Because I'm Worth It

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  Elise giggled. “He’s kind of goofy looking.”

  Blair’s little Help the Hopeless campaign was starting to wear thin. “If he’s shopping in Bendel’s, he’s probably gay. Why don’t you just go up and talk to him if you think he’s so cute?”

  Jenny was mortified. Just go up and start talking to him like some sort of desperate, stalking freak? No way.

  “Come on,” Elise prodded. “You know you want to.”

  Jenny could barely breathe. Every time she thought she was getting more confident, something like this happened to prove that she was just as insecure as ever. “Maybe we should just leave,” she muttered nervously, as if Blair and Elise were about to rope her into participating in some shady drug deal. She picked her book bag up from off the floor. “Thanks for you help,” she told Blair quickly. Then she grabbed Elise’s hand and dragged her out of the store, keeping her eyes straight ahead as she passed the blond boy.

  Pathetic. Blair sighed as she watched them go. But she’d been in such a good mood ever since Owen Wells’ call, it wouldn’t kill her to give Jenny a little more help when she so obviously needed it. She pulled the receipt for her dress out of her shopping bag and, using the rust-colored eye pencil, drew a big heart on the back of it and wrote Jenny’s Constance Billard e-mail address inside it. Everyone’s school e-mail addresses were the same, just the first initial and the last name, so it wasn’t hard to figure out. Then she crumpled the receipt into a tight little ball and walked past the skinny blond boy, tossing the balled-up receipt hard at his back and spinning through the revolving doors before he had a chance to see who she was.

  Blair Waldorf making an effort to do something nice for someone else? Talk about a makeover! This was more than just a Jiffy Lube change of hairstyle. Like a true diva, she was going for the entire weekend spa package, including the spiritual overhaul.

  as if he didn’t have it good enough already

  Just as Aaron had suspected, there was a cream-colored envelope from Harvard waiting for him beside the Spode china milk jug of white roses on the side table in the foyer of his father and stepmother’s East Seventy-second Street penthouse apartment. Aaron let an extremely thirsty Mookie tear down the hall to the kitchen with his leash still on and picked up the letter with rigid fingers. Serena was waiting expectantly behind him, but he would really rather have opened it alone. What if he didn’t get in?

  Serena slipped out of her coat and tossed it on the blue toile–upholstered chair in the corner. “I’ll still love you no matter what,” she said breathlessly.

  Aaron stared down at the envelope, annoyed at himself for feeling so tense. He was usually pretty mellow about this kind of thing. “Fuck it,” he declared under his breath and tore open the sealed envelope. He unfolded the neatly creased cream-colored piece of paper and read the short paragraph typed on it, twice. Then he looked up at Serena. “Uh-oh.”

  Her face fell. What a horrible thing for her sweet love to go through! “Oh, poor baby. I’m so sorry.”

  Aaron handed her the letter and she glanced at it reluctantly.

  Dear Mr. Rose, We have reviewed your application and we are very pleased to inform you of your acceptance to Harvard University’s class of— Serena’s blue eyes were suddenly enormous. “You got in! Oh baby, you got in!”

  Behind them, Myrtle, the cook, walked briskly down the hall with a drooling, panting Mookie trailing after her. Her light yellow maid’s uniform was spattered with something orangey-red and she looked pissed.

  “Myrtle, Aaron got into Harvard,” Serena announced proudly. She put her arms around her boyfriend and gave him a squeeze. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  Myrtle was unimpressed. She thrust Mookie’s leash at Aaron, her fleshy wrists jangling with gold bracelets and her work-weary hands smelling of onions. “Better take that dog with you where you’re going,” she chided before stomping back to the kitchen in her new white Nike tennis shoes.

  Serena and Aaron grinned mischievously at each other. “I think this calls for a little celebration, don’t you?” Aaron asked, his relief mutating instantaneously into cockiness.

  Serena tweaked his adorable freckled nose with a slender forefinger. “I know where they keep the champagne.”

  Blair rode the elevator up to her family’s penthouse overlooking Central Park at Seventy-second Street. When the elevator doors rolled open she instantly recognized Serena’s new navy blue cashmere pea coat flung carelessly on top of the toile Louis XVI chaise in the foyer. It was still hard to get used to the idea of Serena hanging out at her house when she wasn’t even home.

