Kill the Boy Band

by Goldy Moldavsky

  I was the worst best friend in the world.

  “Erin?”

  “None of us are guilty,” Erin said. “Whatever happens, we stick to the same story, alright? We were all together and none of us did it.”

  “You know what that means, right?” Isabel whispered in my direction. “She totally did it.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Um, I know this is an upsetting time, but collect your feels in an orderly fashion. Who do you think you’re talking to?” Isabel said.

  “Way to stick together, you guys!” Apple said. “Can’t we go two minutes without fighting anymore? And let’s stop accusing each other. We just need to be honest about where we all were when Rupert P. passed away. I was at the concert.”

  “I was in the hotel gym,” Isabel said. “They have the best Wi-Fi there.”

  “I was in the bar,” I said. Usually I would’ve blabbed about it to anyone I met—that I had a total “moment” with Rupert Kirke on the roof of The Rondack, where he put his arms around me, saved my life, and said I had lovely eyes—but for some reason I was reluctant to tell my own friends. Maybe it was because they didn’t feel like friends anymore. Anyway, none of them would’ve believed me. Saying I was in the bar was a lot more plausible than meeting the love of your life on a hotel rooftop.

  We all turned toward Erin, waiting for her to tell us where she was when Rupert P. died, but she stayed silent. I didn’t have time to worry about her silence, because what was creeping me out more was the way she stared at me: steady, unwavering. Like she was seeing right through my lie.

  “What if none of us did it?” I said quickly.

  “What?” Erin said.

  “Look.” I pointed to Rupert P.’s arms. “The way he was tied up, his gag was linked to his hands. When we left the room he would’ve been trying to get his hands loose. What if, the more he tried to free his hands, the more it tightened the gag? What if it slipped off his mouth, down to his neck, and he—”

  “Accidentally strangled himself to death?” Erin said.

  “Quite frankly.”

  “You really think that’s what happened?” Isabel asked me.

  “It’s the only explanation we’ve got. The alternative is one of us is a murderer.”

  Isabel nodded and started pacing. “Okay. Now that that’s out of the way, we gotta figure out how to get rid of the body.”

  “What?” the three of us responded.

  “What, you all thought we could just leave him here? Should we tie the tights around his neck into a nice little bow for the police to find? We need to get him back to his room and let someone else deal with him.”

  “We can’t move him to the boys’ room. They’re already back from the show,” I said.

  “And how do you know?” Isabel asked.

  Because I met Rupert K. on the roof. “I mean, if Apple’s back from the concert, then they must be too.”

  “She’s right,” Erin said. “They probably are.”

  “We need to get rid of Rupert P. before he starts to rot,” Isabel said.

  “We aren’t touching his body,” I said. “We need to call the police.”

  You’d think I’d just announced that the remaining Ruperts had just broken up.

  “Have several seats, will you?” Isabel said. “Your arms must be tired of carrying around that huge fucking moral compass of yours. We call the police now and your homecoming court will be a parade of the juvie circuit. I swear, sometimes I think you get off on being a self-righteous buzzkill.”

  “If Rupert P. did die accidentally, then the police will see that and we won’t get into trouble. Not much, at least. The only reason you wouldn’t want to call the police is if he didn’t die accidentally.”

  “I could swear you just accused me of murder.”

  I didn’t respond to that, because maybe I kind of had. “You’re awfully insistent on getting rid of all the evidence.”

  I looked over at Erin, wishing she’d back me up. But I already knew she wouldn’t. She just stood in the corner, her gaze on nothing and no one in particular. She was almost as devoid of color as Rupert P. was.

  “We should have a vote,” Isabel said, starting to pace again.

  “Another vote?” I was good in a crisis, but I didn’t know how far that would take me when it came to standing up to Isabel. It felt like she’d taken the reins somehow, and while Erin had the motive to kill Rupert P.—and might have done it—I still would have preferred her leadership over Isabel’s any day.

  Isabel was already across the room, grabbing the book from the drawer in the nightstand again.

