Blair’s eyebrows shot up in pleased surprise. Was Nate really reforming? Was he doing it for her?
“I’m Hannah Koto,” said the girl sitting next to Nate. “I’ve taken E every day since my dog died last summer.” She glanced at Jackie. “Sorry. Ecstasy,” she clarified.
“I’m Campbell and I’m a budding alcoholic,” said a blond boy who looked no older than ten. “I cleaned out my parents’ wine cellars in Darien and Cape Cod.”
“I’m Georgie and I’ll do anything,” said a strikingly beautiful girl with long, silky brown hair, enormous brown eyes, and dark red lips. She was wearing orange satin Miu Miu short shorts and beautiful tangerine leather Jimmy Choo sandals, Blair noted enviously. “Lately I like pills and I used to be scared that one day I’d fall asleep and never wake up again. But now that I know I have a knight in shining armor . . .” She batted her thick brown eyelashes in Nate’s direction. Blair’s hackles rose.
“Thank you, Georgie,” Jackie interrupted before Georgie could say anything that might jeopardize her control over the group. “Next?”
“I’m Jodia and I’m an alcoholic, too,” said the chubby girl sitting next to Blair. “I even drank perfume once.”
“Me too,” Blair cut in, eager to top Georgie’s performance. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, giving the room a glimpse of her sexy black fishnets through the slit in her dress. “I’m Blair and . . .” She hesitated. Where to begin? She took a deep, dramatic breath.
“My parents got divorced last year. It turns out my father was gay and he was fooling around with my mom’s personal assistant, who was only twenty-one. They’re still together, and now they live in a château in a vineyard in France. My mother just married this gross fat freak real estate developer and now they’re having a baby, even though she’s, like, a hundred years old. It’s a girl, they just found out. I was supposed to apply early to Yale, but my interview sucked. So this old friend of my father’s said he’d give me an alumni interview. He was really attractive and I’d never been with an older guy before so I kind of hooked up with him,” she glanced apologetically at Nate. He’d forgive her for philandering, just as she’d forgive him for straying from her.
Jackie listened with her mouth agape. She was used to the kids in teen group giving a little more detail than was necessary, but she’d never run across anyone who seemed to enjoy talking about herself so much.
“I think part of the reason I cut all my hair off was I was trying to make myself ugly, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. I thought short hair might look cool on me. But I think I was maybe, you know, bringing all the ugliness inside to the surface? And this past week I stayed home from school. I wasn’t really sick, I just couldn’t—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but if you could simply name your problem—,” Jackie broke in when she realized Blair wasn’t even close to being finished.
Blair frowned and twisted her little ruby ring around and around on her finger. It sounded like she had to have a specific problem or they’d kick her out. “Sometimes when I’m upset—which, considering what my life is like now, is all the time—I eat too much, or I eat something that I shouldn’t, and then I make myself sick.” There, that sounded convincing.
Jackie nodded. “Can you name your problem Blair? There’s a name for that you know.”
Blair glared at her. “Stress-induced regurgitation?” she answered tightly. She knew Jackie wanted her to say bulimia, but it was such a gross word, she refused to say it, especially in front of Nate. Bulimia was for losers.
The rest of the room tittered. Jackie was eager to get the group back on track after Blair’s soliloquy. “Well, I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” she noted, marking something on her clipboard.
She looked up and smoothed back her wiry brown hair. “Now it’s my turn. I’m Jackie Davis and my job is to help you break away!” She punched her fist into the air and let out a little whoop like she was at a basketball game and her team had just scored. She waited for the members of the group to punch the air with their fists and whoop along with her, but they just stared at her blankly. “All right. Good. Now I want you all to pair up. We’re going to do a little exercise I like to call ‘Go to hell, demon!’ One of you is going to be the thing you just named, the thing you’re trying to break away from. I want the other person to stand in your face and tell that demon where to go. Tell it anything you want, but do it with feeling. Make it real. Okay, go ahead, pair up. There’s only seven of us, so someone will have to pair with me.”
