I Like It Like That (16 page)

“Fifty bucks says she won't show,” Anthony Avuldsen challenged his friends. Nate, Anthony, Charlie, and Jeremy had walked over to Sheep Meadow directly after school let out, just to see if a certain popular online personality was actually going to show her face.

The weather was fine and a bunch of guys were already throwing a Frisbee around. Nate recognized Jason Pressman, a junior from the St. Jude's lax team, and went over to say hello.

“Didja hear about Holmes?” Jason asked. There was a big bag of pot in his lap, and he was busy rolling tight little joints and lining them up inside an old Altoids tin.

“I heard he was missing.” Nate licked his lips as he watched Jason sprinkle pot inside a neatly folded rolling paper.

“Busted,” Jason said. “Dude got caught in the Miami airport with like, a bale of hash.” He sealed the joint and dropped it into the tin. “He's been expelled. Coach says you gotta be lax captain now.”

Anthony, Charlie, and Jeremy were rolling their own joints just a little ways away. Nate turned around and grinned at them. It was an even better story that he'd given up lax captain only to get it in the end. Besides, he'd earned it.

Jason reached up and slapped Nate's hand, passing him a joint as he did so. “Nice work, man. Congratulations.”

“Hey, thanks.” Nate held the joint in his fist. “What a day,” he observed, throwing his head back to catch the sun.

Good thing there were more guys around than girls, otherwise the grass would've been wet with drool.

The meadow was filling up with private-school boys pretending they just happened to all be in the park at the same time for absolutely no reason. Chuck Bass was sitting cross-legged on a red camping blanket, wearing a black baseball cap with Sun Valley Ski Patrol printed on it. Perched on his shoulder was a small white monkey.

Yes, that's right. A live one.

Chuck was an asshole, but he never ceased to entertain. Nate was too intrigued not to check it out. He lit the joint Jason had given him and walked over. “What is that, anyway?” he asked, sucking on the joint.

“A snow monkey. From South America.” Chuck scratched the monkey under the chin while the monkey looked up at Nate with trusting golden eyes. “Sweetie, meet Natie. Natie, meet Sweetie.”

“Where'd you get her?”

Chuck sneezed and blew his nose into a pink silk handkerchief. “Him. Georgie's mom sent him to my parents as a thank-you gift—you know, for getting her out of the whole indecent-exposure fiasco?” He stroked Sweetie's long white tail where it draped over his left shoulder, as though he were wearing an expensive fur stole, only it was still alive. “Actually, they have snow monkeys in the zoo right here in Central Park, but they're really rare as pets. Mom thinks Sweetie smells, but I have my own apartment now over on Sutton Place. So I get to keep him.”

Well, isn't he just the luckiest?

“Cool.” Nate was pretty much over the monkey now and ready to move on to something else.

“Hey, Nate!” Jeremy shouted at him. “This kid's seeing your old girlfriend. The ninth-grader with the huge boobies!”

Twenty feet away, Jeremy, Charlie, and Anthony were talking to some kid with platinum blond hair whom Nate thought looked familiar, but he wasn't sure. He walked over and shook the kid's hand, holding the joint between his lips as he did so, like Humphrey Bogart or something.

“We're not seeing each other,” Leo insisted nervously. “We sort of met online and then became friends and then—” He stopped and frowned at Nate. “Hey, I never knew she'd gone out with you.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and kicked at the grass. “Anyway, now we're not even talking.”

Just then, Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf walked into the meadow, trailed by five younger girls, including Jenny Humphrey, the notorious “ninth-grader with the huge boobies.” The girls helped Serena spread out a huge red fleece stadium blanket. Then they all sat down cross-legged on top of the blanket in a tight circle. Blair handed each girl a ball of pale yellow yarn and a set of pink metal knitting needles.

“First we have to cast the yarn onto one needle,” Jenny instructed. She made a loop of yarn, stuck the tip of her needle through it, and began casting on. The other girls leaned in, watching closely.

Not fifty feet away, Nate continued to puff on his joint. “But you like her. I mean, admit it. She's pretty hard not to like.”

Leo blushed. “Yeah.”

