“Someone’s taken a shine to you, eh, Coco?” Bailey cooed, tickling the dog under her furry chin as though she were a hairy little baby. “Come, come. I’ll give you the grand tour.”
Blair frowned at the four other dogs, all staring at her expectantly. The last thing she wanted was some mutt drooling all over her linen Calypso tunic.
“This way, girls.” Bailey beckoned, leading the five dogs and two girls like a flock of ducks down the cavernous hall-way and into the main part of the house. The hall was lined with wall-size Ellsworth Kelly red circle paintings that Blair recognized from a spread on the Winter estate in last sum-mer’s Elle Decor, and opened onto a massive kitchen with poured concrete counters. A huge teak bowl filled with brilliant yellow lemons sat squarely on one counter. “This is the kitchen,” explained their jovial host. “But the only thing you really need to know is that the bar is over there.” He pointed to a metal corner table lined with an asymmetrical stack of glass decanters. “Allow me.”
Bailey went to work pouring one of the clear liquors over ice and crushed mint leaves and handed two full martini glasses to Blair and Serena, who had to shift Coco under her arm to accept the drink.
“What is this anyway?” Blair raised her dark, perfectly arched eyebrows suspiciously.
“Just a mint tea for my girls!” Bailey emptied his own martini glass in a long gulp, and then poured himself a refill. “And the fridge is stocked, so raid away. Just don’t tell me about it—it’s swimsuit season, don’t you know.”
“Right,” Blair agreed, inwardly rolling her eyes. Old people were always talking about watching what they ate, but she intended to consume as much Cold Stone Creamery ice cream and Balthazar French bread as she liked and still look glorious in her new ivory-and-sky-blue striped Blumarine bikini.
Yummy.
“Come, come.” Bailey flung the doors open onto the sunny bluestone patio. “That’s the pool, and that,” he continued, pointing at a low, concrete bungalow that was like a miniature version of the main house, “is your home away from home. The pool house. I daresay you’ll be quite comfortable there. We’ve got the AC cranked, the sheets are imported from Umbria, and Stefan will fetch you anything you need.”
Anything?
“There are just two more very important people you girls must meet,” Bailey gushed, and clapped his hands gaily, spilling what remained of his cocktail. “Svetlana! Ibiza! Front and center, please!”
More dogs?
“Comink, Meester Winter!”
Two leggy amazons burst out of the pool house—their pool house—and rushed toward Blair, Bailey, and Serena. The dogs erupted into an ecstatic barking chorus.
“I Svetlana,” announced the girl with ass-length whitish-blond hair and no discernable hips. She was wearing a minuscule neon-orange bikini bottom and two tiny orange triangles over her nonexistent boobs.
“I am Ibiza,” pronounced the other girl carefully. She had chestnut-colored hair layered to frame her almost foxlike face, brilliant blue eyes, and a bright smile that was slightly marred by two very prominent buckteeth. Her lavender-and-gold striped bathing suit was one of those horrible and complicated cutout one-pieces that looks like a bikini from behind. A carefully placed circular cutout in front revealed her rather fuzzy navel.
Ew!
Ibiza, which sounded more like a brand of car than a name, placed her hands on Blair’s arm and air kissed her twice. Blair shuddered with horror, realizing that, except for her excruciating orthodontic issues, this girl looked exactly like her. She wrenched out of the girl’s grip and studied the other model, who was, on closer inspection, a diluted version of Serena, minus the grace, poise, and New England breeding.What the hell was going on?
“Ibiza and Svetlana are going to be the faces of the new line, darlings. On the ads, you know,” Bailey explained with a satisfied sigh. “You two are the inspiration, obviously.”
Obviously.
“They’re here to watch you. To be you, really,” he went on, dramatically raising his martini glass as if he were starring in Rent on Broadway. “I want them to capture your very essence!”
Um, hello, creepiness?
“Pleased to meet you.” Serena offered her hand to the girls, turning to her own doppelganger first. Serena was always unfailingly polite, but even she couldn’t stop skeeving out on the inside. Apart from the high-pitched voice and questionable taste in swimwear, Svetlana looked just like her, but not. It was like Halloween in fourth grade when she and Blair had dressed up like their homeroom teachers, complete with wigs, ugly Talbots cardigans, and brown loafers.
