“Womp womp,” Erin said. “You guys should probably stay under the scaffolding. It’s supposed to rain later.”
The way Erin said stuff, with her catwalk confidence and her eat-shit smile, it made me feel giddy and confident too, because I was on her team and when she said those things it was like I was saying them too.
I met Erin last year, at the start of high school, and even though we were both freshmen, Erin was already popular by then. She was popular the moment she stepped foot on school grounds, maybe because she simply decided to be. Where Erin went, so went everything shiny and new, and all she left in her wake were drooling boys and awed stares. She was the opposite of me.
I’d always been a bit of a loner, and it didn’t really help matters that my father died in the summer between junior high and high school (two weeks after he died was when I -happened to buy my first Ruperts album). It was hard enough transitioning to a new school and trying to make friends when you had your own personal shit going on. Plus, it wasn’t like anybody was knocking down my door, eager to befriend the loner/quiet/sad girl.
So you ask yourself, how the heck did I become Erin’s best friend? It’s simple. I wore a Rupert K. T-shirt to school one day. I probably should have known better. Wearing a boy band shirt in middle school was one thing, but high school was populated by snickering, cruel beasts who fed on boy-band-T-shirt-wearing freshman like me. Wearing that shirt made a statement, and that statement was: Ridicule me! But Erin sat next to me at lunch that day. “Is Rupert Kirke your favorite?” she’d said. “Mine’s Rupert Xavier.”
And so goes the story of our beautiful friendship. See, The Ruperts were the source of all the good things in my life. After Erin and I became friends, things got better. Nobody gave me grief for wearing Rupert K. shirts, for starters. But even when I wasn’t in full-on fangirl mode, Erin still had my back. Going down the halls in school was always easier with her by my side. It was self-assurance by proximity; when she was with me I was untouchable, and if anybody ever said anything to me Erin would be there to feed them a nice, warm dish of beautifully prepared shit. Erin floated, and so therefore I did too.
Now she laced her arm through mine and I swear we positively skipped into the hotel lobby together, leaving all the other Strepurs out in the cold.
At this point you’re probably asking yourself how all of New York’s Strepurs were able to get away from their families on Thanksgiving to stand guard outside of this hotel. You are still asking the wrong questions. Fangirls don’t play. We’d cancel Christmas in a heartbeat if Santa got in the way of us seeing the boys. I didn’t know what the girls outside had told their parents about skipping Thanksgiving this year, or if they’d told them anything at all, but the four of us had taken care of this detail already.
Like I said, I told my mom I’d be with Erin. Erin double-booked her parents, telling her mom she’d be spending Thanksgiving with her dad and telling her dad she’d be spending Thanksgiving with her mom. (The fact that Erin’s parents lived on different islands—her mom in Brooklyn, her dad in Manhattan on the Upper West Side—and didn’t communicate with each other directly really worked out nicely for us.) According to Isabel, her Dominican family didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving (or any other strictly American holiday, for that matter). And Apple’s parents—the only parents of our group who were actually aware of our plan to stay at a hotel for the night and were totally on board with it—threw Thanksgiving the night before. They disrupted work schedules and endured extended family arguments, but Apple was happy and that was all that mattered to her parents.
Inside the hotel I stopped to marvel at the lobby. The front desk was on the right side, with the entrance to the hotel bar off to the left. Every surface was either glass, hospital white, or gold, with the biggest pops of color coming from unexpected accents. Like the ceiling, which seemed to be made up entirely of suspended skateboard decks in the most psychedelic neon colors, hovering above us. The elevator bank was sleek, pristine, gilded, but was disrupted by the ugly appearance of a dirty phone booth right in the center of it. There were scratches in the Plexiglas and graffiti all over its accordion doors, and I wasn’t sure if it was a working phone booth, an art installation, or just a symbol of The Rondack’s try-hardness, but I appreciated the quirkiness.
Consuela checked in for us, but before handing the keys over to Apple she took me aside. I had no clue why, and as she led me away I turned toward Erin, hoping for some guidance. She only winked and gave me a double thumbs-up. I knew how to read her brand of sign language by now. That particular signal was shorthand for I trust you to lie your ass off, girl.