I did not imagine us going down to the hotel pool.
I did not imagine the biggest superstar on the planet kissing me.
I brought my fingers to my lips, trying to feel something there, even though memories—real or false—were intangible. It was the perfect kiss, just like I’d always dreamed it would be … I know how that sounds. That it was too perfect, that it was the kiss I dreamed of because I literally dreamed it up. I didn’t.
I didn’t.
I looked down at myself, at my clothes, at my hair. I looked crazy. I kept telling myself I wasn’t crazy, but what Isabel said was gnawing at me. Maybe she was right. Maybe I’d told one too many lies. I’d always made up stories. Had the lines just blurred between the real ones and the fake ones?
Maybe I was a little crazy. I could admit that—we all were—but was I crazy enough to kill?
I pictured Rupert P., the veins straining in his neck. I heard his breath cut out, the strangled noise it made, I saw his amber eyes go wider than they’d ever gone before and then stay unblinking forever, and I saw myself pulling the tights.
“We should get out of here,” Erin said, breaking through my thoughts. I brushed past her, my former best friend, and grabbed my bag. Everyone else did too. None of them said anything to me as we all left the room. None of them said anything as we waited in front of the elevator doors.
And none of us spoke when the doors opened and The Ruperts stood on the other side of them, handcuffed, accompanied by a pair of cops.
An officer spoke first. “Take the next one.”
We all roundly ignored him. Of course, Isabel was the first one to move forward. She crossed the threshold between us, the lesser people, and walked right into the elevator, the realm of the boys, rendering the cop’s efforts to continuously hit the DOOR CLOSE button totally futile. She may have been the first one in, but don’t kid yourself—we all would’ve done the exact same thing. It felt like we’d seen the boys all throughout the day, in different incarnations, but this time it’d be for real, enclosed in a small space, no place to hide. No cops were going to get in the way of that.
The doors closed behind us.
“Bloody fans,” Rupert X. muttered under his breath.
“Don’t say another word, Rupert,” Rupert K. said. It didn’t surprise me that he’d be the only one to take his Miranda rights seriously.
There was just enough room for us girls to stand facing the boys, about a foot between us. That feeling in the pit of my stomach of suspended gravity—of my stomach climbing up to my throat—wasn’t just the elevator descending. Standing in front of The Ruperts, I knew the four of us girls were more or less thinking the same thing.
Was this all there was?
They were just boys. Take away the band, the lights, the fame, and the screaming girls, and they were just boys, chosen for us to obsess over. When they chuckled we made gifs, and when they hugged each other we wrote overblown analyses. But they were just boys who we’d looked at through a prism.
I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt this way about the boys now, who felt like our perception of them had totally changed. Apple’s favorite was gone, and they were the ones to throw him off a roof, so this couldn’t have been that exciting for her. My theory that Isabel stopped liking them a long time ago and now only followed their every move for her website still held strong. Maybe she still had a thing for Rupert L.—aesthetically he wasn’t unappealing—but he was a mouth breather of the highest order. (We already knew this, but in person, in an otherwise silent, enclosed space, it was impossible to ignore and increasingly irritating.) How could Isabel stand him?
Up close, Rupert X. was pale. Too skinny. Very possibly addicted to an illicit substance. Erin looked at him with such hatred in her eyes. She wasn’t even trying to hide it.
“You look quite familiar,” he said to her.
“Fuck you,” Erin replied.
In the hard golden light of the elevator I saw the different shades of Rupert K.’s forehead, a bumpy terrain dusted in makeup. I hadn’t noticed it the other two times I’d met him that day.
A scary thought, considering Isabel’s hypothesis that I’d imagined it all.
Had I really hallucinated the whole thing?
He didn’t say anything to me, but he stared at me. His eyes were locked on mine.
Once upon a time I would’ve loved this moment. I would’ve fantasized about looking into Rupert K.’s eyes and he looking back into mine.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
These were boys who made us do bad things.
Made us turn on one another.
Made us stupid with delight, and then just stupid.
Isabel took out her phone and pointed the camera right at them.
“Oi, what are you doing?” Rupert L. said. “Aren’t you girls fans?”