“It’s going to be like a giant slumber party!” Bailey screamed like a six-year-old girl.
Ibiza and Svetlana giggled fakely. “Pillow fight!” they yelled in unison in their thick eastern bloc accents.
“God, you two are divine!” Bailey threw his glass onto the velvety green lawn and clapped his hands together again in rapid-fire applause.
Blair glared at the quasi–mirror images of her and Serena. To everyone else, they probably looked like happy, carefree, malnourished Barbie dolls, but Blair had always been more perceptive than the average girl. Sure, Ibiza and Svetlana were probably supposed to just sit around waiting for Blair and Serena to rub off on them, but Blair could see something else in their beady foreign eyes. Something calculated and decidedly bitchy.
And it takes one to know one.
These girls weren’t interested in being second best. Ibiza and Svetlana definitely had other plans.
Well, then.
Blair turned and grinned at Serena, suddenly very happy that she had her best friend with her. She grabbed Serena’s hand. “Let’s cool off,” she whispered naughtily.
“Good idea.” Serena understood immediately. She let Coco wriggle out of her grasp. Then the pair leapt into the tempting blue swimming pool, shoes and all, squealing as they landed in the perfectly body-temperature water.
“Eek!” screeched Bailey as the chlorinated pool water splashed his gleaming white linen trousers. “Now this,” he announced to no one in particular, “is inspiring. Hilfe! Stefan, quickly: my sketchbook! Bitte, dearest!”
Blair dunked her head under the glittering, rippling water, feeling her dark hair swirl around her. She surfaced just in time to see Ibiza turn to Svetlana conspiratorially. And with that, the copycats stepped to the edge of the pool and cannonballed into the deep end, their bones slapping the water.
Welcome to your new family, girls!
n knows a desperate housewife when he sees one
“Nate? Naaa-te? Where are you hiding, my little goose-berry?”
That muffled, far-off cry made the fine sun-bleached hairs on the back of Nate Archibald’s tanned neck stand straight up. He’d purposely chosen the dingy but deserted attic of Coach Michaels’s house for a quick escape from yet another day of indentured servitude in the not-so-fashionable part of Long Island.
Escape, of course, meaning escape to stoned land. Inhale THC, exhale CO2.
He took a long drag from the freshly rolled joint and blew a plume of warm, dry smoke out the small half-window, straining to hear where the voice was coming from. The voice in question belonged to Patricia, also known as “Babs,” Coach Michaels’s ever-present and usually sun-bathing-topless-by-the-pool wife. Nate had been working at the Michaelses’ Hampton Bays house since graduation—or in his case, semigraduation, since he hadn’t yet received his diploma, due to a now-infamous Viagra-stealing incident. And while Babs had always been friendly—bringing him tall glasses of lemon-infused ice tea as he guided the lawnmower over Coach’s beloved lawn, urging him to eat a slice of buttery cinnamon toast when he showed up in the morning, bleary-eyed and ready for work—for the past two days she’d been . . . well, extra friendly. He might have been stoned most of the time, but he was with it enough to notice that Babs Michaels definitely had a thing for him.
Doesn’t everyone?
Nate paused and focused all his energy on listening to t
he quiet house, but the only noise he heard was the pounding of his stoned, nervous heart. He brought the joint back up to his lips and paused—maybe the pot was making him paranoid, but he thought he heard something. It sounded like footsteps coming closer.
Shit! Nate hastily stubbed the joint out on the rough wooden windowsill, sending a shower of sparks onto the floor. Great—not only was he about to get caught smoking a joint on the job, he was going to burn the fucking house down in the process. He tucked the roach into his pocket— no sense wasting it—and frantically fanned the smoke out the open window.
“Are you up here, Nate?” Babs’s voice boomed from the bottom of the attic stairwell. “Do I smell something . . . illegal? You know, I was a teenager once, too—not so long ago!”
Nate was still waving his hands frantically when Babs emerged from the top of the stairs. A sly smile spread across her wrinkled, slightly sun-burnished face. Her dyedred hair was pulled back in a sloppy ponytail. A halo of auburn frizz puffed out around her forehead.
