Nothing Can Keep Us Together

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  “Okay,” Dan responded dubiously. It appeared he had no choice in the matter.

  Chuck tapped him on the shoulder. “So guess what? That dykey girlfriend of yours? I heard she’s gonna be single again. Her ‘better half’ is totally moving out.”

  Meaning Vanessa or Aaron? Dan wasn’t even sure any-more who Vanessa was living with. All he knew was it wasn’t him. His perspiration-soaked hands began to shake with a mixture of confusion and happiness. Maybe Vanessa had broken up with Aaron. But they were so in love. They even had matching haircuts. He scribbled a series of check marks across the top of the page he’d been writing on. Vanessa broke up with Aaron!?

  “So I take it you’re accepting the nomination,” Larry persisted, tapping his pencil annoyingly against his wooden teacher desk. “All in favor say, ‘Yeah!’”

  “Dude!” the class of boys responded in unison, perpetuating the not-so-funny tradition that had started on the first day of senior year. Dan blanched as they began to whoop and shriek in a completely unnecessary display of fake enthusiasm. “Go, Dan!”

  The minute the bell rang, Dan called Vanessa to tell her how sorry he was.

  Yeah, right.

  “Talk about misinformation!” Vanessa ranted. “Where do people get this shit? So, how are you anyway?” she asked, sounding kind of glad to hear from him.

  “I was just voted senior speaker,” Dan admitted, like he’d been campaigning for it for weeks. Secretly, he was dying inside that Vanessa and Aaron were still together, but he wasn’t about to let her know that.

  “Senior speaker? What the fuck!” Vanessa responded. “Wait, is that a good thing?”

  “I guess.”

  “Look, I have photo lab now, but do you want to come over later or something?”

  Dan pressed his cell phone against his ear until it began to hurt. A group of freshmen boys almost sent him toppling down the stairs in their rush to lunch. All of a sudden he realized just how lonely he’d been. Was it really possible that he and Vanessa could be friends again, just like that, with one phone call?

  And if they could be friends again, there was always the chance they could be more.

  “Will Aaron be there?” he asked cautiously as he wandered down the fourth-floor hallway toward English class. A random, lint-covered rubber band was in his pocket. He pulled his scraggly, light brown hair into a stubby ponytail and then pulled it out again, dropping the rubber band on the floor. His dad, Rufus, was Mr. Ponytail Freak, not him.

  “Aaron has band practice,” Vanessa told him casually. “Not that you couldn’t come over even if he were here.”

  Hello, threesome?!

  Dan felt like a window was swinging open and a cool breeze was sweeping his face. “I’m supposed to go to this stupid AP history cram session for our final next week, but I could skip it.”

  Chuck Bass’s monkey scampered past him down the hall with a half-eaten bag of Smart Puffs in his mouth. Chuck was too busy dabbing Aveda pomade into his freshly highlighted hair in front of the full-length mirror he’d installed inside his locker to even notice.

  “Okay, I’m in photo lab now. As usual, everyone else cut except me. They’re all probably at some stupid sample sale or something. Shopping for their stupid white wedding—I mean, graduation gowns or whatever. Fuck!” Vanessa exclaimed, sounding like she’d stumbled into something. “It’s dark in here.”

  Dan’s ear was sweating now. “I wish I were there,” he blurted out, unable to stop himself.

  “Me too,” Vanessa responded eagerly. “Seriously.” Wait, was she flirting with him?

  “So maybe I will come over later,” he ventured. “Dad and Jenny are away anyway, so I don’t have to be home at any particular time.”

  Is that so?

  “Cool.” Vanessa sounded distracted now. “Look, I’m gonna do something dumb like drink fixer instead of my tea if I don’t hang up now. I’ll see you later, okay?”

  Dan could hardly wait. “Yeah, okay.” He hung up. Down the hall Sweetie was peeing on the marble floor in front of the door to the history department offices. Dan grinned at him.

  Good boy.

