When Nate and Serena took their places at the table, Chuck smirked at them knowingly. How was it? his face seemed to say. Serena wanted to hit him.
She ordered another cup of coffee and dumped four teaspoons of sugar in it and stirred and stirred, like she was trying to stir a hole through the cup, the saucer, the table, and the floor, burrowing her way into some old pharaoh’s tomb where she could cry and cry and no one would find her.
Nate ordered a Bloody Mary.
“Bottoms up!” Chuck said cheerfully, banging his glass against Nate’s and taking a big gulp.
Blair was back at the table. She had already devoured her crème brulée and was working on her mother’s. It was full of chicken abortions, but she didn’t care—she was going to throw it all up in a minute anyway.
“Hey Blair,” Nate said softly, causing Blair to drop her spoon with a clatter. He smiled and leaned across the table. “That looks awesome,” he said. “Can I have a bite?”
Blair’s hand fluttered nervously to her heart. Sexy Nate. Her Nate. God, she wanted him. But she wasn’t going to give up that easily. She had her pride.
Blair regained her composure and pushed her plate toward him, reaching for her drink and downing the rest of it in one big swallow. “You can have the rest,” she said, and stood up. “Excuse me.” Then she clacked away in her heels to stick her finger down her throat in the ladies’ room.
Some lady.
Disclaimer: All the real names of places, people, and events have been altered or abbreviated to protect the innocent. Namely, me.
hey people!
I thought S looked cute in her picture in the Sunday Times Styles section. Although her teachers probably weren’t thrilled to see her double-fisting martinis on a school day. To tell you the truth, I’m kind of over the whole thing. I mean, isn’t it enough that we have to see that picture of her every time we use public transportation? Obviously you’re not over it yet, though.
Your E-mail
hey gg,
i went to the show at the gallery and looked for ur picture. very sexy. i like ur column too. u rule.
—Bigfan
Dear Bigfan,
As long as you are not a stalker, I guess I’m flattered.
—GG
Dear Gossip Girl,
When I saw S’s picture in the paper, I had an idea!! Are you S? If you are, you are very sneaky. Also, my dad loves you and wants you to write a book. He’s got lots of connections. If you tell me who you are, he can make you famous.
—JNYHY
Hey JNYHY,
You are very sneaky yourself. And not to brag or anything, but I’m already kind of famous. Infamous is more like it. All the more reason for me not to tell you who I am.
—GG
Sightings
D was seen returning a gorgeous Armani tux at Barneys and renting a much less gorgeous one at a formal store. His sister J was seen buying underwear at La Petite Coquette, although she chickened out on the thong. N was seen buying a big bag of pot in Central Park. Tell me something new. B was seen in the J. Sisters salon getting another Brazilian wax. The old one must have started to itch. S was seen with her feet out her bedroom window, letting her toenails dry. I don’t think she’s ever spent this much time at home in her entire life. Maybe she should get a cat or something. Meow.
TWO QUESTIONS
First: If you knew about a party that you weren’t invited to, wouldn’t you go, just to piss people off? I would.
Second: If you’d made up your mind to go to the party, wouldn’t you want to really rub people’s noses in it by looking completely gorgeous and stealing everyone’s boyfriends? Definitely.
But who knows what S will decide to do. That girl is full of surprises. . . .
At least I’ve given us all something to think about while we’re getting our pedicures, plucking our eyebrows, and squeezing our zits.
See you at the party!
You know you love me,
a change of heart
“Ugly, ugly, ugly,” Serena said, wadding her new black dress into a ball and tossing it onto her bed.
A gorgeous Tocca dress? Come on, how ugly could it be?
Each day that week, Serena had dressed in her maroon uniform, gone to school, come home, watched some TV, eaten dinner, watched some more TV, and gone to sleep. She even did some homework. She spoke to no one except her parents and her teachers and maybe a passing greeting to the girls at school. She was beginning to feel only half-there, like the shadow of her former self, a girl people had known once, but couldn’t quite remember anymore. And for the first time in her entire life, she felt ugly and awkward. Her eyes and hair looked dull to her, and her beautiful smile and cool demeanor had been roped off until further notice.
