I looked around, and it was only then that I really stopped to listen to what the girls around me were screaming. It wasn’t some unintelligible noise of collective anguish. They were saying something. I could pick words and sentences from the air.
“I saw him! He didn’t do anything wrong!”
“I was with Rupert the whole time!”
“I was with Rupert!”
“I was with Rupert!”
“I was with Rupert!”
“Ignore her, she’s simple,” Erin said, suddenly next to me, smiling up at the cop and pulling on my elbow. “She’s just sad, like the rest of us.”
She steered me away. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“You know it isn’t right.” We were crossing the street to meet Apple and Isabel, and it almost felt like that time we’d waded through the crowd at the Today show to get to Apple’s tent. It seemed like so long ago. “The boys are going to go down for this and they didn’t do anything wrong.”
“They threw a body off a roof,” Erin said. We were on the other street now, back with Isabel and Apple. “I know he weighed one hundred and five pounds soaking wet, but from that height that scaffolding still felt the fall.”
“According to Twitter, twelve girls were injured,” Apple said. “One girl lost her ability to clap.”
“Which is to say nothing of the hundreds of girls pledging to kill themselves if the cops don’t let The Ruperts go. Fuck, sometimes even I’m embarrassed to be in this fandom,” Isabel said.
“I can’t live with myself knowing Rupert K. is going to go down for something that I was a part of! He needs to know the truth. Someone needs to know the truth,” I said.
“The truth stays with us,” Isabel said.
“Isabel’s right,” Erin said. “We can’t tell anyone anything. Promise.”
I took her hand and led her away from the other two girls. Before I promised anything I needed to know something.
“Do you believe I did it?”
My sanity was riding on her answer. Literally. She still knew me best. Despite her secrets, and her betrayal. Despite her allegiance to Isabel and her warped ideas about boy bands and teen girls. Erin may have stopped being my best friend, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that she’d still held the title not one hour ago. “Just tell me,” I said. “I need to know what you think.”
“Any of us could’ve done it,” she said. “We all had motive. I even told you I wanted to ‘kill the boy band,’ which in retrospect was a really poor choice of words.”
“Yeah, but the difference is, I don’t actually believe that you killed Rupert P.” I never really suspected Erin. Maybe I let my imagination wander a few times, but despite everything, everything she’d done and all the new things I’d learned about her, I knew Erin wasn’t capable of murder. “Do you believe that I did?”
The rain was turning her light hair dark, and she kept blinking through it. She sighed and bit her lip, the red of it faded by now. She seemed to think of that just as I did because she dug a lip gloss out of her pocket. Michelle Hornsbury’s Pink Lemonade lip gloss.
“You know what?” I said. “Don’t answer that. You were wrong about so much today already.”
“Look—”
“No, you listen to me now.” It was so easy to say that, and I suddenly wondered why I’d never said it to her before. “Maybe obsessing over a boy band is stupid. But so what? You say that us fans are the worst thing that’s happened to society. But all we’re doing is loving cute boys. Is that really so bad?”
“Fans have turned love into something medieval.”
“But that’s love. It’s crazy and great. Being interested in cute boys is what we’re supposed to be doing at this age. You know what we’re not supposed to be doing? Kidnapping people. Murdering them. Inciting riots outside of hotels that are direct results of the bad choices we’ve made. You say our stanning has gone too far, but you’re the one who took things too far, Erin. You ruined people’s lives … You’re a life ruiner.”
The wailing sirens, the girls; I still couldn’t wrap my mind around the destruction we’d caused. So much had changed since the afternoon. Including our friendship. “You told Isabel that I hallucinate that Rupert K. is with me sometimes.”
“I fucked up.” She looked like she meant it, sad enough to cry, and then actually crying. Or maybe that was just the rain, an illusion of false tears on her face. The rain couldn’t make her less beautiful, though. I hated that even then I was thinking that. “I’m sorry, okay?” Erin said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Erin was saying sorry. What a time to be alive indeed. Strangely, it didn’t make me feel any better. Maybe Erin was right. Maybe girls apologized too much.
