Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  Nate shot Serena back a quick “OK” and joined his friends. He and Anthony and Charlie Dern passed an enormous joint between them as they dribbled a soccer ball around on the grass, pretending not to miss their goofy friend Jeremy.

  Charlie puffed on the joint and passed it to Anthony. Nate shot Charlie the ball and Charlie tripped over it. He was six feet tall and his head was too big for his body. People called him Frankenstein. Ever the athletic one, even when he was stoned, Anthony dove for the ball, kicked it up in the air, and headed it back to Nate, catching him in the chest. Nate let the ball roll to the ground and dribbled it between his feet.

  “Shit, this stuff is strong,” Anthony said, hitching up his grass-stained St. Jude’s sweatpants.

  “Yeah, it is,” Nate agreed, passing him the ball. “I’m already all fucked up.” His feet were itchy. It felt like the grass was growing through the rubber soles of his sneakers. If Jeremy had been there he would have had something funny to say to distract him. Without Jeremy there, Nate could feel himself starting to freak out.

  Tufts of park grass sprouted in the damp, warm spaces between his toes. Bugs scurried across the arches of his feet. He rubbed the bones of his ankles together. Soon the ants and weevils and creepy-crawlies would scurry up his legs and torso and neck, into his ears and nose, and lay their eggs in his brain. When he opened his mouth all that would come out were bugs. He couldn’t move his legs. He was being eaten alive by the grass, swallowed whole in Central Park. He couldn’t breathe. He was dying.

  Anthony stopped dribbling the ball. “Hey, Nate. You’ve seen Serena van der Woodsen, right?” he asked. “I keep hearing all this crazy shit about her.”

  Nate could feel the other two boys staring at him. He bent down and poked at the tops of his feet. Damn. They were numb. “Yeah, I saw her last night,” he said, trying to keep his voice casual even though his tongue was a mass of spiders and he was being devoured by the earth.

  Charlie cleared his throat and spat in the grass. “Well?” he asked. “Is she totally psycho now? That’s what I heard. I heard she had sex with this whole group of guys in her room and then killed them all. Her roommate ratted her out.” He snorted. “Oops! Like, maybe Serena should have killed her too?”

  Anthony laughed and sucked on the roach. “I heard she has a kid. I’m serious. She had it in France and left it there. Her parents are paying to have it raised in some French nunnery where the nuns whack you with thistles if you speak out of turn and there’s nothing to eat but wormy old bread and like, you have to whiz in a chamber pot. It’s like a book by whatthefuck’shisname—the dude we had to read for English—Thomas Hardy. No, it’s a fucking horror movie adaptation of a Thomas Hardy book.”

  Serena of the Doobievilles?

  “Can you imagine Serena with all these guys in her dorm room? Like, ‘Ooh, baby. Harder, harder!’ And then, ‘Hasta la vista, baby!’ ” Anthony fell down on the grass, rubbing his toned belly and cackling hysterically. “Oh, man!”

  Nate couldn’t believe what he was hearing. When his friends were stoned they got so outrageous. He dropped down in the grass and began to remove his shoes and socks. He didn’t speak out in Serena’s defense. He just sat there, watching the veins pulse in his feet, wondering if they were going to explode like Jeremy’s eyeballs.

  Meanwhile Blair was getting impatient. On her back in a treatment room, naked from the waist down save for a paper “waxing skirt,” she’d been waiting for her aesthetician for nearly a quarter of an hour. She’d wanted to get a Brazilian bikini wax before Friday night, leaving enough time for the little rash she sometimes got afterwards to go away, and had chosen her mother’s salon to do the job because it was close to school and there was an open lunchtime appointment. The meatpacking district salon where she usually went for haircuts and waxing was huge and busy and modern, with cool music, fresh cappuccinos, and a separate floor for spa treatments. This salon was intimate-—meaning cramped—with powder blue carpeting, gilt mirrors, and classical music, and was full of Park Avenue matrons with their dogs in their laps having their roots done by obnoxiously talkative stylists. The door to her treatment room was open just a hair, and she could hear one of the stylists talking to his client.

