“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 she 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.”