Downstairs in the lobby Dan and Jenny Humphrey were still alive and well, but a little down on their luck.
What else is new?
“Elise promised me she’d get us in,” Jenny insisted as she dialed her Constance Billard classmate once more. Earlier that day she and Elise had hatched a plan to get into Blair’s party, where everyone who was anyone was going to be. Elise would wear her mom’s blue suede jacket and pretend to be an actress. Jenny would wear a V-neck and pretend to be Dan’s date, or, better yet, she’d bump into some cute St. Jude’s boy in the elevator who would refuse to go to the party without her enormous cleavage by his side. Both girls had sworn that whoever got into the party first would help the other girl get in.
Dan was only going because his father would probably send him out later to pick up Jenny anyway. Plus he had nowhere else to be. Plus Serena might be there, even though Jenny had mentioned something about Serena maybe having her own party, although she had a feeling no one was going because oddly the senior girls at Constance were all being sort of mean about Serena coming back and—And that was when Dan had tuned Jenny out.
Dan had never been inside the lobby of such a fancy apartment building. The ceiling was twenty feet high, with elaborate gold moldings and a glittering crystal chandelier. One wall sported an enormous gilded mirror and the other a mural of a stag being chased by a mounted hunt. On a marble-topped table in front of the mirror stood a giant gold and cream china urn decorated with black pug dog faces and filled with at least one hundred fresh white roses. The floors were a creamy marble that sounded beneath Jenny’s Nine West boots and squeaked under Dan’s Converse sneakers. A doorman wearing white gloves and a gold waistcoat with his hunter green doorman uniform stood by the building’s glass and cast iron front door, while another white-gloved doorman manned the intercom system behind an imposing dark wood and green leather-paneled station.
“I think my friend is up there,” Jenny squeaked timidly at this second doorman. He was seven feet tall, buck-toothed and shriveled, and totally terrifying. “She just called me. She’s like, waiting for me.”
“As I said before, you’re too late,” the doorman insisted. “I just received instructions from Miss Waldorf herself. No more guests. The mother will be home soon and Miss Waldorf is going to bed.”
“But it’s only ten o’clock!” Jenny protested. It had taken all her courage to come to the party and she wasn’t giving up easily.
“It is a school night,” Dan mumbled at the floor. He’d been working on a new haiku about his murderous feelings toward Chuck Bass, compounded with his murderous feelings toward himself, compounded with his sister’s taste for raw meat, and illuminated by his love of cigarettes.
Meat is murder.
I love smoking—which
one of us is better off dead?
Dan still wasn’t sure about the first line. He’d be happy to go home and ponder it some more.
“Oh, be quiet,” Jenny snapped, as if reading his mind. She stabbed at the buttons on her cell phone. Stupid Elise. Jenny should have guessed she was lying. Elise was probably already tucked in bed with her teddy bears, like the immature baby that she was, dead to the world.
Oh, she’s dead all right.
The doorman glanced at his watch, which was gold and looked like it had been keeping perfect time for all of the four thousand years he’d been a doorman.
“It would probably be best for you to take it outside,” he told Dan politely but firmly.
“It”? Dan wanted to protest for Jenny’s sake, but feared the insults would only get worse. “Let’s just go,” he whispered, leading his sister toward the door. Chances were Serena wasn’t even at the party anyway, and she was the only reason he’d come.
If only they’d lingered in the lobby a moment longer.
After killing Elise, Blair asked Myrtle to remove the food and tell the bartender to stop serving. Then Blair called down to the doorman requesting that no additional guests be allowed up. Serena was still dancing, the center of a hub of gyrating boys and girls, while Nate watched from the bar. She was acutely aware that if she stopped dancing every boy in the room might stop looking at her. In addition, she might have to talk to Blair, who might be sort of mad at her for killing Kati and Isabel, Blair’s loyal followers.
She might.
