Dear Professor Papadametriou,
Thank you for offering me the opportunity to work with you this summer. However, something has come up and I will not be able to accept the position. I would very much like to meet you and your dogs and your son sometime. Until then, good luck, and good luck with your book.
All the best,
Daniel Humphrey
P. S. I’ve enclosed a poem you might want to include in your book.
He turned to another fresh page.
view from the roof
The view is better from up here.
See her factories, her rivers.
If her hills weren’t in the way
I could see into the windows of the apartment across the street.
See a woman pouring milk as she sets the table for dinner.
Oh there. There’s the table. There.
I can see everything from here.
There. Yes. Right there.
Dan wasn’t sure if he really had the guts to send such a sexually explicit poem to a professor he’d never even met, but it would be cool if Professor Papadametriou actually used the poem in his book.
Ms. Solomon sat down at her desk and rested her pointy, unpleasant chin in her hands, looking completely defeated because she’d worn her sexiest dress just for Dan and he’d barely looked at her for the last forty minutes.
“I’d like you to open your notebooks and take the last ten minutes of class to write whatever you feel like writing,” she instructed with unusual generosity. Normally she droned on about Wordsworth or some other dead poet until five minutes after the bell had rung, driving the boys apeshit. Dan took the opportunity to get started on a new graduation speech.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to celebrate the end of the first chapter in our lives and the beginning of the second. We already know what comes next. Four years of college, and then another graduation. But whoop-dee-doo! Now is the time to be in love. …
Whoop-dee-doo? Triple, super-duper uh-oh.
who’s that boy?
Senior homeroom was last period on Tuesday in the Constance Billard senior lounge, a windowless room above the library that had been a storage area until it was given to the seniors as a place to relax and escape from all the underclassmen. No teacher was present, which meant that none of the girls were paying any attention to Mimi Halperin, the perky but lame president of the senior class, as she made announcements about senior privileges during exam week.
“No uniforms all week, girls. And we only have to come to school for our exams. Awesome, huh?” Mimi clapped her chubby hands together and pushed her thick black hair behind her weirdly small ears. The other girls yawned and looked at their watches, eager to leave so they could continue their quest for the perfect graduation dress or work on their tans. Mimi had been the class clown and everyone’s buddy way back in third grade, but now that they were all grown up, no one thought she was funny. Still, they’d voted for her for president at the end of junior year because she was the only one who seemed to want to do it. Because it went on your transcript for college, class president was a coveted position, up until senior year. The class president had to attend weekly student council meetings at 7:30 A.M. and help out at all the school functions, like the book fair and the scholarship fund drive. It was a lot of work, and now that it was the end of senior year and everyone was already into college, no one cared.
“Moving on, I’m pleased to announce—drumroll, please—our senior class graduation speaker is … Blair Waldorf! Yay, Blair!!” Mimi jumped up and down on her stubby legs and clapped her hands over her head like this was the best thing that had ever happened.
Take that, you bitch! Blair gloated silently at the back of Serena’s pale blond head. That’s what you get for trying to sabotage me.
The lounge hummed with gossip as everyone discussed the results. No one had really wanted Blair to be speaker, because her whole speech was going to be about herself, but they questioned Serena’s ability to write a coherent speech.
“She’s so dumb from all the drugs she did up at boarding school, she’d probably have to bribe Blair to write the speech for her anyway,” Laura Salmon whispered to Rain Hoffstetter.
“I heard Serena dropped out,” Rain whispered back. “Nate gave her some gross STD and she’s going to miss graduation anyway because she has to go to some clinic in Belgium to try and get cured.”