“Say something,” she said. “Forgive me.”
I wouldn’t give that to her. I wasn’t ready to.
“Please,” Erin said. “I know you. You’re too nice not to accept my apology.”
“Fuck nice,” I said.
I turned and started to walk away.
“Where are you going?” Erin said, calling after me. But I did not turn around. I went back to The Rondack.
I didn’t know what I was doing, going back to the scene of the crime. I guess I needed time to myself, to reflect on what I’d possibly done. I didn’t really believe I’d killed Rupert P., but visualizing my friends murdering him actually made me believe that maybe I was capable of it too. And Isabel and Erin were a convincing pair; if they thought I’d gone crazy, then maybe I had. I mean, how do you know you’re really crazy unless someone tells you that you are? I did dream of seeing Rupert K. all the time.
Maybe I had hallucinated seeing him tonight.
It didn’t help my sanity any that when I opened the door to our hotel room Michelle Hornsbury was there.
She was just standing there, staring at the chair. The one that Rupert P. had once sat on. And she was weeping. Seeing her like that freaked me out. It felt like something out of a horror movie, like seeing a little girl with pigtails in a hallway: You didn’t realize just how creepy something like that could be until suddenly it was. I jumped, and Michelle Hornsbury did too when she heard me.
“Michelle,” I said, breathless. “What are you doing here?”
She looked scared to see me too for a second and wiped her eyes quickly, but then she squinted, her brows knitting together. “I thought you girls had left,” she said in a tear-clogged voice. “Are you going to stay the night? I know this was originally your room, but you left and, well, you know what they say—finders keepers and all that. I’m afraid I’ve already claimed the bed, you’ll have to take the couch.”
Relegated to the couch. Again. I shook my head, trying to get back to the matter at hand. “Wait, what?”
Michelle Hornsbury shrugged. “I was invited to stay in this room,” she explained slowly. “I wasn’t just going to leave because Orange unceremoniously kicked me out.”
“Apple.”
“No, thank you, I’m not hungry.”
Could this night honestly get any more bizarre? It was never going to end. So long as I was in this hotel it seemed I was destined to spend my days in some weird Twilight Zone dimension where friends turned against you, boy bands were dumb, and beards came alive. Total mindfuck. And I obviously didn’t do well with mindfucks. I didn’t even know why I’d come back. To see the room one last time? To punish myself? All I really wanted to do was go home and forget about all of this. But seeing Michelle Hornsbury, I knew why I couldn’t leave. All the times I’d said I’d go to the police, and even the one time I actually did, nothing changed. I was still responsible for what happened to Rupert P. Whether I only helped to kidnap him, or whether I actually did black out, go stark raving mad, and kill him. The more time that passed with that hypothesis in my mind, the more I believed it.
And nothing would change—everything would continue to not change—until I actually did something to change it.
I had to tel
l someone what I’d done. Even if no one would believe me.
I cleared my throat. I didn’t normally clear my throat before confessions, but people on TV did and the moment seemed to call for it. “Michelle,” I said. “I think I killed Rupert P.”
She turned to me, her face screwed up in cloudy confusion. “What?”
“I think I might be going crazy.” I just let it all out at that point. No holds barred. Confession was a go. “Last year I got really depressed—my mom calls it my ‘bad way.’ My dad died and after that I kind of had a breakdown. But what if it really was more serious than that? I mean, I’ve always imagined Rupert K. as if he was standing right next to me, but I always thought that was just because I have a really good imagination—I write a lot, it’s my thing—and don’t most Rupert K. fans fantasize about him sometimes? But then when Isabel told me he never tweeted that ‘Bright Lights’ thing I really got to thinking. He could’ve just deleted it before any of the girls saw it, but what if he didn’t, you know? What if I imagined I was with him when really I was here, in this room, strangling Rupert P.? He was a douchefuck—mayherestinpeace—but he didn’t deserve to die. I went from a crazy fangirl to literally a crazy fangirl, I think.” I took a breath. I needed one. “And if it wasn’t me then it was definitely Isabel, who I think may actually be bloodthirsty. I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“Oh, you poor thing,” Michelle said.