  S has rendered party school totally useless

  “So just drink some coffee and read poetry quietly to yourself, okay, Dad?” Jenny Humphrey pleaded with her uncooperative father, Rufus, as they stood in front of the dapper wrought-iron gates of Hanover Academy, just outside the quaint and lovely town of Hanover, New Hampshire. After appearing semiclothed on the Internet and in the pages of various fashion magazines, and colluding with post-college-age rock stars in their suite at the Plaza Hotel, Jenny had been given an ultimatum by Mrs. McLean, headmistress of Constance Billard. She had to stop making headlines and finish up her freshman year at Constance behaving like the demure school girl she was supposed to be or she’d have to find some other school to attend in the fall. Jenny had taken this as a challenge and wound up spending an entire weekend with the Raves in the lead guitarist’s Bedford Street town house. She’d even recorded a song with them! The following Monday, Mrs. McLean and everyone else in the city had read all about it in the gossip columns.

  Say good-bye to Constance Billard and hello to … boarding school!

  Now it was the following Monday and Jenny had taken the day off from school to look at Hanover, the famously wild and crazy boarding school of her dreams. Hanover was where party girl extraordinaire Serena van der Woodsen had gone for two years before getting kicked out last October, and Jenny imagined that Serena had never been replaced. Well, here she was to replace her. She was going to bring Hanover to new heights of infamy, and if, for some reason—which was hard to imagine—Hanover didn’t appeal to her, or worse, didn’t accept her, she would also visit the Croton School. Croton was only an hour and a half away from the city, in Croton Falls, New York, and according to all the prep school guidebooks Jenny had been reading, it was almost as wild as Hanover.

  “I might get a haircut, too,” Rufus replied, sounding chipper. His wiry salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back into a straggly ponytail held by a rainbow-colored twist-tie that had come on a bag of flaxseed bagels from the Whole Foods near their Upper West Side apartment building. To go with his fancy hairstyle, Rufus was wearing a red-and-white checked Western-style snap-up-the-front short-sleeved shirt, heavy brown canvas Carhartt work shorts, and scuffed beige suede Birkenstock clogs with black wool socks.

  Nothing like the country to bring out one’s sense of fashion.

  “Oh. Good.” Jenny tried not to get too excited. The last time Rufus had gotten his hair cut—sometime around her thirteenth birthday—he had gone to a Lower East Side salon popular with drag queens and gotten bangs with purple streaks in them. “So, I’ll just go on my tour and meet you at that place in town,” she added, referring to the bookstore café they’d passed on the way through the town of Hanover. The campus was a mile-and-a-half walk from town along a nice tree-lined path. It would be reassuring to have that distance between herself and Rufus, in case he decided to start a political movement or something equally insane out of sheer anxiety at having to leave the city.

  “You got it!” Rufus pecked her on the cheek with his grizzly mouth before striding down the path with exaggerated jauntiness. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” he called out behind him.

  As if there were anything he wouldn’t do.

  Jenny tugged on the pretty jade green cap-sleeved blouse she’d bought at Scoop in Soho on Saturday. It was Japanese and had little dragonflies stenciled all over it. She’d buttoned it up all the way to the collar, but now that her dad was on his way, she unbuttoned the top two buttons, revealing her most surprising assets—her 34 double-Ds.

  No reason the boys at Hanover shouldn’t know what they were in for.

  She extracted her laminated campus map from her bought-on-the-street-outside-of-Bloomingdales-but-looked-just-like-Serena’s imitation Louis Vuitton Calla Lily bag. The school’s ivy-covered old brick buildings were right out of an Abercrombie & Fi
tch catalog, but Jenny was disappointed not to see any gorgeous, half-naked, sun-dappled boys playing Frisbee out on the lawns. Riley, the girls’ dormitory where she’d arranged to meet her host, was on the other side of the parking lot, perched on top of a grassy hillock. It was a gorgeous summer day, and the air smelled like fresh-cut grass.

  “I already love it here,” Jenny whispered, her skin tingling with excitement. Her whole life was about to change. No more uniforms. No more bitchy, cliquey girls who would spend hours dissecting a girl’s choice of mauve lip gloss over pink. No more being known only for her excellent calligraphy, her overhyped Internet scandal, or her supposedly pornographic photo shoots. No more rumors, no more scandal.

  Well, maybe that was taking it a little too far. There was nothing wrong with a little scandal. It was just that at a boarding school like Hanover, the bar for scandal would be considerably higher.

