“I can’t serve you alcohol.”
Classic. “Do you have Sprite?”
“One Sprite coming up.”
He had no idea what he was talking about, but he was a Civil War bartender—I didn’t expect him to. He was just another adult who forgot what it was like to love something so completely. In fact, he probably only liked things ironically, which meant he didn’t really like things at all. And I may have only been a teenager, but I knew a truth that he had obviously never grasped: The joy you find as a teen, however frivolous and dumb, is pure, and meaningful. It doesn’t matter that it might ferment and taste different when you’re older. That’s the whole point of being a teenager—not worrying about the future.
Other people may have seen fangirls as crazy teenage girls obsessed with a fad, but they couldn’t understand the small but important joy you can get from indulging in these fandoms. They didn’t understand that a new gif of Rupert K. grinning at you could be the difference between a crap day and a beautiful one. They didn’t get the friendships that formed, the community of people who shared in your same joy. Maybe it was obsession, but it was also happiness; an escape from the suckiness of everyday life. And when you find something that makes you happy and giddy and excited every day, us fangirls know a truth that everyone else seems to have forgotten: You hold on to that joy tenaciously, for as long as you can. Because it’s rare to get excited about anything these days. Ask your parents.
All of my best memories have something to do with The Ruperts. Like the times Erin and I spent at her house.
At school, Erin still had her popular friends: a seemingly unending supply of people she’d sit with in the back of classes, girls she’d go to the bathroom with to touch up mascara and trade lip balms, guys who’d carry her books just because she liked the idea of it. And while the two of us had our moments at school—meeting up at my locker every morning, eating lunch together, passing notes in the classes we shared—it was still vastly different from when we would hang out together after school. At Erin’s house, we’d lie on our backs on her carpeted bedroom floor and sing Ruperts songs as loud as we could until we were out of breath and dizzy from laughing. Erin would always pop up and grab her hairbrush to sing into, and I would always marvel at the fact that nobody at school ever got to see this side of her—the geeky, fangirly, passionate-about-a-boy-band side. Because being too passionate or excited about anything was never cool. Erin only let me see that side of her.
“There you are!”
Speak of the devil. I spun at the sound of Erin’s voice. She marched through the bar until she was beside me, taking the stool next to mine. Civil War Bartender watched us skeptically. Or maybe that was just the look of someone checking Erin out. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said.
Civil War Bartender set my drink down in front of me, and Erin didn’t even wait for him to ask what she wanted before saying, “Rum and Coke.”
“What are you, like, seventeen?” he asked.
Erin didn’t betray anything. Not an impeccably mascaraed eyelash moved on her face, but I could tell she was beaming at the fact that someone thought she was older than her actual age.
“Did no one ever tell you it’s bad manners to question a woman’s age?” she said.
“Do your parents know you’re in a bar in the middle of the day?”
“I don’t know,” Erin said. “Do yours?”
I wish I could talk to him that way. But watching Erin do it was just as good. “What does a girl have to do to get a drink around here?” she said.
“Be not so much a girl,” Civil War Bartender said. He smiled at her. He actually smiled! Did he think she was flirting with him or something? That this was some meet-cute banter? He was in for a rude awakening. I braced myself, wishing this bar served popcorn.
“Oh, you don’t think I’m woman enough,” Erin said. “Come on. I’ll show you my tits for a drink.”
“Erin!”
“Wow, did everyone just hear that?” Erin said, ignoring me. “The bartender just asked me to show him my tits for a drink!”
“Hey!” Civil War Bartender said.
“Well, I never!” She was making a scene. I was embarrassed and enthralled. Watching Erin was like watching a new movie without knowing any spoilers: can’t-look-away-edge-of-my-seat realness.
“What is wrong with you?” Civil War Bartender hissed, but he was working hard behind the bar like he was Tom Cruise in Cocktail. “Rum and make the Coke cherry,” Erin said.
He stamped the glass down in front of her, and she winked at him. “That’s a good boy.”
