Kill the Boy Band

by Goldy Moldavsky

  Isabel stormed into the room and interrupted my thoughts with her pacing. “Where’s Erin?” she said. “She’s not answering my texts and we need her.”

  “Still can’t make a decision without Erin,” I muttered.

  Isabel rolled her eyes. “Rush me to the burn unit.” She whipped out her phone. “We need to act. Now. We make decisions as a group.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll be horrified to know that Erin is with Michelle Hornsbury right now, asking her how she likes her room service because she’s offered her room and board here with us.”

  The extra emphasis at the end there had the desired effect. Isabel froze and looked at me. “Are you joking?”

  “I think we’re way past joking right now.”

  “Michelle Hornsbury is coming here?” Apple said, mouth full of Reese’s. “To stay with us?”

  “If Erin doesn’t find a way to lose her, yeah.”

  Michelle Hornsbury divided Rupert P. fans into two categories: girls who liked her and thought she was beautiful and perfect enough to be with their favorite boy, or girls who abhorred her, deeming her too ugly and lowly to be with their man. Apple had always belonged to the latter group. In Apple’s mind, Rupert P. did not belong with anyone but her.

  I could see from the look in Apple’s eye that she still hated Michelle Hornsbury, despite the fact that she no longer liked Rupert P. anymore. And also the fact that he was dead, obvs.

  “I am not spending the night in the same room as her,” Apple said.

  “Michelle Hornsbury isn’t coming here,” Isabel said.

  “Well, she just might, so we have to hide him. Now,” I said.

  The three of us looked at Rupert P. He was still so wretched. Mayherestinpeace.

  “Hide him where?” Apple said.

  “I don’t know, a closet or something.”

  “A closet?” Isabel said. “So that Michelle Hornsbury could just sit in the middle of the room telling us stories about life as a beard while Rupert P.’s body finally flops out of the closet? Cuz you know that’s what’s going to happen.”

  A knock on the door. None of us moved.

  “Open up!”

  It was Erin. “I’m alone, it’s safe.”

  We opened the door. “I got rid of her.”

  “How?”

  “I took her outside and a glob of Strepurs swallowed her up.”

  Those girls outside were good for something after all.

  “We still need to move him,” Erin said.

  “No way,” I said. “This has gone on long enough. We need to call the police.”

  “No!” Isabel said. “Griffin is already calling the police. They’ll come down here, get a real investigation going, put two and two together, and then we’re done for, for real. We need to move him out of this room. Make him someone else’s problem.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “Watch me.”

  “Isabel’s right,” Erin said. “It’s our only option. We need to move the body.”

  “And where are we going to move him?” I said. “The hallways only lead to rooms, stairwells, or elevators. We can’t just dump him somewhere.”

  Isabel picked up the room key on the table next to the door. “The boys’ room. We can dump him there.”

  “What?” This had suddenly become more than just getting rid of the problem—it was now making it someone else’s problem.

  The Ruperts’ problem.

  Our Ruperts.

  “You want to make them take the fall for Rupert P.’s death?”

  “It’s us versus them, and I always gotta look out for my girls,” Isabel said. “I’m like a feminist. I’m like Beyoncé.”

  I would have laughed if she wasn’t being completely serious. “It’s only us versus them because you’re making it that way.”

  Isabel shrugged. “Maybe they wouldn’t get in trouble. Maybe they’ll call the police right away and the police will see that Rupert P. died accidentally and the matter will be put to death—rest.”

  “Or maybe not,” I said. “Guys, think about this. This could seriously fuck up The Ruperts’ whole careers. We love those boys.”

  I looked around the room. The truth was, we all had a reason to want Rupert P. dead. Motivation that, if TV and movies had taught me anything, would hold up in court. Erin had a mission. She wanted to “kill the boy band.” Isabel had her site—her need for chaos—a story that would break the Internet, with her holding the sledgehammer. Apple had been put down in the cruelest way by the one person she loved most.

  And me? What did I have?

