Psycho Killer (14 page)

“Tell me you don’t care about Serena van der Woodsen being back,” Jenny challenged. She put a spoonful of meat in her mouth and sucked on it. Then she stuck her fingers in her mouth, pulled out a white piece of fat gristle, and wiped it on her plate. “You should see her,” she went on. “She looks so completely cool. It’s like she has this whole new look. I don’t mean her clothes. It’s her face. She looks older, but it’s not like wrinkles or anything. It’s like she’s Kate Moss or some model who’s like, died and come back to life. Like she’s totally
experienced
.”

Jenny waited for her brother to respond, but he just stared into his coffee cup.

“Don’t you even want to see her?” Jenny asked. “It’s too bad we didn’t try to get into her party instead of Blair’s.”

Dan remembered what he’d heard Chuck Bass say about Serena. That she was the sluttiest, druggiest, most venereally diseased girl in New York. That she’d maybe even murdered someone. And Jenny had just said she looked experienced. But Dan didn’t believe a word of it. It was all just a bunch of terrible lies and bullshit rumors. And the more he thought about it, the more he wanted to kill Chuck Bass for spreading them.

Life is fragile and absurd. Murdering someone’s not so hard
.

Dan pointed at the little pile of gristle on Jenny’s plate and wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“What’s wrong with it?” Jenny said. “I don’t like the fat, I just like the meat.”

Dan pushed his coffee away, careful not to slop any onto his script.

“Oh, be quiet, Mr. Anorexic,” Jenny sighed. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my question.”

Dan shrugged his scrawny shoulders.

Jenny put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “About Serena,” she said. “I know you want to see her.”

Dan scowled into his lap. “Whatever,” he mumbled.

“Yeah, whatever.” Jenny rolled her eyes. “Look, I know last night didn’t work out, but there’s this party a week from Friday—
Kiss Me or Die
? It’s like, a benefit to save the birds of prey that live in Central Park. Did you know there were vultures in Central Park? I didn’t. Anyway, Blair Waldorf is organizing it, and you know she and Serena are still sort of best friends, so of course Serena will be there.”

And most likely, if Serena was there, she would kill at least one person, or maybe even lots of people. And Jenny wanted to watch.

Dan kept reading his script, completely ignoring his sister. And Jenny went on, ignoring the fact that Dan was ignoring her. She was used to it, since Dan rarely said anything anyway.

“All we have to do is find a way to get into that party,” Jenny continued. She grabbed a paper napkin off the table, scrunched it into a ball, and threw it at her brother’s head. “Dan, please.
We’ll have more time to plan than we did last night. Come on. We have to go!”

Dan tossed the script aside and looked at his sister, his brown eyes serious and sad.

“Jenny,” he said, his voice hoarse from lack of use, “do you really want to get kicked out by another doorman? I don’t want to go to that party. Next Friday I’m supposed to hang out with Vanessa and watch her sister’s band. You can come if you want.”

Jenny kicked at the legs of her chair like a little girl, pouting her bloody, meat-stained lips. “But why, Dan? Why won’t you go to the party?”

Dan shook his head and refused to say anything else.

“Oh, shut up. You’re such a wimp! You drive me crazy,” Jenny huffed, rolling her eyes. She stood up and dumped her dishes in the sink, scrubbing at them furiously with a Brillo pad. Then she whirled around and put her hands on her hips. She wore a pink flannel nightshirt and her curly brown hair was sticking out all over because she had gone to sleep with it wet. She looked like a mini disgruntled housewife with boobs that were ten times too big for her body.

“I don’t care what you say. I’m going to that party!” she insisted.

“What party?” their father asked, appearing in the kitchen doorway.

If there were an award for the most embarrassing dad on the planet, Rufus Humphrey would have won it. He wore a sweat-stained white wifebeater and red checked boxer shorts, and was scratching his hairy belly. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and his gray beard seemed to be growing at different intervals. Some of
it was thick and long, but in between were bald areas and patches of five o’clock shadow. His curly gray hair was matted and his brown eyes bleary. There was a cigarette tucked behind each of his ears.

Jenny and Dan looked at their father for a moment in silence. Then Jenny sighed and turned back to the dishes. “Never mind.”

