Isabel pressed her pug nose up against the window. “Look!”
Blair and Serena were walking hastily down Ninety-third Street, their arms linked, grinning slyly like they'd just shared the most entertaining secret. Instead of the usual socially acceptable midthigh length, Blair's uniform hung all the way down to her knees. It was totally obvious that she'd borrowed the uniform from Serena.
Nudge, nudge.
Just as the girls were turning into the great blue doors of the Constance Billard School, a yellow taxi pulled up, and Jenny Humphrey stepped out, munching on a breadstick. She'd managed to change out of her Plaza Hotel bathrobe and into a pink T-shirt and her blue-and-white-seersucker Constance Billard spring uniform. She was also wearing a pair of rather fetching hot pink Jimmy Choo platform sandals that were totally out of uniform, and an enormous pair of pink tortoiseshell Jackie O. sunglasses.
Uh-oh, don't look now, but someone thinks she's hot stuff.
“Where did she get those shoes?” Kati breathed in disbelief. “The waiting list for those is like a mile long.”
“They're probably fakes; you just can't tell from here,” Isabel replied.
Neither girl wanted to admit what they were really thinking—that Damian or Lloyd from the Raves had probably given Jenny the shoes and the glasses—because to be jealous of a freshman was so completely uncool.
Serena, Blair, and Jenny had only just stepped inside the doors when they were accosted by Mrs. M, Constance Billard's formidable headmistress.
“Girls,” Mrs. M commanded. “I'd like to talk to all three of you in my office, please. Your parents are on their way.”
Huh? All three girls wondered in unison.
This should be fun.
Mrs. M's face was doughy and soft, and her hair was dyed Raggedy Ann auburn and permed into little ringlets, giving her a sweet, grandmotherly appearance. But appearances lie: she was anything but sweet. In fact, she was a big, mean old dyke who purportedly kept a tractor-driving girlfriend in her house upstate and had a tattoo on her thigh that said, “Ride Me, Vonda.”
“Sit down, girls,” she ordered, arranging her wide, navy blue Talbots pantsuit-clad ass on the period chair behind her giant mahogany desk. Mrs. M's office was decorated entirely in red, white, and blue, and the Constance girls weren't quite sure if she actually thought she was the president or if she was just extremely patriotic.
In a daze of obedience, Serena, Blair, and Jenny planted themselves on the stiff blue loveseat opposite Mrs. M's desk. The loveseat was a little crowded with all three of them on it, but the nearness was comforting.
“Two of you are meant to be graduating next month, after which you are no longer my responsibility,” Mrs. M began. “One of you, however, has only just begun her high-school career, and you're already headed in a very bad direction, no thanks to the two of you seniors.” She propped a pair of half-glasses on her nose and sorted through a bunch of files on her desk. “All three of you are in a very precarious position.”
Blair opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it again when her mother appeared in the doorway of Mrs. M's office, dressed in tennis whites and carrying a fussing and whimpering Yale in a Burberry baby sling. The sling hadn't been adjusted properly and it banged against her hip like a cumbersome tote bag.
“I'm trying this new thing called ‘attachment parenting,’” Eleanor explained breathlessly. “It's supposed to make your children bond with you and increase their confidence.” She giggled and hitched the sling up on her shoulder awkwardly. “I think you're supposed to walk around like this all day long, but who has the time? I've got tennis at the Y, lunch at Daniel, and a facial at Arden, and Cyrus and I are going out to Bridgehampton later this week. Half an hour on Mondays and Wednesdays is all the bonding time I have!”
Still, she gets points for trying.
“Oh, and Blair, dear, there's a Dior sample sale I thought you might be interested in going to. It's at noon. You could meet me there.”
Mrs. M raised an unplucked brown eyebrow. Shopping during school hours—heaven forbid! Although if it had been a Talbots sample sale, even she might have been tempted.
“Mrs. Rose.” Mrs. M pointed efficiently to the wing-backed chair next to the loveseat upon which the girls were perched. “I realize you're busy, but I wanted to express my concern about the fact that your daughter is apparently living in a hotel. With her acceptance at Yale University hanging in the balance, I hardly think it's appropriate for a young woman to be living in such …” She paused, searching for the appropriate words. “An undisciplined environment.”
