Kill the Boy Band

by Goldy Moldavsky

  This whole time Apple had been inching Michelle Hornsbury across the room and we’d all followed along with her, careful, apprehensive. Apple swung open the door. “So you can take your dead fake boyfriend’s pants and kindly get the fuck out of our room.” With that she took the underwear out of Erin’s hand and threw it out the door for Michelle Hornsbury to fetch.

  “You’re mad!” Michelle Hornsbury said.

  “Quite frankly.” Apple let go of the knob, and the door swung shut in Michelle Hornsbury’s face.

  Wow.

  I didn’t know about anybody else, but I was taken aback. Even Isabel looked shocked, her mouth hanging open in proud awe. “Well gag me with a blueberry-flavored prophylactic,” she said. “What did I just witness?”

  “Apple went in,” I said.

  “Slay a bit!” Isabel said.

  “Can everyone hold up with the boss bitch accolades?” Erin said. “What the hell was that with the lamp? Don’t tell me you were trying to kill her.”

  “Another dead body is just a drop in the bucket at this point,” Apple said.

  Well, that put another mark in my Apple-did-it column.

  “Great going,” Erin said. “Did you get your rocks off, Apple? Because thanks to that little display, Michelle Hornsbury is going to go directly to the police with Rupert P.’s underwear in hand—evidence that you handed to her, I might add—and make us official persons of interest.”

  Apple only shrugged. “I didn’t hand it to her. I threw it in her general direction. I did what needed to be done.”

  “We need to leave,” Erin said. “This isn’t cute anymore.”

  “But all the fun’s about to start,” Isabel said.

  “What are you talking about?” Erin said.

  “One of The Ruperts supposedly flung himself off a building, and we all know it was the other boys who actually did it. This is the biggest news story of the century, and I have a front-row seat to all of it. I need to update my website.”

  “You’re vile,” I said. It just came out. I didn’t mean to start a fight with Isabel. Mainly because she scared me. But I had to say it. What we were doing was wrong. Even if we hadn’t killed Rupert P. Even if his death really was an accident. “Us staying quiet about all this is wrong.”

  “I can’t with this broken record,” Isabel said. “We got away with it.”

  “The other boys are going to go down for it.”

  “Well, they were stupid enough to throw Rupert P. off a building!”

  “Are you even a fan of theirs, or is every bad thing that happens to them just more fodder for your website?”

  “We all went to their room to dump Rupert P.’s body,” Isabel said. “So check yourself before you start asking who’s a fan.”

  She was right. But the night wasn’t over yet. Isabel’s heart may have been nothing more than a frostbitten tumor between her lungs, but mine still worked. I still had my morals. I was still a fan. I could still do something to change the outcome.

  “I’m going to confess. To everything.”

  Erin stepped in front of me before I could reach the door. “Think about what you’re doing,” she said. “Isabel and Apple and I are all sticking together on our story.”

  “Really? So if I confess, it’s still your word against mine?”

  Erin didn’t say anything to that, and I think, despite everything that had happened, that shocked me the most. “You’re my best friend.”

  Isabel let out a snarl of a laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” I said. I was tired of being afraid of Isabel. “You know, I could just go to the police and tell them you did it. I’ll just tell them you wanted to destroy the boy band for hits and retweets.”

  “You’d lie like that?”

  “Who said it’s a lie?” I said. She smiled and I hated it. “He didn’t die accidentally, Isabel.”

  “She’s right,” Erin said. “It would’ve been impossible for Rupert P. to use the tights to kill himself. Someone killed him.”

  “Oh, and now you think it was me too?” Isabel said. She turned to me. “Now I get it. Why you’re so eager to point fingers. It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “It all makes sense now.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said.

  “Am I? We have no idea where you were when Rupert P. died.”

  “I told you, I was in the bar.”

  “That’s not what Erin says.”

  I turned to Erin, not even a little bit surprised that she’d talk to Isabel about me behind my back.

  “You weren’t at the bar,” Erin said. Her voice slow and steady. Deliberate. “I know you weren’t at the bar because I was.”

  The thing about lying is you can be really good at it and still get caught.

  This just happened to be the worst possible lie to get caught in. Isabel was enjoying it. She was the bull, suddenly awake and pawing the ground. It was up to me to stand my ground or run with my tail between my legs.

  “Okay, I wasn’t at the bar,” I said. “I was with Rupert K.”

  Quiet. And not even like an awed quiet, more like an I-love-the-way-you-lie kind of quiet.

  “What?” Erin said.

  “I went up to the roof and he was there. We talked. When I came back down I found you all in the hallway, and that’s when we all walked into the room and found Rupert P. dead.”

  “And let me guess,” Isabel said, “you were with him when Rupert P. quote-unquote jumped off the roof too.”

  “Actually, yeah, I was.”

  “You expect us to believe that?”

  “This is exactly why I didn’t tell you in the first place. I know it sounds crazy, but it happened. He tweeted ‘Bright Lights, Big City’—it was something we’d talked about earlier, so I knew where to find him.”