  “Hair is like a muscle,” he was saying. “It has like, a memory. And it has to be worked out, otherwise it just falls all blah, you know? It’s like a child. It needs exercise. It needs to be fed. And it needs to go to school. Or else it won’t get into a good college.” The stylist chuckled. “Not your children, babe. Yours are all geniuses, clearly.”

  Blair had never heard anything more asinine in her life. Hair was nothing like a muscle. Hair was dead. Dead, dead, dead. Just like that idiot hairdresser should have been for saying something so stupid. She checked her e-mail on her phone for the twelfth time. Nate still hadn’t replied to her message. Where was he? Flirting with those slutty L’Ecole girls outside that pizzeria he always went to? Cutting class with his pals? Or worse, sharing a bottle of chardonnay and a baguette in the park with Serena?

  Stop it, she told herself. You’re acting crazy. But she was tired of lying there, partially exposed, with the door practically wide open and no one paying her any attention.

  “Is someone going to come in here and do my wax?” she called, hating that she sounded like a fifty-year-old high-maintenance housewife from New Jersey. “I have to get back to class.”

  The chatty hairstylist stuck his head in the door. He wore a short bleached blond goatee and a slicked back blond ponytail. On every finger of both hands were sparkling gold David Yurman rings. His skinny black jeans were complemented by a pair of red suspenders and a black oxford shirt unbuttoned to reveal a tanned, muscular chest. Rounding off the look was a pair of black Prada biker boots. His over-fifty clients probably thought he was sexy. Blair could barely stand to look at him.

  She crossed her legs one over the other beneath the paper skirt. “I’m waiting for Mina,” she snapped.

  The stylist tried to wrinkle his Botox-injected forehead into a frown. “Sorry, babe. Mina had to go pick up her son. Strep throat. Just give me a sec to finish this blowout. I’ll do your wax.”

  He closed the door, leaving Blair feeling more exposed than ever. She was about to put her clothes back on when the guy returned.

  “So. How do you want it?” he asked, donning a pair of latex gloves and pulling them carefully over his tacky rings. He cocked his index fingers at Blair like two latex-covered pistols. “Project Runway, the Bermuda Triangle, or Completely Spank-Me Bare?”

  He’d chosen the wrong girl to fire at. Blair sat up. No way was she letting this jerk anywhere near her bikini line. “No, thank you. I’ll reschedule,” she told him briskly.

  The hairstylist glanced at the pot of boiling hot melted wax on the countertop and then eyeballed her bare knees. He grinned, his bleached blond goatee punctuating a set of hideously crooked yellow teeth. “Babe, trust me. I’ve seen it all.”

  Ew. Blair had had enough of this hairdryer-wielding idiot. Never again would she return to this salon. She jumped to her feet, buttoned on her Constance uniform, stamped back into her gold and black Chanel flats, snatched her dove gray cashmere Calvin Klein blazer off the hook, and slung her wine-colored Mulberry school bag over her arm.

  “Try waxing off your ugly face,” she spat, grabbing the guy’s ponytail with her serving hand. Then, with the strength of a nationally ranked tennis player, she dunked his entire head into the pot of bubbling hot wax.

  He’d look so much better bald. Like a boiled potato in suspenders and boots. Mr. Frédéric Fuckkai Potatohead.

  If he survived, that is.

  The atmosphere in the Constance Billard cafeteria was substantially subdued now that Kati, Isabel, and Nicki were dead and no longer attending school. Blair had run off somewhere, and Laura Salmon and Rain Hoffstetter sat by themselves at the senior girls’ regular table, sharing a pumpernickel bagel. Serena started toward them, hushed stares stabbing at her back. When th
ey spied her, Laura and Rain dropped their bagel halves and glared at her so menacingly that Serena altered her course and pretended to examine the salad bar.

  Even the olives and cherry tomatoes stared back at her, appalled and accusing. Serena abandoned her tray, backing out of the cafeteria and fleeing to one of her old school haunts, the private bathroom next to the nurse’s office.

  The bathroom seemed to have escaped the renovations the school had undergone in 1973, 1992, and 2002. The floor was old-fashioned black and white mosaic tile. The walls were white subway tile, graying and marked with girlish graffiti in some places. There was an old claw-foot bathtub, used by no one. The girls used to whisper that after hours Mrs. McLean invited her girlfriend Vonda over to the school for a bubble bath, but even that hadn’t happened in a while, since the tub was lined with a powdery film of white dust.

