “Did we miss anything, girls?”

  “That about covers it,” I said. And that, ladies and gents, is what made Rupert P. of The Ruperts such a spectacular. Fucking. Flop.

  “So what did you ever do to deserve this?” Erin said. “You’re a cold sore on picture day. You are a fart in a cramped elevator. You are the gum on the bottom of my Louboutins. You, Rupert Pierpont, are a miracle of awful. But hey, you do you.”

  “Alright, alright,” Rupert P. said. “Just tell me what I can do so that you don’t show anyone those videos of me and Griffin. Please!”

  Erin walked over to his chair, stood right before him. He couldn’t see her, but something told me this wasn’t about him so much as it was about Erin. She stood tall, looking down her nose at him. “Why don’t you beg for me, love?”

  Something about the way she said it—the way she made the word “love” sound so cruel—brought me to my senses. I pulled her by her elbow and dragged her to the corner of the room. I got in her face, and what I saw, unbelievable as it was, was something that amounted to tears in her eyes. At the very least they looked awfully glassy. I’d never seen Erin cry, or even come close to it. But then she blinked. She fixed me with a pressed gaze, and I said, “What you’re doing isn’t cool.”

  “And what is it that I’m doing?”

  “I have no clue,” I hissed, keeping my voice low enough so that only she could hear me. “But taunting him like this? Using Griffin against him? Your actions are bordering on the homophobic. And I don’t know what you might be thinking, but it isn’t a total scream.”

  “Do you honestly think I’d out him? Contrary to some of my actions today, I’m not a raging asshole. I’d never do that to someone.”

  “Yeah, well, Rupert P. doesn’t know that.”

  “The point: You’re finally nearing it,” she said. “Rupert P. has something to lose. I’m not going to give him special treatment just because he’s gay. If I did, that would be the real injustice here, wouldn’t it? Think of how far it would set us back as a society.”

  Behind us, Isabel had taken over Erin’s role, and now she was the one standing over Rupert P. “What suite are the boys staying in?” she asked.

  “Room 1620,” Rupert P. said.

  “Where is your room key?”

  “Back right pocket.”

  “I volunteer!” Apple shouted.

  “Let’s go!” Isabel said.

  “Wait, you can’t just go into their room,” I said.

  “She’s right,” Erin said. “What if they’re there now?”

  That was not what I’d meant at all. But she did have a point.

  “Where is the rest of the band?” Isabel asked Rupert P.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can ask them.” Erin took Rupert P.’s phone and typed out a group text to the rest of the boys, whose names were clearly marked in the contacts.

  Where are you?

  The first text came back from Rupert X.

  I told you to never fckin txt me u stupid ginger gint.

  “Drag him!” Isabel said. “Rupert X. might be my new favorite Rupert.”

  The next text came from Rupert L.

  I’m heer. Wear r u?

  Ever helpful. Sometimes, I couldn’t figure out why Isabel loved Rupert L. so much. He was super cute, sure, and he may have been built like a bag of rocks, but he was also dumb as a bag of rocks. His tweets were always littered with typos. It figured his text messages would be too.

  “Autocorrect can be a bitch,” Isabel explained.

  Finally, the text from Rupert K. that I was waiting for came in.

  Sound check at NBC. Are u close?

  Isabel spun to face Rupert P. “Wait a minute. How did everyone leave the hotel without being spotted?”

  “Maintenance entrance in the car park below the hotel,” Rupert P. said, calmer now. “It’s the reason we picked this place. I need to be at sound check, so can you please let me go now?”

  Rupert P. could’ve said a whole bunch of things just then, but Erin and Apple and Isabel were too distracted to pay him any more unnecessary attention. They had the boys’ room key and the promise that they weren’t around. They had the keys to the castle.

  “Let’s go!” Isabel said again, getting antsy, bouncing in place.