That was not the reaction I had been expecting from the fake girlfriend of the dead boy bander. I expected backing away slowly and threats to call the police. Maybe even screams. Maybe even Michelle Hornsbury beating me up. But not this.
“You didn’t kill Rupert P.,” she said. “I did.”
I swear this was what she said. Honestly, I’m not trying to place the blame on someone else. By now I hope you’ve seen how much I was willing to sacrifice by telling her all this—just to make it right.
“What?”
“Whew, you don’t know how good it feels to get that off my chest,” she said, heaving a big breath. “Thank you.”
“What do you mean you killed Rupert P.? How? You couldn’t have.”
“Rupie and I had a complicated relationship.”
The mother of all understatements.
“It’s true, what Griffin Holmes said on that video. Rupie was gay. I knew it all along. But I didn’t care. Rupie needed a girlfriend, and I got to do a lot of things from my place on his arm.
“We went everywhere together whenever he toured, and usually he’d always get a room just for us. Well, at least just for me, while he was out doing … whatever. But recently he’d been distant. He still wanted me to come on tour with him, but only in theory. In practice he didn’t want me there at all. He wanted me around but he didn’t want me around. Do you have any idea how frustrating that was? To be there but to also not be there? I should’ve just ended it, I know that now, but I was used to this life. I got to go all over the world—I wasn’t just about to stop.”
As she spoke, Michelle Hornsbury swept her hand over the edges of the big chair in the room. Rupert P.’s death chair. Now she sat down in it, which added an extra layer of queasiness to everything she was saying.
“So recently Rupie had been booking a room for me for a night. We’d walk into the hotel together a couple of times to be seen together, and then my trip would be cut shorter than the boys’. But this time he didn’t book me a room. I confronted him about it. I said I needed someplace to stay while I was here, and he said that I could just roam around the hotel. That it would just be for a night. That this place had ‘great amenities.’ As if that was supposed to make up for the fact that I didn’t have a bed to sleep in. Now tell me that’s not a horrible way to treat your fake girlfriend.”
“Fairly horrible,” I said, though all I could think about was how screwed up the world of boy banders and beards was.
“He said that the hotel had been all booked up. That he’d really tried to get me a room but couldn’t. But he had a room with the rest of the boys. And he had a room with Griffin.
“Two rooms!” Michelle Hornsbury went on. “It made me crazy! And then when I found him in a new room full of girls, well, I guess that was the final straw.”
“How’d you know he was even here?”
“I heard you and Erin talking about it at the bar, the first time we met. After I left my purse at the table I went back for it, and you girls were bragging about having Rupert in your room.”
“We weren’t bragging.”
“Whatever it was, I couldn’t believe it. It was the third room he had access to in this bloody hotel. Which was three more rooms than I had access to!”
“How did you even get in here?”
“I went to the front desk and said I was one of the girls in your room and that I’d lost my key. The boy at the front really was easy to persuade. He gave me a new key, no problem. I’ve actually had a key to your room since then. I had to confront Rupie. He wasn’t taking any of my calls, and now he was hiding out with other girls. I waited in the stairwell on this floor for all of you to leave, and then I went in the room. You can imagine how shocked I was to see Rupert all tied up.”
“Yeah—”
“I wasn’t shocked in the slightest! Rupie had always been a crazy bondage freak. In my mind, not only was he constantly off having crazy bondage fun with Griffin, now he was off having bondage fun with a room full of girls when he could’ve just been having it with me, had he asked! I suppose I just suddenly snapped. I completely lost my head. I choked him with the tights that had gagged his mouth.”
Well, shit.
“But if you killed him, why did you stick around? Why didn’t you just leave?”