Eleanor beamed cluelessly back at the headmistress. She had noticed that Blair had gone away for the weekend, but she wasn't exactly sure where, and she hadn't really noticed that Blair hadn't come home last night, because she and Cyrus had gone to a cocktail party to celebrate the opening of one of his new buildings and hadn't come home until nearly two them-selves. She sat down in an armchair to the left of Mrs. M's desk and crossed her legs, tucking Yale up under her arm like the latest Hermes Birkin bag. Yale whined in protest, but Eleanor kept on smiling, as if she wasn't sure what else to do.
Blair squirmed uncomfortably in her place on the loveseat. With a mother like that, couldn't Mrs. M understand why she had to live in a hotel?
“Blair stayed over at my house last night,” Serena fibbed. For someone who looked like Upper East Side Barbie, Serena was extremely good at thinking on her feet, or her Manolos, or whatever shoe-of-the-moment she happened to be wearing. “Look, she even borrowed one of my uniforms.”
“Then why have I been fielding calls all morning from parents and prospective parents worried about their daughters sleeping in hotel rooms with drunken rock stars?” Mrs. M demanded. “I even had a publishing house call to inform me that next year Constance Billard will have the honor of being listed in their college guidebook as one of the five best schools to send your daughter to if you want her to be a celebrity or just date one.”
“Cool,” Jenny blurted out, and then immediately wished she hadn't.
Mrs. M shot her a don't-even-start-you-little-chickenshit glare. The headmistress seemed to be at a loss for giving Eleanor advice on how to raise her daughter, which must have been a frequent problem, considering the fact that most of the parents of the girls at Constance Billard didn't raise their daughters themselves. They had help, and lots of it.
“I'm sure if the girls were together they couldn't have done much harm,” Eleanor commented with more savvy than Blair had thought she was capable of.
“We didn't even leave the room,” Blair added, and then clamped her mouth shut again. What was her problem anyway? Serena had just said they'd stayed at her house last night.
Then Serena's mother, Lillian van der Woodsen, and Jenny's father, Rufus Humphrey, suddenly appeared in the doorway of Mrs. M's office. Rufus was unaccustomed to leaving the house or even waking up before eleven o'clock and looked even more disheveled and outrageous than usual. His long, wiry salt-and-pepper hair was pulled into a bun updo and fastened with the huge glittery purple plastic hairclip Jenny had bought in fourth grade, and he was wearing gray sweatpants that had been cut off to a sort of midcalf clam-digger length and a red flannel shirt with one sleeve rolled up and a pack of unfiltered Camels sticking out of the breast pocket. His shoes were okay—vintage brown penny loafers—only not so good with the sweatpants and seriously awful without socks.
Mrs. van der Woodsen was her usual immaculately dressed and poised self, seeming to emanate an odor of fresh-cut lilies and French-milled soap. She hugged her long, tanned arms against her chest, risking wrinkling her mint green linen Chanel dress so that none of her body parts would get too close to Rufus.
“Sorry we're late for the inquisition,” Rufus growled. He shot Jenny a threatening look. “I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”
Mrs. van der Woodsen went over and graciously kissed Mrs. M on the cheek. It was the sort of kiss benefactors are used to bestowing on the d
irectors of the organizations they so generously give millions of dollars to. “It's my fault the girls were late for school,” she admitted. “My driver had to rush off to pick up my dry cleaning, so they were forced to walk.”
Serena shot her mother a grateful glance and her mother blinked with silent understanding.
Now we know where Serena got her grace under pressure.
Baby Yale suddenly made the type of gastrointestinal noise that only babies are allowed to make in public. Eleanor whipped out her cell phone and dialed the nanny. She'd had quite enough bonding, thank you very much. She wasn't about to risk having to change a diaper. “Stay in the car, I'll be right out,” she directed frantically.
Mrs. M looked like she'd suddenly realized there were way too many people in the room and that if she didn't do something about it, things were going to get extremely weird.
As if they weren't weird enough already.
