You're the One That I Want (15 page)

Since 1764? Wow, he is old!

"I heard she stole the Audrey Hepburn screenplay Blair wrote for Yale. That's how she got in. Blair found out and now they're, like, total enemies again."

Being the subject of such outrageous tales was nothing new to Serena. Her mysterious return to Constance that fall after almost two years away at boarding school had turned her into a veteran of half-truths and petty gossip. She knew the best way to handle it, too: ignore it.

All of a sudden her cell phone buzzed and vibrated in her pink canvas Lulu Guinness rucksack. She took a peek and recognized Nate's number. "Hey," she whispered, holding the plume to her ear, behind her giant chemistry textbook. "Did you hear about Blair's mom?"

"That's why I'm calling," Nate replied. "What happened?"

Serena wasn't the type to tell tall tales. "I'm not sure. All I really know is Blair went to a meeting with the headmistress and her mom, and then all of a sudden she and her mom were, like, running into a car outside school. The receptionist (old some girls in our class she was in labor and the car was headed for Lenox Hill."

"Jesus," Nate muttered.

"I know," Serena responded. "She wasn't supposed to have it until June."

"Do you think we should go to the hospital? Like maybe tomorrow or something? We could bring flowers and--

"I don't know," she answered doubtfully, although she cer-tainly had a lot of flowers to recycle. "It's kind of a private family thing. We may not be welcome."

Actually, Blair's mom had always treated them like family. Blair was the one who wouldn't welcome them, and they both knew it.

"Yeah," Nate agreed. "You're probably right. I guess I just . . ." His voice drifted off.

"I know," Serena said softly.

They both wished they were a threesome all over again, there for one another in times like this. Too bad Blair was mad as fuck at them.

"The crazy thing is, I'm kind of leaning toward going to Yale," Nate admitted. "Blair's going to kill me."

Serena stared out the window. A dog walker led twenty dogs at once down the street toward Central Park, his head tilted back, singing at the top of his lungs.

"I'm kind of leaning toward Yale, too," she said, even though she wasn't completely convinced. Drew, Christian, or Lars? How would she ever decide? "Or maybe I should just take a year off."

"We could all wind up at Yale together," Nate mused.

Now that would be something.

"Maybe," Serena agreed. The library felt incredibly still all of a sudden. She peeked over her textbook to see what was up, and forty pairs of eyes glanced quickly away. The entire room had been eavesdropping on her conversation.

Well, it served her right for talking on the phone in the library, which we all know is against school policy.

"I better go," she told Nate quickly. "Bell's gonna ring any minute."

"Hey," Nate said before she could hang up, "is that girl with the shaved head still interviewing people in the park?"

"I think so," Serena replied.

"Cool," he answered, sounding distracted. "Later," he abided, before clicking off.

Serena popped her textbook closed. Maybe she could press some of the flowers she'd been sent inside that very book and use them to make Blair's mom a cute card or something.

Nate tucked his phone back into his pocket and shot upstairs from the locker area, on his way to the local florist to send Blair's mom some flowers. Just in time, he remem-bered why he'd been hunkered down in the locker area in the first place. Brigid was still camped out up there, waiting for him.

He swung around and walked slowly back downstairs again as he dialed 411. Blair had always talked about how when they had an apartment together she would order flowers from Takashimaya three times a week. She was pretty fussy about flowers. He got the number and punched it in.

"I'd like to send flowers to a patient at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan," Nate told the woman on the other line.

Jeremy tripped down the stairs behind him. "Nice," he noted, handing Nate a brown paper bag and a handful of change. "Just put, 'Love, comma, Nate,' on the card," Nate instructed. Nice. 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!

NY Times birth announcement

I did their wedding announcement, and now it's only ... ahem, five months later, and I'm doing the birth announcement. Here goes:

Yale Jemimah Doris Rose, daughter. Due in early June, the little munchkin just couldn't wait. Instead, she decided to be born at Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at 2:17 p.m., April 20--yesterday. Total labor time: forty-five minutes. Weight: eight pounds, nine ounces. Height: nineteen inches. If she'd waited any longer, she'd have been a Big Mac instead of just a Whopper Jr. The glowing parents are Eleanor Wheaton Waldorf Rose, society hostess, and Cyrus Solomon Rose, real estate developer, of East Seventy-second Street. Siblings are Aaron Elihue Rose, 17; Tyler Hugh Waldorf -/Rose, 12; and Blair Cornelia Waldorf, 17, who is responsible for the baby's unusual first name. Blair is obviously hoping her new baby sister will bring her luck at the university of the same name--heaven knows she could use some. Mother and child are doing fine, and the happy family will be returning to their penthouse tomorrow afternoon.