Hannah raised her hand. “Wait. Are we talking to their demon or our own demon?”
“Your demon,” Jackie clarified. “This is going to help you exorcise it!”
Blair waited for Nate to walk over to her, but before he even had a chance the pale bitch in the totally inappropriate orange satin short shorts minced up to him and took his hand. “Be my partner?” Blair heard her whine. Everyone else had already paired up, so Blair was stuck with Jackie.
“All right, Blair!” Jackie screeched at her. She was wearing clumpy brown mascara and her eyes were toad brown. “Let’s tell that demon where to go!”
Suddenly Blair wondered if rehab was really the right place for her. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she announced. Hopefully the exercise would be over when she got back, and she might be able to snag a seat next to Nate before they all sat down again.
Jackie eyed her suspiciously. “Okay, but make it quick. And let me remind you that all the restrooms are monitored.”
Blair rolled her eyes as she pushed open the door and walked across the hall to the ladies’ room. She washed her hands and reapplied her lip gloss, pulling open her dress and flashing the mirrors with her bare chest, just to give whoever was watching a cheap thrill. Then she walked back across the hall and peeked in the door again, checking to see if they’d finished the exercise.
Nate and that Miu Miu short shorts–clad slut Georgie were standing near the door. She had her hands on Nate’s shoulders and their faces were only inches apart.
“I’ve been thinking of a way to thank you for the roses,” Blair thought she heard Short Shorts whisper. “I want to give you a pony ride.”
She wasn’t talking to her demon, Blair realized. She was talking to Nate.
Blair waited for Nate to express his horror and disgust at what Short Shorts was saying, but all he did was grin at her with his tongue lolling, like he couldn’t wait to hear more.
“I’m going to cover you with—” Blair didn’t wait to hear the rest of Georgie’s sentence. It was pretty obvious why Nate liked rehab so much and why he was so into reforming all of a sudden. She backed out the door and into the hall, pulling her cell phone out of her purse to call her mom. A car was supposed to come and get her in two hours to drive her back to the city, but no way was she waiting that long. Rehab was nothing like a spa; it was just another classroom full of pathetic losers who needed to get a life.
“You can’t use that in here, miss!” an aide shouted at her in the hallway. Blair glared at her and marched down the hall and into the lobby. One of the receptionists was reading a newspaper with a full-page color ad for Serena’s Tears on the back.
Suddenly something occurred to Blair. She’d never really thought about it before but Serena van der Woodsen—her supposed best friend—was the absolute queen of comebacks. This past fall Serena had been kicked out of boarding school and had come home to the city, her reputation so smeared only the most desperate wanna-bes would talk to her. But in a series of show-stealing cameos Serena had won everyone back, Blair included, and now she was the star of a fucking international perfume ad campaign. If anyone could help Blair shimmy her way back to the top and make everyone fall in love with her again, Serena could.
Blair pushed open the glass doors of the rehab clinic and stood at the top of the marble steps, gasping in the cold. Quickly, she punched Serena’s number into her cell phone.
“Blair?” Serena shouted, her phone cuttin
g in and out. “I thought you were mad at me.” She coughed loudly. “God, am I sick.”
“Where are you?” Blair demanded in response. “Are you in a cab?”
“Right,” Serena answered. “I’m going to a movie premiere with some people I met at the perfume shoot. Want to come?”
“I can’t,” Blair answered. “Serena, I need you to come get me. Tell the cab to take I-95 up to Greenwich. Exit 3. There’s this place called Breakaway on Lake Avenue. Get him to stop and ask someone if he can’t find it. Okay?”
“Greenwich? But that’s going to cost like a hundred bucks!” Serena argued. “What’s going on, Blair? Why are you in Greenwich? This doesn’t have anything to do with that old guy I saw you with the other night, does it?”
