It all started with a knock on the door.
I knew instantly that it was Apple. I knew without question that she’d forgotten to take the room key with her when she left to get the ice. Apple forgot things with the frequency and attitude of someone who knew she could simply hire people to remember things for her. So I knew it was her outside the door. What I didn’t know was that she wouldn’t be alone.
Before I go on, I just want to state for the record that kidnapping one of The Ruperts was never part of the plan for me. When we booked the hotel room, all I knew was that we’d be one step closer to the boys. The best we could hope for was to see them, be close to them, breathe the same air as them. The most we could pray for was the opportunity to possibly get them to see us in return, to stop and talk to us, to love us the way that we loved them. All while taking a zillion selfies and bawling our eyes out.
But we never actually got to do that.
What actually happened, according to Apple’s story, was this:
On her way to the ice machine at the end of the hall Apple saw someone already there, getting his own tub of ice. As fangirl luck would have it, it was none other than Rupert Pierpont.
I’ll never know if the series of events that unfolded next would have been completely different if it was any of the other boys. If it was Rupert X. getting ice on the eighth floor at the exact same moment that Apple was, maybe none of this would have ever happened. Maybe I wouldn’t be telling you this story. Maybe Apple would’ve just walked away. (Let’s be real—she wouldn’t have walked away.) But she didn’t. And what happened, happened.
Anyway, you can imagine her reaction.
You can’t?
Okay, let me help you out. Imagine a big blubbering mess of tear-streaked flesh and dry heaving. Apple did the only thing Apple could think to do. She ran at full fucking speed. Apple did not stop. Apple’s overwhelming desire to hug/touch/hump Rupert P. by any means necessary meant nothing was going to get in the way of her flesh touching his. She did not stop until she football tackled Rupert P. to the ground.
Rupert P. was out cold instantly. This was actually kind of a best-case scenario, under the circumstances, because a tackle from Apple could’ve very well killed him.
I should probably mention that Apple is a beautiful girl who is 267 pounds. I know her exact weight because she tweets about it every day. We all stanned for our respective boys in our own respective ways, and the way Apple worshipped at Rupert P.’s throne was by tweeting him on the daily in the hopes that he would tweet her back. As of today he had tweeted her back a total of zero times. She hadn’t stopped trying, though. Actually, she’d started a campaign to lose weight in order to get his attention. So far she’d lost sixteen pounds and he hadn’t blocked her yet. (So … success?) At five feet four inches tall and 267 pounds, Apple was the lolly to our pixie sticks. And at top speeds I could only imagine she was deadly.
So when I opened the door, Apple was there, just as I’d expected, but she was out of breath and holding Rupert P.’s ankle in her fist, the rest of him draped on the floor behind her, limp as the sack of coal Santa brings for the naughty kids.
“I found one,” she said.
And that was how my three friends and I came to be in possession of our very own boy bander.
So back to our second official group meeting, now with Rupert P. tied up in the other room.
“What are we going to do?” Isabel said.
We were in the room not occupied by the worst boy bander alive, and Isabel was pacing. This worried me. If Isabel was scared, that meant we should all be scared. Like I mentioned before, thanks to her family, Isabel knew of crime. And I was pretty sure kidnapping someone, no matter how irrelevant he was, was a pretty big crime.
I watched as she carved a path in the carpet around the bed, deep focus on her stony face, like a bull circling a red cape before charging. She seemed fine before, but I guess tying up an unconscious flop was one thing and listening to it make threats was quite another. Isabel was post postal.
“?Mierda madre culo puta!” she said. “We need to think!”
When Isabel was mad she cursed in Spanish. I found this out when we were at the side entrance for Live with Kelly and Michael once and Isabel tried to sneak past one of the security guards when he wasn’t looking. He was too quick, though, and she ended up on their ban list. I’d never heard so many Spanish obscenities yelled so loud and all at once. But while Isabel might have grown up speaking (broken) Spanish, I’d aced it last year and knew that her curses never made any sense. Like now, for example, all she’d said was, “Shit mother ass bitch.” Isabel was a nonsensical Spanish curser.
She turned to me, nostrils flared more than ever. Truly, her transformation into an angry bull was nearly complete. “?Que me miras, pendeja! Think!”