Your e-mail

Dear GG,

Last night I found my older brother reading my Treat magazine in bed. I got it back from him, but he showed me the page he was all into. It's this girl in my class at Constance in a jog bra that's way too small for her standing there with all these other models, like in boob-size order. My brother asked if he could rip it out and put it in his locker. I told him no, but I think he's going to buy the magazine and do it anyway. If I was that girl, I'd die

--phoenix

Dear phoenix,

Let's hope for your classmate's sake that your brother doesn't have a lot of friends.

--GG

Sightings

A whole group of Constance Billard seniors in the Wicker Garden on Madison Avenue, cooing over baby gifts. Any excuse to shop. J and E accidentally getting on the same crosstown bus and ignoring each other the whole ride. Still mad, huh? V getting purple highlights at a Williamsburg hair salon. Wait, how can she get highlights when she has no hair?! N creeping out of the St. Jude's School for Boys after even the janitor had left. Boy, is he paranoid. B in Zitomer on Madison buying diapers and a three-hundred-dollar cashmere baby romper. Guess who's going to be that little girl's favorite big sister? S walking through the park, giving flowers away to the homeless. It's the thought that counts.

I'm off to the local newsstand to check out that mag!

You know you love me,

gossip girl size matters

Dan walked into first-period English on Tuesday to find every guy in his class poring over some teen girl magazine.

"What people don't realize is they look even bigger in per-son," Chuck Bass, Dan's least favorite person at Riverside Prep and perhaps the world, observed from his usual place in the back of the classroom. Chuck was wearing the army green military-style beret he'd picked up at West Point that weekend. It was his favorite new accessory besides his pet snow monkey, which he carried with him everywhere, even to .the bathroom. Chuck looked up. "Am I right?"

Dan had the uneasy feeling that Chuck was talking to him. "It's like they're full of helium or something," another boy added, leaning over Chuck's desk to see.

Chuck shook his head. His dark hair had grown into a sort of chin-length man-bob that he swished around with obvious pride. "Dude, if they were full of helium, she'd fucking float away." He squinted down at the magazine again, his gold monogrammed pinky ring glowing beneath the harsh class-room lights. Then he looked up at Dan again. "Dude, she's your sister. What's her fucking deal?"

Dan's instinct was to tell Chuck to go fuck himself, but since it involved his little sister, Jenny, who often blundered into all kinds of trouble, he felt he ought to check it out for himself. He sat down on the desk in front of Chuck's and put in loot up on the chair. On the floor, something wriggled inside Chuck's orange Prada messenger bag. Suddenly a white head with eyes like golden marbles popped out. It was Chuck's monkey, grinning devilishly.

Han glared at Chuck. "What about my sister?"

Chuck smirked and handed over the magazine. "Don't tell me you don't know about this."

The magazine was open to a two-page spread entitled "Does Breast Size Matter?" The article was an earnest discussion of girls' social status based on breast size. Apparently if you were flat-chested or supersized, you were more likely to be ostracized. II you were buxom but not hideously so, you were a slut. Popular girls tended to have nice, medium-sized 34Bs. Dan studied the picture. Jenny and five other girls wearing matching blue jog bras and Lycra shorts were lined up in breast-size tinier, biggest to smallest, in front of a volleyball net. The other girls were all models--blond, with cheesily perfect smiles, flat tummies, and golden tans. The girl next to Jenny definitely had implants, but her chest still wasn't as big as Jenny's one hundred percent naturals. Jenny's chest looked abnormal and almost freakish, stuffed inside a jog bra that was way too small. Worse still, she was sticking out her tongue and her big brown eyes were shining, like she was having the time of her life.

