Love the One You're With
Gossip Girl novels created by Cecily von Ziegesar:
Gossip Girl
You Know You Love Me
All I Want Is Everything
Because I’m Worth It
I Like It Like That
You’re The One That I Want
Nobody Does It Better
Nothing Can Keep Us Together
Only In Your Dreams
Would I Lie To You
Don’t You Forget About Me
It Had To Be You
The Carlyles
You Just Can’t Get Enough
Take A Chance On Me
Love The One You’re With
If you like
gossip girl
, you may also enjoy:
The Poseur series by Rachel Maude
The Secrets of My Hollywood Life series by Jen Calonita
Betwixt by Tara Bray Smith
Haters by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Footfree and Fancyloose by Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain
Copyright © 2009 by Alloy Entertainment
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Poppy
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue,
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
Poppy is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company.
The Poppy name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
First eBook Edition: October 2009
The characters, events, and locations in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-07161-1
Contents
for r, it’s all about the essentials
the one time you want to get busy on vacation
a’s certainly not getting married today
tortured romance isn’t as fun as it seems
a certain british girl is hungry like the wolf
does b believe in something that she’s never seen before?
everything comes out in the wash
A Preview of
I will always love you
make new friends, but keep the old…
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if
they cannot find it.
—Charlotte Brontë,
Jane Eyre
It’s November, the time of year when fall drifts to winter and we all start wrapping our cashmere sweaters more tightly around us and thinking about the holidays. In New York, we allow the tourists to enjoy the city, whether they’re wobbling around Wollman Rink wearing their blindingly bright puffer jackets or gawking at a larger-than-life SpongeBob SquarePants balloon during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It’s cold, it’s dark, but the windows in Bergdorf’s are sparklier than the Marni dresses inside, and all of us Manhattan natives are just itching to celebrate the season in style.
the one thing in our way
Thanksgiving. Who’d have thought a holiday all about gratitude (my short list: sample sales, Corner Bakery coffee, St. Jude’s swim team boys running in Central Park without shirts) would have evolved into a four-day calorie-fest all about forced bonding with strange relatives? Luckily, many New Yorkers avoid the awkwardness by heading out of town for the holidays. And who can blame them? Why listen to your drunk uncle drone on about his glory days when you could wear your slinkiest, sexiest Malia Mills string bikini on the beach or your new fur-trimmed boots on the slopes?
So take my advice: Find out who’s going AWOL for the holidays, and make sure you get invited along!
sightings
A
and
J
sharing a dressing room at Barneys, trying on Stella McCartney dresses. They’ve gone from bitches to besties in the time it takes most people to lose their late-summer tans….
J
, later, at a playground on Bleecker Street, with her on-again boyfriend
J.P.
and two freckly-faced toddlers. Babysitting, or an early visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future?…
R
,
O
, and the rest of the swim team guys, drinking pitchers at one of those sticky-floored dives on Second that don’t card, ignoring the pack of cougars surrounding them…. Lastly,
B
and her best friend, the pierced, tattooed
S
, taking photos in Brooklyn. They’re certainly taking
Rancor
seriously!
your e-mail
q:
Dear Gossip Girl,
What’s going on for T-Day? You’re totally invited to my house. ’Rents are out of town. Suh-weet!
—ponyparty
a:
Dear PP,
While that sounds delightful, I plan to spend my holidays hanging out with people I actually know. But enjoy the free house!
—GG
q:
Dear Gossip Girl,
So, I’m, like, super in love with one of the St. Jude’s swim team guys, but they’re
always
hanging out together and I feel sort of weird just approaching him in front of all the guys. What should I do?
—swimfan
a:
Dear SF,
A hint: Guys are like wildebeests, always traveling in packs for protection and more scared of you than you are of them. They’re not nearly so frightening close-up. Try hunting one down on his own and see what happens.
—GG
Just thought of a few more things to add to my list of things to be thankful for: Hot boys, tiny Missoni bikinis, and islands with no drinking age. That’s right, I’m joining the legions of New Yorkers getting out of town. Where, you ask? Wouldn’t you like to know? But don’t pout. You should be thankful that no matter where I am, I’ll be keeping track of what anyone who’s anyone is doing—on this island
and
any other island worth visiting.