The headmistress sighed heavily, as though her weekend up in Woodstock baling hay with Vonda had come and gone way too quickly, and maybe she'd better start thinking about early retirement. “Serena and Blair. You're seniors, your parents are busy people. Let's just leave it at this: You may be nearing adulthood, but I'd prefer it if you slept in your own beds, particularly on school nights.”
Eleanor nodded and hastily gathered the howling Yale up in her sling as best she could, clearly eager to get the child safely into her nanny's capable hands. Mrs. van der Woodsen smiled ruefully, as if she were confident that any trouble Serena caused could be easily ironed out with a democratic kiss on the cheek and the promise of a large donation to Constance Billard's development fund. And Rufus grunted, like he couldn't wait to be alone in the room with Jenny and Mrs. M so he could give them both a piece of his mind.
The bell rang, signaling the end of first period.
“May we go to class now?” Blair asked sweetly, as if missing gym was really going to mess up her day.
“You may,” Mrs. M relented. Serena and Blair stood up, leaving Jenny alone on the loveseat. “Just remember, girls,” the headmistress added, “your acceptance at college can be revoked if you do not maintain the standards promised on your record.”
“Thank you for the warning,” Serena replied, bobbing her head in a sort of obedient half-curtsy before grabbing Blair's elbow and booking out of the room. They kissed their mothers good-bye and then took the stairs up to the senior lounge three at a time, breathlessly repeating over and over, “What the hell was that?!”
“Jennifer,” Mrs. M and Rufus said, practically in unison.
Jenny crossed her ankles and sat on her hands, feeling very small and unprotected now that the two older girls had gone. Her father sat down beside her on the loveseat and put his arm around her shoulders. He smelled like stale onion bagels and bad coffee. There were little cigarette burns all over his sweatpants.
“You've always been a pretty good kid.” He gave Jenny's shoulders a squeeze. “Good grades. Great artist. Reads a lot. Nice to her daddy—most of the time.” He shot Mrs. M an amused look. “Are you going to tell me I've been deluded all these years?”
Mrs. M smiled her first genuine smile in weeks. She liked Rufus Humphrey. Sure, he was scruffy and inappropriate, but he was a single dad who'd raised two kids himself and done a decent job of it. His only trouble was that he lived on the other side of the park and didn't play by the same rules that the rest of the Upper East Side had played by since they started nursery school at Brick Church on Park Avenue. He'd never given a cent to the school's endowment or attended a fundraiser. He'd never offered to build the school a new library or gym or swimming pool if it could guarantee Jenny a place at Harvard after graduation. He was also more protective of his daughter than most of the parents she was used to, mainly because he'd changed her diapers himself, and stayed up with her when she couldn't sleep, and punished her when she'd done wrong, and therefore felt a certain personal responsibility for how she behaved.
Whoa, what a concept.
Jenny seriously hoped that this was one of the weird dreams she often had when she ate too many Entenmann's chocolate donuts. Not that she'd eaten any donuts recently. As far as she could remember, all she'd eaten for dinner last night were six fine breadsticks imported from Italy via Federal Express to a particular suite at the Plaza Hotel.
Not to mention the seventh, which she'd wrapped in a gold-embroidered Plaza Hotel hand towel as a memento.
“Thank you for coming at such short notice, Mr. Humphrey,” Mrs. M began. “And I have to admit I agree. Jennifer is an intelligent, creative, and mostly well-behaved girl. However, she is building a reputation, for being … a little wild, and the parents of her peers are beginning to ask questions.”
Rufus gave his beard a perplexed tug. As a self-proclaimed anarchist he must have felt supremely uncomfortable in Mrs. M's patriotically decorated office, having to defer to an authority figure about his daughter's supposed wild behavior.
“What do you mean by ‘a reputation for being a little wild?’”
Mrs. M took off her glasses and folded them carefully in front of her. “Mr. Humphrey, are you aware that your daughter was not at home last night?”
Rufus nodded. “You got a problem with that?”
Jenny giggled and then clamped her hand over her mouth.
“Well, where do you imagine that she was?” Mrs. M persisted, her soft, rag-doll face becoming more and more stern by the minute.
Rufus snorted, and Jenny could sense his anarchist blood beginning to boil. “I don't have to imagine where she was. She told me. She spent the night at her friend Elise's house. Right around here somewhere.”