  Serena checked the wall to the left of the paper towel dispenser and there it was. S + B FOREVER, scrawled inside a skinny heart. Blair had written it with a turquoise-colored Sharpie in fifth grade while she and Serena took turns shaving their legs for the first time with Blair’s dad’s razor. How many times had Serena and Blair escaped to this bathroom together to discuss their hair, share their period woes, and apply lip gloss? How many times had Serena stood outside that very bathroom door while Blair pretended to have a stomach virus, quickly flushing down the remains of her regurgitated lunch?

  Blair was barely speaking to her now.

  Serena washed her hands, even though they were already clean.

  What, no blood?

  Her reflection in the mirror was tense and her skin looked dull. She kept the cold tap running and began to splash icy water on her face, over and over, willing all the badness and loneliness and meanness to go away.

  Behind her the bathroom door swung open.

  “Oh my gosh!” exclaimed a short girl with curly dark hair and a chest that was way too big for her tiny frame.

  “I should’ve locked it,” Serena said, reaching for a wad of paper towels. She patted them against her dripping face as the girl stared at her with enormous dark brown eyes. “What’re you staring at?” Serena demanded more harshly than she’d intended.

  The girl blinked. “I just can’t believe I’m talking to you. I’m Jenny. You’re Serena. I—” The girl bit her tiny red button lips. “I know everything about you. You’re amazing. You’re like, famous.”

  The girl, Jenny, was almost a foot shorter than Serena, with soft brown eyes like those adorable baby seals’ eyes in the World Wildlife Fund board members’ updates Serena’s mother received in the mail twice a year.

  Serena took a step toward her. “Like what? What do you know about me?”

  “Not all those silly rumors,” the girl said, quivering from head to toe. “But I know you killed Nicki Button. And Kati Farkas. And Isabel Coates. You’re like a superhero. You’re like Robin Hood. You’re killing all the meanest girls so girls like me can have a chance.”

  This thought had never occurred to Serena. And, although she liked the sound of it, Jenny had her facts completely wrong. Who knew what she’d say next, and to whom? For all Serena knew, Jenny had been sent there by Blair, like some sort of suicide bomber, just to rile Serena up.

  Jenny might be cute, but unfortunately the little curly-haired, button-lipped, seal-eyed imposter would have to die.

  “Go on,” Serena coaxed, buying time as she glanced around the bathroom, looking for some useful appliance with which to kill the little minx. There was the toilet plunger, but who knew where that had been. The china soap dish looked too brittle. The metal towel rack might work. She could get it off the wall, stab Jenny through the heart, and then drown her in the bathtub.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” Jenny promised, turning to go. “And don’t worry, I can use the bathroom upstairs. I just wanted you to know how cool I think you are.”

  Sure, you won’t tell anyone, Serena thought bitterly. No one on this goddamned island could ever keep their mouth shut.

  “Wait!” Serena called sharply. She gripped the towel rack, bracing herself to yank it out of the wall.

  Jenny turned around and blinked her big brown baby seal eyes up at her idol.

  Serena hesitated. She could kill this little Jenny, easy. But then what? She’d go back out to the cafeteria and the first person to talk to her would say the wrong thing and she’d kill them too?

  When was this going to end? How many more people were going to die before she and Blair became friends again? Wasn’t that why she’d come back? Wasn’t that why she’d tried to kill Nate? Why she’d killed Jeremy, and that girl in the elevator, and Kati and Isabel—to protect her friendship with Blair? But it wasn’t happening. Things were different now, irreparably different. She and Blair would never be friends again.

  She let go of the towel rack. “Never mind,” she said dismissively. “I was going to ask to borrow a hairbrush, but I just remembered I have mine.” She tried to smile. “Nice meeting you. Jenny.”

  The younger girl’s face flushed with Serena’s utterance of her name. “You too!” she squealed before closing the bathroom door behind her.

  Pulling another paper towel from the dispenser, Serena rubbed at her cheeks, trying to bring some color back into them. She spied the turquoise heart again, reflected in the mirror. S + B FOREVER.

