“The fight hasn’t even started and you’re already tapping out?” Isabel said.
“I’m not tapping out …” Maybe I just didn’t want to get my karate gi all wrinkled if I knew it was a losing battle. (In my mind, the metaphorical fight she was talking about was a karate match, not a wrestling one. Karate just seemed so much more dignified.)
“You’re always too chickenshit to do anything,” Isabel said, rolling her eyes. “Your goody-two-shoes mentality is getting way tired.”
“Isabel, kindly shut up,” Erin said.
I loved Erin in that moment. Because nobody told Isabel to shut up. If anyone did, they’d probably end up on the floor, Isabel standing triumphantly over them with knuckles freshly bruised and bloody. But Erin wasn’t just anybody. Isabel curled her upper lip and went back to her phone.
I squeezed Erin’s knee, a nonverbal thanks, and she, in turn, squeezed mine: no probs.
“The boys will still be in New York, there’ll be other ways to meet them,” Erin said. She dunked a Twix bar into her milk shake and bit off the end of it, making us wait for her to go on. She fixed us with a smile, sly and satisfied, and asked us a -question we already knew the answer to. “Where are they staying?”
“The hotel!” All of us said it at the same time.
We turned to Isabel. “Isabel?”
“My sources won’t know where the boys will be staying yet, but I’d put my money on The Rondack.”
Aside from threatening people’s lives every day on Twitter, Isabel ran the most popular Ruperts update site on the Web. She knew stuff about the boys before the boys even knew it themselves.
“The hotel is our best bet,” I said, “but everyone goes there. It’s going to be packed.”
“We could get a room at the hotel,” Apple said. “We’d be free to roam around, find out which rooms the boys are in, corner them in hallways, and force them to comply with our every whim.” She smiled to herself, lost in a daydream/the boys’ probable nightmare.
“I don’t think a hotel is a good idea,” I said. “Maybe we could—”
“I think a hotel is a fantastic idea, actually,” Erin cut in.
I watched her, trying to interpret this new eagerness in her. Erin was never this gung ho about things. Her MO was cool and aloof.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “But we won’t be able to check into a hotel. We’re minors.”
“I can get Consuela to check in for us,” Apple said.
Consuela worked as a housekeeper for Apple’s family, but while that may have been her official title, her role in Apple’s life stretched much farther than that. Consuela was Apple’s chaperone when she went to Montreal to see the boys in concert. Consuela was actually the one who stayed in the tent at the Today show for the first two days before Apple got there. And Consuela was the one who’d nearly gotten herself arrested at Toys “R” Us when she smacked a fellow holiday shopper with her purse trying to get to the last limited edition Rupert Pierpont doll that Apple needed for her collection. Consuela was basically an honorary Strepur, whether she wanted to be or not.
“How much money is that going to be?” Isabel asked. “Because I can’t—”
“I’ve got it covered!” Apple said.
“We’ll all chip in for a room,” I said. Erin pinched me under the table and Isabel shot me a dirty look, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t fair to make Apple always pay for everything. Apple grinned at me, and that settled it.
“We’re getting a room!” Erin said.
The day of The Ruperts’ Thanksgiving spectacular, even the city felt more alive than ever. I thought we’d miss the madness of the big parade, since that was in Midtown and we were all the way downtown, but everyone who’d spent the morning perched on Thirty-Fourth Street must’ve migrated a couple of miles south, because the streets of SoHo were buzzing with life. That is to say, more so than usual. There were people everywhere, shouts and car horns overloud and pulsing in my ears; for all intents and purposes, New York herself was an excited fangirl that day. And her heart, where I could swear everyone in the city was heading to or coming from, was The Rondack.
It was the swankiest hotel in SoHo—maybe the swankiest hotel in all of NYC. Even before everything went down later that night—when the hotel got bathed by helicopter beams from overhead and swarmed by hapless cops on the ground—the place was already crawling with chaos. It was the epicenter of all the action. And my friends and I were poised to make our entrance.
My friends and I and Consuela.