The lounge was its same crusty old New York self, except for the six flat-screen Pioneer TVs hanging from the wood-paneled walls, running Vanessa’s latest film on a constant loop. The fact that all the characters in the film were slowly trickling into the party made it seem like the opening night of an edgy new documentary, and everyone at the party felt totally famous.
“I told you I was telegenic,” Chuck Bass crowed, watching himself onscreen. He’d arrived with an entourage of crew-cutted boys in gray flannel uniforms no one else there had ever laid eyes on before.
That’s because he’d raided the sophomore class of some random Catholic school near his Sutton Place apartment and paid the boys to come.
“They’re cute,” Isabel remarked, eyeballing a particularly innocent, wide-eyed-looking boy who was signing Chuck’s Riverside Prep yearbook with a yellow highlighter pen. Isabel had changed into a pair of cutoff Rogan jeans and a cut-up red Juicy Couture T-shirt and was looking almost indecently slutty.
The boy eyeballed her back. He’d never seen so much well-tended exposed skin. Maybe it was his lucky night!
“They’re only, like, thirteen years old,” Kati scoffed as she flipped through her yearbook, counting how many people had signed it. She was saving her virginity for college. Sort of. Technically she’d already lost it to Chuck Bass at a party at Serena’s house, like, two years ago, but she’d been so drunk at the time, she didn’t even remember it.
Lord Marcus slipped something cool and wonderful around Blair’s neck. Blair touched her collarbone and glanced down. It was a Bvlgari pearl choker exactly like the one she’d borrowed from her mother for her Breakfast at Fred’s audition, only ten times nicer. Each pearl in the strand was its own unique shape, imperfect and perfect at the same time, fastened by an ornate gold clasp shaped like the letter B. “Congratulations, Bee,” he murmured, kissing her on the nape of the neck.
Bee?
Blair had always wanted a nickname. She tilted her chin up to kiss him on the mouth, feeling drunk with happiness and all the vodka she’d consumed with Vanessa in the hours between graduation and now. She had an insanely cute new car, an insanely hot new boyfriend, and she was going to Yale in the fall. The pearls were just accessories for her already-perfect life.
Well, aren’t we smug?
“I’d love for you to come to England this summer,” Lord Marcus whispered, his lips brushing Blair’s hair. “My family’s desperate to meet you. You could stay at the house. And maybe we could even fly to Paris and see your dad while you’re over.”
Blair’s breath caught in her throat and she turned around, blinking up at him like a vacant cartoon princess who’d just been woken from a witch’s spell. He’d only asked her to visit him, but it had sounded almost like … a marriage proposal. He was her prince, her knight—well, not exactly, but a lord was almost the same thing. He’d swooped in on his white stallion, swept her off her feet, and now he wanted to take her home to meet his parents because soon—maybe even sometime this summer—he was going to give her an incredibly rare diamond ring, kneel down before her, and ask her to marry him.
Not that he actually mentioned marriage. And when exactly did a white stallion enter the picture?
“Yes,” Blair responded blissfully. “Oh, yes!”
It was more of a response to the marriage proposal in her head than to Lord Marcus’s original proposal, but in the world according to Blair, they were intrinsically linked: She would go to England and she would come back engaged to Lord Marcus.
Even though she was only seventeen and her mom had never even met him. Not that she ever planned to purposely introduce her mother to Marcus. They could meet at the wedding. Or maybe they’d elope to some remote South Pacific island and have an intimate nighttime wedding on a beach with only the natives as their witnesses. They’d eat fire-roasted goat and dance barefoot in the sand.
Remember, anything can happen on the Island of Blair.
She’d kept her summer open, thinking she would need all two and a half months just to shop and pack for Yale. She’d even considered going over to Europe to see her dad—but mostly to shop, because the stores in New York never put out any fall fashions until September, and she had to be in New Haven for orientation at the end of August. How on earth would she arrive at Yale with the right cashmere sweaters, ankle boots, and fitted jackets unless she bought them directly from Prada in Milan or Burberry in London?