Now it was Friday, the night of the Kiss on the Lips party. And the question she couldn’t answer: to go or not to go?
It used to be, before fancy parties like this, Serena and her friends would spend half the night getting dressed together—swilling gin-and-tonics, dancing around in their underwear, trying on crazy outfits. But tonight Serena rummaged through her closet alone.
There was the pair of jeans with the rip in the leg where she’d snagged them on a barbed-wire fence in Ridgefield. There was the white satin dress she’d worn to the Christmas dance in ninth grade. Her brother’s old leather jacket. Her moldy tennis shoes that should have been thrown out two years ago. And what was this? A red wool sweater—Nate’s. Serena held it to her face and smelled it. It smelled like her, not him.
Toward the back of the closet was a black velvet flapper dress that Serena had bought with Blair at a vintage store. It was a dress to wear while drinking and dancing and lounging around decoratively in a huge house full of people having a good time. It reminded Serena of the good-time gal she’d been when she bought the dress—her old self, the girl she’d been up until two weeks ago. She let her robe drop to the floor and slipped the dress on over her head. Maybe it would give her back some of her power.
Barefoot, she padded into her parents’ dressing room, where they were getting ready for their own black-tie affair.
“What do you think?” Serena asked, doing a little twirl in front of them.
“Oh, Serena, you’re not wearing that. Tell me you’re not,” her mother exclaimed, fastening a long rope of pearls around her neck.
“What’s wrong with it?” Serena said.
“It’s an old ratty thing,” Mrs. van der Woodsen told her. “It’s just the sort of dress my grandmother was buried in.”
“What’s wrong with one of those outfits you bought with your mother last weekend?” Mr. van der Woodsen suggested. “Didn’t you buy anything to wear to the party?”
“Of course she did,” Mrs. van der Woodsen said. “She bought a lovely black dress.”
“That makes me look like a fat nun,” Serena said grumpily. She put her hands on her hips and posed in front of her mother’s full-length mirror. “I like this dress. It’s got character.”
Her mother sighed disapprovingly. “Well, what’s Blair wearing?” she asked.
Serena stared at her mother and blinked. Under normal circumstances she would have known exactly what Blair was wearing, down to her underwear. And Blair would have insisted on going shoe-shopping together, because if you bought a new dress, you had to have a pair of new shoes. Blair loved shoes.
“Blair told everyone to wear vintage,” Serena lied.
Her mother was about to respond when Serena heard her phone ring in her bedroom. Was it Nate calling to apologize? Blair? She raced down the hall in her bare feet, scrambling to pick it up.
“Hello?” she said breathlessly.
“Yo, bitch. Sorry I haven’t called in a while.”
Serena took a deep breath and sat down on her bed. It was Erik, her brother.
“Hey,” she said.
“Saw you in the paper last Sunday. You are crazy, aren’t you?” Erik laughed. “What did Mom say?”
“Nothin
g. It’s like I can do whatever I want now. Everyone thinks I’m like, ruined or something,” Serena said, fumbling for the right words.
“That’s not true,” Erik said. “Hey, what’s up? You sound sad.”
“Yeah,” Serena said. Her lower lip started to tremble. “I sort of am.”
“How come? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. There’s this party I’m supposed to go to that everyone’s going to. You know how it is,” she began.
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Erik said gently.
Serena propped her pillows against the headboard of her bed and wriggled under her comforter. She rested her head against the pillows and closed her eyes. “It’s just that no one’s talking to me anymore. I don’t even know why, but ever since I’ve been back it’s been like I have mad cow disease or something,” she explained. The tears began to fall from underneath her closed lids.
“What about Blair and Nate? Those guys must be talking to you,” Erik said. “They’re your best friends.”