  Erin had her phone out instantly. “He didn’t tweet that,” she said.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Erin’s right,” Apple said. “There’s no tweet like that on his feed.”

  “Then he must have deleted it.”

  “We all would’ve seen it, though,” Erin said.

  “No, you guys were too busy listening to Michelle Hornsbury’s stories. I saw the tweet as soon it went out. He probably just deleted it like two seconds later.”

  “You imagined it.”

  Isabel. On her hind legs now and smiling. Her smile this time wasn’t one of a beast about to pounce, but of one who’d already devoured her prey, satisfied. All I was to her was something stuck between her teeth. “You imagined the tweet. Just like you imagined meeting Rupert K. You’re literally crazy.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Erin told me about the time you spent in that psych ward freshman year.”

  I stared at Erin. A dagger through the heart, twisting.

  “It wasn’t a psych ward,” I said in a low voice. It was after my breakdown, my moment of paralyzing fear after my dad’s death. My mom took me to her hospital, but I wasn’t even admitted. “It wasn’t a psych ward,” I said again. Erin was the only one I told. Everyone else just thought I’d been out sick for a couple of days. How could she tell Isabel? “You know nothing about that.”

  “You know what else Erin told me? That you like to fantasize about Rupert K. You imagine he’s with you all the livelong day. Face it—all of your lies have facilitated your slow spiral into insanity.”

  I was too embarrassed to be fully angry. “I’m not crazy.”

  “Sure,” Isabel said. “And you also didn’t kill Rupert P.”

  “I did meet Rupert K. He told me about his hobbies, he told me what direction he wants his music to go in …”

  “Let me guess, video games and folk?” Isabel said. “It’s in all of his interviews.”

  “Folk dubstep.”

  “Doesn’t that sound made-up to you?”

  My heart sped up, my breath trying to catch up.

  Isabel was wrong.

  Just because she spoke with authorit
y didn’t make anything she said true. She didn’t know anything. “I did not kill Rupert P.”

  “Girl, you’re being real messy right now. You’re consumed by your obsession,” Isabel said. “The rest of us—we know how to handle it, but you? You go insane.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You hallucinate.”

  “Stop it.”

  “And now it’s escalated to murder.”

  “No!”

  “I feel bad for you.” She walked up to me. “You’re full-stop psycho and you don’t even know it.”

  My eyes found Erin’s, always finding her, but only for a second. She looked down. Even Apple was looking at me funny. I knew it wasn’t good when Apple of all people thought I was crazy. “Apple, Isabel’s just talking shit.”

  Apple’s eyebrows knit together. “Okay,” she said. What she didn’t say was, I believe you. What she meant was, I’m afraid of you. “We’re all a little crazy right now,” she said, the most unconvincing giggle in the world pinned on the end of it. “I’m going to get my things.”

  I turned to Erin, but she still wouldn’t look at me.

  This wasn’t happening.

  I did not imagine meeting Rupert K. on the roof both times.

  I did not imagine us going down to the hotel pool.

  I did not imagine the biggest superstar on the planet kissing me.

  I brought my fingers to my lips, trying to feel something there, even though memories—real or false—were intangible. It was the perfect kiss, just like I’d always dreamed it would be … I know how that sounds. That it was too perfect, that it was the kiss I dreamed of because I literally dreamed it up. I didn’t.

  I didn’t.

  I looked down at myself, at my clothes, at my hair. I looked crazy. I kept telling myself I wasn’t crazy, but what Isabel said was gnawing at me. Maybe she was right. Maybe I’d told one too many lies. I’d always made up stories. Had the lines just blurred between the real ones and the fake ones?

  Maybe I was a little crazy. I could admit that—we all were—but was I crazy enough to kill?

  I pictured Rupert P., the veins straining in his neck. I heard his breath cut out, the strangled noise it made, I saw his amber eyes go wider than they’d ever gone before and then stay unblinking forever, and I saw myself pulling the tights.

  “We should get out of here,” Erin said, breaking through my thoughts. I brushed past her, my former best friend, and grabbed my bag. Everyone else did too. None of them said anything to me as we all left the room. None of them said anything as we waited in front of the elevator doors.

  And none of us spoke when the doors opened and The Ruperts stood on the other side of them, handcuffed, accompanied by a pair of cops.

  An officer spoke first. “Take the next one.”

  We all roundly ignored him. Of course, Isabel was the first one to move forward. She crossed the threshold between us, the lesser people, and walked right into the elevator, the realm of the boys, rendering the cop’s efforts to continuously hit the DOOR CLOSE button totally futile. She may have been the first one in, but don’t kid yourself—we all would’ve done the exact same thing. It felt like we’d seen the boys all throughout the day, in different incarnations, but this time it’d be for real, enclosed in a small space, no place to hide. No cops were going to get in the way of that.

  The doors closed behind us.

  “Bloody fans,” Rupert X. muttered under his breath.

  “Don’t say another word, Rupert,” Rupert K. said. It didn’t surprise me that he’d be the only one to take his Miranda rights seriously.