Now her summer was more defined. She would shop, get engaged, and then shop some more.
“I can’t bear to think this is our last night together,” Marcus lamented, kissing her behind the ear. “It would do my heart good to know you’re going to come over in a couple of weeks.”
Blair would have closed her eyes and kissed him and then whispered something about how she really, really needed to lie down so would he please walk her to her suite so she could rip his clothes off and they could consummate their marriage a little early, but then Serena and Nate wandered into the party behind a group of L’École girls who were all smoking Gauloises and wearing crocheted Marni halter tops and gold Gucci toe-ring sandals because that French model, Pru, had just worn a crocheted Marni halter top and gold Gucci toe-ring sandals on the cover of the June issue of French Vogue. Serena had changed her outfit—luckily. Otherwise Blair would have broken her perfect, aristocratic nose.
“I thought you told me they broke up,” Tina Ford, who’d just graduated from Seaton Arms, commented to Isabel Coates. She bit into an Absolut Citron–soaked ice cube. “Isn’t that why they both missed graduation?”
“I heard they were never really together,” Kati Farkas trilled in reply, even though Tina wasn’t even talking to her. “Nate’s gay. He came out last week. And he’s in so much trouble. His parents are disowning him. They’re not even going to pay for Yale.”
“So why is Serena still pretending to go out with him?” Isabel demanded, lifting up her ripped red T-shirt and exposing her tummy just to give that innocent-looking Catholic school boy Chuck had brought with him a little thrill.
The other girls rolled their eyes. “Oh, you know how she is. She always has to be so nice to everybody,” Rain complained. “Nate’s dad probably, like, hired her to flirt with Nate so he wouldn’t be gay anymore!”
Actually, that does sound like something Captain Archibald would do.
As they’d filed out of Brick Church, and in the seconds before their families caught up with them, Serena had tried to explain to Blair why she’d almost missed graduation, while Blair had pretended not to listen. Obviously Serena’s second Breakfast at Fred’s audition was way more important than listening to Blair’s speech or getting her diploma. At least Blair had the satisfaction of knowing that Serena would never get the part. She was way too tall, too blond, and too blue-eyed—totally wrong for it.
“I got the part!” Serena screamed at the top of her lungs, so excited, she didn’t care who was listening. She grabbed Nate and squeezed him with her long, perfectly toned arms. “Ken Mogul just called. I got the part!”
Blair nearly fell off Lord Marcus’s knee. She’d already been hating Serena all over again for missing her graduation speech and for wearing the exact same Oscar de la Renta suit she had. And of course she still secretly hated her for being with Nate. It hadn’t seemed possible to hate her any more—until now. But Blair had already started talking to Serena again—she’d even taken Serena’s chemistry exam for her, for Christ’s sake, so now she was stuck with the awkward choice of suddenly acting like a bitch for no reason in front of Lord Marcus, or being completely fake and pretending to be nice so Lord Marcus wouldn’t think she was a bitch and change his mind about wanting to marry her.
As if he hadn’t already noticed her bitchy side.
Nate stood next to Serena like a hired piece of celebrity arm candy. He rubbed his eyes and smiled at Blair and Marcus blearily, and for the first time in a long time, Blair wondered what she’d ever seen in him. No matter how often they broke up, her
happily-ever-after fantasies had always featured Nate, but now they had a new and improved co-star. She leaned back against Marcus’s chest, making it very clear that she was supremely comfortable on his lap and totally unruffled by Serena’s news. Her perfectly tailored suit was a little warm in the stuffy room, but it looked so good on her, she didn’t care.
All of a sudden, another good-looking but shorter couple stepped around Nate and Serena and gazed tensely around the room, as if they were worried someone might yell at them for crashing the party. Blair sat up and unbuttoned her Oscar de la Renta suit jacket, flinging it onto the floor in disgust. The male part of the new couple was her twelve-year-old brother Tyler, attempting to look like a rock star by wearing a vintage Armani tuxedo jacket over a ripped black AC/DC T-shirt. The dimple-cheeked, waiflike girl on his arm was wearing the same fucking white Oscar de la Renta suit Blair was. She was even wearing the same fucking Manolo Blahnik shoes as Blair. Her fucking hair was the same color as Blair’s, and it was cut in a short layered bob, just like Blair’s. Blair squinted. She had never seen this fucking girl in her life, but if she wasn’t mistaken, she was also wearing Chanel’s fucking Stroppy lip gloss, Blair’s fucking favorite.