  Jenny’s host, Fiona Castagnoli, was waiting for her outside the door to Riley. Fiona looked like a forty-five-year-old soccer mom—short and pudgy, in a coral-pink-and-white striped J.Crew oxford shirt tucked into stone-colored L.L. Bean Bermuda shorts. Her white socks were folded neatly at the ankle, and her white-on-white Reebok sneakers were brand-spanking-new. “Jennifer?” she asked eagerly, her supercurly, tight auburn ponytail bouncing between her shoulder blades. “We have to hurry. I’m taking you to study hall and we’re already five minutes late!”

  Fiona was lugging a lime green Lands’ End backpack with every book she owned in it. Jenny blinked at her. When she’d thought about coming to visit Hanover, she’d imagined hanging out in a dorm room with chic skinny blond girls, drinking vodka gimlets and flirting with boys smoking pipes, their school neckties flopping loosely against their tanned bare chests. “If you have lots of work to do I could, like, hang out here and wait for you,” she offered.

  “Oh, could you?” Fiona cried. She seemed immensely relieved. “You see, it’s finals week next week, and I have forty-seven Spanish irregulars to study and thirteen proofs to do for geometry.”

  Jenny peered inside the open door. A few girls lounged in leather armchairs in the crystal-chandeliered common room reading magazines and listening to their iPod minis. Jenny recognized a red-and-white rose-patterned Marc Jacobs top on one of them. And one girl was wearing the pair of gold Belle by Sigerson Morrison flats she’d coveted all spring but had never saved up enough to buy. They looked exactly like the types of girls she would have wanted to be friends with. All that was missing were the boys with the pipes and the vodka.

  “I’ll stay here,” she told Fiona firmly.

  “Okay.” Fiona hitched her ugly green backpack up on her shoulder. “I’ll come back and get you in, like, an hour and ten. We can get bagels in the café and I’ll show you my room.”

  Whoa, sounds like a party.

  Jenny was already sure she was never going to see Fiona again because Fiona was going to get so caught up in her irregular verbs or whatever, she’d forget all about how she’d left Jenny with the coolest, worst-behaved girls at Hanover. She pulled a tube of Chanel Stroppy lip gloss out of her bag and smeared some on. Then she stepped inside the common room. “Hi,” she announced shyly. “I’m Jennifer. I’m visiting from the city? I go to Constance Billard—you know, where Serena van der Woodsen went?” She knew it was lame to mention Serena right away, but she wanted these girls to know that she was cool, that she was one of them.

  One girl with short black hair and beautifully painted Chanel Vamp toenails glanced her way but then looked quickly away again. Other than that, no one seemed to hear what she’d said. The wood paneling in the common room gave off an amber glow, and the oriental carpet beneath Jenny’s feet was in perfect condition. She felt like she was in the den of some old mansion rather than in a school.

  “So, I hear Hanover can get pretty crazy sometimes. At least, that’s what Serena told me,” Jenny babbled on, still standing in the doorway like an idiot. She wanted to make it very clear that she didn’t just know of Serena. They were pals.

  “Shush,” whispered a beautiful blond girl with legs so long and so tan, they looked fake. “You’re going to get us in trouble.”

  Hello? Since when were Hanover girls worried about getting into trouble?

  “Sorry,” Jenny muttered meekly. She sat down in an empty leather chair, wincing at the noisy farting sound it made when her bare legs rubbed against it. She placed her faux Louis Vuitton bag primly on her lap, wishing she’d at least thought to bring a book. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the girl with short black hair checking her out once more. Jenny pulled an old receipt from Duane Reade out of the side pocket of her bag and then hunted for the stubby Hello Kitty pencil she’d had since fifth grade.

  What’s the deal? I thought Hanover was supposed to be totally WILD, she scribbled on the back of the receipt. Then she folded up the receipt and daringly tossed it in the short-haired girl’s lap. Less than a minute later the receipt came back with blue pen all over it. Well, basically, the little episode with your friend Serena (who used to be my neighbor here in Riley—when she was actually around) ruined everything. After getting rid of her, they instituted the disciplinary code, which basically says that if you tell on your friends, you get privileges. There’s so much incentive to tell on your friends that no one ever does anything worth talking about anymore. This place is totally dry, quiet, and B.O.R.I.N.G!!! I’m a senior, though, so I’m outta here—YAY!

