“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.”
“We can’t just take her purse.”
“We aren’t going to. We’re just going to look through it for the proverbial shits and giggles.”
“Erin, this is next-level wrong.”
She ignored me.
In retrospect, we should’ve just left, but we didn’t. We never should’ve touched that purse. But Erin had to open it. She had to look through it. She had to take a souvenir.
Michelle Hornsbury’s purse was basically a first aid kit if you ever found yourself walking down the street and needing to transform into a Proper Girl ASAP. There was every type of makeup a person could possibly need, the requisite feminine products, snacks, even a mini bottle of tequila.
“Is Michelle Hornsbury secretly a lush?” I asked.
Erin shrugged. “Who knows, but let’s start the rumor that she is.” She pulled out a fuchsia alligator-skin wallet first and rifled through it. “Only five bucks American, the rest are pounds.” She put it back and then took out a tube of lip gloss in Pink Lemonade, the same tint that Michelle Hornsbury had been wearing. “I say we go back to our room, show this to Rupert P., and tell him we ain’t fuckin’ around.” Erin laughed, really gleefully. It was pretty infectious.
“So now you want him to think we kidnapped his girlfriend too?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “Why not?”
In the grand scheme of things, if I really thought about it, this probably wasn’t even the craziest thing a Strepur had done to The Ruperts. There was that girl in Australia who dressed as a maid at their hotel, got their room key, and watched them sleep for the whole night. She recorded it with night-vision video. Thanks to her, we now knew that Rupert X. snored and that Rupert L. cried out in his sleep. She was a hero among us, really.