  We all wrote down our votes again. Put the crumpled pieces of paper into Apple’s ski cap again. I read them out loud again.

  The first vote. “Move the body.”

  The second. “Call the police.”

  The third. “Move him.”

  The fourth vote. “Move the body.”

  It was like déjà vu, only worse. This was actually real.

  I opened the door and walked out into the other room. Rupert P. was in his chair, dead, but still watching me. A shiver ran through my whole body. I couldn’t be there any longer. I left.

  I now lived in a world where murdering a boy band member was as acceptable as asking for his autograph.

  Okay, I know we didn’t technically murder him. Maybe. But he died under mysterious circumstances that we were directly responsible for. Rupert P., however ugly and shitty a person he was—mayherestinpeace—did not deserve to die.

  It was too much to think about.

  Obviously, I went back to the hotel bar.

  I couldn’t just flee the hotel. I wanted to, but I couldn’t leave things the way they were: a boy dead in our room and my friends in the lurch. But I also couldn’t just sit there and watch them play around with someone’s death.

  Perhaps the bar wasn’t the best place to clear my head, though. It was fuller this time of night. Beyond the windows I couldn’t see anything but Strepurs, just piled on top of each other, pressed against the glass. They were the rolling fog in horror movies, the ever-expanding dark blob in The Blob (the 1988 remake). I thought back to what Erin said, about those girls being zombies, and now it was all I saw. It was in the glazed-over look behind their overtired eyes; their open mouths, silent from where I was sitting, but eerily cavernous; the drool that fell limply from the corners of them. Were those girls my peers? Was I kidding myself into thinking there was more than just glass doors that separated us?

  You could put up a few stanchions, post a pair of guards at the front, but nothing you did could really stop them. It felt like I was the only one who knew the unique and undeniable truth that the only reason this hotel was still standing was because the Strepurs outside of it were feeling merciful. For now. The moment they all decided that nothing would stand in the way of them and The Ruperts, people were going to fall and walls were coming down.

  There was a stool open at the bar. I sat in it a second before realizing I’d have to see the Civil War Bartender again. He showed up immediately. Even his beard wasn’t enough to obscure the smugness behind it. “I heard about what happened.”

  I sat up straighter, alarmed. Did he know Rupert P. was dead? Did the girls call the police after all? “I’m—I’m sorry.”

  “I bet you are. A Rupert quits the band. Smartest guy in the group.”

  Oh. “You know about that?”

  “It’s all over the news.” He took his phone out and flicked through some things on the screen until a blue glow reflected off his face. He showed me the screen. It was the signature royal-blue background of Isabel’s site. If someone as civilian as Civil War Bartender was on it, it had to mean she was getting crazy traffic, which meant she was probably raking it in too. Rupert P.’s death might end up being the best thing to happen to Isabel.

  “Come to drown your sorrows?” Civil War Bartender said.

  “Will you serve me alcohol if I said yes?” I didn’t know how drink
s worked exactly. I’d never had any alcohol before, but if movies and books were to be believed, there was a chance I could black out, maybe forget whole parts of the day. Suddenly alcoholism didn’t seem like an altogether bad way to lead a life. A drink sounded like just exactly what I needed.

  “Still no.”

  “I’ll have a cherry Coke.”

  He poured me a glass and watched as I gulped it down. I didn’t realize my hands were shaking until some of the Coke spilled down the front of my sweater, the ivory cable knit soaking it up like a towel. “Damnit.”

  “You’re really upset about this,” Civil War Bartender said.

  Why was he still here? He handed me a stack of napkins, and I dabbed them on myself in a futile attempt to get clean.

  “Chaos for a boy band is always a good thing,” he said. “Shakes things up a bit. It’ll either make them stronger musicians or they’ll disband altogether. Any way you spin it, it can’t be bad.”

  He was starting to sound like Erin. How could two people so different have the same opinion on this?

  “Rupert Pierpont was the weakest link anyway,” he said. “Wasn’t he, like, the one who juggled all the time?”

