Because I'm Worth it (7 page)

Blair had gone to the hair salon without eating any lunch, and this little we-love-Aaron worshipfest was making her dizzy with disgust.
She
was the one who should have been opening
her
early acceptance letter, but after her botched interview Constance Billard’s college advisor had told her it was best not to apply early. Getting into Yale had been Blair’s sole mission in life—well, besides marrying Nate Archibald and living happily every after in the ivy-covered brick town house just off Fifth that she already had picked out—but now she’d have to wait until April along with all the rest of the morons in her class to find out if she’d even gotten in. It was completely unfair.

“Sorry, Blair.” Aaron sipped his champagne. He’d always been supersensitive about ruffling Blair’s feathers, but he was feeling too good about himself right now to bother. “I’m not going to apologize for getting in. I deserve this.”

As if the enormous new science wing his father’s development company built on campus last year had absolutely nothing to do with it.

“Fuck you,” Blair replied. “In case you forgot, I would be hearing from Yale right now if you hadn’t kept me up drinking shit beer and eating crappy junk food in that gross motel room the night before my interview.”

Aaron rolled his eyes. “I never told you to kiss your interviewer.”

Serena let out a little snort and Blair glared at her.

“Sorry,” Serena apologized quickly. “Come on, Blair,” she coaxed. “You’re, like, the best student in our class. You’re totally getting in. You just have to wait until April to find out.”

Blair kept on glaring at her. She didn’t want to wait until April. She wanted to know
now
.

Aaron lit another herbal cigarette and tilted his chin toward the ceiling to blow a few smoke rings. Already there seemed to be a sort of lazy, superior air about him, as if he knew he could just drink champagne all day for the rest of second semester and still go to Harvard. The fucker.

“Hey,” he yawned. “I have to head up to Scarsdale to practice with my band, but let’s go out later to celebrate.”

Serena stood up on the bed and did a few jumping jacks, as if she really needed the exercise. “Definitely.”

Blair watched Serena’s gorgeous hair fly up into the air above her head and then cascade prettily down onto her shoulders as Aaron blew more smoke rings. All of a sudden, Blair couldn’t stand to be in the same room with them. “I have homework to do,” she huffed, reaching up to feel her new hairdo as she turned to leave.

“Oh my God!” Serena cried, vaulting off of Aaron’s bed. “Wait, Blair—your
hair
!”

Nice of her to finally notice.

Blair stopped in the doorway and put a hand to where her dark hair fell in a clean line at the nape of her neck. “I like it,” she declared defensively.

Serena walked around her like she was one of those Greek marble statues on the main floor of the Met. “Oh my God!” she repeated and reached out to tuck a flyaway hair behind

Blair’s ear. “I
love
it!” she exclaimed, a little too enthusiastically.

Blair wrinkled her pert nose suspiciously. Did Serena really love it, or was she just being fake? It was always so hard to tell.

“You look exactly like Audrey Hepburn,” Aaron remarked from the bed.

Blair knew he was only saying what she wanted to hear to make up for being such a smug asshole about getting into Harvard. She thought about mentioning her Yale alum interview with Owen Wells on Thursday night but decided to keep the interview to herself. “Excuse me,” she told them coldly. “I have stuff to do.”

Serena watched Blair leave and then climbed back onto the bed beside Aaron. She picked up the letter from Harvard and folded it up, carefully tucking it inside the envelope again. “I’m so proud of you,” she murmured, falling into Aaron’s arms and kissing him.

Eventually Aaron pulled away, but Serena kept her eyes closed, licking the sweet herbal aftertaste of his kiss from her lips. “I love you,” she heard herself say. The words seemed to have just fallen out of her mouth. She opened her eyes dreamily.

Aaron had never told a girl he loved her, and he hadn’t planned to say it to Serena, at least not right away. But it had already been an amazing day, and she was so completely gorgeous with her cheeks all flushed and her perfect mouth all red from kissing. Why not? It was like the end of one of his secret cheesy rock-star fantasies, where he and some incredibly hot girl roared off into the sunset together on a kick-ass Harley.

“I love you, too,” he said back, and kissed her again.

Disclaimer: All the real names of places, people, and events have been altered or abbreviated to protect the innocent. Namely, me.

hey people!

Aren’t we special?

So the rumor floating around about the Ivies not accepting anyone early this year turned out to be totally false. Hooray—some of us got in! I know we’re feeling pretty special, but if we start partying like it’s 2099, drinking champagne before homeroom and cutting half our classes, we’re going to wind up with only each other to party with, because all our other friends are going to hate our guts. Try to keep it to yourselves if you can, at least until April when the rest of the class finds out where they’re going. It’s for your own good, I promise.

The
L
word

With Valentine’s Day less than a week away, love is in the air
everywhere
. It’s on the tips of our tongues. It’s what we’re thinking about before we fall asleep. We catch ourselves and our neighbors doodling corny hearts in math class. But just because the world has turned into one gigantic B
E
M
INE
candy heart doesn’t mean we have to go around making promises we can’t keep. Using the
L
word in intimate settings can be dangerous. I prefer to use it more generally, as in,
I love you all
. And I mean that, I really do!

Sightings

N
skulking down
Madison Avenue
with his hands in his coat pockets, looking uncharacteristically tense and preoccupied.
V
and
D
kissing in
Shakespeare Books
, near
NYU
—
aw
, how
cute
.
B
at
Sigerson Morrison
in
NoHo,
trying on pair of shoes in the store.
S
in
Fetch
on
Bleecker Street
, buying another irresistible doggie outfit for her favorite pooch.
J
and her new friend,
E
, giggling in the feminine-hygiene aisle at Duane Reade. Ah, youth. And
A
, stocking up on used reggae records at a tiny unnamed shop on East Third Street. He’s got to have something to listen to while he blows off the rest of second semester.