“There you are.” Babs sighed. “Didn’t you hear me calling for you?”
Nate shook his head, suddenly very concerned about how stoned he was.
“Well,” she continued, strolling toward him, past the piles of cardboard boxes and all the old toys and junk that she and the coach had stored up there. “You know what my husband said: while he’s out of town, you’re mine.”
“Y-y-yeah,” stammered Nate. Coach was away at some lacrosse conference in Maryland for the week, probably learning new techniques in torturing high school boys. Nate was suddenly panicked he hadn’t completely put out the joint. Were his pants going to catch fire?
Yikes.
“The thing is, Nate,” Babs went on, idly tracing the handle-bars of a rusted Schwinn bike that was hanging from the ceiling, “I need a hand. Do me a little favor, will you?”
“’Course.” he nodded. “That’s what I’m here for.”
“Well, this particular favor might be outside of your regular job description,” she admitted. “But if you’d be so kind as to help me out, maybe I won’t mention anything about the fact that my attic smells like a Grateful Dead concert. What do you say?”
What can you say to blackmail?
“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Nate stumbled. “It won’t happen again.”
Babs laughed. “You can’t possibly expect me to believe that.” She smiled, pushing past the upside-down bike toward Nate, who was still hunched by the window. “But never mind. I need a hand, and you’ve got two.” She took his now-callused hands in hers, examining them. “Two very capable, strong hands.”
Nate wondered if he shouldn’t warn Coach that his kids might not look like him for a reason: Babs had probably bagged every grocery boy who’d bagged her groceries!
“What can I do for you?” he asked, trying to sound cheerfully polite, although he heard his voice warble in pure stoned terror.
Babs dropped his hands and undid the top button on her pink cotton shirt. “I decided to get a little surprise for the coach.” She undid another button.
“I see,” Nate replied evenly. And he did see: some very impressive cleavage, and nary a tan line, thanks to her after-noon regimen of topless sunbathing.
Nice.
“I decided to get a little tattoo.” She giggled, undoing the last button on her shirt and letting it slide off her shoulders and onto the floor. “Just a little something for the coach to discover when he gets home.”
“Great.” He nodded. Eye contact, eye contact, eye contact.
“But I’ve got to take special care of it,” she whispered huskily, turning her back to Nate to reveal a tiny tattoo of a butterfly, its green wings spread across the burnished leather of her lower back. “But I just can’t seem to reach it,” she continued. “My tattoo artist, Matty? He said I have to rub this ointment on it every couple of hours.”
Nate studied the tattoo, trying desperately to clear his head. What was he supposed to do in this situation? Babs was okay, but up close her skin looked kind of like a beat-up old baseball glove, and her perfume smelled like the soap in a gas station bathroom.
No wonder Coach Michaels needed that Viagra.
Speaking of him: he’d kick Nate’s ass, and not just figuratively, if he knew that his wife had taken her top off in Nate’s presence. On the other hand, if he didn’t rub Babs with ointment she’d tell Coach Michaels he’d been smoking pot on the job. The coach probably wouldn’t give Nate his diploma at the end of the summer, which would mean no more Yale, and basically his whole entire life would be fucked up.
His choices were slightly limited.
“Where’s the ointment?” he asked Babs, closing his eyes as he dabbed it on. He searched his stoned brain for something nonsexual to talk about. “Um, after this I gotta get that mower out of the sun, otherwise she might blow. I don’t want to start any fires.”
Too late, honey.Too late.
twisted minds think alike
“Ouch, shit,” muttered Dan Humphrey, burning his tongue on his tap-water-and-Folgers-crystals excuse for a cup of coffee.
Ever heard of Starbucks, dude?
Dan stuck a slightly bent Camel in his mouth and tried to simultaneously take a drag from it while blowing to cool his coffee, which was totally impossible. Coffee splashed out of the lumpy, eggplant-colored ceramic mug his mother had made years ago, before she’d moved to Hungary or the Czech Republic or wherever the hell she lived, and onto the dusty yellow linoleum floor. He was definitely not a morning person.