  Erin took a step but I took her hand. It felt suddenly like if I let her go I’d lose her for good. “Erin, he’s willing to let us get out of this mess scot-free,” I whispered. It felt necessary to keep my voice low, as though what I was saying was too important and fragile to state out loud. “Don’t you think this has gone on long enough?”

  The way she looked at me just then, the way her eyes crinkled with some of the glassiness of before but none of the sadness—for the first time, that look scared me. “It hasn’t even started yet.”

  Neither of us could know then just how right she would turn out to be.

  Rupert P.’s head hung low. With the girls out of the room I felt I could be nice again. And something about the way he looked, the way he was literally bent out of shape, made me feel like being extra nice. “You don’t have to be ashamed,” I said. “It’s okay to be gay.”

  He didn’t say anything. For a second he was so still I thought he might have fallen asleep. And then I had the creepy thought that he was dead or something. Amazingly, it was only the first time that night that I’d have that thought. But then his lips twisted ruefully, and in that moment I knew not only that he’d heard me, but that he also hated me.

  “It’s okay to be gay, is it?” he said, his voice mocking and nasal. “Well, thank heavens you’re here to tell me that. I never would’ve thought so until this very moment. That’s all I need, yeah? A Rupert Kirke fangirl to share her infinite wisdom with me.”

  Yep, he hated me. It made me feel uneasy. But I guess it was too much to ask of the person you were kidnapping not to hate you.

  “It’s okay to be closeted too,” I continued. “You should come out in your own time. And if and when you do come out, your fans are still going to love you. I don’t know if you know this or not, but there’s hardly anything that fangirls love more than gay boy band members. I mean, I don’t particularly subscribe to that faction myself, but you’d be surprised how many slash rpfs there are out there.”

  “Slash rp—? What the hell is an rpf?”

  “Real person fics … fanfiction.” “Fanfiction” was one of those
few words people didn’t say in real life. Like “shit” blurted in a kindergarten classroom. It just wasn’t done. And it felt weird to say it now. I thought briefly of writing down everything that was happening for a future fic. Sort of a true crime rpf. I was pretty sure it’d never been done before. Then I realized it would probably come off way too unrealistic. It’d have to be an AU fic. “Forget it,” I said.

  “Bloody hell, how is this my life?” Rupert P. said. “How am I taken prisoner, listening to a teenage girl talk to me about fanfiction! How the fuck did I even end up in the bloody band! I can’t sing, you know! I can’t even bloody sing!”

  “I know.”

  “Shut up! You don’t tell me I can’t sing! I’m the only one who’s allowed to say it. Me!”

  “Sorry,” I muttered under my breath. “How did you know I was a Rupert Kirke fan?”

  “What?”

  “When you said I was sharing my ‘infinite wisdom’ with you, you called me a Rupert K. fangirl. How did you know?”

  “You stink of it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re wearing his perfume,” he said.

  All the Ruperts had their own separate fragrances. They were a big hit, along with the requisite nail polish and hair accessories. You could smell like your favorite boy and wear his face on your head at the same time. Rupert K.’s fragrance smelled of jasmine and baby’s breath flowers. I was wearing it now. But I’d only dabbed it on my neck and wrists. I was sure Rupert P. was exaggerating about the strength of it.

  “And Rupert K. is everyone’s favorite,” he said.

  “Not my friends’.”

  “Lovely bunch, they are.”

  “I’m sorry about them,” I said. “But I’m not like them. I’m going to let you go.”

  He looked up, unseeing but disbelieving. He let a moment pass, maybe wondering if I was going to end that sentence with a “Just kidding!” But I wasn’t. Without the rest of the girls and their majority rule, I realized I could finally set him free. And I had to do it before I lost my courage. But I had to think of how. There were a few things that could happen after I untied him. At best he’d punch me in the face and leave me unconscious on the floor; at worst he’d set me on fire like he’d promised before. Plus, there was the blindfold to worry about. I wondered if we could work something out, where I promised to let him go only under the condition that he walk out with his blindfold on. And there was the issue of warning my friends to get out of the penthouse before Rupert P. found them.