  “Everyone’s word against yours,” Isabel said.

  I gaped at her. Yeah, exactly like Beyoncé. “If I don’t agree to this you’ll all pin his death on me?”

  I looked at Erin’s face, but she turned away. These were the girls I had thought were my best friends. And they were going to turn on me.

  I didn’t have a choice.

  I really believed that.

  And you have to believe me.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Isabel smiled. “You finally decided to level up,” she said. “Let’s move him.”

  Moving a body is a lot harder than it sounds. Especially when that body belonged to someone as wretched as Rupert P. Mayherestinpeace.

  Apple tried Googling our best options, but results varied, and we didn’t have most of the materials mentioned (barrels, coffins) on hand.

  We went through all of the possible scenarios. The obvious way to go would’ve been the Weekend at Bernie’s route. It’s this movie where these two guys pretend that this dead guy, Bernie, is still alive by putting him in sunglasses and walking him around with them and stuff. Pretty fucked up if you think about it, but it was nice to know that some movies were still relatable. All we would have to do was find some sunglasses. It’d look like he was just stumbling around drunk, which wouldn’t cause any alarm because that was what Rupert P. looked like most of the time anyway.

  But then we realized we didn’t have sunglasses, and it would look pretty unconvincing if someone stared at him for too long, like if we were stuck in an elevator with other people or something. He had this permanently shocked look on his face that really wasn’t helping things either.

  Then we thought about Apple giving him a piggyback ride. She could probably do it, and it wouldn’t look too suspicious (instead of a stumbling, shocked drunk, Rupert P. could look like a peacefully sleeping child), but that idea was forgotten when Erin thought up an even better plan.

  * * *

  The four of us looked down at Rupert P., halfway inside of Apple’s gigantic neon-orange rolling duffel bag and halfway out. (We would’ve preferred to hide him in something that wasn’t quite so ostentatious, but Apple was the only one among us who’d brought a big enough bag.) After emptying it of every last kernel of corn, Rupert P. still didn’t fit.

  “He doesn’t fit,” I said.

  “We’ll make him fit,” Isabel said.

  That did not sound good to me. Actually, it sounded really bad, and I started to imagine her pulling out a machete from behind her back, but luckily all Isabel did was kneel on the ground and start bending his knees and contorting the rest of him to see how we could better squeeze him into the case. “Are any of you going to help me?”

  We all got down on our knees and did what we could. But if I’m being honest, I only touched him when I was sure someone was looking at me. I didn’t want to touch him at all. I think Erin felt the same way. Her face remained pinched the whole time as she blindly pressed her fingers against whatever part of him was closest to her. I think her strategy was more to push him away from her rather that to push him inside the luggage. It was a good strategy. I copied her. Apple was the least helpful. Who knew all it would take for her to stop touching Rupert P. was him being dead? Thankfully, we had Isabel. She was all business, like this wasn’t her first rodeo.

  A few minutes later we all stood up and surveyed our handiwork. Ruper
t Pierpont was stuffed in the bag like a ventriloquist’s dummy in a very small trunk, though probably a lot less lovingly. Thankfully, his face was obscured, so I could imagine he was just a pile of clothes. Apple did the honors of zipping the bag closed.

  “Should we say something?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Apple asked.

  “I don’t know. It just feels like we should say something. To honor him. Like what people do at funerals and stuff?”

  “This isn’t no funeral,” Isabel said.

  “It would still be nice,” I said.

  “That’s the one thing this death and cover-up is missing,” Isabel said. “Niceness.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Just say something,” Erin snapped.

  Since Erin had agreed to it, Isabel no longer seemed to have any objections, but now that they were all looking at me expectantly I didn’t know what to say.

  “Fine, I’ll go,” Isabel said. She cleared her throat. “Rupert Pierpont was a living wonder. He lived and we all wondered how he did it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, may he juggle with Jesus.”

  We stared at her.

  “The end,” she said.

  It was something. After a moment of silence we got back to the task at hand.