  “For someone who despises boy bands so much, you seem to know an awful lot about them.”

  “I can’t shut my eyes to the world around me. As John Lennon once said, ‘Living is easy—’ ”

  “ ‘With eyes closed.’ I know. What I don’t know is what the fuckall that quote has to do with what we’re talking about.” I kept dabbing the stain, which seemed to only be growing, in proportion with my annoyance. “Don’t you have a Kickstarter to fund or something? I don’t have to sit here and listen to you. You don’t know anything. You think you’re so cool with your beard and your dollar-store philosophies about boy bands and life? You think you have anything to say about the experience of the modern American teenage girl? You have no fucking clue what it’s like to be me or my friends. You don’t know what we’re capable of. So why don’t you kindly fuck off!”

  I didn’t know where any of that had come from, but it felt good getting it out. Is this what it felt like to be Erin all the time? To always make an impact? The few people sitting next to me at the bar gave me long looks before vacating their stools. Even Civil War Bartender took a step back.

  “Wow,” he said. “Fans, man. You’re all crazy.”

  “Yeah? Write me an open letter.”

  His gaze left mine to look at someone behind me. He rolled his eyes. “I’ll be way over there if you need me.”

  Erin took one of the newly empty stools beside me. “We need to talk.”

  “Sometimes, Erin, I think you’re the coolest person I’ve ever met. And sometimes, I can’t believe I even allow myself to talk to you.” I guess talking to the bartender ripped something open in me. A new confidence, maybe. Whatever it was, I was riding it as far as it would take me. “You betrayed me. You lied to me all this time since you’ve been back from Dublin. You could’ve talked to me. I would’ve listened.”

  “But you wouldn’t have changed your mind about the boys,” Erin said. “You probably would’ve judged me for sleeping with Rupert X.”

  I didn’t say anything right away. I wanted to deny it, but I got this twinge in my gut that maybe she was right. Maybe I would’ve done the unmentionable thing—maybe I wouldn’t have believed her, or worse: Maybe I would’ve slut-shamed my best friend over my love for a boy band.

  “I would have believed you,” I said, hoping that saying it would make it true.

  “Whatever,” Erin said. “That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “I know what you want to talk about,” I said. “He’s sitting unblinking in our hotel room.”

  “We need to—”

  “Come play, you said. The water’s nice, you said. And now a person is dead!” My voice had risen a bit, and we both looked around to see if anyone had heard me. But no one was paying any attention to the two teenage girls sitting at the bar. “Kill the boy band—those were your exact words.”

  “I didn’t mean literally,” she hissed. “You … you don’t actually think I had something to do with his death, do you?”

  She looked even worse than she had up in the room. Her hair seemed impossibly limp, and no matter how many times she put her hands through it, it wouldn’t cooperate, like even her golden strands were sick of her bullshit. She pushed it back, a nuisance. It didn’t look very fashionable. Even the red in her lipstick had faded. I’d never seen the perfect Erin so … imperfect.

  “No,” I said. “No, it was an accident, remember? He did it to himself.”

  “That’s the thing I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “I don’t think that he did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I called my dad.”

  “You what?” My first reaction was to be scared. But then the more I let it sink in, the more relieved I felt. It made me long for grown-ups in a way I thought I’d grown out of. I wanted an adult to swoop in and help us, take care of everything, clean up our mess and tell us it would be okay. I knew it wouldn’t be that easy, but I allowed myself to live in that one second when I hoped it would be. It was warm and safe.

  “I didn’t tell him anything. I just asked him—hypothetically—if someone could kill themselves through strangulation.” Erin’s father was a cardiologist. He and Erin didn’t speak very much unless Erin needed some urgent medical advice about periods or STDs “for her friends.” He was always happy to impart his knowledge to her if it got the two of them to talk, it seemed. “He said probably not.”

  “Probably not is not no.”

  “He said the victim would pass out first before they’d ever get close enough to actually kill themselves.”

  “But the tights.”