Blair stepped in front of Nate, blocking his view. “Remember the last time you were over? When we were on my bed?” she asked. She stole a sip of Nate’s beer even though beer tasted like moldy socks. All that activity in the kitchen had given her quite a thirst.
Nate nodded. He remembered.
“Didn’t we start something and sort of not finish it?” Blair elaborated.
Nate frowned and then shrugged his shoulders. He was so used to Blair almost having sex with him but never actually having it that he didn’t believe she ever intended to do it. “Maybe,” he said.
Blair stepped forward and put her hands on his chest. “Well, I want to do it now.” She frowned. “Actually, not now—my mom will be home in a minute and I really need to clean up and take a bath. This Friday. I want to do it on Friday.” She lifted her chin and gazed up into Nate’s pretty green eyes. Every time she got this close to him she could not stop smiling. “It’s going to be Friday the thirteenth,” she added kinkily.
Nate smiled back and kissed her smiling red mouth. He could never resist when Blair was being all coy and sweet and suggestive and smiley. It made him want to be all coy and sweet and suggestive and smiley right back. “Okay,” he agreed. “Sounds like fun.”
Across the living room Serena saw them kissing and stopped dancing. She stepped into the hall to retrieve her coat. Guests milled around, wondering whether to stay or go now that the bar had run dry. Serena buttoned her coat. The elevator was crowded. The lobby was bright. Sadness stabbed at her broken heart as she walked up the quiet, leaf-strewn sidewalks of Fifth Avenue toward home, alone.
life is fragile and absurd
“You’re so full of it, Dan,” Jenny told her brother. They were sitting at the kitchen table in their large and crumbling tenth-floor, four-bedroom West End Avenue apartment. It was a beautiful old place with twelve-foot ceilings, lots of sunny windows, big walk-in closets, and huge bathtubs with feet, but it hadn’t been renovated since the 1940s. The walls were water-stained and cracked, and the wood floors were scratched and dull. Ancient, mammoth dust bunnies had gathered in the corners and along the baseboards like moss. Once in a while Jenny and Dan’s father, Rufus, hired a cleaning service to scrub the place down, and their enormous cat, Marx, kept the cockroaches in order, but most of the time their home felt like a meandering, neglected attic. It was the kind of place where you’d expect to find lost treasures—ancient photographs, vintage shoes, or the skeleton of that chemistry teacher who took a sudden early retirement after giving you a D-minus on the final last year.
Jenny was eating raw hamburger meat with a grapefruit spoon and drinking a cup of cinnamon tea. Ever since she’d gotten her period last spring, she’d had the weirdest cravings. And everything she ate went straight to her boobs. Dan was on his fourth cup of Folgers instant coffee made with lukewarm tap water and eight teaspoons of sugar. He worried about his little sister’s eating habits, but he never ate anything at all, so what did he know?
Vanessa Abrams’s short film script, the film he was supposed to star in, lay on the table in front of him. He wouldn’t actually have to speak in the movie—thank goodness—because Vanessa was narrating the whole thing herself, but she’d asked him to read it anyway. Over and over the same lines popped out at him: “Life is fragile and absurd. Murdering someone’s not so hard.”
“Tell me you don’t care about Serena van der Woodsen being back,” Jenny challenged. She put a spoonful of meat in her mouth and sucked on it. Then she stuck her fingers in her mouth, pulled out a white piece of fat gristle, and wiped it on her plate. “You should see her,” she went on. “She looks so completely cool. It’s like she has
this whole new look. I don’t mean her clothes. It’s her face. She looks older, but it’s not like wrinkles or anything. It’s like she’s Kate Moss or some model who’s like, died and come back to life. Like she’s totally experienced.”
Jenny waited for her brother to respond, but he just stared into his coffee cup.
“Don’t you even want to see her?” Jenny asked. “It’s too bad we didn’t try to get into her party instead of Blair’s.”
Dan remembered what he’d heard Chuck Bass say about Serena. That she was the sluttiest, druggiest, most venereally diseased girl in New York. That she’d maybe even murdered someone. And Jenny had just said she looked experienced. But Dan didn’t believe a word of it. It was all just a bunch of terrible lies and bullshit rumors. And the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to kill Chuck Bass for spreading them.