  “What if the boys are all in their room right now?” Erin asked.

  “Should we text them again?” Apple asked.

  “We can’t. If we use Rupert P.’s phone now it will definitely look like foul play.”

  “We’re just going to have to risk it,” Isabel said. “It’s now or never, girls. We wanted to meet the boys anyway.”

  This was not how I wanted to meet the boys.

  But we left the room.

  Even though the bag had wheels Apple couldn’t drag it ­herself, so Isabel grabbed one corner of the handle and pulled him down the hallway with her.

  The four (five?) of us waited in front of the elevator doors silently, not speaking to one another, not even looking at one another. When the doors opened we should’ve looked, or at least said something, because the elevators were going down and I don’t think any of us realized it until the doors closed behind us. We were now stuck riding in the same elevator with four girls, all tweens, and a lone mother acting as chaperone, all wearing The Ruperts T-shirts. The mother too.

  “Hi!” one of the girls said. “Are you guys Strepurs too?”

  I don’t know why, but our first instinct—without even consulting one another—was to shake our heads firmly and deny we were fans. Usually it was fun meeting other Strepurs and gushing together about our shared love, but I guess we all just wanted to distance ourselves from The Ruperts as much as possible, given the circumstances. Ironic, I know, since we were heading to their room. And we were carrying one of them in our luggage.

  “Oh!” the same girl said. She had dirty-blonde hair. She might have been twelve. I know they were only a few years younger than us, but they still seemed way too young to be cavorting around a hotel.

  “Well, we’re fans!” Dirty Blonde said.

  I don’t want to overuse exclamation points here, but you have to believe me when I tell you that every sentence of hers ended with one. I could virtually see them popping out of her mouth with excited aplomb.

  “How are you guys in here?” Erin asked.

  “We got a room!” the girl said.

  Shit, they were us. This elevator was maybe a portal to a different dimension, because we were staring at ourselves in the mirror and the picture wasn’t pretty.

  Was this what we looked like to the outside world? Imbeciles bouncing on the balls of our feet with stupid grins on our faces and tear ducts ready to flood at the drop of a hat, or more likely, at the bat of a boy bander eyelash? Because I’ll tell you right now, it was a scary sight.

  “Actually, we just went up to the penthouse floor looking for the boys!”

  “You did?” Isabel said. “Any luck?”

  “No!” Her face was an emoji. Specifically, the pouty cat with the lone tear on its cheek. “We knocked on every door but no one opened! They’re probably hiding out because Rupert P. just quit! Those poor boys are having a really hard time right now!”

  “I heard Rupert X. couldn’t stop crying,” another girl with frizzy hair said.

  “I heard Rupert L. is roaming the streets of Manhattan looking all over for Rupert P. so that he can have a real heart-to-heart with him and convince him to rejoin the band.”

  Another girl piped up. “I heard Rupert K. bought him a really rare collectible Troll doll that he was waiting to give him for his birthday but he’s going to give it to him tonight because he feels bad and wants him to come back.”

  “They’re such good guys!” Frizzy Hair said.

  “They really love each other!” Dirty Blonde said.

  “Nothing can ever tear them apart!” another one said.

  “We’re from Tarrytown!” the last one said.

  The four of us didn’t say anything.

  I don’t think we knew how to respond. They were really hard to understand. Were they even speaking English? Was this how we sounded to people? I tried to convince myself that we were different from them. Cooler. Better … Saner. But of the two groups, only one was lugging around a dead body in a suitcase.

  Mercifully, the doors opened to the lobby. “BYE!” the four girls yelled.

  “Bye,” the four of us muttered.

  They stepped outside but turned around when we didn’t. “Aren’t you guys coming out?”

  Erin stabbed the DOOR CLOSE button with her finger a bunch of times and didn’t stop until the doors were completely shut. Then she pressed the button marked 16.

  The four of us looked at one another briefly, dumbfounded, a little scared. Then we resumed not speaking to one another.