  She’d come back to the city and to Constance hoping everything would go back to the way it had been. But then she’d slipped up. She’d slept with Nate again. And whether Blair knew about their trysts yet or not, Serena could never be the friend Blair wanted her to be. Because Serena loved Nate and wanted him for herself. And Blair would always hate her for that.

  Last fall at Hanover, Serena had studied the reign of the Tudors in England, featuring Henry VIII, the famous king who’d beheaded two of his six wives and hundreds of his loyal servants. She and Blair were sort of like King Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief officer. Their bond was so strong it eventually became toxic, because both men wanted the same thing—power.

  Still looking in the mirror, Serena lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes into a regal glare. When their friendship had finally played itself out, King Henry VIII had had Thomas Cromwell beheaded for treason. And so it went with her and Blair. They couldn’t just keep killing other people and fighting over Nate. Of course Serena would kill whomever she must to protect herself. But if she really wanted to take back her old station and hold on to Nate, the one person she would have to kill, whether she liked it or not, was Blair herself.

  Serena glanced at her watch. Only three more classes left in the day. She was late for Double Latin, and after that she had an appointment with Constance’s college admissions advisor. Blair would probably be busy after school with one of her many activities. Serena wasn’t exactly sure when she’d have the chance to get Blair alone with the right weapon and the blind resolve to do away with her best friend since birth. But when she did, Blair was going down.

  Cutting yet another class, the three boys lay on their backs in the grass, far too stoned now to kick the ball. Anthony, whose grandfather was an Oscar-winning film director, took this moment to show off his extensive knowledge of film.

  “How come so many famous old movies, you know, like The Big Chill—movies that our parents watch—show people getting high? If it’s such a cool, acceptable thing, then why is it illegal?”

  “Because people become assholes after college,” Charlie explained. “They start policing themselves. But it’s all a bunch of bullshit. Pot is good for you.”

  “Word,” Anthony agreed. “Unless you’re like Jeremy and you smoke some bad weed and your fucking eyeballs explode.”

  All three boys tapped on their eyelids with cautious fingertips.

  “Man, why’d you have to bring that up?” Charlie moaned. “Now I’m all paranoid.”

  Nate was already paranoid. His feet no longer bothered him. The paranoia was of a different sort.

  It was only Wednesday.
Was it possible that Blair could remain ignorant about him and Serena—doing it not once, but twice—until Friday, even though she was in school with Serena every day and they were still sort of best friends and probably still told each other everything? Chances were, no. And what about Chuck Bass? He wasn’t exactly good at keeping secrets. The entire Upper East Side probably knew by now.

  Nate rubbed his pretty green eyes viciously. It didn’t matter how Blair found out. Any way he looked at it, he was fucked. He tried to come up with a plan, but the only plan his stoned mind could think of was to wait and see what happened when he saw Blair on Friday night. He could tell her then himself. Make a complete confession. After they had sex. Or before.

  Good plan.

  “Wonder if Serena even knows who the daddy is,” Charlie mused, wandering back into Serena territory. He turned his head to look at Nate. “You and her had a thing, didn’t you, Archibald?”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Nate shot back.

  Charlie shook his head and smiled. “I don’t know, man. Around. What’s the problem? She’s hot.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve had hotter,” Nate said, and immediately regretted it. What was he talking about?

  “Yeah, Blair’s pretty hot too, I guess,” Charlie said, digging the heels of his green and white Stan Smith tennis sneakers into the grass. “I bet she gets pretty crazy in bed.”

  “Dude’s tired just thinking about it!” Anthony said, rolling toward Nate and poking him in the ribs.

  Annoyed, Nate rolled away, lay back in the grass, and stared at the empty blue sky. If he tilted his head all the way back, he could just see the limestone rooftops of the penthouses along Fifth Avenue jutting out above the treetops, Serena’s and Blair’s included. He tucked his chin down so all he could see was blue sky again. He was too baked to deal with any of this. He tuned his friends out and tried to clear his mind completely, his head as empty and blank as the sky. Images of Serena and Blair, naked, rose before him and crowded out the blankness.

  “You know you love me,” they teased in unison, making him smile.