“I knew word would get out soon enough and that if I ran it would look suspicious. I was actually hoping to have you girls caught. You’d already kidnapped him; the police would assume that you had killed him too. You were a troupe of raving mad fanatics after all. I figured if I caught you here with him that was my best chance to get away with it and place the blame on someone else. That’s why I wanted to get you to let me into your room so badly. Sorry about that, by the way.”
“Uh …”
“And then when I came here and he was gone I was shocked. Impressed. But shocked. You girls were pure evil dumping his body in the boys’ room.”
So it hadn’t been me. It had been Michelle Hornsbury: part-time model, professional beard, murderer.
And I was alone in a room with her.
Maybe I was going to hell today after all. Literally—at the hands of Michelle Hornsbury. I glanced toward the door, but there was no way I could get anywhere near it without Michelle noticing. Her eyes bore into me like a cop’s flashlight in my face, my heart speeding up. “Are you going to kill me?”
“What?”
I tried to keep my voice steady, but there was no hiding the fear in it. “Now that I know your secret, what’s to stop you from killing me?”
“Well, gosh, I’m not a psychopath! Killing Rupert was an act of passion!” Michelle Hornsbury cried. “A mistake, really. I don’t just go around killing people!”
“So why did you tell me?”
“For the same reason you tried confessing to me, I guess. Guilt isn’t good for my complexion.”
“Do you feel less guilty now?”
“A little … Maybe … Not really.” She sighed, seeming tired. “All I wanted was a room,” she said. “You have to believe me. All I wanted was one measly room.”
Beautiful, posh Michelle Hornsbury. I’d never seen anyone so sad and pathetic. I’d also never been this close to a murderer. I needed to get the hell out of there.
“Can I ask you something?” Michelle Hornsbury said.
“Okay.”
“Why did you kidnap him?”
At the end of the day there still wasn’t a logical answer to that question. But I guess that was fitting, in a way. There was so little logic to fandom. At the end, the only thing left was passion. Madne
ss. Maybe those two things weren’t so different.
I shrugged. “He was a Rupert.”
She dwelled on this for a minute. Her eyebrows rose and then fell just as quickly. She’d come to be satisfied by this answer, even though I couldn’t possibly understand how she could be.
“Are you going to tell on me?” Michelle Hornsbury asked. “Because I should probably take this time to remind you that I know about the kidnapping, and then the disposal of the body in the boys’ room. The punishment would still be awfully severe for you.”
Always nice getting threatened at the end of the night. “No. I won’t tell on you.” I didn’t know if that was true yet, but I wanted to get out of there alive. Also, somehow, impossibly, I felt sorry for her. I knew she was a psycho, so there was still fear there, but now it was mingled with pity.
“So do you mind if I stay here tonight, then?”
“Go nuts,” I told her.
She shot me a look and I winced, realizing what I’d just said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
Michelle Hornsbury watched me carefully for another minute and then just up and walked into the bedroom, closing the door behind her and leaving me like I was another fan she couldn’t deal with. At least she didn’t kill me.
I counted my blessings and got the hell out of there. Outside the room, in the hallway, I dug into my pocket and found my white bead bracelet. A lot of crazy shit had happened since Rupert P. had broken it, but I’d gotten through the night without having to smack it against my skin to feel the sting. I’d have to find another way to commemorate my dad, and that was okay.
I left The Rondack and never looked back.
“That’s quite a story,” the officer said.
I nodded. “Thank you.” And then as soon as I said it I realized I must’ve sounded like an idiot. He hadn’t been complimenting my storytelling abilities.
“Probably didn’t have to be so long, though,” he said, “did it?”
“What?” This was not the reaction I was expecting. I was sitting on the chair beside his desk at the precinct, people bustling about all around us. It had taken a week since everything went down at The Rondack for me to muster up the courage to come down here and make this confession. Not to sound like a snob or anything, but honestly, I thought there’d be a bit more fanfare.
Kill the Boy Band Page 20
