You Know You Love Me

  Aaron pulled a cigarette out of a funny-looking tin and lit it. He cocked his head at Blair. “What makes you so sure you’re getting in?” he asked.

  Blair shrugged. “I’ve been planning to go there since I was little,” she said in explanation. “Is that pot?”

  “No way, man,” Aaron said with a grin. “They’re herbal. Want to try one?”

  Blair made a face and pulled a pack of Merit Ultra Lights out of her bag. “I prefer these,” she said.

  “Those things will kill you,” Aaron remarked. He slipped the car into the middle lane and took a deep drag. “These are one hundred percent natural.”

  Blair glared out the window. She really didn’t feel like being lectured on the holistic qualities of Aaron’s special cigarettes. “Thanks, but no thanks,” she said, hoping that would put an end to the conversation.

  “So I’m trying to figure out whether you’re a big partier or not,” Aaron said. “Something tells me that when you let your hair down, you can get pretty crazy.”

  Blair continued to stare out the window. Actually, he was right, but she really didn’t give a crap what Aaron thought. Let him think what he wanted to think.

  “Not really,” she said, puffing her cigarette.

  “So, do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he doesn’t want to go to Yale?”

  “No. I mean, he does,” Blair corrected, “but he’s looking at Brown this weekend. He’s going up there with a few friends.”

  Aaron nodded. “I see,” he said.

  Something about the way he said it completely infuriated Blair. It was like he saw right through her and Nate and knew that she had practically gotten down on her hands and knees and begged Nate to come up to New Haven with her, but he’d refused.

  Aaron could go fuck himself for making her feel like shit.

  “Look, it’s really none of your business,” Blair snapped. “Let’s just get there, okay?”

  Aaron shook his head and pointed at the tin of herbal cigarettes that he’d placed on the dash. “You sure you don’t want one?” he asked. “They’ll mellow you out.”

  Blair shook her head.

  “Fine,” Aaron said. He pulled out into the left lane and revved the engine up to ninety.

  Blair glanced at his hand on the stick shift. His thumbnail was bruised a purpley-black color, and he was wearing a silver thumb ring in the shape of a snake. If he hadn’t been her almost stepbrother, it would have been kind of sexy.

  But he was, and it wasn’t.

  Dan was too depressed to even think about getting high with Nate’s friends in the backseat. The whole way on the train up to Ridgefield, Serena and Nate and his friends had talked about stuff Dan didn’t know about. Like bars he’d never heard of, or places in the country where he’d never been sailing or played tennis. Dan had spent last summer working part time at a bookstore on Broadway and part time at a deli. He got’ free books at the bookstore, and at the deli he got to drink as much coffee as he wanted. It was great. But he hadn’t shared that little piece of trivia. It was anything but glamorous.

  Dan knew Serena wasn’t trying to be a snob. She wasn’t like that. She didn’t need to climb up the social ladder—she was already on the top rung. What depressed him was that she didn’t want to be alone with him the way he wanted to be alone with her. If she did, she wouldn’t have turned their cozy weekend away into a rockin’ slumber party.

  “Who wants one?” Serena called from the passenger seat. She turned and dangled a six-pack of Bud into the backseat.

  “Me!” All four of the other boys cried out eagerly, including Nate, who was driving.

  “No way, Nate,” Serena said. “You have to wait till we stop.”

  “Aw, come on,” Nate said. “I was baked when I took my driving test.”

  “Sorry,” Serena told him, passing a beer back to Charlie. “You wanted to be Big Daddy the Driver. Now you have to pay.”

  Anthony giggled and kicked the back of Nate’s seat. “Daddy, are we there yet?”

  “Shut up back there,” Nate shouted gruffly. “Or I’m going to have to pull over and spank the tar out of you.”

  The back seat erupted in laughter.

  Dan sat hunched by the window, watching the billboards on 1–95 flash by, hating Nate and his friends. First they’d taken his sister away and now his girlfriend. As if they didn’t already have everything they could possibly want handed to them on a fucking silver platter. Dan knew that wasn’t exactly fair, but he didn’t feel like being fair. He was pissed.

  He reached in his pocket for a Camel, his hands shaking more than ever.