  The elevator doors opened. We walked down the hallway. Eerily quiet. We stopped in front of Room 1620—the boys’ suite. Isabel was ready to put in the key right away, but I knocked first, just in case. We all waited for a minute, and then when nothing happened Isabel put the key in, turned the handle, and we were in.

  You don’t want the details, right? You don’t want to know that untangling Rupert P. should’ve probably been easier than stuffing him in the bag but was actually just as hard, maybe even harder because now we had to lift him onto a chair. Worst of all, The Rondack was so hip beyond belief that our choice of chair was limited to either high bar stool chairs or beanbags. You’re probably thinking the beanbags are the way to go: low to the ground, dump the body on top and go. You have obviously never tried to casually position a dead body on a giant bag full of beans.

  Rupert P. sank into the bag easy enough, but no matter how hard we tried to sit him up, he kept flopping over the sides or bending forward so that his forehead lay on his knees. Finally we decided to have him just sort of lie back, feet on the ground, knees bent, eyes on the ceiling.

  You don’t have to tell me that this was wrong. I knew this was wrong. This was so wrong. The mounted deer head on the opposite wall stared at me with his black marble eyes like even it knew it was wrong too. The deer head was judging me.

  “So are we going with autoerotic asphyxiation, or what?” Isabel asked.

  “If you’re implying that we manipulate him to look like he was …” Erin made a squick face. “No fucking way.”

  I had to agree with her. I wasn’t going anywhere near Rupert P. or his pants, no matter how dire the consequences.

  “You guys hear that?” Isabel said. We all froze, listening. Rustling, muffled—a sound from the hallway.

  “Someone’s coming,” Erin said.

  “The Ruperts?” Apple asked. “The Ruperts are coming?” I swear she looked equal parts scared of getting caught and excited to get a close-up look at the boys.

  Isabel swore under her breath, but I didn’t have time to swear. I looked for an exit strategy. Or at least a hiding strategy. “The closet!”

  I didn’t know it was a closet until we opened th
e doors. Two of them, made of rows of slats. I didn’t know if that was good because it meant we could peek through them and see outside, or bad because it meant someone could peek through them and see us, but the closet was just big enough for all of us to fit inside of it if we stood side by side. We were also helped by the fact that the boys hadn’t unpacked any of their things, so it was completely empty except for a few hangers that hung over our heads.

  And as I squinted through the slats, waiting for more noise and the boys, my eyes caught sight of it: the thing we’d left, bright as a neon sign. “Apple’s suitcase!”

  Key cards jiggled in the door and a male voice muttered a swear word. The girls gasped, but I must’ve been crazier than I thought because I jumped out and grabbed the bag. I slammed back into the closet, hoping the newly closed slatted closet doors were enough to cover up the madness behind them. I hugged the suitcase to my chest.

  None of us breathed, not even when the boys walked in.

  They walked in quietly, but with purpose, and I don’t think I’d ever seen them like that before. Usually, in all the behind-the-scenes videos and specials, they were always joking around with one another, climbing on top of one another or poking one another or at least chatting. Now they seemed to be totally in their own heads. They could’ve each been walking inside separately, the way they ignored one another.

  Each of them held armfuls of plush dolls, handmade books, and signs plastered with their faces and essay-long notes scrawled in careful cursive. They must’ve finally made an appearance at the front entrance of the hotel and met with fans.

  Apple, standing to my right, squeezed my hand. Her favorite may have already been dead, but she was still a fan of The Ruperts as a whole, and seeing the band this close was doing a number on her. I knew this because despite everything that had happened, it was doing a number on me too. My guts seized up at the sight of them, and I squeezed her hand back.

  I waited for the boys to notice the big dead mess left gift-wrapped for them in the middle of the room, but Rupert X. and Rupert L. seemed more interested in finding the closest trash bin. They didn’t lose stride as they marched up to it and dumped all of the fan gifts they’d been holding into it. A teddy bear bounced off the top of the pile, and Rupert X. bent down and picked it up.