You're the One That I Want (10 page)

"Absolutely not," Rufus retorted. "Who will drink all the orange juice before I even get up in the morning? Who will fill up the butter compartment of the fridge with nail polish? Who will bleach my black socks pink?"

Jenny rolled her eyes. Her dad would be really lonely all by himself. And she didn't really want to live with Dan and Vanessa anyway. Not when they were practically married and everything. It would be way too weird.

All of a sudden Vanessa felt horribly guilty for taking Dan away from Rufus when Dan's mother had already left years ago to live in Prague with some baron or something. "We'll come over for dinner on weekends," she offered lamely. "Or you guys could come over and cook. Ruby has lots of great cooking stuff. Someone better teach me how to use it."

Rufus brightened. "We can have cooking tutorials!"

Vanessa fiddled with her camera lens, trying to get Rufus into the picture. "Mr. Humphrey, do you mind if I ask you some questions?" she asked.

Rufus sat down on the floor and pulled Jenny down next to him. "We love the attention!" he said and pinched his daughter in the side.

"Dad," Jenny whined, crossing her arms over her chest even though she was wearing the sweatshirt.

"So, how does it feel to have a son old enough to be going to college and moving out?" Vanessa asked.

Rufus tugged on his wiry, untamed salt-and-pepper beard. He was smiling, but his brown eyes were liquid and sad-looking. "If you ask me, he should have moved out a long time ago. American families spoil their kids. They should start school as soon as they can hold their heads up, and they should be out of the house by fourteen." He pinched Jenny's side again. "Right about when they start acting resentful toward their fathers."

"Dad," Jenny whined again. Then she brightened. "Hey, does this mean I can have Dan's room? It's like twice the size of mine."

Rufus frowned. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves," he grumbled. "He still needs a room." He cocked a wild eye-brow at Vanessa. "You might kick him out. He might even get kicked out of college!"

"But you just said--" Jenny started, and then stopped. Her father was always contradicting himself. She should have been used to it by now. "Anyway, once I get some modeling money, I can redecorate this room," she added.

Rufus rolled his eyes dramatically for the sake of the cam-era and Jenny punched him in the arm. Then Dan appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a Kelly green Lacoste polo shirt that his mother had sent him a few years ago. It was about three sizes too small and made him look like a golf-playing dweeb on crack.

"That shirt stays here," Vanessa ordered.

Dan chuckled, pulled the shirt off over his head, and tossed it into Jenny's trash basket.

"Hey," Jenny whined. "Use your own trash can."

"It's just a shirt. You can handle it," Dan growled back.

Then Jenny burst into a fit of giggles. Dan thought he was such a stud because he'd had a poem published in The New Yorker and had gotten into all those colleges, but without a shirt on he looked really puny, and wasn't it sort of lame that he did absolutely everything Vanessa told him to without question?

"I'll really miss you, Dan," Jenny sighed with pretend dolefulness.

Rufus pulled a packet of mini cigars out of his back pocket and passed them out to everyone without any explanation. Then he lit his and began to puff away. "Maybe it's for the best," he sighed.

Vanessa turned off her camera and rolled her unlit cigar around between her lips. It was hard not to feel guilty when Rufus looked so sad, but then again, she couldn't wait to have Dan all to herself, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Her eyes were riveted on his pale, bony chest. It was the chest of a tortured artist. Her man.

"Ready to go?" she asked, grinning at him excitedly.

Dan grinned back. He still hadn't come down from his happy high, and he wasn't planning to anytime soon. "Ready," he responded gamely.

Let's just hope he packed some other shirts. gossipgirl.co.uk

topics previous next post a question reply Disclaimer: All the real names of places, people, and events have been altered or abbreviated to protect the innocent. Namely, me.

HEY, PEOPLE!

Annoying Girl

You know who I mean. The one who thinks she's gorgeous and smart and every boy is in love with her. She shouts, "Me, me, me!" and waves her hand in the air whenever the teacher asks a question. She's the most self-righteous person in the room, but she's insecure about appearing too self-righteous, so she giggles a lot and acts stu-pid to hide her supposed genius. And she's the loudest, messiest drunk you've ever seen. Without her friends, she'd pass out in a pud-dle of sick on the bathroom floor or wind up going home with some sleazy older guy. But her friends always seem to take pity on her, and the next day she's bouncier than ever, smiling like nothing happened.