  One thing was certain. He wasn’t on this trip for nothing. Tomorrow he was going to ace his fucking Brown interview.

  Aaron saw a sign for a Motel 6 about twenty miles before New Haven and turned off the exit.

  “What are you doing?” Blair said. “We’re not there yet.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a Motel 6. We’re close enough,” Aaron said, as if that explained everything.

  “What’s so great about Motel 6?”

  “They’re clean. They’re cheap. They have cable. And their vending machines rock,” Aaron said.

  “I thought we were going to stay someplace nice, with room service,” Blair said. She’d never been to a motel before.

  “Trust me,” Aaron said, pulling up outside the motel office.

  Blair stayed in the car with her arms folded sullenly across her chest, while Aaron went in to register. He was trying to act all down with the people and pretend he wasn’t a spoiled rich boy from the suburbs. It was so annoying. Still, she felt kind of seedy driving up to a motel in a red Saab with a boy with dreadlocks. The parking lot was dim and the rooms were all shaded with curtains. It looked like the kind of place people went to disappear from a previous life.

  Aaron came back with one key. “They only had one room left. It’s got a big bed, though. You okay with that?”

  Blair was certain Aaron was expecting her to throw a hissy fit and demand her own room.

  “Fine,” she said. She could deal.

  Aaron got back in the car and screeched out of the parking lot and back onto the main road.

  “Where are we going now?” Blair demanded. She hated Aaron’s way of just doing whatever the hell he pleased, never mind what she wanted.

  “That’s the other great thing about Motel 6es. They’re always on roads with cheesy strip malls, so you can get everything you need,” Aaron said. He turned into the parking lot of a Shop ‘n’ Save and pulled his mother’s Shop ‘n’ Save credit card out of his wallet. “Come on, let’s splurge,” he said.

  Blair rolled her eyes.

  At least he knew how to use plastic.

  Nate drove until he couldn’t stand it anymore. His friends had been giggling in the back seat for two and a half hours, and he needed a beer.

  “I’m pulling over,” he said. “I saw a Best Western sign. They’re okay, right?”

  “My family stayed in a suite in a Best Western upstate when we were dropping my sister off at camp,” Dan said. “It was nice.”

  “They have suites?” Jeremy said. “I thought Best Westerns were like, motels.”

  “It had room service,” Dan said a little defensively. “And a fridge full of drinks.”

  “We’re definitely getting a suite,” Charlie said.

  Dan closed his eyes and prayed that there weren’t any suites in this particular Best Western. There was still hope that he and Serena might wind up sharing their own room together. It might be almost better than he’d hoped.

  The bed in the Motel 6 was loaded with snack food. Chips Ahoy, Fritos, Wise potato chips, Smart Food, dairy-free chocolate pudding, Hawaiian Punch, soy Swiss cheese, Ritz crackers, and, of course, beer in cans.

  “I bet there’s something good on TNT,” Aaron said, plunking himself down on the end of the bed. He cracked open a Bud and reached for another one of his special cigarettes.

>   Blair fluffed up a pillow and leaned against the headboard, tucking her knees neatly under her chin. She’d never done exactly this before—eaten crap and drunk Bud in a motel room with a boy she didn’t know very well while watching bad TV. It was kind of… different.

  “I’ll have one of those,” she said quietly.

  Aaron kept his eyes on the TV and handed her a beer, his silver snake ring flashing. “See, I told you. Die Hard 2. Excellent.”

  “And one of those,” Blair said, pointing to his cigarette.

  Aaron turned and smiled crookedly at her out of the side of his mouth. “I’m telling you, they make you feel really mellow,” he warned.

  “Fine,” Blair said evenly.

  She’d had a stressful past few days. Why shouldn’t she relax?

  Aaron flipped her a cigarette and handed her a pack of matches. “Careful not to inhale too quick, or you’ll fry your lungs.”

  Blair rolled her eyes, annoyed. She knew how to smoke. The back of Aaron’s T-shirt read POWER TO THE PEOPLE, which also annoyed her. He thought he was so cool and liberal and politically aware. She lit a match and held it up to the cigarette. Just a quick smoke, a few sips of beer, and maybe a donut, and then she was going to bed early.