  Jenny looked up from the note and studied the other girls in the room more carefully. One of the iPod listeners was muttering to herself, and Jenny realized she wasn’t listening to the latest downloads but rather memorizing Spanish conjugations. A petite Asian girl with thick pigtails who Jenny had thought was reading a fashion magazine was actually completely engrossed in Science Digest.

  Uh-oh.

  I probably wouldn’t get in anyway, Jenny scribbled back. She tossed the note to the girl, then stood up. Applications for boarding school were supposed to have been done in the fall, so she was pushing it timewise wherever she decided to go, never mind who would have her. But surely there were other schools that weren’t quite as strict as Hanover clearly was now.

  She went outside and wound her way back to the school gates, wishing that she hadn’t sent her father away in such a hurry. Heading down the path toward town she came upon a blond boy in a red Ralph Lauren baseball cap, a white V-neck T-shirt, and floppy aqua-colored J.Crew linen pants, smoking a Marlboro as he shuffled slowly back toward campus. He was completely adorable.

  Jenny smiled shyly at him as he approached, mustering up the courage to ask him if Hanover was really as bad as that short-haired girl back in Riley had made it out to be.

  “You’re not going to tell on me, are you?” the boy demanded, glaring at her with more hostility than anyone deserves.

  “N-no,” Jenny stammered. Was everyone at Hanover totally paranoid?

  “Right,” he sneered back, still glaring as he shuffled away.

  When she arrived at the coffee shop, her dad was behind the counter whipping up a soy milk chai latte, even though he and Dan had spent an hour one day lecturing Jenny on how chai was just some made-up Starbucks bullshit and how the only real hot drink on the planet was Folgers instant coffee. “The air is so fine, I was thinking I might move up here. They even offered me a job here in the café,” he crowed, beaming at her. “Dan’s off to Evergreen in the fall anyway. We’ll sublet our place—make a fortune!”

  “Sorry, Dad, but I don’t think so,” Jenny sighed. “I mean, I don’t think I want to go here.”

  Rufus carried the paper cup of frothy hot liquid around the counter and handed it to Jenny. “You mean you want to stay home with me?” he asked, his bushy salt-and-pepper eye-brows arched hopefully.

  Jenny smelled the drink, made a face, and then handed it back. “No. I just have to keep looking. Croton’s on the way home anyway.”

  Rufus winked at the big-hipped, hemp-dress-wearing, frizzy-haired woman coming
out of the kitchen with a tray of buckwheat scones in her hands. He sighed. “You sure?”

  From what Jenny could remember, the prep school guidebook she’d read from cover to cover in the corner by the window upstairs at the Broadway Barnes & Noble had listed Croton Academy in Croton Falls second on the list of party schools, right after Hanover. Croton was supposed to be full of kids who’d been kicked out of their New York City private schools for bad behavior. Obviously the book hadn’t been updated recently if it still listed Hanover as the number one party school, but maybe what it said about Croton was still true.

  “Come on, let’s go.” Jenny tugged on the pocket of her father’s Carhartt shorts, all excited about Croton now.

  It sounded way cooler than Hanover. And hopefully it had no disciplinary code.

  Professor Pierre Papadametriou

  English Dept., The Evergreen State College

  2700 Evergreen Parkway NW

  Olympia, WA 98505

  Daniel Humphrey

  815 West End Avenue, Apt. 8D

  New York, NY 10024

  Dear Mr. Daniel Humphrey,

  I saw your query in Seeking Paid Summer Internship on college employment site. I am poetry and biology professor at college and I seek summer intern. You live in my house. I have two dogs and a son. My wife left for Greece. Son is fisherman. Dogs live outside. You work on my very interesting book with me. I feed you good Greek food! Tell me when you come and I will fix hammock in attic. Must go feed dogs. They love my moussaka!

  Please write back soon.

  Pierre

  D and v have déjà vu … all over again

  “Wow. Your place looks really … lavender,” Dan remarked when Vanessa let him in. When he’d lived there the walls of the small, nondescript apartment had been plain, peeling, and white, and there’d been black Halloween sheets hanging in the windows in place of curtains. Now the walls were painted a delicate light lavender with celery green trim, and black-and-white chintz curtains hung from real curtain rods in the windows. There were a nice Danish modern wooden table and chairs in the living room and a cool, modern gray sofa. The place looked like it had been decorated by a real decorator.