"Christ," Dan muttered, and tossed the magazine back on Chuck's desk, his hands beginning to sweat and shake as I hey always did when he needed a cigarette. He knew the article was intended to empower girls with big chests. There was Jenny, looking freakish but proud of it. But that wouldn't stop every guy who saw the picture from ripping it out and writing some lewd comment underneath it before pasting it on the door of a bathroom stall.

"Says here eight out often guys prefer a gorgeous girl with average-size breasts over an average girl with supersize tits," Chuck elaborated.

Thanks, Captain Asshole, sir.

It was pretty obvious to Dan that his sister was so eager to be a model, she hadn't thought about what the picture would actually look like. Still, not long ago, a very compromising picture of Jenny had been posted all over the Internet. People had talked about it for a day or two, and then it had gone away. And Jenny had never even seemed that bothered by it. She was like Mr. Magoo, running blindly into the most embarrassing, awkward situations, and then walking out of them, unscathed and blaming nobody. Hopefully this would be the same, but just in case, Dan felt obliged to warn her.

Jenny sat by herself near the mirrored wall in the back of the Constance Billard basement cafeteria, eating a grilled cheese sandwich with pickle slices. She concentrated on neatly lining the pickles up on top of the toasted bread, trying to pretend that she didn't mind eating alone. There was a strange stillness in the air that she couldn't quite explain, but every time she glanced up at the mirrors, all she saw were the heads of the other upper-school girls, bowed over their plates, eating quietly.

Right. Since when did upper-school girls ever eat quietly? As a matter of fact, the room was buzzing, buzzing with the sound of that morning's juiciest scoop.

"I heard she didn't even get paid to do it--she volun-teered," Vicky Reinerson whispered.

"But Serena put her up to it, remember? In peer group?"

Mary Goldberg hissed. "She was like, 'Oh, Jenny, anyone can he a supermodel.'"

"Easy for her to say," Cassie Inwirth agreed. "But it's not like I feel sorry for Jenny. It's so obvious she just wants atten-tion."

"Yeah, but nobody wants that kind of attention," Vicky Countered.

The three girls stole a glance at the back of Jenny's head. I low could she just sit there eating her lunch like nothing was wrong?

Jenny's cell phone rang quietly inside her bag. "Hey," she answered without even checking who'd called. Dan and Elise wore the only ones who ever did anyway, and she and Elise were no longer friends. She tucked the phone under her curly brown bob to hide it from the lunch ladies. "What's up?"

"I'm just calling to check that you're okay," Dan mumbled back.

Jenny stared at her reflection in the mirror. She'd worn pink metal barrettes in her hair today, and she thought she looked sort of retro and cool. "Um, I think so."

"So no one's, like, said anything to you or ...," Dan faltered.

"About what? Why, did you do something weird, Dan?" Jenny accused.

"About the photo of you in that magazine? The guys here all stole it from their sisters. They're putting it up in their lockers and stuff."

A little shiver shot up Jenny's spine. Dan wouldn't be so concerned if the picture was as good as she thought it was. "Did you see it? What's wrong with it?"

He didn't respond.

"Dan!" Jenny practically shouted. "What's wrong with it?"

"It's just. . .," Dan fumbled. "Okay, the whole thing is about how girls with no chest or really big chests aren't popular. I guess the article is supposed to make you feel better, but you kind of look like a... circus freak next to the other girls. I mean, they basically made you look as big and freakish as possible."

Jenny slid the tray of food away and rested her head on the cold wooden table. No wonder the room seemed so quiet. Everyone had been busy whispering about her, the big-boobed freak.

Yup.

It was even worse than a Stayfree ad. She was the circus freak. Maybe she should just run away and live with her neu-rotic mom in Europe or something. Change her name. Dye her hair orange.

"Jenny?" Dan said gently. "I'm sorry."

"Never mind," Jenny said miserably, and clicked off. She kept her head on the table, wishing she could just disappear.

All of a sudden she felt a warm body next to hers and smelled Serena's trademark signature essential-oil mixture.

"Hey sleepyhead. So, Jonathan Joyce--you know who he |s, right?--calls me, like, all excited about your Polaroids. He knows we're pals and totally wants to shoot us together, like, later this week!"