  Tomorrow she had her future to contend with.

  The Best Western suite had two double beds and a pull-out sofa. There were hunting scenes on the walls, and through the large, rectangular window was a view of a local fairgrounds, closed for the winter. The Ferris wheel hovered in the night air like an obese skeleton. Dan couldn’t stop staring at it.

  Nate and his friends had ordered a bunch of pizzas and a case of beer and were lying all over the beds fighting over the remote. Jeremy wanted to watch pornos on pay-per-view. Nate wanted to watch an old spaghetti western on Bravo. Charlie wanted to turn out all the lights and open all the windows and listen to Radiohead on the CD player.

  Serena was taking a shower. Dan could smell the steam from underneath the bathroom door. It smelled like lavender and candle wax. Serena was singing.

  “Voulez vous couchez avec moi, ce soir?”

  Yes, Dan did want to sleep with her tonight. Badly. But it didn’t look like that was going to happen.

  “Hey, you boys better not be getting pepperoni grease on my bed,” Serena warned, opening the bathroom door, her body wrapped in a big white hotel towel.

  “Which one is your bed?” Anthony asked, burping loudly.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Serena replied. “But if you’re going to burp and fart all over that one, maybe I’ll sleep on the other one.”

  She walked across the room to her bag and pulled a gray sweatshirt and a pair of plaid flannel boxers out of it.

  Every one of the boys watched her. It was kind of hard not to.

  “And don’t eat all the pizza, either,” Serena said, marching back to the bathroom to change. “I’m starving.”

  Dan lit a cigarette, his hands shaking harder than ever. He got up from his chair by the window, grabbed a beer off the bed, and sat down on the sofa. He had nothing better to do. He might as well get drunk.

  Serena came back out of the bathroom wearing the sweatshirt and boxers. She picked up a can of beer and a slice of pizza and sat down on the sofa next to Dan. It was such a relief to have the other three boys along for the trip. The poem Dan had sent her had been all about love and death and how he wanted to keep on living because of her. Serena liked Dan a lot, but he really needed to lighten up.

  “Here’s to college,” she said, slapping her pizza against Dan’s beer can. “Wouldn’t it be funny if we all wound up going to Brown together?”

  Dan nodded, threw his beer back, and stood up for another one. Yeah, that’d be funny all right, he thought.

  Hilarious.

  Blair lay back on the bed and held a Ritz cracker over her left eye, squinting at the ceiling with her right one. A tiny spider walked toward the overhead light.

  “Gross. There’s a spider on the ceiling,” she told Aaron. She had drunk three beers and eaten four donuts. She was having Ritz crackers and spray-on cheddar cheese for dessert.

  “Know what we forgot?” Aaron said, kicking the empty beer cans off the bed and shoving a handful of Fritos in his mouth.

  “Water?” Blair said. She had eaten so much sugar, salt, and grease she was dying of thirst.

  The three herbal cigarettes she’d smoked hadn’t helped either.

  “No,” Aaron said. “Candy.”

  Blair smiled. A KitKat might be nice.

  “Okay,” she said.

  They tiptoed out of their room and down the hall to the vending machine. Blair burst out laughing when she saw the hall carpet. It was brown with red swirls. Who decorated these places, anyway?

  Aaron stood in front of the vending machine, frowning. “I can’t decide,” he said.

  Blair stood next to him. They had KitKats, but they also had Twixes and Snickers and Almond Joys. It was a tough decision.

  “How much change do we have?” she asked seriously.

  Aaron held out his hand. They had enough for exactly two and a half candy bars. Or two candy bars and some gum.

  Blair burst out laughing again. “I’m getting straight A’s in AP calculus, and I can’t even pick out a fucking candy bar,” she said.

  Aaron took three quarters and dropped them into the slot. Then he grabbed her hand. “Okay, close your eyes and pick one.”

  He guided her hand toward the machine until her fingers were just skimming the buttons. Blair pressed her finger on the button and heard something drop into the bottom of the machine. She bent down to pick it up.

  “Wait!” Aaron cried, pulling her back. “Let’s do another one and then see what we got.” He dropped another three quarters into the slot.