Dan smirked and leaned back in his chair. Their father hated the Upper East Side and all its pretensions. He only sent Jenny to Constance because it was a very good school and because he used to date one of the English teachers there. But he hated the idea that Jenny might be influenced by her classmates, or “those spoiled debutantes,” as he called them.

Dan knew their dad was going to love this. He tapped his foot on the floor expectantly.

“Dan won’t take me to this benefit I want to go to next week,” Jenny explained, still at the sink.

Mr. Humphrey pulled one of the cigarettes from behind his ear and stuck it in his mouth, playing with it between his lips. “A benefit for what?” he demanded.

Dan rocked his chair back and forth, a smug look on his face.

Jenny turned off the faucet and spun around to glare at him. “It’s a party to raise money for those poor vultures that live in Central Park.”

Dan snickered.

“Oh, shut up,” Jenny snapped, furious. “You think you know everything. It’s just a stupid party. I never said it was a great cause.”

“You call that a
cause
?” her father bellowed. “Shame on you. Those people only want those birds around because it makes them feel like they’re in the pretty
countryside
, like they’re at their houses in
Connecticut
or
Maine
. They’re probably going to build
birdhouse mansions for them or something. Like there aren’t thousands of homeless people that could use the money. Leave it to the leisure class to come up with some charity that does absolutely
no one
any good at all!”

Jenny leaned back against the kitchen counter, crossed her arms over her chest, and tuned her father out. She’d heard this tirade before. It didn’t change anything. She still wanted to go to that party. She was tired of always hearing about all the cool things the cool girls did the next day. She wanted to be part of the coolness. If blood was going to be spilled at the
Kiss Me or Die
party, she wanted to see it spill, live and in person.

“I just want to have some fun,” she retorted. “Why does it have to be such a big deal?”

“It’s a big deal because you’re going to get used to this silly debutante nonsense, and you’re going to wind up a big fake like your mother, who hangs around rich people all the time because she’s too scared to think for herself,” her father shouted, his unshaven face turning dark red. “Dammit, Jenny. You remind me more and more of your mother every day.”

Dan suddenly felt bad. Their mother had run off to Prague with a count or prince, and she was basically a kept woman, letting the count or prince or whatever he was dress her and put her up in castles all over Europe. All she did all day was shop, eat, drink, and go hunting with the prince. She wrote them letters a few times a year, paid for their schooling, and sent them the odd present. Last Christmas she’d sent them the taxidermied head of some pig-deer type rodent she’d shot and killed in Bavaria. It hung from a towel hook on the bathroom wall.

It wasn’t a nice thing for their father to say that Jenny reminded him of their mother. It wasn’t nice at all.

Jenny looked like she was about to cry.

“It’s okay, Dad,” Dan spoke up. “We weren’t invited anyway.”

“See what I mean!” Mr. Humphrey said triumphantly. “Why would you want to hang out with those snobs anyway? Besides, every time I look at the paper there’s a new murder, and they’re all on the Upper East Side. I don’t want you over there after dark. It’s too dangerous. You’re staying home.”

Jenny stared glassy-eyed at the dirty kitchen floor. She could see how Serena might find it easy to kill people. She herself could think of two people she would very much like to kill right now.

Dan stood up. “Get dressed, Jenny,” he said quietly. “I’ll walk you to your bus stop.”

Every Wednesday, Nate and Blair had grown accustomed to e-mailing each other a quick love note (okay, it was Blair’s idea), to help them get over the hump of the boring school week. Only two more days until the weekend, when they could spend as much time together as they wanted. Nate scanned the note without really reading it. Which hairs Blair chose to cut or wax didn’t concern him. In fact, he’d really rather not know. He liked to think she looked pretty without really trying. But that would be a different girl.

He scrolled through the other junk in his inbox and was thrilled to discover an e-mail from that girl.

“Hey, Archibald! Quit fucking with your phone!”

It was a sunny October day in Central Park. Out in Sheep Meadow lots of kids were cutting class, just lying in the grass, smoking, or playing Frisbee. The trees surrounding the meadow were a blaze of yellows, oranges, and reds, and beyond the trees loomed the beautiful old apartment buildings on Central Park West. A guy was selling weed, and Anthony Avuldsen had bought some to add to what Nate had picked up at the pizza parlor the day before at lunch.

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.