“Is that true?” Blair wondered out loud. Not about the STD part, but about the dropping-out-of-the-running-for-senior-speaker part. She was reluctant to prolong homeroom, because there were only five more minutes left for her to get changed, powdered, glossed, and perfumed before she was scheduled to meet up with a very hot English lord who’d promised to spend the afternoon dress shopping with her. Last night over Ketel One martinis, Lord Marcus had confessed that his squash game had been a total disaster because he’d been thinking about her the whole time. And Blair had confessed to Googling him the minute she’d unpacked her laptop. His family, the Beaton-Rhodeses, owned the largest textile mill in England and lived in a very huge and historical old mansion outside of London. They also owned a villa near Milan and a beach compound in Barbados. Marcus’s parents were special friends of the royal family, and Marcus himself had even attended Princess Diana’s funeral. He was listed by Hello! magazine as one of the most eligible young bachelors in England, and Blair was determined to win his heart before any of those greedy English bitches got to him. But first she needed to know if she’d beaten Serena by getting elected senior speaker or if she’d only won because she was the only girl left in the running. She glared at Serena and repeated, “Is that true?”
Serena squirmed in her seat, pulling her school uniform down over her bare knees and pulling up her pale yellow ankle socks so they looked nerdy and ridiculous. She’d wanted her act of martyrdom to go unnoticed by the rest of the senior class. Now everyone knew about it. “Is there a problem?” she responded, sounding a lot bitchier than she’d intended.
“But Blair, you want to be our speaker, right?” Vanessa Abrams asked from her seat right next to Blair’s. Vanessa was wearing a black tank top and no bra and should have been sent home for being inappropriate and out of uniform. Normally this sort of go-class-go type of homeroom drove her nuts, but she’d been feeling so nostalgic about graduating lately, she was actually sort of into it.
“Yes,” Blair admitted. “I do.”
Vanessa rolled her eyes and gave her friend’s arm a gentle little shove. “Then what do you care?”
Blair shrugged. “Can we go now?” she asked Mimi, eager to get out of her uniform and into the tight white Juicy Couture clamdiggers and green Marni halter top she’d brought to wear shopping with Lord Marcus.
Serena shot Vanessa a grateful glance. She really hadn’t meant to make a fuss. And maybe, when she thought about it later—like, years later, when they both had blue old-lady hair and had retired to Mustique or some other hot and sunny place, Blair might hate her a little less.
After homeroom, the senior girls congregated outside Constance Billard’s great blue doors, still buzzing about the senior speaker situation. They couldn’t help but notice the gorgeous, tall, golden-haired boy who was standing on the sidewalk only a few feet away, wearing perfectly ironed jeans and the cutest salmon-pink-and-white checked Thomas Pink button-down shirt. Blair brushed by them wearing a completely different outfit from what she’d worn to school that day, sprinted down the steps, and, to their complete amazement, kissed the boy on the cheek without even stopping for air.
“Nice to see you too,” Lord Marcus chuckled, holding her arms and looking her up and down appreciatively.
Blair blushed hot pink down to her jade green Kate Spade flats. God, he was dreamy—even better than the boy she’d dreamed up to star opposite her in the movie in her mind, because he was real, and royal, and more perfect than Nate could ever attempt to be.
Last night at the Yale Club bar, when she’d begun to slur her w
ords from drinking too much Ketel One, he’d held her hand all the way back to their rooms, kissing it gently before he said good night. Blair had swooned so hard she almost puked. How could something so insanely sexy come so effortlessly to him? It had been all she could do to keep herself from sledgehammering the wall between them with her black salon-size Vidal Sassoon hair dryer and jumping his adorable bones.
The group of senior girls clustered in front of the school in their matching light blue seersucker uniforms, looking a little like the pigeons roosting in the eaves of the school roof as they stared incredulously at Blair and her hot British lord.
“What, did she, like, create him in a lab or something?” Laura Salmon demanded with a mixture of jealousy and awe.
She pulled her white eyelet blouse down tight across her chest in a lame attempt to show off her new red DKNY demicup bra.
“He’s completely perfect,” Isabel Coates breathed, yanking out some of the bobby pins holding down her grown-out brown bangs. “But I bet he, like, washes dishes at the Yale Club or something.”
“Actually, I think he’s her cousin—you know how she has that aunt in Scotland?” Rain improvised. “She’s just pretending he’s her hunky new boyfriend to make Nate jealous.”