Life is fragile and absurd. Murdering someone’s not so hard.
Dan pointed at the little pile of gristle on Jenny’s plate and wrinkled his nose in disgust.
“What’s wrong with it?” Jenny said. “I don’t like the fat, I just like the meat.”
Dan pushed his coffee away, careful not to slop any onto his script.
“Oh, be quiet, Mr. Anorexic,” Jenny sighed. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my question.”
Dan shrugged his scrawny shoulders.
Jenny put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “About Serena,” she said. “I know you want to see her.”
Dan scowled into his lap. “Whatever,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, whatever.” Jenny rolled her eyes. “Look, I know last night didn’t work out, but there’s this party a week from Friday—Kiss Me or Die? It’s like, a benefit to save the birds of prey that live in Central Park. Did you know there were vultures in Central Park? I didn’t. Anyway, Blair Waldorf is organizing it, and you know she and Serena are still sort of best friends, so of course Serena will be there.”
And most likely, if Serena was there, she would kill at least one person, or maybe even lots of people. And Jenny wanted to watch.
Dan kept reading his script, completely ignoring his sister. And Jenny went on, ignoring the fact that Dan was ignoring her. She was used to it, since Dan rarely said anything anyway.
“All we have to do is find a way to get into that party,” Jenny continued. She grabbed a paper napkin off the table, scrunched it into a ball, and threw it at her brother’s head. “Dan, please. We’ll have more time to plan than we did last night. Come on. We have to go!”
Dan tossed the script aside and looked at his sister, his brown eyes serious and sad.
“Jenny,” he said, his voice hoarse from lack of use, “do you really want to get kicked out by another doorman? I don’t want to go to that party. Next Friday I’m supposed to hang out with Vanessa and watch her sister’s band. You can come if you want.”
Jenny kicked at the legs of her chair like a little girl, pouting her bloody, meat-stained lips. “But why, Dan? Why won’t you go to the party?”
Dan shook his head and refused to say anything else.
“Oh, shut up. You’re such a wimp! You drive me crazy,” Jenny huffed, rolling her eyes. She stood up and dumped her dishes in the sink, scrubbing at them furiously with a Brillo pad. Then she whirled around and put her hands on her hips. She wore a pink flannel nightshirt and her curly brown hair was sticking out all over because she had gone to sleep with it wet. She looked like a mini disgruntled housewife with boobs that were ten times too big for her body.
“I don’t care what you say. I’m going to that party!” she insisted.
“What party?” their father asked, appearing in the kitchen doorway.
If there were an award for the most embarrassing dad on the planet, Rufus Humphrey would have won it. He wore a sweat-stained white wifebeater and red checked boxer shorts, and was scratching his hairy belly. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and his gray beard seemed to be growing at different intervals. Some of it was thick and long, but in between were bald areas and patches of five o’clock shadow. His curly gray hair was matted and his brown eyes bleary. There was a cigarette tucked behind each of his ears.
Jenny and Dan looked at their father for a moment in silence. Then Jenny sighed and turned back to the dishes. “Never mind.”
Dan smirked and leaned back in his chair. Their father hated the Upper East Side and all its pretensions. He only sent Jenny to Constance because it was a very good school and because he used to date one of the English teachers there. But he hated the idea that Jenny might be influenced by her classmates, or “those spoiled debutantes,” as he called them.
Dan knew their dad was going to love this. He tapped his foot on the floor expectantly.
“Dan won’t take me to this benefit I want to go to next week,” Jenny explained, still at the sink.
Mr. Humphrey pulled one of the cigarettes from behind his ear and stuck it in his mouth, playing with it between his lips. “A benefit for what?” he demanded.
Dan rocked his chair back and forth, a smug look on his face.
Jenny turned off the faucet and spun around to glare at him. “It’s a party to raise money for those poor vultures that live in Central Park.”