  There was just enough room for us girls to stand facing the boys, about a foot between us. That feeling in the pit of my stomach of suspended gravity—of my stomach climbing up to my throat—wasn’t just the elevator descending. Standing in front of The Ruperts, I knew the four of us girls were more or less thinking the same thing.

  Was this all there was?

  They were just boys. Take away the band, the lights, the fame, and the screaming girls, and they were just boys, chosen for us to obsess over. When they chuckled we made gifs, and when they hugged each other we wrote overblown analyses. But they were just boys who we’d looked at through a prism.

  I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt this way about the boys now, who felt like our perception of them had totally changed. Apple’s favorite was gone, and they were the ones to throw him off a roof, so this couldn’t have been that exciting for her. My theory that Isabel stopped liking them a long time ago and now only followed their every move for her website still held strong. Maybe she still had a thing for Rupert L.—aesthetically he wasn’t unappealing—but he was a mouth breather of the highest order. (We already knew this, but in person, in an otherwise silent, enclosed space, it was impossible to ignore and increasingly irritating.) How could Isabel stand him?

  Up close, Rupert X. was pale. Too skinny. Very possibly addicted to an illicit substance. Erin looked at him with such hatred in her eyes. She wasn’t even trying to hide it.

  “You look quite familiar,” he said to her.

  “Fuck you,” Erin replied.

  In the hard golden light of the elevator I saw the different shades of Rupert K.’s forehead, a bumpy terrain dusted in makeup. I hadn’t noticed it the other two times I’d met him that day.

  A scary thought, considering Isabel’s hypothesis that I’d imagined it all.

  Had I really hallucinated the whole thing?

  He didn’t say anything to me, but he stared at me. His eyes were locked on mine.

  Once upon a time I would’ve loved this moment. I would’ve fantasized about looking into Rupert K.’s eyes and he looking back into mine.

  Now I wasn’t so sure.

  These were boys who made us do bad things.

  Made us turn on one another.

  Made us stupid with delight, and then just stupid.

  Isabel took out her phone and pointed the camera right at them.

  “Oi, what are you doing?” Rupert L. said. “Aren’t you girls fans?”

  “We’re your biggest fans,” Isabel said.

  The doors opened at the lobby, and the temporary quiet, where the only sound was that of Rupert L.’s breathing, was replaced by the continued noises of the pandemonium I’d heard the last time I was there. It hadn’t subsided at all. In fact, it was louder now. The madness just outside the glass doors had seeped its way inside, and there was no way to avoid it.

  We all stepped out of the elevator, and us girls stood back as the cops led the boys away. They bowed their heads, looking down to avoid the flashing camera lights. The glass doors opened and everyone was screaming, despair that their favorite boys were being taken away or happiness that they were finally getting to see them. It was impossible to tell the difference.

  Rupert K. turned back around. He was being dragged forward, but he turned his head to see me. The expression on his face was inscrutable. Did he recognize me? Was Isabel just playing mind games with me? Was I playing mind games with myself?

  We watched as the cops ushered them to the back of a police car, glowing with all the flashing lights that were bouncing off of it.

  None of this was right.

  I had to help him.

  “I have to help him.”

  “Keep saying it,” Isabel said. “Maybe you’ll start to believe it.”

  For once I ignored her. I marched through the doors. It had started to rain, which made all the lights—cameras, the blue and red flashes from the cop cars, the beams from the helicopters—reflect off every surface, totally blinding. It took my eyes a moment to adjust. All there was were the flashing lights and thousands of drenched, crying girls. For a moment I wondered if it actually was raining at all, or if it wasn’t just the collective tears of every Strepur in New York.

  I spotted the girl from earlier in the day when we were making our way to the front of the hotel, the one who’d said it wasn’t fair that we’d gotten a room. She was hugging
one of her friends, and she was crying too, but when she saw me she stopped. Her eyes connected with mine and I could swear she hated me. Her eyebrows settled low, her lips formed a tight line, just shy of a pout. As if somehow she knew exactly what my part was in all of this.

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  I don’t know if she heard me. Probably not. It was practically Armageddon outside after all. But either way, she only spurred me on further.

  It took me a moment to find a police officer. Finally, I spotted one being engulfed in a sticky blob of blubbering girls. Every time he pushed his palm out to keep the girls from coming any closer it got swallowed up, lost for a scary moment before he was able to retrieve it again.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the cop. He didn’t hear or he was too busy, so I had to say it again, louder this time. “Excuse me!” It felt like my voice was louder than it had ever been before. “I’d like to confess something.”

  “What’s that?” the cop said.

  Yeah, what’s that? What was I going to confess? That me and my friends had kidnapped Rupert P. earlier? Despite everything, I still didn’t want to rat them out. But I could still help Rupert K. while minimizing the damage.

  “I was with Rupert Kirke.”

  “Who?”

  “Rupert Kirke? He’s one of The Ruperts? I was with him when Rupert P…. jumped. I’m his alibi.”

  The cop rolled his eyes. Couldn’t say I didn’t expect that. “Get in line, miss. Every girl here is Rupert’s alibi.”