You know you love me,
gossip girl
“So, what’s up for Thanksgiving? What does your family usually do?” Avery Carlyle asked her friends Jack Laurent and Jiffy Bennett. They were wedged into a cozy leather booth at Amaranth, the café popular with any socialite who needed a cappuccino or a vodka gimlet as a post-Barneys perk-up. It was exactly the type of place Avery had always imagined hanging out in New York.
“Any parties going on?” she continued hopefully, sipping her cappuccino.
In truth, Avery could have done without Thanksgiving. It was just a four-day interruption of her life, which already had everything she could possibly be thankful for.
Well, almost everything.
In September, when she left her childhood home in Nantucket and began her junior year at the ultra-exclusive Constance Billard School for Girls, it seemed like Avery was destined to be one of those unfortunate girls who spend the entire lunch period in the library because they have nowhere else to go. To start with, she and Jack had taken an immediate dislike to each other after fighting over a limited-edition Givenchy satchel at Barneys the day before school began. Tensions quickly escalated until they were outright enemies at Constance Billard, and Avery was completely ostracized by her classmates. Then when Avery scored a coveted internship at
Metropolitan
magazine and was asked to rat out Jack’s secrets to a pushy gossip reporter, she’d proved to herself and her Upper East Side peers that she was better than that. She’d finally won them over.
Now she and Jack were friends, and for the past month Avery had
finally
been living the New York City life she’d imagined, full of cocktail parties, gallery openings, and café dates like the one they were having now.
“God, I don’t even want to think about Thanksgiving. I have to go with my parents to Beatrice and Deptford’s house in Greenwich. If Deptford doesn’t die first, that is.” Jiffy shrugged as she shoved a slice of avocado in her mouth. She was a petite pug-nosed girl with long bangs that fell over her brown eyes, and five stubborn pounds that kept her from fitting into her older sister Beatrice’s discarded couture. Beatrice was thirty-two, a constant fixture on the society circuit, and had her own column in
Page Six
magazine, where she overshared details about her marriage to her seventy-five-year-old fiancé.
As if we really want to know.
“I’ll be in hell with the stepbrats.” Jack stabbed her napoleon pastry with a fork. The chocolate crumbled on the delicate white plate in a cloud of cocoa powder.
“It can’t be that bad, right? I mean, at least they have a nanny,” Avery offered, eyeing her friend. Jack was always beautiful, but lately, she’d had shadows under her eyes that even La Mer under-eye cream couldn’t hide.
Jack’s life was sort of like an H&M dress: From far away, it looked really fashionable and put together. Not only did Jack actually make bitchiness and vanity seem like character attributes, but she was practically a professional ballerina and was dating J. P. Cashman, the son of one of the wealthiest real-estate moguls in the world and a genuinely nice guy. But up close, Jack’s life was basically coming apart at the seams, particularly her home life. Her mom was a French former ballerina who was currently filming a reality show in Paris, and Jack was now living with—and serving as an unpaid babysitter to—her dad, stepmom, and two stepsisters in her dad’s West Village town house.
“Hey gorgeous!”
Avery looked up, even though she automatically knew it was J.P., there to pick up Jack. He was the only guy Avery knew who could use the word
gorgeous
and not sound totally lame or totally gay.
An important quality in a boyfriend.
J.P. plopped down on the empty chair next to Jack. He had brown hair and brown eyes, and was wearing a black wool overcoat and black dress pants. He looked like a young stockbroker rather than a Riverside Prep junior. “So, what are you guys up to?” he asked conversationally, his fingers playing in Jack’s auburn hair.
“J.P.!” Jack’s tone was playful, but she batted his hand away and carefully hooked her auburn hair behind her ears.
“Discussing Thanksgiving plans.” Avery smiled shyly. Even though she was happy J.P. and Jack were back together, she always felt a pang of loneliness when she saw such a cute couple. Why couldn’t
she
find someone who loved her like that?
“We were actually just heading out,” Jack said, already scraping back her chair. She rifled through her mist gray leather Chloé wallet and tossed her AmEx on the table. Instantly, a white-shirted waiter picked it up.
“Sure.” Avery glanced at her reflection in the gold mirror above the bar and pulled a black-and-white checkered wool Marc Jacobs hat over the tips of her ears. Even though it was only November, the temperature had been freezing, and the weather reports had been forecasting snow all week.