Civil War Bartender left us to go to the other side of the bar. He picked up a heavily dog-eared paperback copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
Of course.
“It’s too bad the bartender is such a shitstain. He could get it otherwise.”
“Ew, Erin, he’s prehistoric.”
She cocked her head to the side and gave him a once-over. “I’d swallow.”
“So wretched.”
She turned to me. “So why’d you run off?”
“Erin, come on. You know this is wrong.” We were away from Isabel and Apple. It was just the two of us. She had to agree with me on this.
“I was raised by nannies who never spoke to me. I know very little about right and wrong.”
Okay, I guess she didn’t agree. I watched as she clamped her crimson lips over the skinny cocktail straw, drinking through it from the corner of her mouth, as always. It was a preventative measure. Erin knew the rule about smokers’ wrinkles around the upper lip. She made a vow never to let her lips turn into something ugly and puckered. She even avoided the dreaded duck face in all of her selfies for that very reason, and I had to give her major props for that. But as I watched her now, the red straw looked like a trail of blood at the corner of her lip, like something she forgot to wipe off after biting into someone. It gave me a chill.
I leaned close to her, making sure that no one was near enough to hear, but kept my voice down just in case. “Holding someone hostage in our room is outrageous.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”
“But think of the story you can get out of this. While other girls are sitting in their darkened rooms updating their Ruperts fap fantasy fics, we’ll have the real thing to play with. You could write something brand-new.”
She was talking about my fanfiction. In real life I never showed my writing to anyone except Erin, but on the Internet I was kind of well-known for my fics. Most Strepurs wrote fics where they injected themselves into the story so that they could play out some deep Mary Sue fantasy of the boys falling in love with them. My fics were different. While they were still rpfs (real person fiction), they were about real issues. There was one fic I wrote where each chapter focused on a different Rupert and explained the origin stories behind their tattoos. I worked with the concept that the reason Rupert L. had covered most of his chest and arms in twenty-seven different renditions of a bunny rabbit from his favorite obscure British animated show was because he was really self-conscious about his body and wanted to cover it up in nostalgia for a simpler time when he had no body image issues.
See? Totally plausible.
My favorite chapter in the fic imagined why Rupert K. had gotten the words “I do” on his forearm. It was the only tattoo he had and he’d never spoken publicly about what it meant, but in my fic I wrote a whole romantic scenario about waiting to meet the right girl and his ideals about marriage and commitment.
“This isn’t exactly fic-worthy,” I said.
“Not fanfic,” Erin said. “You could write something original.”
“Don’t you like my fanfic?”
I always emailed Erin my new ideas before I ever wrote them down, and she was the first person to see the completed chapters before I posted them.
“You know I do,” Erin said, but she started picking at her cuticles—something s
he did when she was getting tired of talking about a topic. “Whatever, forget fics for a minute. Keeping Rupert P. could lead to us finding the rest of the boys. It could lead to a lot of things.”
“Like jail,” I said. “It could lead to jail.”
“The whole situation is pregnant with possibility.”
“And I’m too young to be a mother.”
She threw her head back and laughed, and a little thrill went through me at the sound of it. Anytime I could get Erin to laugh was a good moment. Anytime I could cause her to be pumped or happy felt awesome, honestly. It was part of the reason she was always the first to get new chapters of fic from me. Her praise was always more important than the praise of hundreds of readers online.
“Be real,” she said. “You know what they say. The night is young and so are we.”
“We’ve gone too far, Erin. You know I’m always with you on things, but …”
She looked at me expectantly, but it was harder than I thought it would be to disagree with her. Maybe if I phrased it a certain way, she’d see it the way I saw it. “We’re kidnapping an international superstar.”
“Rupert P. can’t even sing.”
“I don’t care if he’s basic, it’s still illegal.”
Erin put her drink down and brushed her hair back without actually putting any of it behind her ears. Her blonde hair was far too beachy to belong to a New Yorker in winter, but Erin had discovered the secret to effortlessly wispy-chic hair, and she was keeping it to herself. The hair added to the overall allure. She always said she was saving herself for Rupert X., and while lots of girls said the same thing, Erin had the sort of looks where if she ever did get in a room alone with Rupert X., her dreams would very probably come true. And Erin always did get her way.