  “Blair?” Serena’s voice echoed out of the former guest room, which now belonged to Aaron. “Get in here. Where have you been?”

  “Hold on,” Blair called. She pulled off her light blue duffle coat and hung it up in the coat closet. She didn’t really feel like explaining her drastic new look to Serena and Aaron while they were sitting around in their underwear or something equally nauseating, but she didn’t see how she could get out of it. If she ignored them, they’d soon be banging her door down, bouncing up and down on her bed, and demanding her attention like immature imbeciles.

  The smell of herbal cigarette smoke wafted out into the hall. “Hey,” she called, standing outside the half-opened door.

  “Come on in,” Aaron slurred. After two glasses of Dom Perignon he was already tipsy. “We’re having a party.”

  Blair pushed open the door. The room had been redecorated for Aaron in shades of aubergine and cerulean, with funky fifties gray metal shutters in the windows instead of curtains and giant vinyl beanbag chairs on the floor to lounge around on. The woven organic hemp mat covering the hardwood floor was littered with CD cases, computer games, DVDs, music magazines, and library books about Jamaican Rasta culture and the evils of the meat industry. Serena and Aaron were sitting on the disheveled Edwardian four-poster bed, drinking champagne out of her mother’s best crystal flutes, in their underwear, just as Blair had predicted. Actually, Serena was wearing one of Aaron’s oversized hunter green BRONXDALE ATHLETIC T-shirts, with her white satin La Perla panties peeking out from underneath it.

  Well, at least it was nice underwear.

  Blair was about to ask what the big occasion was when Serena blurted out, “Aaron got in! He got into Harvard!”

  Blair stared at them, bile rising in her throat. It was hard enough to look at Serena’s gorgeous abundance of long, pale blond hair now that her own hair was sitting in a trash can back on Fifty-seventh Street, but the smug smile on Aaron’s annoying dreadlocked face was enough to make her want to projectile vomit all over his stupid cruelty-free rug.

  “Pull up a beanbag,” Aaron offered. He pointed to the Harvard mug sitting on his desk. “That mug’s pretty clean if you want some champagne.”

  Serena waved a sheet of cream-colored paper in the air. “Listen to this. ‘Dear Mr. Rose,’” she read aloud. “‘We have reviewed your application and we are very pleased to inform you of your acceptance to Harvard University’s class of—’”

  Blair had gone to the hair salon without eating any lunch, and this little we-love-Aaron worshipfest was making her dizzy with disgust. She was the one who should have been opening her early acceptance letter, but after her botched interview Constance Billard’s college advisor had told her it was best not to apply early. Getting into Yale had been Blair’s sole mission in life—well, besides marrying Nate Archibald and living happily every after in the ivy-covered brick town house just off Fifth that she already had picked out—but now she’d have to wait until April along with all the rest of the morons in her class to find out if she’d even gotten in. It was completely unfair.

  “Sorry, Blair.” Aaron sipped his champagne. He’d always been supersensitive about ruffling Blair’s feathers, but he was feeling too good about himself right now to bother. “I’m not going to apologize for getting in. I deserve this.”

  As if the enormous new science wing his father’s development company bui
lt on campus last year had absolutely nothing to do with it.

  “Fuck you,” Blair replied. “In case you forgot, I would be hearing from Yale right now if you hadn’t kept me up drinking shit beer and eating crappy junk food in that gross motel room the night before my interview.”

  Aaron rolled his eyes. “I never told you to kiss your interviewer.”

  Serena let out a little snort and Blair glared at her.

  “Sorry,” Serena apologized quickly. “Come on, Blair,” she coaxed. “You’re, like, the best student in our class. You’re totally getting in. You just have to wait until April to find out.”

  Blair kept on glaring at her. She didn’t want to wait until April. She wanted to know now.

  Aaron lit another herbal cigarette and tilted his chin toward the ceiling to blow a few smoke rings. Already there seemed to be a sort of lazy, superior air about him, as if he knew he could just drink champagne all day for the rest of second semester and still go to Harvard. The fucker.