Growl.
Blair hitched up the straps on her totally see-though cream-colored Cosabella camisole. If it hadn’t been for Lord Marcus, she’d have grabbed the girl by the scruff of the neck and thrown her out on the street.
“Hey, sis,” Tyler greeted her in a fake stoner voice, puffing up his shoulders in an attempt to look bigger. “This is Jasmine. Jazz, this is my sister, Blair.”
“Cool,” Blair’s apple-cheeked clone responded casually. Like she hadn’t just spent all day trying to dress exactly like Blair.
Blair wrinkled up her pert little nose. “I got the part!” she heard Serena scream from the other side of the room, for what seemed like the thousandth fucking time. She picked up her cigarette holder, waiting for Marcus to give her a light. “How do you do?” she replied in her best gracious-under-pressure Audrey Hepburn imitation, blowing smoke over her brother’s and his stupid little girlfriend’s heads.
Serena may well have gotten the part, but Blair lived it, every day.
Nothing can keep us together
It was almost surreal how graduation changed everything and everybody. The party was like being at a reunion, except that they’d only just graduated that morning. Some of the girls were still wearing their white graduation dresses with rubber flip-flops and their hair all undone, looking like runaway brides. The boys had rolled the cuffs up on their neatly pressed khakis, and their school ties hung askew on their bare, sun-kissed chests, so that they resembled models in a Ralph Lauren menswear campaign, dressed up for cocktails but sitting on a dock with their feet dangling in a lake as if they’d rather drink beers together than go back inside to the stuffy cocktail party.
Serena thought of herself as an emotional person. The fashion designer Les Best had even named a perfume Serena’s Tears when he’d caught her weeping in the snow at a photo shoot in Central Park. She’d always thought she’d be a basket case during graduation. After all, she’d grown up with these people, shared the same ups and downs, suffered the same disappointments and triumphs. But here she was, nothing short of ecstatic. Even Nate’s mopey, distracted disposition couldn’t bring her down, because she’d gotten the part!
Yes, we heard her the first time.
In his usual pretentious, oddball manner, Ken Mogul hadn’t even watched her second audition. He’d kept his back turned, trying to ascertain whether she radiated the right energy for the part. When she finished delivering her lines, he didn’t turn around, just held up his hand and said, “Thank you.”
The second audition had taken place in an old warehouse in the Meatpacking District, on the opposite end of Manhattan from Brick Church. Serena was already dressed for graduation, and she’d promised to pay her taxi driver handsomely if he waited for her outside. Within seconds, she was hurtling east on Fourteenth Street, praying that Mrs. M wouldn’t make her repeat her senior year and realizing too late that she’d left her shoes behind.
After graduation, over lunch at Tavern on the Green, her mom had been more miffed over the missing white Jimmy Choos than the fact that Serena had nearly skipped the ceremony. “What kind of girl goes around barefoot?” Mrs. van der Woodsen wanted to know. Then Ken Mogul had called Serena’s cell.
“I don’t like tans or freckles, so please, try and stay out of the sun. We start shooting at Fred’s next month,” he announced gruffly. Serena just sat there with the phone pressed against her ear, trying to figure out what he was talking about. Then she realized: I got the part. I got the part!
Hello? Can we change the subject now please?
Her parents considered acting in movies somewhat déclassé, but less than nine months after getting kicked out of boarding school, Serena had been accepted at Yale, Harvard, Brown, and Princeton and was about to star in a remake of Breakfast at Tiffany’s: They could hardly complain.
I got the part, I got the part! Serena kept screaming to herself. Her first real part in her first real movie. For the first time in her life she realized that this was something she really wanted. And it hadn’t just happened. She’d made it happen. Good thing she was now at a party, because there was an excited little girl on a trampoline inside her, bouncing and bouncing and bouncing.