Dan deposited the sad cup on a semicluttered part of the old Formica kitchen counter and padded over to the beige ’70s refrigerator, hoping against hope that he could scrounge up something edible to eat on his way downtown in the sub-way. He only had twenty minutes to get to his job—a dream gig at the Strand, the storied, sprawling used bookstore in Greenwich Village—and if he didn’t eat now, by the time his lunch break rolled around, he’d be half-dead from malnourishment.
Holding his breath to avoid exposure to any unfortunate smells, he wedged his head inside the large, rumbling appliance and surveyed the scene: an ancient CorningWare coffee pot filled with some concoction covered with fuzzy green mold, a white ceramic bowl overflowing with unidentifiable vegetable remains, a clear plastic case containing hard-boiled eggs that his sister, Jenny, had drawn little faces on before she left for Europe more than a month ago. It wasn’t pretty.
“Don’t bother,” muttered a voice behind him. “I looked last night. There’s nothing even remotely close to edible in there.”
He closed the refrigerator and smiled weakly at Vanessa Abrams, whose status had evolved from best friend to girl-friend to roommate. After many ups and downs—all of which involved Dan’s horny, wandering eye—they’d decided they were better off as friends who slept in separate beds, in separate rooms. It just so happened that those rooms were in the same apartment, because Vanessa had been rendered homeless by her newly Czechoslovak-boyfriended totally selfish bitchface of a sister.
“Yeah, this sucks.” Dan dropped his cigarette into the sink, where it went out with a hiss. “I’m so hungry.”
“Mmmm,” Vanessa grunted, microwaving some water in a Pyrex measuring cup, the only clean vessel she could find. She spilled Folgers on the floor while trying to spoon it into the cup. She wasn’t much of a morning person either.
A match made in heaven.
She hoisted herself onto the cluttered kitchen counter, her pale, prickly legs sticking out from a pair of Dan’s tattered navy blue boxer shorts. It was bizarre to see her still wearing something of his, something so intimately his, when they weren’t together anymore. It made him . . . sad.
Every night for the last week, Dan had lain awake in bed, wondering what Vanessa was doing in the next room. He’d hear her get up to go to the bathroom, and think about accidentally bumping into her in the dark, familiar hall of the apartment. They’d fall into each other’s arms, furiously kissing all the way back to Dan’s bed. He
’d rub her shaven head, loving the feel of the familiar soft stubble on his chest, the way her ears were always so hot when she got excited—
Dan suddenly started shaking his head as if his fantasy was water stuck in his ears.
“You okay?” Vanessa asked, eyeing him suspiciously. She shifted from side to side on the countertop, settling beside the microwave.
“Um, yeah,” Dan practically yelled, his pinkies now lodged in his ears. “I guess I better hit the road. Gotta get to work. Make the donuts.You know how it is!”
“Why are you screaming?” she asked quietly, her eye-brows knitted in question.
“Oh, sorry.” Dan laughed. He downed his coffee in one quick gulp, ignoring the burning sensation in his throat, and reached past Vanessa to grab his folded-up copy of the New York Review of Books to read on the subway. “So. ’Bye. Have a good day,” he added, resisting the urge to kiss her.
“’Bye,” she called after him.
But hello, awkward?!
The rolled-up Review tucked safely in his damp armpit, Dan bounded down the musty granite stairs toward the legendarily filthy employee lounge at the Strand. The dark stairwell smelled like moldy books, which should have been nasty but was actually one of Dan’s favorite smells.
He had thirty seconds to stash his paper, grab his name tag out of his locker, and report to the floor for duty. None of the bookstore’s managers had any sense of humor about things like tardiness. They were crusty, liberal pseudoacade-mics who resented young summer job kids like Dan, who they all just called “the new kid” or “hey, you,” despite the fact that he’d been working there full time for almost a month and wore a name tag everyday, just like they did.
How glamorous.
Dan burst into the tiny lounge, accidentally banging the door against the wall, startling a skinny kid with short, mussed-up blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses too big for his square, wide-eyed face.
“Sorry,” Dan muttered, dashing over to his designated locker—a tiny, one-foot-square cubby just inches above the dust-bunny-and-decades-old-cigarette-butt-littered concrete floor. He entered his nerdy combination—8/28/49, the birth-day of Goethe, the author of his all-time favorite book, The Sorrows of Young Werther—tossed his paper inside, and grabbed his plastic name tag.