I mean, who even wears watches anymore?!
Could they see through the slats? Were our lives over as we knew them? We held our breaths. We held our breaths so long we were going to pass out, and soon Rupert P. wasn’t going to be the only dead person in this room.
“How many of those stupid watches have you packed?” Rupert X. said.
“I didn’t think I’d packed any …” Rupert L.’s eyes were squinty, his face screwed up. When Rupert L. was thinking hard you could see it. It was the phenomenon most commonly known as Rupert L. Constipation Face (RLCF). He came closer to the closet, slowly. And then he sniffed. “Did we pack the perfume too?”
We were all wearing The Ruperts’ perfumes.
We were all fucked sideways.
“I don’t know. Will you please just come here?”
But Rupert L. didn’t turn back around. He kept coming closer. His hand was on the doorknob, ready to pull, when Rupert X. yelled, “Oi!”
Rupert L. turned.
“We need to focus. You’ve still got his Twitter passcode, yeah?”
Rupert L. nodded.
“Good. We’ll need to post on his behalf. Let’s go to the bedrooms and gather as many sheets as we can. We need to wrap him.”
“We do?” Rupert L. said.
“I don’t know, but it sounds right. Now come help me!”
The boys disappeared down a hallway heading toward the bedrooms, and almost as soon as they did Erin pushed open the closet doors and we got the hell out of there.
When we got back to our hotel room everyone around me was breathing sighs of relief, but I felt different. I felt like I couldn’t breathe at all.
I went straight for the bedroom and locked the door behind me, falling onto the bed that Isabel and Erin had already claimed for themselves. It got me thinking about strange bedfellows. Which made me laugh. Which in turn made me realize that I was maybe going crazy and/or having a weird kind of panic attack. My heart was racing. It was all I could hear as I stared up at the ceiling, hoping for answers there that would quell the questions running through my mind. And there were a lot of them. Here’s an abridged list:
Had I really just pinned a dead body on The Ruperts, thus betraying the de facto loves of my life?
Was I going to hell?
How had I started this day having milk and toast and ended it by stuffing a body into a way-too-flashy suitcase?
Were my best friends actually my best friends? Was this what it meant to be part of a group of girlfriends? Kidnapping, murder, disposing of bodies all in a day’s work? Did the fact that I was so reluctant to help make me a terrible friend?
Did I actually know my friends at all?
Did I know Erin?
And the most important question of all:
How did Rupert Pierpont die?
What Erin had said—or, more appropriately, what her dad the doctor had said—was worming its way through my gray matter until it was all I could think about.
A person couldn’t strangle himself. Someone killed him.
Someone standing on the other side of that door.
I started to laugh again.
I don’t know why, so don’t judge me. It was just … My body felt weird. Shaky, fidgety, like I was lying on a trampoline while people all around me jumped.
People who looked an awful lot like my friends.
My teeth chattered and my cheeks tickled. I was having a full-on freak-out, so if you really think about it, laughing was the least offensive thing I could’ve been doing at that moment. The thing is, I recognized this feeling. I was on the brink of a breakdown.
I had one of these before, shortly after my dad died, when life felt impossibly heavy and my thoughts spiraled so far out of control that I was basically catatonic with fear. It was the kind of fear that pulled all the breath out of you with one continuing scream. The kind the made the walls move in, the kind that shut you up and shut the world out. The kind that sends you to therapy.
I had to pull myself together, rein in my reeling mind, before things got really bad.
I wanted to go home. When we’d all made the decision to come to the hotel I was secretly happy I’d get to skip Thanksgiving this year. I couldn’t handle another Thanksgiving like the one I’d had last year. Just a few months after my father’s death, me and my mom in our cramped apartment, eating silently under the fluorescent kitchen light. It was so pathetic and my mom and I knew it but pretended we didn’t. Trying to make small talk over the cold gravy had given me anxiety.
But I would still choose a Thanksgiving like that one over the one I was currently experiencing.
I took out my phone and began typing a message.
Hi mom.
I held the phone in front of my face, waiting for her reply, turning the screen on again every time it dimmed to black.
Hi honey. Thanks for checking in. Busy over here. So glad you’re having fun.
But I wasn’t having fun. I wanted to tell her that, but my finger only hovered over the screen. Finally, I texted back.