When she leaned forward, her hair fell around her face, and her hands fell onto mine.
“Have you given any thought to what would happen if we let Rupert P. go right now?” The pause was meant to be dramatic. I let her have it. “We’d be so dead.”
“We’ll be dead whether we keep him for an hour or whether we keep him for a day. We’re fucked sideways either way.”
“Or we can wait until we figure it out so we’re not,” she said. “The answer will come to us eventually.”
With her hands in mine, she smiled at me, and I guess it put me at ease. I’d always trusted Erin before; why shouldn’t I trust her now?
“Wait, did you just leave Rupert P. up there?” I said. “With Apple?”
“Don’t worry, Isabel’s there to make sure she doesn’t molest him.”
“Did you at least warn them not to get him wet or feed him after midnight?”
I smiled at my Gremlins joke, but Erin just stared at me blankly. Honestly, I know all of Tumblr is obsessed with the ’90s right now, but if you just go back a little further to the ’80s, you’ll find a treasure trove of retro awesomeness. The movies are super vintage, and the fashions are a trip: I’d take big hair over chokers any day.
“And you trust Isabel?” I said, getting back on topic. “She’s probably too busy stoking the fanwank in her site’s comments section to care what Apple does.”
“Quite frankly. I trust Isabel. She’s chill.”
“She’s chill? I didn’t realize you guys had gotten so chummy.” I tried to sound casual, bring up the topic in a nonchalant way, but I really was curious: Where was I when Erin and Isabel decided to become BFFs?
Erin cocked her head to the side and smiled, a look on her face like she could read my mind, which made me slightly happy and slightly scared. “Aww.” She pinched my cheek. “You’re still my best girl.”
I averted my gaze, but smiled too, reassured. Maybe I’d been making too much of in-jokes and bed sharing. And then I saw her, sitting alone at a small round table in the corner. “Holy shit. Michelle Hornsbury.”
Michelle Hornsbury was gorgeous, even from this distance. Impeccable waves of brown hair cascading down her shoulders and back. Posh Brit. Dewy skin. Permanent rosy blush. Eyes that sparkled. Rupert Pierpont’s girlfriend, in the flesh.
Erin whipped out her phone. I thought she was going to citizen pap her, take a discreet pic, but when she showed me the screen, it was only Michelle Hornsbury’s Twitter. “Michelle Hornsbury just posted this five minutes ago.”
Rupie is showing me the sites in NYC. Love him. #bestboyfriendever #lovinlife #NooYawk #fuggedaboutit #xoxo #blessed #bae #baegoals #bagels
Michelle Hornsbury was a gorgeous girl. And she was a liar.
“We should go talk to her.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I think we’ve proven today that we’re all a little crazy,” Erin said. She hopped off her stool. “I’m doing it. And if you don’t come after me, I might say something really stupid, like that we accidentally kidnapped her boyfriend.”
She left her rum and cherry Coke barely touched on the bar. Of course, I followed her. I always followed her.
“Hi!” Erin said when we got to Michelle Hornsbury’s table.
She looked up from her phone, all doe eyes and sparkly pink lip gloss. “Hello,” she said. Doe eyes, lip gloss, and wariness.
“You’re Michelle Hornsbury, aren’t you?”
Michelle Hornsbury smiled and looked as she always did in pictures: somehow frightened and unsure. A bunny rabbit who suddenly realized she wasn’t alone. “Why yes, I am.”
“I’m Erin. And this is my friend—”
“Diane Court,” I said. I knew Erin was giving me a look, even though I wasn’t watching her.
“Pleased to meet you,” Michelle Hornsbury said. “Are you girls Hornies?”
You’d be forgiven to think Michelle Hornsbury just asked us a very inappropriate question. In fact, she was only asking if we were fans of hers. “Hornies” were what Michelle Hornsbury fans called themselves. Terrible fan name, I know, but what else do you expect from fans who came up with the name “Strepurs”?