  “Rupert P. would’ve passed out long before he could pull them tight enough to actually die.”

  “But … there’s still a chance he did this to himself, right? I mean … It can’t … We didn’t …”

  “I don’t know,” Erin said. She wiped her hands over her face. Another thing I’d never seen her do. Erin could go a whole day without touching her face just so that her makeup stayed meticulously in place. “I don’t know anything anymore. I just think we have to entertain the possibility that someone did kill him.”

  “You mean one of us.”

  She nodded.

  “Girls!”

  Erin and I turned because, well, we were the only girls in the bar. Michelle Hornsbury rushed to us, all out of breath and unfairly beautiful. She wrapped her arms around Erin first and then me, air-kissing our cheeks once on each side.

  To say it was weird was an understatement.

  I couldn’t remember if we’d returned her purse. I think we just left it on the table. Had someone else brought it up to the bar and relayed the message that it was actually me and Erin who’d found and returned it? It was the only explanation for her sudden turnaround regarding fangirls.

  “You don’t know how happy I am to see some familiar faces!” she said in her lilting English accent.

  “Um, is everything okay?” I asked her.

  The happiness vanished from her face, and she looked at me like I was an idiot. “Of course it’s not okay. Haven’t you heard the news?”

  That Rupert P. was dead?

  “That Rupert P. quit the band?” Erin said. I had to stop jumping to the dead thing so quickly. “How is he doing?”

  I couldn’t believe she’d asked that, but I knew what Erin was trying to do. Just like the last time we’d spoken to Michelle Hornsbury, Erin was gauging the situation, seeing where Michelle Hornsbury fell into the grand scheme of things. Trying to catch her in a lie.

  “Girls, I have something to confess.”

  That she was Rupert P.’s knowing beard? That the rumors were true—she really did use cotton candy and the tears of Rupert P. fans as perfume? Both of us leaned forward.

  “The truth is, I don’t know how Rup
ie is doing,” Michelle Hornsbury said. “He hasn’t called me, and I haven’t been able to reach him on his mobile. I can’t find him anywhere.”

  Honesty. It was refreshing.

  “It’s so unlike him,” Michelle Hornsbury said, laughing, obviously trying to pass the whole my-boyfriend-is-ignoring-me thing off as a funny anecdote. He’s not ignoring you, Michelle Hornsbury. Rupie’s dead. Sorry.

  “I’m beginning to get a little bit worried, actually,” she said. “But I’m sure he’s just clearing his head at the moment and needs some space.”

  “Right,” Erin said.

  “Totally,” I said.

  “The thing is—and this is why I’m so glad I ran into you both—I’m going to need a place to stay. I was wondering if you two wouldn’t mind helping a fellow Strepur girl out?”

  I was confused. Michelle Hornsbury had just referred to herself as a Strepur. “Don’t you have a room already?”

  “I did,” Michelle said. She nodded vehemently, like the more she did it the more we’d believe her or something. “I had a room with Rupie, of course.” A lie. Rupert P. was staying at the boys’ suite when he wasn’t staying in Griffin’s room. “But you see, he’s run off and taken the room key.”

  “Can’t you just get another one from the front desk?” Erin asked.

  She and I knew that she couldn’t. They didn’t give you keys for imaginary rooms. But for some reason we still wanted to catch her in the lie. Clearly, Rupert P. hadn’t planned on spending any time with Michelle Hornsbury on this trip. It now made sense why she’d been hanging out in the bar earlier. Was that her shtick? Make an appearance for the cameras walking in and out of various hotels all over the world, holding Rupert P.’s hand for all to see, but then what? Did she just sneak away in the middle of the night when no one was outside? Damn, Rupert P. couldn’t even get his fake girlfriend her own hotel room? That was low, even for Rupert P. Mayherestinpeace.

  Michelle smiled brightly and blinked. “You know, I tried that, but since the reservation was made under Rupert’s name, they can’t give a key to anyone but him. You know how it is, with crazy fangirls running amok. No offense, of course.”