Boing!
“I heard she and Ken Mogul went on a drug binge last night and she totally talked him into giving her the lead in his movie. He was all set to skew it older and cast Natalie Portman, but Serena brainwashed him,” someone whispered.
“She even tried to get him to cast Nate as her costar, but he’s always so baked, he forgot his lines during his tryout,” whispered someone else.
“And didn’t you hear? Nate totally didn’t graduate. He got busted for stealing painkillers from the nurse’s office at his school, and now he has to go to some drug rehab prison thing in the bad part of the Hamptons, like, all summer,” Rain Hoffstetter informed all who would listen. She’d hooked up with Charlie Dern when their parents had parked next to each other at a drive-in movie theater out on the Cape last weekend. They’d been talking on the phone every night since, so she was very up-to-date on her Nate information.
Nate was grateful for his role as Serena’s mute piece of arm candy. He felt like he’d been encased in six inches of clear plastic. Everyone’s voice sounded muffled and distant. It didn’t help that Blair looked radiant on Marcus’s knee, or that Serena clearly didn’t need a boyfriend right now, or that he was incredibly stoned.
“Blair?! Did you hear? I got the part!” Serena threw herself at Blair and Lord Marcus, dragging Nate along with her. She squeezed Blair’s shoulders exuberantly. “You’re not mad, are you?”
Me, mad? Blair smiled tensely, still intent on impressing Marcus with her sweet, forgiving nature.
Ha!
“You’re such an excellent actress,” she finally told her ex-friend politely. “You totally deserve it.”
Serena’s ear-to-ear smile faded slightly. She knew Blair too well not to be able to gauge that she was less than pleased and more than pissed. Blair was complicated: It was best to flee when she was acting volatile. “Is Vanessa around? I can’t wait to tell her—I’m totally talking to Ken Mogul about hiring her to film the movie!”
Her face resolutely blank, Blair pointed to where Vanessa was sitting in the corner with her own personal bottle of Stoli, happily signing the yearbooks of all the nonseniors at the party who thought she was beyond cool.
“Vanessa Marigold Abrams!” Serena cried and dashed across the room, leaving Nate behind.
Nate stood in front of Blair and Lord Marcus all cuddled up in their wing-back chair, his hands in his pockets, feeling like a jerk.
“How’s it feel?” Lord Marcus asked, reaching up to shake Nate’s hand.
Nate didn’t know who knew about his graduation predicament, and he didn’t much want to talk
about it. “I’m just glad it’s over,” he mumbled. Lord Marcus looked bigger than he remembered, and even though he was a guy, Nate could appreciate how handsome he was. Blair had really scored.
“That’s how I feel,” Blair agreed with a perky smile. She reached up and casually stroked the back of Lord Marcus’s tanned, muscular neck, showing off how comfortable she was talking to Nate while sitting on Marcus’s lap.
Nate suddenly perked up, remembering the reason he’d come to the party in the first place. “Blair, can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked, although to him it sounded like he’d said, “Woo shee ga ga?”
Blair had always been the needy one in their on-again-off-again relationship, so it was a new experience to see Nate hovering over her, looking uncomfortable and a little desperate, with something bulky stuffed under his arm. Was he going to give her a present? she wondered. God knew she’d given him enough presents in their time together, and he’d hardly given her anything except flowers a few times, when he’d thought of it.
“Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back,” she murmured to Marcus. She slipped off his knee, flashing him a sultry I’m-only-tolerating-this-party-for-a-half-hour-more-before-I-tear-your-clothes-off look. Then she followed Nate into a semiquiet corner of the crowded room, trying to appear impatient and indifferent while her heart thundered so furiously in her chest, she wouldn’t have been surprised if it were visible through her nearly transparent cream-colored camisole.
Nate pulled the thing out from under his arm—a navy blue paper Gap shopping bag, folded in half. Blair was slightly appalled. He’d bought her a gift at the Gap?