“But Nate’s not even here,” Kati Farkas pouted, her shiny pink lower lip jutting out in a way that made her look even dumber than she actually was.
“No, but Serena is,” Isabel remarked insightfully.
The girls turned to stare at Serena, who had just stepped outside the blue doors. She adjusted the earphones on her pink iPod mini and blinked her gigantic lake-blue eyes, her long, pale blond hair gleaming in the bright, hot sun. She waved to the other girls and then started on her merry way, traipsing down the steps until she caught sight of Blair, hanging on the lapels of her royal British hunk.
Lord Marcus was about to hail them a cab down to the Oscar de la Renta boutique on Madison and Sixty-sixth Street, where he’d promised to help Blair sort out her graduation dress issues, when Blair suddenly grabbed his pink-and-white checked shirt, nearly ripping it off his body.
“Kiss me now,” she told him urgently. Of course it was sort of unexpected—they’d only just met yesterday—but didn’t that make it all the more romantic?
Or all the more bizarre.
“Because somebody’s looking or because you want me to?” Lord Marcus responded with an amused, irresistible smile that made it very clear he didn’t care either way.
“Both.” Blair closed her eyes in anticipation of the kiss. Of course she wasn’t in love, yet. It was the idea of Lord Marcus she loved. But their first kiss lasted longer than an on-screen kiss, tasted better than steak frites, and felt better than a day-dream—way better. It certainly wouldn’t take much for her to fall genuinely in love. She was definitely almost there.
A cab pulled to a stop beside them and, his lips still pressed against Blair’s, Lord Marcus raised his hand to flag it. But the cab was already occupied by a very tense Nate Archibald. Nate opened the cab door, and Lord Marcus and Blair stepped aside to allow Serena to breeze past them and into the backseat. She pulled the door closed, looking up at Blair and Lord Marcus through the window with her huge blue eyes. Blair stared back, her body pressed against Lord Marcus. Serena lifted her hand to wave at them, her perfect lips parting in a smile as the cab took off toward Fifth Avenue.
And even though Serena was already gone, Blair smiled back. Because for once in her life, she honestly didn’t give a damn where they were going.
guess who’s bonking in bergdorf’s?
Located at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, Bergdorf Goodman was one of the oldest and most beautiful luxury department stores in Manhattan. It was the first store Serena’s mother had ever taken her shopping in, and even though it was stuffier and more old-fashioned than Barneys or Bendel’s, it seemed like the appropriate place to buy her graduation dress. She’d asked Nate to come along only because she needed a second opinion, although with his standard uniform of well-worn knit polo shirts or white button-downs and khakis, Nate wasn’t exactly astute when it came to fashion.
“I wonder where Blair met him,” Serena mused aloud as Bergdorf’s sleek ivory-colored elevator whisked them up to the third floor.
Nate didn’t respond. He was staring at Serena’s boobs. They were hard looking, like the small Empire apples that grew on his family’s estate on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. He had taken a couple of Coach Michaels’s Viagras on his way to pick her up and he was pretty sure he was beginning to feel the effect. There was a lot of pressure down there, like a handless hand job, and if he didn’t do something about it soon, things were going to get kind of messy.
Like, how soon?
The elevator doors glided open and Serena was immediately drawn to a rack of exquisitely made white Oscar de la Renta suits—swishy pleated knee-length skirts and fitted jackets with cool white leather belts decorated with adorable little white leather bows.
“I don’t know why I even care,” she continued as she fingered the suits without even noticing that Nate was staring at her like she was a slice of extra-cheese pizza hot out of a Ray’s Original Pizza oven. “Blair will probably never talk to me again.”
“May I help you?” offered a bulky middle-aged sales-woman with a gold Bergdorf’s name tag that read JOAN. Joan was wearing a purple Chanel suit that did nothing for her lumpy hips and piano legs.
“I need to try these on in a size four.” Serena pointed to three of the white Oscar de la Renta suits. Until now she hadn’t thought of wearing a suit to graduation instead of a dress, but it seemed to make perfect sense. She’d never been the frilly-white-dress type anyway, and there was something so crisp and final about the suits that made them totally perfect for graduation.