“Not anymore,” Serena said quietly. Tears were streaming freely down her face now. She picked up a pillow and dabbed it against her cheeks to ebb the flow.
“Well, you know what I say?” Erik said.
Serena swallowed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “What?”
“Fuck ’em. Totally. You don’t need them. You’re like, the coolest chick in the Western Hemisphere. Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em,” he said.
“Yeah,” Serena said dubiously. “But they’re my friends.”
“Not anymore. You just said so yourself. You can get new friends. I’m serious,” Erik said. “You can’t let assholes turn you into an asshole. You just have to fuck ’em.”
It was a perfect Erikism. Serena laughed, wiped her runny nose on a pillow, and threw it across the room. “Okay,” she said, sitting up. “You’re right.”
“I’m always right. That’s why I’m so hard to get ahold of. There’s a huge demand for people like me,” he said.
“I miss you,” Serena told him, chewing on her pinky nail.
“I miss you too,” Erik said.
“Serena? We’re leaving!” she heard her mother call from out in the hall.
“Okay, I better go,” Serena said. “Love you.”
“Bye.”
Serena clicked off. On the end of her bed was the invitation to the Kiss on the Lips party that Jenny had made for her. She snatched it up and tossed it in her wastepaper basket.
Erik was right. She didn’t have to go to some stupid benefit just because everyone else was going. They didn’t even want her there. Fuck ’em. She was free to do what she pleased.
She carried the phone over to her desk and shuffled through a pile of papers until she found the Constance Billard School student directory, which had arrived in the mail on Monday. Serena read through the names. She wasn’t the only one skipping the party. She could find someone else to hang out with.
the red or the black
“Yo,” Vanessa said, picking up the phone. She was getting ready to go out with her sister and her friends, and she was wearing a black bra, black jeans, and her Doc Martens. She didn’t have any clean black shirts left, and her sister was trying to convince her to wear a red one.
“Hi. Is that Vanessa Abrams?” a girl’s voice said on the other end of the phone.
“Yes. Who’s this?” Vanessa said, standing in front of her bedroom mirror and holding the red shirt up to her chest. She hadn’t worn any color but black in two years. Why should she start now?
Please. It’s not like wearing a red shirt was going turn her into a bouncy cheerleader with blond pigtails. She’d have to be brainwashed for that to happen.
“It’s Serena van der Woodsen.”
Vanessa stopped looking at herself and threw the shirt on her bed. “Oh,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Well,” Serena said. “I totally understand why you wanted to cast Marjorie. You know, for your film? But you seem to really know what you’re doing, and I really need the extracurricular or Ms. Glos is going to kill me. So I thought I’d try to make my own movie.”
“Uh huh,” Vanessa said, trying to figure out why Serena van der Woodsen of all people would be calling her up on a Friday night. Didn’t she have a ball to go to or something? Some fête?
“So anyway, I was wondering if maybe you could help me. You know, like show me how to use the camera, and whatever. I mean, I really don’t know what I’m doing,” Serena said. She sighed. “I don’t know, maybe making a film is a dumb idea. It’s probably a lot harder than I think.”
“It’s not dumb,” Vanessa said, feeling kind of sorry for Serena despite herself. “I can show you some of the basic stuff.”
“Really?” Serena said. She sounded thrilled. “How about tomorrow? Can you do it tomorrow?”
Saturday was Vanessa’s vampire day. She usually woke up after dark and then went to the diner or to the movies with her sister or Dan.
“Sunday is better,” she said.
“Okay. Sunday,” Serena said. “You probably have a lot of equipment and stuff at your house, right? Why don’t I come over there, so you don’t have to lug it around.”
“Sounds good,” Vanessa said.
“Okay,” Serena said. She paused. She didn’t seem very eager to hang up the phone.
“Hey, isn’t that big party in the old Barneys building tonight?” Vanessa said. “Aren’t you going?”
“Nah,” Serena answered. “I wasn’t invited.”
