Dublin girl? “What does he mean?”
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Erin raced to him and picked up the pink tights on the ground, so quick that Rupert P. didn’t even have time to try and snatch her. But I was quicker. I pulled her hand away before she could gag him. This time I didn’t turn to her for answers, though. I turned to Rupert P.
“How do you know who she is?”
“He’s delusional and butthurt,” Erin said. “Don’t listen to him.”
“You were at the Dublin show,” I said.
“She was more than just at the Dublin show,” Rupert P. said. “She was the Dublin show.”
“You went backstage?” Isabel asked.
“You met the boys?” Apple said, looking up from her phone.
“No wonder you did this,” Rupert P. said. “Don’t tell me this is your way of getting back at us.” For some reason he looked at me then. And he laughed. “What did I tell you? Can’t trust your own best friend.”
“What is he talking about, Erin?”
“I’m done talking,” Rupert P. said. “You girls will destroy yourselves from the inside. Don’t need me to muck it up for you.”
“Apple, hold him down,” Erin said.
“Oi!” Rupert P. said. But Apple was already on him, and just as he’d said, she was clearly stronger than him. She held his arms behind the chair. Erin used the same pair of hot-pink tights she’d used the first time. She wrapped them twice around his mouth and then used the ends to tie his hands behind his back. Every time he tried to move his arms the tights got tighter around his mouth. Who knew Erin was such a mastermind at tying people up?
Who knew anything about Erin anymore?
I looked at her, but she averted her eyes.
“Well, I’m going to the concert,” Apple said. Her tears had already fallen, and apparently were long since forgotten.
“But you don’t have tickets,” Isabel said.
“Actually, I do.” She held up her phone. “Consuela has been standing outside of NBC this whole time. She just texted that a Rupert P. fan was so upset by his absence that she walked out. Consuela snagged her ticket.” Apple left the room.
“Well, this was anticlimactic,” Isabel said. “The Internet’s blowing up right now, and I need to be on top of it.” She left the room too.
Erin looked at me but neither of us said anything, a silence so icy I shivered. Even Rupert P. looked interested in it, his eyes darting back and forth between us, riveted like a fan at Wimbledon. But we weren’t about to indulge him. Or at least Erin wasn’t. She walked out of the room.
My plan to set Rupert P. free would have to wait. Right now I needed to follow Erin.
Story of my life.
But this time I followed Erin with the intention of getting some answers. She jammed her finger into the elevator button, still not saying anything, not even looking at me. After a few seconds of waiting she huffed and pushed through the stairwell door. I followed her. I followed her down eight flights. For a moment I was stupid enough to think she was trying to get me to come with her someplace private, but by the time we got to the lobby she was taking so many sharp turns around corners that it hit me that she was actually trying to lose me.
“Wait up!” I said as I followed her into the Valmont room.
I didn’t know what the Valmont room was for, but it was a huge space with rows of chairs divided in the middle to form an aisle. Maybe they held weddings there, or seminars. Right now it was empty except for me and Erin.
She finally stopped, a lone rose standing tall among a field of ugly brown chairs. She spun on her heel to face me. “Yes?”
As if I was a pesky gnat she couldn’t get rid of. As if I wasn’t the one friend she told all her secrets to. “What the hell was all that about?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You were the Dublin show?” I said, echoing Rupert P.’s words. “What was he talking about? How does he know you?”
“He must’ve seen me at the concert.” Picking at her cuticles, wanting to change the subject. But I wouldn’t.
“Stop lying to me, Erin. At first I thought it was only a little weird that we were taking a boy bander hostage, but now I feel like you’re writing a story and I’m just playing a part in it, because all I got from everything that went down in there is that (a) Rupert P. is an unmitigated asshole and (b) his being in our room right now is maybe not the fluke that I thought it was. What the hell is going on?”
She took a deep breath, and I could see from the look on her face—cheeks filled with color, lips twisted, resigned—that she would tell me something she’d never told me before. That she would be honest with me. Maybe for the first time.
“Rupert P. being in our room is a fluke,” Erin said. “How could I have known what Apple would get up to when caught alone in a hallway with the love of her life and an ounce of determination?”