The thing about Annoying Girl is, whether we like it or not, we all have a little bit of her in us. That's why we love to hate her so much. She's our worst nightmare. I mean, how many times have you wanted to wave your hand in the air when you knew the answer, only stopping yourself because you didn't want to look like an idiot? And how many times have you wanted to just sit down in a boy's lap and start kiss-ing him but didn't for fear he'd laugh in your face? In a way, Annoying Girl is us minus the insecurity. She's so fine with herself you want to slap her. But you also secretly wish you could be that obnoxious with-out any concern for what other people might think. Face it, people will always find reasons to hate us, especially if we're beautiful.

Though there is one particular blond girl who seems unable to do wrong. Not only did she get into every impossible-to-get-into college she applied to, she's already got all the guys at each of those schools lining up to talk to her.

Your e-mail

Dear GG,

I heard there's this whole forgery scandal going on. Like you can pay someone to make you totally convincing acceptance letters to like, Princeton, or wherever, and there's nothing the schools can do about it because they are so real.

--wiz

Dear wiz,

You can buy anything these days, but if you weren't a good enough student to get into a school as hard as Princeton on your own merits, would you really want to fake it? I mean, even-tually you might have to do some work! --GG

Sightings

This just in: S and geeky-but-cute glasses-wearing Harvard boy feed-ing each other French fries in one of the Harvard dining halls. She's got her college selection criteria straight. Cute boys, check. Decent fries, check. B hanging with her new homegirls in a karaoke bar in Georgetown. She really is having a nervous breakdown! N doing some private drills with the leggy blond who coaches Yale's lacrosse team. Nudge, nudge. As if he didn't already have enough secrets from B. Little J in that hole-in-the-wall bra shop in the Village where they take one look at you and tell you you're a totally different size than you thought. In her case, an E-cup! V and D in Williamsburg, grocery shopping together. Actually, they were fighting over whether to get spaghetti or a more interestingly shaped pasta--yup, married already.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I'm thinking of putting on a tracksuit and pretending to be a lacrosse coach. Who knows, I may get lucky!

Be good. You know I won't be.

You know you love me,

gossip girl thirty seconds of true love

Serena held Drew's cheeks in her hands and blew steam into the lenses of his glasses. Then she rubbed it off with the tip of her perfectly shaped nose. "Promise me you'll come to New York?"

She'd spent the entire afternoon sitting right next to Drew in the pit during orchestra practice. The conductor had even let her play the timpani and the bells! Of course, she could hardly keep time watching Drew play xylophone. The way he closed his eyes and pursed his lips and tapped his feet as he played was beyond adorable. After practice he'd bought her a cappuccino in the coffee house, and they'd started to share a brownie. But by then Serena was so smitten she'd had to drag Drew back to his dorm room for a private xylophone lesson. Uh-huh.

Not that she'd gotten him out of his neatly pressed J. Crew cords--he wasn't that kind of boy--but he definitely knew how to kiss. Now they lay entwined on his narrow bed, their clothes all rumpled and their hair matted to their heads. Serena wanted to stay that way for the rest of the weekend; unfortunately, she had to go.

Drew took off his glasses and cleaned them on his pillowcase.

He put them back on and cleared his throat. "So, do you think l decide to go here in the fall?"

"Definitely," Serena breathed. She nuzzled her head into his chest. "I don't know how I'm going to make it until then without you."

There were only two weeks left of Drew's sophomore year. I hen he was off to Mozambique for the summer to study percussion.

Drew kissed her hair. "I'll come down and visit before I ho, and I'll write every day while I'm gone."

Aw.

Serena closed her eyes and kissed him for a long, long lime. It was dinnertime and the dorm was quiet. Then, all of a sudden, voices resounded in the hall outside as people returned to their rooms to do whatever it was people did after dinner at college--study, flirt with the hottie down the hall, study, hook up with the hottie down the hall, pretend to study, make cosmos, play strip poker, order pizza.

The door opened and Drew pulled away from her.