“I’ll pay you back,” Blair interrupted impatiently. “I’ll tell you all about it when you get here. Will you do it, S?” she asked, using the endearment she hadn’t used since they were little.
Serena hesitated, but Blair could tell she was intrigued by the idea of an adventure with her old friend. The phone crackled as she heard Serena give the driver directions.
“I have to hang up because my phone is running out of juice,” Serena yelled. “I’ll be there soon, Blair, okay? Oh, and by the way, Aaron and I broke up.”
Blair sucked cold air in through her nostrils, her freshly glossed lips turning up in a smug smile as she absorbed the information. “We’ll talk about it when you get here.” Clicking off, she sat down on the cold, hard steps and buttoned up her sky blue cashmere toggle coat, pulling the hood up over her head before firing up a Merit Ultra Light. If anyone had passed by on the road, they’d have seen a mysterious girl in a blue hooded coat, looking defiantly sure of herself, even though the plot had changed and the script had to be entirely rewritten.
what we talk about when we’re not talking about love
“Everyone get their coats,” Serena told the ninth graders in peer group on Monday. “We’re taking you out for hot chocolate at Jackson Hole.”
“Don’t worry, we have permission,” Blair added, checking herself out in the cafeteria mirror. She’d gone back to the salon to have her hair touched up and now she looked like Edie Sedgwick from the Andy Warhol Factory days. It was totally far out.
“Wow,” Jenny breathed, staring at her. “You look great.” Jenny was so happy since meeting Leo, she was practically bursting with love for everyone she encountered.
Blair turned around, remembering something. “Have you been checking your e-mail?” she demanded.
Jenny’s eyes lit up. “Oh, yes. Yes, I have!”
Blair thought about taking credit for Jenny’s obvious state of complete ecstasy, but it was actually more fun to watch Jenny glow in complete oblivion. Maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible being a big sister after all. She noticed Elise Wells was wearing a tight black cropped sweater instead of one of her trademark prissy pink cardigans. Good. Maybe her mom had finally murdered her father for being such an asshole.
“How are things with your dad, Elise?” Serena asked, practically reading Blair’s mind.
To Blair’s surprise, Elise smiled happily. “Fine. He and Mom went away together this weekend.” She laughed and nudged Jenny in the arm. “But never mind me. I think Jenny has something to say.”
Jenny knew her face was beet red, but she didn’t care. “I’m in love,” she declared.
Serena and Blair exchanged disparaging looks. The last thing they wanted to talk about was love. “Come on, get your coats,” Serena urged. “We’ll meet you outside.”
The atmosphere in Jackson Hole on Madison Avenue was thick with the smell of hamburger grease and the tittering sound of gossip. As peer group A walked in and sat down at a table near the large glass windows, Kati Farkas and Isabel Coates huddled together in the back corner, discussing the latest developments with anyone who would listen.
“Did you hear about Nate Archibald and that girl from Connecticut?” Kati asked. She’d had her hair cut short over the weekend and it made her Germanic nose look twice its size. “They got busted for having sex in the broom closet at rehab and now he has to go to private therapy in the city instead.”
“Wait, I thought it was Blair and Nate in the broom closet,” Isabel sniffed. She was wearing a sample of Serena’s Tears that she’d gotten from her mom’s publicist friend who worked at Vogue. It made her nose run.
“No, stupid. Blair is seeing that old guy, remember? She’s not having his baby anymore, though. She had a miscarriage. That’s why she missed so much school.”
“I heard that Blair and Serena both sent in applications to the University of California school system today,” said Laura Salmon. “They have rolling admission, so you find out which
UC school can take you, like, a few weeks after you apply.” She raised her thin strawberry blond eyebrows. “Hey, maybe we should all do that!”
Not that any of them would really have considered going to a UC school.
“So what was it like, being in that perfume ad?” Mary Goldberg asked Serena while the girls in peer group A were waiting for their hot chocolates. Cassie Inwirth and Vicky Reinerson pricked their ears up on either side of her. The three girls had gotten matching short haircuts over the weekend, but since none of them had gone to see Gianni at Garren, their cuts were only pale imitations of Blair’s old one, and nothing compared to her new one.