Dan snickered.
“Oh, shut up,” Jenny snapped, furious. “You think you know everything. It’s just a stupid party. I never said it was a great cause.”
“You call that a cause?” her father bellowed. “Shame on you. Those people only want those birds around because it makes them feel like they’re in the pretty countryside, like they’re at their houses in Connecticut or Maine. They’re probably going to build birdhouse mansions for them or something. Like there aren’t thousands of homeless people that could use the money. Leave it to the leisure class to come up with some charity that does absolutely no one any good at all!”
Jenny leaned back against the kitchen counter, crossed her arms over her chest, and tuned her father out. She’d heard this tirade before. It didn’t change anything. She still wanted to go to that party. She was tired of always hearing about all the cool things the cool girls did the next day. She wanted to be part of the coolness. If blood was going to be spilled at the Kiss Me or Die party, she wanted to see it spill, live and in person.
“I just want to have some fun,” she retorted. “Why does it have to be such a big deal?”
“It’s a big deal because you’re going to get used to this silly debutante nonsense, and you’re going to wind up a big fake like your mother, who hangs around rich people all the time because she’s too scared to think for herself,” her father shouted, his unshaven face turning dark red. “Dammit, Jenny. You remind me more and more of your mother every day.”
Dan suddenly felt bad. Their mother had run off to Prague with a count or prince, and she was basically a kept woman, letting the count or prince or whatever he was dress her and put her up in castles all over Europe. All she did all day was shop, eat, drink, and go hunting with the prince. She wrote them letters a few times a year, paid for their schooling, and sent them the odd present. Last Christmas she’d sent them the taxidermied head of some pig-deer type rodent she’d shot and killed in Bavaria. It hung from a towel hook on the bathroom wall.
It wasn’t a nice thing for their father to say that Jenny reminded him of their mother. It wasn’t nice at all.
Jenny looked like she was about to cry.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Dan spoke up. “We weren’t invited anyway.”
“See what I mean!” Mr. Humphrey said triumphantly. “Why would you want to hang out with those snobs anyway? Besides, every time I look at the paper there’s a new murder, and they’re all on the Upper East Side. I don’t want you over there after dark. It’s too dangerous. You’re staying home.”
Jenny stared glassy-eyed at the dirty kitchen floor. She could see how Serena might find it easy to kill people. She herself could think of two people she would very much like to kill right now.
Dan stood up. “Get dressed, Jenny,�
�� he said quietly. “I’ll walk you to your bus stop.”
partially naked lunch
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
I’m at my mom’s hair place. Lunch is over in 38 minutes and they’re making me wait. Missed you when you left last night. Mom and Cyrus are going away Friday. You can sleep over. This time it’s really going to happen.
I love you. Call me. xo B
PS: I’m not cutting my hair short, just waxing my bikini ; )
Every Wednesday, Nate and Blair had grown accustomed to e-mailing each other a quick love note (okay, it was Blair’s idea), to help them get over the hump of the boring school week. Only two more days until the weekend, when they could spend as much time together as they wanted. Nate scanned the note without really reading it. Which hairs Blair chose to cut or wax didn’t concern him. In fact, he’d really rather not know. He liked to think she looked pretty without really trying. But that would be a different girl.
He scrolled through the other junk in his inbox and was thrilled to discover an e-mail from that girl.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: Friday
Hey. I didn’t even see you leave last night. Sorry. Let’s all get together Friday night. OK? Love, S
“Hey, Archibald! Quit fucking with your phone!”
It was a sunny October day in Central Park. Out in Sheep Meadow lots of kids were cutting class, just lying in the grass, smoking, or playing Frisbee. The trees surrounding the meadow were a blaze of yellows, oranges, and reds, and beyond the trees loomed the beautiful old apartment buildings on Central Park West. A guy was selling weed, and Anthony Avuldsen had bought some to add to what Nate had picked up at the pizza parlor the day before at lunch.
Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer Page 10