A redheaded boy wearing a red baseball hat and black basketball shorts stood in the doorway. "Hey. S'happening?" he said in a strong Massachusetts accent.

"Wade, Serena. Serena, my roommate Wade. Serena is from New York. She's on her way down to Brown," Drew explained, looking flustered.

Serena sat up and wiped her mouth.

"Just stopped by to check out Harvard," Wade observed in a mocking tone. "Guess you liked it okay."

Serena blushed even harder. She swung her feet to the floor and slipped them into her brown suede Calvin Klein flats. "I better go. My driver's been waiting for over an hour." "I'll walk you," Drew offered. As soon as they were out of the room and walking down the hall to the exit doors, Drew gave Serena's hand a little squeeze. "For the past two years Wade has given me shit about not having a girlfriend. I don't think he expected to see me with someone so . . ." He faltered and bit his lip, as if embarrassed by the stream of adjectives that was about to pour out of his mouth.

Mouthwateringly hot? Supremely bodacious? Superbly succulent? Female?

Serena grinned up at him as he held the door open for her, her cheeks pink with the rush of love. Drew didn't have to finish his sentence. She knew how he felt, because she felt exactly the same way about him.

A gray Lincoln town car was waiting at the bottom of the steps, ready to whisk her off to Providence. She wrapped her arms around Drew's neck, pressed her cheek against his, and inhaled in an attempt to absorb as much of him as possible. "I love you," she whispered in his ear before pulling away and running down the steps and into the car.

Drew raised his hand to wave good-bye and the car pulled away, leaving Serena smiling and crying and happier than she had felt in a long, long time. At long last she'd found true love.

A love that would last for at least thirty seconds.

blearnssomethingatcollege

"Okay, so you want to hear something totally gross?" Forest, one of Rebecca's Georgetown roommates, asked the group.

Blair was seated around a table with Rebecca and her three roommates in the back of Moni Moni, a cheesy Georgetown karaoke bar. A tour bus full of nerdy-looking Hungarian men in tracksuits monopolized the karaoke machine, putting everything they had into "Staying Alive" by the Bee Gees. Blair and the other girls were drinking green kiwi-flavored frozen cocktails called Kiwi the Snowman while they pretended not to notice how obnoxious the so-called music was. The drinks were ridiculously strong, and they were having trouble stringing sentences together.

"I'm sure you're going to tell us, even if we don't want to know," Gaynor replied. Gaynor had black hair streaked with blond and a nose that was so severely pugged, Blair could see straight up it.

Not that she was really looking.

"Will you just tell us already?" Rebecca whined.

"Okay," Forest said slowly. She lit a cigarette and paused dramatically. Forest was Korean-American and had bleached-blond hair that would have looked so much better if she just le it be brown.

Not that Blair cared enough to say anything.

"So you know how Georgetown is supposed to be all about brotherly love and there are no fraternities and every-thing is supposed to be all uncompetitive and all? Well, I just found out that there's this underground lacrosse fraternity, and for orientation the older boys make the younger boys eat a cracker with their jizz on it. It's like this whole ritual thing. And if you, like, don't eat the cracker, you don't get on the team."

Everyone made a face, including Blair. Sometimes boys were just. . . gross. Except for Nate, who would never ever do anything remotely that disgusting.

"You're from New York City?" Fran piped up. Fran was only four-foot-eleven, weighed about eighty pounds, and spoke in a breathy whisper. Her skin was so transparent, Blair thought she could actually see Kiwi the Snowman pumping through her veins. "I've only been there once. I got food poi-soning at a sushi restaurant and spent the whole week puking."

"As if you don't puke enough already," Forest quipped, suggesting that Fran's diminutive size was self-imposed.

"Do you know that guy Chuck Bass?" Gaynor asked Blair.

Blair nodded. Everyone knew Chuck, whether they liked it or not.

"Is it true he didn't get in anywhere?" Rebecca asked, crunching ice between her slightly bucked teeth.

"That seriously bites," Forest said, without a hint of sym-pathy.

Silently, Blair gulped of her drink. Since Georgetown was looking less and less appealing and she basically had no other options, she could almost sympathize with Chuck.

"Do you know Jessica Ward?" Rebecca asked. "She came here for a term and then transferred to BU?"