While Michelle Hornsbury had no discernible talents, and therefore no reason to be famous whatsoever, some of Rupert P.’s fans spilled over into becoming fans of his girlfriend. I always thought obsessing over a famous person’s significant other or parent or sibling was dumb, but there were still a lot of people who did it. Michelle Hornsbury’s fans were dedicated enough to build websites in her honor and send her cookies whenever she said she was feeling sad on Twitter.
So, were we fans?
“Quite frankly!” I lied.
“Can we sit down?” Erin said.
Michelle Hornsbury’s smile was still present, as ever, but dimmer now, even more unsure, if that was possible. “Uh, I don’t know … I really should get back to my …” She looked around the totally empty table, the candy-colored cosmo in her hand, her phone. “Emails. I’ve got loads of emails to read.”
Erin sat down anyway. Not wanting to stand around like an idiot, I sat down too.
“Well, alright,” Michelle Hornsbury said. She was originally from Derby, England, but she must have cleaned up her Midlands accent in the time she became Rupert P.’s girlfriend, because now Michelle Hornsbury was All Posh All The Time.
“Where’s Rupert P.?” Erin asked. She just dove right in. I kicked her under the table. Kicking under the table was the universal sign for You’re so bad! But Erin didn’t even flinch.
“Oh, he’s busy working away,” Michelle Hornsbury said. “Working hard to get ready for that concert for you girls. Will you be attending?”
“We couldn’t score tix,” I said, suddenly hopeful. I thought maybe she’d have an extra pair in her purse that she was just waiting to give away to the first person who asked. Surely that was how fame worked?
“Shame,” Michelle Hornsbury said.
I guess that was not how fame worked.
“How did you girls get into the hotel, by the way? Security seems pretty tight.” She looked around like someone in need of said security.
“We have a room here,” I said.
“Here? At
this hotel?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How did you manage to find a room? I thought the hotel had no vacancies this week.”
“Actually, we booked our room a couple of nights ago,” Erin said. “And there were a few others available too.”
“Oh,” Michelle Hornsbury said. Her Bambi eyes looked into the bottom of her glass.
“Michelle,” Erin said. “You just tweeted about being with Rupert P. five minutes ago.”
“I was,” Michelle said, her eyes going big again. “He was just here. And now he’s gone. Like I said. Work. Always working. Such a workaholic, that boy, bless him.”
“We actually just saw Griffin Holmes earlier,” Erin said.
Griffin Holmes, stylist to The Ruperts. I could not believe Erin had just brought him up. She did it to get a reaction out of Michelle Hornsbury, I was sure of it. And judging by the way Michelle stood up abruptly, she had. “Lovely to meet fans, as always,” she said. “Unfortunately, I must be going now. Toodles!”
We watched her go, and then Erin and I looked at each other. “Toodles!” we said in unison.
“So you’re Diane Court now?” Erin said, eyebrow arched and perfectly skeptical. “I thought Andie Walsh was your go-to.”
“It felt like a Say Anything moment.”
Erin didn’t get it, but also didn’t care enough to stay on the topic. “Okay, Diane, tell me that wasn’t delicious.”
I shrugged, noncommittal. I felt slightly guilty about how we’d just conducted ourselves.
But Erin wouldn’t let it go. “Tell me that was not crème-de-la-crème, four-star delicious.”
Erin’s biggest talent in life was making being bad feel so good. Because there was no way I would’ve enjoyed that if Erin wasn’t there. And yet, I couldn’t lie. I got a tiny kick out of it. “Okay,” I said. “It was kind of delicious.”
“Know what’s even more delicious?”
Erin tucked her fingers under the strap slinked over the back of Michelle Hornsbury’s vacated chair. She pulled up a purse and dangled it before me.
“She forgot her purse!” I said. “We have to return it to her.”
“Would you loosen the pretty white bows in your hair just once? Let’s have some fun with it first.”
Kill the Boy Band Page 5