“So what are you doing? Why don't you just walk over there”— Nate pointed to the circle of girls on the red blanket—“and kiss her? That's what I'd do.” As soon as he'd said it, he realized that was what he needed to do with Blair—just walk up and kiss her. He'd been horny the whole time he'd been off pot, but when he was stoned he was romantic. It was one of the things Blair loved about him.

“I don't know,” Leo said quietly. “Maybe some other time.”

“Yeah,” Nate agreed. Now really wasn't such a good time.

The five boys were still watching the group of knitting girls when Dan walked up, looking ragged and overcaffeinated as usual, a damp Camel dangling from his pale, trembling fingers.

“Hey, did you and my sister break up or something?” he asked Leo.

Leo looked at him helplessly. “I'm not sure.”

Dan swiveled his scruffy head around to check out the scene. His classmate and Asshole Extraordinaire, Chuck Bass, was sitting on the ground with a white monkey on his shoulder. Chuck had even brought the monkey to school with him that morning, but the teachers had made him take it home. Then Dan saw something that made him drop his still-burning cigarette in the wet grass.

Vanessa was kneeling on a red blanket ten feet behind Chuck, her face obscured by her camera. In front of her was the pink plastic UFO toy he'd sent her, whirling and blinking crazily on top of a little fold-up stool. Dan could just make out the crazed Japanese pop song emanating from the toy, and it made him want to dance a happy little jig.

Not that he was about to go ahead and actually dance.

Nate sucked at the dregs of his joint and nodded at Vanessa. “Think that's her?”

“No way,” Dan said. Although he secretly wondered if Vanessa might be the sexy Web mistress they'd all come to see. It would be just like her to do something totally out of character like that and freak everyone out. “Maybe she's not coming.”

Nate flicked the dead roach in Chuck's direction. “Not unless she's already here.”

The six boys contemplated Chuck for a moment, chuckling to themselves. Despite the fact that this seemed to be a boys-only nonevent, there sure were a lot of girls around. Kati Farkas and Isabel Coates had wandered up to pet Chuck's monkey and spy on Blair and Serena's little knitting group.

“What are they doing?” Kati whined. She scratched Sweetie behind the ears, and the monkey bared his teeth.

“He has sensitive ears!” Chuck warned.

“Maybe they're knitting things to hide drugs in. I've heard smugglers use babies to smuggle drugs into other countries,” Isabel suggested, wishing desperately that she could join the circle.

“Don't you love how everyone's looking at us like we're … witches or something?” Serena whispered.

The other girls giggled conspiratorially.

Blair wiped her nose and reapplied her lip gloss. She hadn't missed the fact that Nate was among those watching. “They have no idea,” she agreed, even though she and the rest of the girls in the group were absolutely eating up the attention.

Her stepbrother, Aaron Rose, came over with his guitar and sat down on the corner of the girls' blanket.

“What should I play?” he asked them.

“Anything.” They were all just getting the hang of knit-purl-knit, but the music from Vanessa's crazy pink plastic toy was driving them insane.

“Stir it up, little darling, stir it up—” he began, singing his favorite reggae song. Aaron had only turned up to see if Blair was the girl everyone was making such a fuss over. For all he knew, it could have been any one of them.

“You never know,” more than one of the boys in the meadow observed.

That's right. You never know.

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

hey people!

About last night

Sorry boys, but you got punk'd! I know it was totally mean of me not to reveal myself, but admit it, you bonded, and wasn't it fun? Just what you needed, right? Best of all, you got to pet that sweet little monkey. And though you hate to admit it, you kind of like that you still don't know who I am, because you love imagining what I look like. I'm the girl of your dreams.

What we don't know and are dying to find out

Will N and B get back together?

Will S find someone to love?

Will V and D forgive each other and live unhappily ever after?

Will we hear more from G? Do we want to?

Will J and L figure it out? Does she want to?

Will C come out?

Will I?

You know I can't wait to answer all of the above. But first, I'm building an altar to the Saint of College Admissions. Every day I will buy the saint a new gift, like that pair of beaded slip-ons I've had my eye on in the Barney's shoe department, or that hot pink bag everyone's talking about and no store seems to have. That way, if I don't get in to my number one school I'll have lots of consolation prizes. And if I do get in, I'll have an excuse to congratulate myself with even more gifts. Either way, I won't lose. None of us will!

You know you love me,