“Elise Wells,” Jenny elaborated hoarsely. “She's in my class.”
“Yes. Well. Elise wasn't an hour late to school this morning. In fact, she arrived at school on time and alone. Your daughter, however, only just arrived. And that is because she had to go home and change first. Because, in fact, she spent the night at a hotel, in a suite, with a rather well known rock music group.”
Rufus's jaw fell open, revealing his crooked, coffee-stained teeth. For once, he was completely speechless. Jenny hugged her arms against her chest, keeping her eyes fixed on the royal blue rug.
“This isn't her first mishap, either,” Mrs. M continued. “There was that compromising image of her and a boy that was passed around the Internet a few months back. Afterwards, I sent you a letter suggesting Jennifer see a therapist a few times a week here at school, to which you never responded. And then last month Jennifer appeared in a popular teen magazine in only an exercise bra, upsetting more than a few of her classmates' parents—mostly those who also have teenage sons.”
Rufus swiped his hand over his face. “Jesus, Jenny,” he breathed.
Even Jenny had to agree that Mrs. M made her sound like a first-class slut, but she wasn't even going to try to defend herself. Besides, she'd been mostly good most of her life—it was kind of exciting being the bad girl.
“So are you suspending her, or what?” her dad demanded.
Yes, please. Jenny thought with silent pleasure. And send me straight to boarding school.
Mrs. M shook her head. “Not yet. This is only a warning. But if Jennifer continues to behave in such a publicly flagrant way, or in a way that upsets her schoolmates and their parents, I will have to take measures to ensure that the reputation of this institution remains intact.”
The third bell rang, signaling the start of second period.
“I'm missing Latin,” Jenny squeaked. “May I go?”
“Not so fast, missy,” her father bellowed, tightening his grip around her shoulders. Rufus was a softy at heart, but he did a mean disciplinarian act when he was pissed off.
“That's all right. You are both dismissed,” Mrs. M responded. She pushed her chair back and folded her arms across her chest, looking dykier than ever.
Jenny jumped to her feet and hurried out of the office before her father could catch up and have the last word—and befo
re Mrs. M could send her home for being so completely out of uniform.
“You look tired, Mr. Humphrey,” she heard Mrs. M say behind her. “I've got a wonderful farm in Woodstock. You really should visit sometime.”
“Woodstock—I love Woodstock!” Rufus exclaimed. “I camped out there back in 1974. I was living in a van with a couple of poet pals—”
Jenny bolted upstairs to Latin, oddly thrilled at how close she'd come to getting expelled from Constance. Who cared if her picture was in the gossip columns as an unidentified, short, curly-haired, “publicly flagrant” floozy? Eventually she'd be recognized as the girl who always hung out with the Raves. People would constantly ask if she was Damian's girlfriend, and she'd be a Page Six girl, just like she'd always wanted!
N's Personal Little Cluster*%@#
“A Pyrrhic victory,” Mr. Knoeder mumbled in his typical impossible-to-follow manner. “Archibald. Are you with me?”
Nate hadn't done his homework. He wasn't even sure what day it was. He'd woken up, taken a shower, and wandered into school, hoping for some guidance. Now this asswipe of a history teacher wanted him to answer some idiotic question about the Vietnam War, which everyone knew had been a total clusterfuck.
“Pyrrhus was a Greek king or whatever who kicked the shit out of the Romans in some battle, but there were a ton of casualties,” Nate heard himself saying. No wonder I got into Yale and Brown, he congratulated himself. I'm a frigging genius!
“Actually, it was the Battle of Pyrrhus,” Mr. Knoeder corrected, sticking his pinky in his ear as he wrote something on the board. The St. Jude's boys all called him Mr. No Dick because he wore his pants so high and so tight, he couldn't possibly have had a dick. “But your answer was mostly accurate.”
Nate got out his cell phone and started texting Jeremy, who was seated in the same row as he was, four desks down.
HEY THKS DICKLESS, he wrote.
WNT 2 HANG L8R? Jeremy wrote back.
CANT. GROUNDED, Nate replied.
SORRY 2 HEAR ABT B & THT KID, Jeremy wrote back.