Nate was practically bursting as he followed Serena and Joan to the ladies’fitting room. He stood just outside as Joan hung up the suits, closed the heavy gray velvet curtain, and then hurried off to find something else she thought Serena might like. Now was his chance.
He yanked the curtain open. Serena had unbuttoned her uniform. Her white polo shirt was around her neck and she was wearing only a flimsy white camisole instead of a bra underneath. “Hey,” she greeted him with a shy smile. “It’s okay if you come in.”
Nate yanked the curtain shut with one hand as he unbuckled his belt with the other. Go, go, go!
Serena began to remove one of the suits from the hanger. Then she noticed Nate staring at her with his pants around his ankles.
Hello?
“Nate, what are you doing?” His brilliant green eyes glittered and his thin lips parted hungrily, like he hadn’t eaten lunch or something. She giggled and crossed her arms over her chest. “They don’t have cameras in these things, do they?”
As if either of them cared?
He grabbed her camisole and yanked it away from her body, ripping it entirely in half in the process. Serena dropped the suit on the dressing room floor and grabbed him back. For once, Nate wasn’t weeping into a fistful of soggy tissues. She wasn’t about to miss this opportunity.
Nate was eternally grateful that Serena was Serena and not Blair. Blair would have wanted to dissect his behavior. She would have wanted to make a fuss or have an argument, while Serena just flicked away the remains of her camisole and helped him off with his shirt. “You didn’t tell me you were all hot and bothered.”
Slightly.
Nate grabbed the other pristine white satin Oscar suits off their hooks and scattered them at their feet. “Remember when we were in the tub at my house, the summer before tenth grade?” he told her urgently, pressing his lips against her neck.
Serena blushed again. How could she forget? It had been their third time. When they were both still counting.
“Let’s do the same thing again,” Nate practically shouted. “Pretend all these white dresses are the bubbles!”
Whoa. Who ever said boys lack imagination?
“Yes!”
&nbs
p; “Oh, yes!”
“Found something you like, dear?” Joan, ever the helpful Bergdorf sales matron, poked her gray head through the opening in the thick velvet curtain. She stared at the confusion of tanned, writhing limbs and white satin on the floor of the dressing room and then quickly withdrew, popping a few blood pressure pills before attending to a new shipment of Missoni sweaters. That sort of vulgar behavior was completely unladylike and therefore completely un-Bergdorf’s, but there wasn’t much she could do. Serena van der Woodsen had opened a Bergdorf’s charge account when she was seven and had been a loyal customer ever since. And of course it was nice to see that she was so comfortable in the store.
Nate began to cry as soon as it was over. The Viagra had worn off just in time. “I just can’t believe you’re going to be wearing one of these,” he murmured, extracting the skirt to one of the suits from underneath his bare ass.
“Well, I haven’t even tried it on yet.” Serena let her head fall back, closing her enormous dark blue eyes as Nate pressed his soggy cheek into her hair. It was sweet and sort of feminine of him to cry after they’d done it, and she suddenly realized she was the stronger, more “masculine” one in their relationship. At least they’d finally done it. Now they were more authentically a couple.
That’s some couple.
“I already have this yellow Tocca dress I really like, anyway. Maybe I could bleach it or something,” she continued distractedly.
Then Nate’s mind began to wander, too, to his final history term paper.
Talk about multitasking!
He was writing about the origins of lacrosse, but would his history teacher, Mr. Knoeder, aka Mr. No Dick, think it was un-PC or whatever to write about an old Native American sport without really dealing with the politics of how the Indians had been treated in colonial times and all that? After all, Nate was going to Yale next year to play lacrosse, not to become some kind of lacrosse historian.
Obviously.
He propped himself up on one elbow and tugged a tissue out of his navy blue canvas Jack Spade book bag. He’d grown accustomed to carrying tissues.
Nothing Can Keep Us Together Page 8