  “Hey,” he yawned. “I have to head up to Scarsdale to practice with my band, but let’s go out later to celebrate.”

  Serena stood up on the bed and did a few jumping jacks, as if she really needed the exercise. “Definitely.”

  Blair watched Serena’s gorgeous hair fly up into the air above her head and then cascade prettily down onto her shoulders as Aaron blew more smoke rings. All of a sudden, Blair couldn’t stand to be in the same room with them. “I have homework to do,” she huffed, reaching up to feel her new hairdo as she turned to leave.

  “Oh my God!” Serena cried, vaulting off of Aaron’s bed. “Wait, Blair—your hair!”

  Nice of her to finally notice.

  Blair stopped in the doorway and put a hand to where her dark hair fell in a clean line at the nape of her neck. “I like it,” she declared defensively.

  Serena walked around her like she was one of those Greek marble statues on the main floor of the Met. “Oh my God!” she repeated and reached out to tuck a flyaway hair behind

  Blair’s ear. “I love it!” she exclaimed, a little too enthusiastically.

  Blair wrinkled her pert nose suspiciously. Did Serena really love it, or was she just being fake? It was always so hard to tell.

  “You look exactly like Audrey Hepburn,” Aaron remarked from the bed.

  Blair knew he was only saying what she wanted to hear to make up for being such a smug asshole about getting into Harvard. She thought about mentioning her Yale alum interview with Owen Wells on Thursday night but decided to keep the interview to herself. “Excuse me,” she told them coldly. “I have stuff to do.”

  Serena watched Blair leave and then climbed back onto the bed beside Aaron. She picked up the letter from Harvard and folded it up, carefully tucking it inside the envelope again. “I’m so proud of you,” she murmured, falling into Aaron’s arms and kissing him.

  Eventually Aaron pulled away, but Serena kept her eyes closed, licking the sweet herbal aftertaste of his kiss from her lips. “I love you,” she heard herself say. The words seemed to have just fallen out of her mouth. She opened her eyes dreamily.

  Aaron had never told a girl he loved her, and he hadn’t planned to say it to Serena, at least not right away. But it had already been an amazing day, and she was so completely gorgeous with her cheeks all flushed and her perfect mouth all red from kissing. Why not? It was like the end of one of his secret cheesy rock-star fantasies, where he and some incredibly hot girl roared off into the sunset together on a kick-ass Harley.

  “I love you, too,” he said back, and kissed her again.

  Disclaimer: All the real names of places, people, and events have been altered or abbreviated to protect the innocent. Namely, me.

  hey people!

  Aren’t we special?

  So the rumor floating around about the Ivies not accepting anyone early this year turned out to be totally false. Hooray—some of us got in! I know we’re feeling pretty special, but if we start partying like it’s 2099, drinking champagne before homeroom and cutting half our classes, we’re going to wind up with only each other to party with, because all our other friends are going to hate our guts. Try to keep it to yourselves if you can, at least until April when the rest of the class finds out where they’re going. It’s for your own good, I promise.

  The L word

  With Valentine’s Day less than a week away, love is in the air everywhere. It’s on the tips of our tongues. It’s what we’re thinking about before we fall asleep. We catch ourselves and our neighbors doodling corny hearts in math class. But just because the world has turned into one gigantic BE MINE candy heart doesn’t mean we have to go around making promises we can’t keep. Using the L word in intimate settings can be dangerous. I prefer to use it more generally, as in, I love you all. And I mean that, I really do!

  Sightings

  N skulking down Madison Avenue with his hands in his coat pockets, looking uncharacteristically tense and preoccupied. V and D kissing in Shakespeare Books, near NYU—aw, how cute. B at Sigerson Morrison in NoHo, trying on pair of shoes in the store. S in Fetch on Bleecker Street, buying another irresistible doggie outfit for her favorite pooch. J and her new friend, E, giggling in the feminine-hygiene aisle at Duane Reade. Ah, youth. And A, stocking up on used reggae records at a tiny unnamed shop on East Third Street. He’s got to have something to listen to while he blows off the rest of second semester.

