Rupert K. was beautiful. He had ruddy cheeks, but the cute kind that looked like he’d always just come from running a marathon out in the cold. He’d had braces when he was twelve, so his teeth were straight and perfect. He had brown hair that he liked to keep short and that he was always pushing back off his forehead, especially when he didn’t want to answer a tele-vision interviewer’s question. He loved fantasy video games, folk music, and baking thumbprint cookies with his grandma. When he smiled, sometimes he would bite the inside of his right cheek. He had a beauty mark on the nape of his neck, right where his heartbeat pulsed on his carotid artery. It was the shape of California and the size of a pinkie nail. Recently, he’d taken to wearing porkpie hats on the crown of his head, something his fans were now copying. He wore sunglasses a lot because his pale green eyes were super sensitive to the sun. He had a tiny scar beneath his lower lip that he got when he fell off the jungle gym when he was six. And he seemed to take pleasure in ruining my life with how perfect he was.
Like I said. He was a life ruiner. All of the aforementioned things would’ve been enough to have me melting over him, but what really put Rupert K. into the man-of-my-wildest-dreams category was something he’d said in one of the first interviews he’d done.
“Happiness isn’t always easy,” he’d said. “But it’s a priority.”
That resonated with me. It felt like he got me.
“Let’s focus, girls,” Erin said, commanding even the attention of some of the Chocolateburg diners at the table next to ours. Erin was always commanding attention. “The boys will be here in a month. Is there any possible way to get tickets?”
Tickets to Coming to America: The Ruperts Learn about Thanksgiving! were free and distributed online by a third party not affiliated with NBC. All 550 tickets were gone 2.7 seconds after they went up. You couldn’t even buy them on StubHub. It was the biggest crisis we’d ever faced as fans.
“The only way to get tickets is if we find four fans willing to give them up,” I said. “So, we’re never getting tickets.” I didn’t know why we were even bothering with this group meeting, but I didn’t say anything like that.
“We could offer to buy the tickets off them,” Apple said. She would suggest something like that. There were very few things in life that Apple’s parents could not buy her. Unfortunately for all of us, these tickets were one of those things.
This is as good a place as any to give you some stats on Apple and her career as a Ruperts fangirl:
Favorite member of The Ruperts: Rupert Pierpont
Number of times she’s seen The Ruperts in person: 18
Number of times she’s met (this includes getting anything from a selfie to a hug) all/a member of The Ruperts: 8
Apple came from the outrageous ode to wealth and vanity that was Greenwich, Connecticut. She’d grown up there ever since her parents—an elderly, magnanimous couple—adopted her from an orphanage in Beijing when she was one year old. As the story goes, Apple’s parents were browsing the orphanage when they spotted the chubbiest baby they’d ever seen eating a piece of fruit out of the trash. I’ll give you one guess which fruit.
Living all the way in Connecticut never stopped Apple from seeing The Ruperts in New York. Actually, she’d been to every performance of The Ruperts in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. (Once she even trekked as far as Montreal.)Erin and I met Apple at one of The Ruperts’ shows. It was an outdoor performance for the Today show and Apple had pitched a neon-orange tent as big as a circus in Rockefeller Center four days prior to the concert so that she could be in the front row.
It got her on the news.
A reporter interviewed her in front of her tent, asking, “Why are you so devoted to this band?”
“Because,” she’d said, “I’m a Strepur for life!”
“Excuse me?” the clueless newsperson said.
“Strepur. It’s what Ruperts fans call themselves. It’s ‘Ruperts’ spelled backward.”
The newsperson stared, blinked, smiled, and concluded the interview by asking a passerby how he felt about the growing population of Strepurs.
“I’m all for strippers,” the man said.
The clip was a mini viral sensation.
Anyway, Erin and I had convinced our moms to let us leave for the city at two in the morning the day of the Today show concert so we could get a good place in line. (When I say “convinced,” I mean that Erin told her mom that she was going and I just waited for my mom to leave for her overnight shift.) By the time we got to Rockefeller Center, there must’ve been at least a thousand people there already. And there, at the front of the line, was that huge James and the Giant Peach of a tent. It was a lighthouse beacon, shining the way to the Promised Land. Erin grabbed my hand. Any time she did that it felt like she was pumping life into me. Because if you think about it, the only reason to grab your friend’s hand is when something big is about to happen. At first it was scary, but eventually I just started letting her take me. It was almost always worth it. So we waded through the sea of girls all around us, on a quest to reach the tent in the middle of Rockefeller Center.
Apple was all alone in her tent and only too happy to share it with fellow Strepurs. Inside, the walls were wallpapered with posters of Rupert P.’s face, which would’ve normally been offensive, but I ignored it because it was warm, we were in the front of the line, and the tent got restaurant delivery service.
We’d been friends with Apple ever since.
“Do you think a thousand bucks would do it?” Apple asked, back at Chocolateburg. “Is a thousand too—”
“No one is going to sell those tickets,” Erin cut in. “Not for all the money in your parents’ bank account.”
“We could smoke some ticket holders out,” Isabel said. “Threaten to destroy their lives if they don’t give ’em up.”
You think this is a joke.