Vanessa nodded, processing this information. Serena van der Woodsen wasn’t invited? Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.
“Well, do you want to come out with us tonight?” Vanessa offered before she could stop herself. “Me and my big sister are going to a bar here in Williamsburg. Her band is playing.”
“I’d love to,” Serena said.
Vanessa gave her the address of The Five and Dime—the bar her sister was playing in—and hung up the phone.
Life was so strange. One day you could be picking your nose and eating donuts, and the next day you could be hanging out with Serena van der Woodsen. She picked up the red shirt, pulled it on over her head, and looked in the mirror. She looked like a tulip. A tulip with a stubbly black head.
“Dan will like it,” her sister Ruby told her, standing in the doorway. She handed Vanessa a tube of dark red lipstick. Vamp.
“Well, Dan’s not coming out tonight,” Vanessa said, smirking at her sister. She dabbed on the lipstick and rubbed her lips together. “He has to take his little sister to some fancy ball.”
She checked herself out in the mirror once more. The lipstick made her big brown eyes look even bigger, and the shirt was kind of cool, in a loud, look-at-me way.
Vanessa stuck out her chest and smiled invitingly at her reflection. Maybe I’ll get lucky, she thought. Or maybe not.
“I have a friend coming to meet us,” Vanessa informed her sister.
“Boy or girl?” Ruby asked, turning around to check out her butt in the mirror.
“Girl.”
“Name?” said Ruby.
“Serena van der Woodsen,” Vanessa mumbled.
“The girl whose picture is all over town?” Ruby said, clearly delighted.
“Yeah, that’s her,” Vanessa said.
“Well, I bet she’s pretty cool,” Ruby said, rubbing hair gel into her thick black bangs.
“Maybe,” Vanessa replied. “I guess we’ll find out.”
kiss on the lips
“What fantastic flowers,” said Becky Dormand, a junior at Constance. She kissed Blair on both cheeks. “And what a hot dress!”
“Thanks, Beck,” Blair said, looking down at the green satin sheath she was wearing. She had gotten her period that morning, but she had to wear extremely flimsy underwear with her dress. It made her nervous.
A waiter walked past with a tray of champagne. Blair whisked a flute off his tray and downed it in a matter of seconds. It was her th
ird so far.
“I love your shoes,” Blair said. Becky was wearing black, high-heeled sandals that laced all the way up to her knees. They went perfectly with her short black tutu dress and her superhigh ponytail. She looked like a ballerina on acid.
“I can’t wait for the gift bags,” Laura Salmon squealed. “Kate Spade, right?”
“I heard they even put a glow-in-the-dark condom in them,” Rain Hoffstetter giggled. “Isn’t that cool?”
“Not that you’ll be using it or anything,” Blair said.
“How do you know?” Rain huffed.
“Blair?” Blair heard someone say in a tremulous voice.
Blair turned around to see little Jenny Humphrey standing behind her, looking like a human Wonderbra in her black satin dress.
“Oh, hello,” Blair said coolly. “Thanks again for doing those invitations. They really came out great.”
“Thanks for letting me do them,” Jenny said. Her eyes darted around the huge room, which was throbbing with people and music and smoke. Black three-foot-high candles in tall glass beakers trimmed with peacock feathers and fragrant white orchids flickered everywhere. Jenny had never been to anything this cool in her life. “God, I don’t know anyone here,” she said nervously.
“You don’t?” Blair said. She wondered if Jenny thought she was going to talk to her all night.
“No. My brother Dan was supposed to come with me, but he didn’t really want to, so I just let him drop me off. Actually, I do know one person,” Jenny said.
“Oh,” said Blair. “And who is that?”
“Serena van der Woodsen,” Jenny chirped. “We’re making a movie together. Did she tell you?”
Just then, a waitress brandished a platter of sushi under Blair’s nose. Blair grabbed a chunky tuna roll and shoved it into her mouth. “Serena’s not here yet,” she said, chewing hungrily. “But I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to see you.”