  Blair tried to remember where the KitKats had been, but she couldn’t. She pressed another button, and again something dropped to the bottom of the machine. Blair opened her eyes and rushed forward to retrieve their booty. An Almond Joy and a pack of Lifesavers.

  “Lifesavers? No way!” she cried.

  “Way!” Aaron said, grabbing the Almond Joy out of her hand and racing down the hallway.

  “Wait, that’s mine!” Blair yelled and tore after him, slipping on the thin carpet in her sock feet. It was just after two o’clock in the morning. Her interview was in less than nine hours, and she hated to admit it, but she was actually having kind of a good time.

  Yale, schmale.

  Dan lay on the sofa bed, listening to Charlie snoring softly beside him. Across the room Serena was sleeping in one of the double beds with Anthony, or was it Nate? He couldn’t tell. Her mouth hung open on the pillow, and he could see her front teeth glistening in the moonlight. Outside, the Ferris wheel loomed like a giant eye, watching them. Dan rolled over to face the wall. He wanted to get up and write a poem, but he’d left his notebook behind. He’d thought he’d be too busy enjoying himself with Serena to want to write anything serious this weekend. He was just beginning to learn that nothing ever turns out the way you think it’s going to.

  Life sucks and then you die. Maybe that was what Sartre had really been trying to say in No Exit.

  Dan threw off the covers and stood up. On his way to the bathroom to get a glass of water, he walked past the bed where Serena and Nate were sleeping. It was definitely Nate—he could see that now. And on the pillow between them were their hands … clasped tightly together.

  They were holding hands in their sleep.

  Dan turned away, picked up a pen off the bedside table, and locked himself in the bathroom.

  When you have the uncontrollable urge to write a heart-wrenching poem about the absurdity of human existence, toilet paper will always do in a pinch.

  Blair knew she was sleeping funny. The bag of Chips Ahoy was very close to her face and she was still wearing her bra, but she’d deal with that in the morning. Her stomach felt full and warm, and she really should have tried to make herself throw up if she wanted to kee
p fitting into her favorite pair of leather pants, but that, too, could wait until morning. Next to her, Aaron was laughing in his sleep and clapping his hands together, as if he were trying to call his dog. Woofie? Was that his dog’s name? Blair thought hard, but she couldn’t remember. She couldn’t even remember why she was there, in a strange motel room with Aaron and his dreadlocks. But it was nice to fall asleep to the scent of chocolate chip cookies and the piney smoke of his one hundred percent natural cigarettes. It reminded her of Nate.

  Hmm. Sounds like someone finally let her hair down. Sounds like someone also forgot to ask the motel reception desk for a wake-up call.

  Disclaimer: All the real names of places, people, and events have been altered or abbreviated to protect the innocent. Namely, me.

  hey people

  THE LEFT-BEHINDS

  Okay, where the hell is everybody? Should I feel like a total loser for staying in the city this weekend? I did all my college visiting this summer—okay so I am a loser. Anyway, I pretty much know which ones are cool and which ones aren’t, and what I don’t know I can get from the catalogs. The only reason for me to visit a school now is to party with the people there, and frankly, I think we have the highest GPA in partying right here in good old NYC.

  Anyway, everybody may be out of town, but we haven’t lost touch. Check out the e-mails I’ve been getting.

  Your e-mail:

  Q: yo gossip girl,

  i work at the motel 6 outside the town of orange in Connecticut. so this 2 cute boy in this sweet red saab with new york plates pulls up, right? so of course i have to see who’s with him. the girl looked pretty bitchy, to be honest, and totally not his type, anyway, i got off work and went home, but i know they were definitely partying in their room like, all night, because the whole hallway stank of weird smoke, the light was on in their car when i left, i hope they turned it off or the battery is going to be dead today.

  —kiera3

  A: Dear Kiera3,

  Oops, sounds like B is in for a tough morning.

  —GG

  Q: Hey Gossip Girl,

  I went up to Yale on Friday, too, and I am staying at the Motel 6. Okay. I know B and her stepbrother are like, almost related and everything. But I swear I saw them fooling around in the parking lot. Is that gross or what?