“Cold,” Serena answered. She blew her nose on a paper napkin and then pulled her long, golden blond hair up on top of her head, twisted it into a bun, and stuck a pencil through it to hold it up.
Of course now they all wished they hadn’t cut their hair.
“I’d really rather not talk about it,” she added mysteriously.
Blair leaned across the table. “She and Aaron broke up during the shoot,” she told the ninth graders in a confidential whisper. She sat up straight again. “End of subject.”
The waiter brought their hot chocolates, giant steaming mugs, loaded with Reddi-Wip.
“Can we talk about love now?” Jenny asked tremulously. She glanced around the crowded room. If she was lucky, Leo might even show up so she could show him off.
“No!” Serena and Blair cried in unison. They’d specifically brought the group to Jackson Hole so they wouldn’t have to talk about boys, food, parents, school, anything. All they wanted was to sip their hot chocolates and enjoy each other’s company.
Suddenly a hush fell over the restaurant as Chuck Bass waltzed in wearing a fox fur hat and a baby blue pea coat, his monogrammed pinky ring flashing as he passed out pink flyers to everyone inside.
“Be there or be square!” he shouted, drifting out the door in a cloud of Serena’s Tears just as suddenly as he had come in.
The flyer was an invitation to a party on Monday night, and within seconds the entire restaurant was positively humming.
“Are you going?”
“Wait. Do you think it’s really Chuck’s coming out party?
“No. It’s his birthday. Can’t you read?”
“But we went to nursery school together. His birthday is in September. It’s not even his party. It’s some girl’s. He’s just handing out the flyers.”
“I still think he’s bi. I saw him with a girl from L’École Française on Saturday, and they were practically doing it.”
“Who was that guy anyway?” Cassie Inwirth whined.
“You know that site www.gossipgirl.net? Well, I think that’s him!” Mary Goldberg announced.
“You think Gossip Girl is a he?” Vicky Reinerson countered.
“No way!” Serena and Blair cried.
You never know.
Disclaimer: All the real names of places, people, and events have been altered or abbreviated to protect the innocent. Namely, me.
hey people!
Not that I’m greedy or anything
By now you’ve all seen the flyer inviting everyone to my party Monday night. And if you haven’t, where have you been—hiding under a rock? Please don
’t bother to turn up unless you bring one of the following:
A caramel toy poodle puppy
As many bottles of Serena’s Tears as you can scrape up. I know there’s a waiting list, but I’m addicted!
First-class tickets to Cannes this May
Diamonds
A fantastic sense of humor
Every gorgeous boy in your address book
Sightings
N and his über-rich, pale new girlfriend on a carriage ride in Central Park. Guess she got a day pass from rehab for good behavior. S and B in the Les Best boutique getting fitted for his entire fall line. V delivering a manila envelope to the drama department at Riverside Prep. You don’t think she actually turned in that film to D’s drama teacher do you? Now that’s dedication! D and that crazy poetess shouting non-sequiturs out the window of her Chinatown studio. Little J and her new beau checking out tattoos in Stink, an East Village tattoo parlor. Let’s pray they were only browsing.
As for those burning questions . . .
Will N and his misbehaving heiress remain a bona fide item?
Will Bever get over N? Will she grow out her hair? And—thank God the answer is just around the corner—will she get into Yale??
Will S and B remain friends . . . at least until graduation?
Will S become a vapid, redundant, celery-eating, supermodel? Will she ever stay with one guy for more than five minutes?
Will J and her new boy live happily ever after? Will her new best friend try to break them up?
Will V ever even look at D again?
Will D keep hanging out with that yellow-toothed poetess? Will his teeth turn yellow in the process? Will he actually write a memoir?
Will the rest of us get into college? More importantly, will we all graduate?