Your e-mail

Q:
    Dear GG,

I heard that dealer who used to work in the pizza place got busted by the NYPD and now he’s doing time as a narc in the park, busting all his old customers.

—Dawg

A:
    Dear Dawg,

That sounds like a bad TNT movie. I just hope none of our friends end up starring in it.

—GG

Q:
    Dear GossipG,

I totally forgot to tell you before, but I saw that little freshman with the giant boobs in the waiting room of my cosmetic surgeon.

She was looking at a book called
Celebrity Breasts
. I’m serious. Like, totally choosing which ones she was going to get.

—tattletail

A:
    Dear tattle,

That’s all very interesting, but pray tail—I mean tell—why were
you
there?

—GG

As if you weren’t already excited enough . . .

Now that the early admissions thing is over, we can focus on something truly important: Fashion Week. It starts this Friday, and all my favorite people will be there, including me. See you in the front row!

You know you love me.

gossip girl

scrawny westside poet has first taste of fame

On his way to Riverside Prep Tuesday morning, Dan stopped at the newsstand on Seventy-ninth and Broadway to buy the Valentine’s Day issue of
The New Yorker
and a large black coffee that tasted like it had been made three years ago—just the way he liked it. The cover of
The New Yorker
was an illustration of Noah’s Ark docked at a pier in New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty looming in the background. The words
The Love Boat
were painted on the side of the ark, and all of the animals lined up to board were holding hands and kissing and groping each other. It was pretty funny. Dan stood on the corner and lit an unfiltered Camel with trembling fingers as he turned back the cover and searched the table of contents for his poem. There it was under Poems: Daniel Humphrey, page forty-two, “Sluts.” He flipped to it, forgetting all about the burning cigarette propped between his lips. Page forty-two happened to be the ninth page of a fourteen-page story by Gabriel Garcia Rhodes called “Amor con los Gatos”—“Love with Cats”—and right there, in the middle of the story, was Dan’s poem.

Wipe the sleep from my eyes and pour me another cup.

I see what you’ve been trying to tell me all along,

Shaving your head and handling me (so delicately)

With satin and lace:

You’re a whore.

It was freezing outside, but nervous sweat beaded on Dan’s eyelids, and his tongue was as dry as firewood. Dan spat the burning cigarette out onto the sidewalk and closed the magazine, tucking it into his black messenger bag. If he’d turned to the Contributors page, he would have seen the entry:
Daniel Humphrey (Poem, p. 42) is a high-school senior in New York City. This is his first published work.
But Dan couldn’t handle looking at the magazine for a moment longer, not when thousands of people were right now browsing through it and stopping to read his brutal, angry poem, which he honestly wasn’t sure was any good. Dan walked down Broadway toward school, his hands shaking crazily. If only he could have pulled off some heist like sabotaging the
The New Yorker
’s printing presses so they couldn’t print vowels anymore. Then all the Valentine’s Day issues would have been recalled from the newsstands late last night.

As if he could ever have pulled
that
off.

“Yo, dude,” Dan heard the familiar, conceited voice of his least-favorite Riverside Prep classmate behind him. Dan stopped walking and turned around to see Chuck Bass flipping his signature navy blue monogrammed cashmere scarf over one shoulder and running his manicured fingers through his brown-and-blond highlighted hair. “Nice poem in
The New Yorker
, man.” He gave Dan a congratulatory clap on the shoulder, his monogrammed pinky ring glittering in the winter sunlight. “Who knew you were such a stud?”

Was there something distinctly
gay
about Chuck Bass these days? Or perhaps not. Just because he’d gotten blond highlights and was wearing a slim, cream-colored wool coat by Ralph Lauren
and
orange leather Prada sneakers didn’t mean he’d given up molesting defenseless, drunken girls at parties. Perhaps he was simply expressing himself.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

“Thanks,” Dan mumbled as he fiddled with the plastic top on his coffee cup. He wondered if Chuck was planning on walking all the way to school with him so they could discuss his poem. But then Dan’s cell phone rang, saving him from having to answer Chuck’s inane questions about how many chicks he’d bagged before writing the poem, or whatever Chuck Bass liked to talk about on his way to school in the mornings.

Dan put the phone to his ear and Chuck clapped him on the shoulder again and kept walking.

“Hello?”

“Congratulations, Danielson!” Rufus shouted into the phone. His father never got out of bed before eight o’clock, so this was the first time Dan had spoken to him all morning. “You’re the real banana, the genuine article!
The New Yorker
, the goddamned
New Yorker
!”

Dan chuckled, feeling slightly ashamed. Countless notebooks filled with his father’s odd, disjointed poems were stashed in a dusty box in the broom closet. Even though he was an editor of lesser-known Beat poets, the truth was, Rufus had never actually been published.

“And you’ll never believe—,” Rufus continued, but then his voice broke off. Dan heard the toilet flush in the background. Typical. His dad had been talking to him while he was in the can.

Dan gulped his coffee and picked up his pace, crossing Broadway and heading down Seventy-seventh Street. He was going to be late for first-period chemistry if he didn’t hurry up. Not that that would be such a bad thing. “Dad? You still there?” he asked.

“Hold on, kid,” Rufus replied distractedly. “I got my hands full here.”