  Your e-mail

  Q: Dear GG,

  I heard that dealer who used to work in the pizza place got busted by the NYPD and now he’s doing time as a narc in the park, busting all his old customers.

  —Dawg

  A: Dear Dawg,

  That sounds like a bad TNT movie. I just hope none of our friends end up starring in it.

  —GG

  Q: Dear GossipG,

  I totally forgot to tell you before, but I saw that little freshman with the giant boobs in the waiting room of my cosmetic surgeon.

  She was looking at a book called Celebrity Breasts. I’m serious. Like, totally choosing which ones she was going to get.

  —tattletail

  A: Dear tattle,

  That’s all very interesting, but pray tail—I mean tell—why were you there?

  —GG

  As if you weren’t already excited enough . . .

  Now that the early admissions thing is over, we can focus on something truly important: Fashion Week. It starts this Friday, and all my favorite people will be there, including me. See you in the front row!

  You know you love me.

  gossip girl

  scrawny westside poet has first taste of fame

  On his way to Riverside Prep Tuesday morning, Dan stopped at the newsstand on Seventy-ninth and Broadway to buy the Valentine’s Day issue of The New Yorker and a large black coffee that tasted like it had been made three years ago—just the way he liked it. The cover of The New Yorker was an illustration of Noah’s Ark docked at a pier in New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty looming in the background. The words The Love Boat were painted on the side of the ark, and all of the animals lined up to board were holding hands and kissing and groping each other. It was pretty funny. Dan stood on the corner and lit an unfiltered Camel with trembling fingers as he turned back the cover and searched the table of contents for his poem. There it was under Poems: Daniel Humphrey, page forty-two, “Sluts.” He flipped to it, forgetting all about the burning cigarette propped between his lips. Page forty-two happened to be the ninth page of a fourteen-page story by Gabriel Garcia Rhodes called “Amor con los Gatos”—“Love with Cats”—and right there, in the middle of the story, was Dan’s poem.

  Wipe the sleep from my eyes and pour me another cup.

  I see what you’ve been trying to tell me all along,

  Shaving your head and handling me (so delicately)

  With satin and lace:

  You’re a whore.

  It was freezing outside, but nervous sweat beaded on Dan’s eyelids, and h
is tongue was as dry as firewood. Dan spat the burning cigarette out onto the sidewalk and closed the magazine, tucking it into his black messenger bag. If he’d turned to the Contributors page, he would have seen the entry: Daniel Humphrey (Poem, p. 42) is a high-school senior in New York City. This is his first published work. But Dan couldn’t handle looking at the magazine for a moment longer, not when thousands of people were right now browsing through it and stopping to read his brutal, angry poem, which he honestly wasn’t sure was any good. Dan walked down Broadway toward school, his hands shaking crazily. If only he could have pulled off some heist like sabotaging the The New Yorker’s printing presses so they couldn’t print vowels anymore. Then all the Valentine’s Day issues would have been recalled from the newsstands late last night.

  As if he could ever have pulled that off.

  “Yo, dude,” Dan heard the familiar, conceited voice of his least-favorite Riverside Prep classmate behind him. Dan stopped walking and turned around to see Chuck Bass flipping his signature navy blue monogrammed cashmere scarf over one shoulder and running his manicured fingers through his brown-and-blond highlighted hair. “Nice poem in The New Yorker, man.” He gave Dan a congratulatory clap on the shoulder, his monogrammed pinky ring glittering in the winter sunlight. “Who knew you were such a stud?”

  Was there something distinctly gay about Chuck Bass these days? Or perhaps not. Just because he’d gotten blond highlights and was wearing a slim, cream-colored wool coat by Ralph Lauren and orange leather Prada sneakers didn’t mean he’d given up molesting defenseless, drunken girls at parties. Perhaps he was simply expressing himself.

  There’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

  “Thanks,” Dan mumbled as he fiddled with the plastic top on his coffee cup. He wondered if Chuck was planning on walking all the way to school with him so they could discuss his poem. But then Dan’s cell phone rang, saving him from having to answer Chuck’s inane questions about how many chicks he’d bagged before writing the poem, or whatever Chuck Bass liked to talk about on his way to school in the mornings.