Psycho Killer (9 page)

Blair bit her lip, fighting back a snarl. Enough was enough. She couldn’t stand it any longer. She reached for Nicki’s ponytail, pretending to remove a piece of lint from the shiny blond strands. Then, with a sharp yank on the gold chain around Nicki’s neck, she crushed the girl’s windpipe before ramming the ridiculous crystal icicle pendant through her yellow Ralph Lauren turtleneck and into her jugular.

Tennis does wonders for one’s reflexes.

“All rise,” Mrs. McLean instructed. “Now go forth and have a wonderful week.”

Mrs. Weeds pounded out the notes to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and both she and Mrs. McLean began to sing in tone-deaf operatic voices as the girls filed out of the auditorium.

“
Glo-ry, glo-ry, hal-lelu-u-u-jah!

Glo-ry, glo-ry, hal-lelu-u-u-jah!”

Nicki slumped in her chair, her red Coach backpack at her feet.

“Come
on
, Nicki,” Rain Hoffstetter hissed. “We have Double French.”

Blair shoved Rain toward the door. “She’s just looking for a tampon. She’ll catch up with us later.”

But Nicki was still there when Jenny Humphrey’s class marched by.

Amazing
, Jenny remarked silently, noting Nicki’s lifeless form. Serena wasn’t wasting any time. She’d only been back at Constance for five minutes and she’d already made her first kill!

Aw, how cute. The killer has a stalker.

The minute Prayers was dismissed, Jenny pushed past her classmates and darted out into the hallway to make a phone call. Her brother, Daniel, was going to totally lose it when she told him.

“Hello.” Daniel Humphrey answered his cell phone on the seventh ring in his toneless speaking-from-the-land-of-the-dead voice. He was standing on the corner of Seventy-seventh Street and West End Avenue, outside Riverside Prep, chainsmoking cigarettes. He squinted his dark brown eyes, trying to block out the harsh October sunlight. Dan wasn’t into sun. He spent most of his free time in his room, reading existentialist haikus by long-dead Japanese poets. He was paler than a corpse, his hair was shaggy and lifeless, and he was dead rock star thin.

Existentialism has a way of killing your appetite.

“Guess who’s back?” Dan heard his little sister squeal excitedly into the phone.

When Jenny needed someone to talk to, she always called Dan. She was the one who had bought them both iPhones. And it was a good thing too, because Dan was more of a loner than she was.
Sometimes he went for days without speaking. He’d even considered cutting out his own tongue, just to see if it would make any difference to anyone, including himself.

“Jenny, can’t this wait?” Dan responded hoarsely, sounding annoyed in the way only older brothers can.

“Serena van der Woodsen!” Jenny interrupted him. “Serena is back at Constance. I saw her in Prayers. Can you believe it?”

Dan watched a plastic coffee cup lid skitter down the sidewalk. A red Prius sped down West End Avenue and through a yellow light. His socks felt damp inside his faded brown suede Hush Puppies.

Serena van der Woodsen
. He took a long drag on his Camel. His hands were shaking so much he almost missed his mouth.

“Dan?” his sister squeaked into the phone. “Can you hear me? Did you hear what I said? Serena is back. Serena van der Woodsen.”

Dan sucked in his breath sharply. “Yeah,” he said, feigning disinterest. “So what?”

“So what?” Jenny repeated incredulously. “Oh, right, like you didn’t just have a mini heart attack. You’re so full of it, Dan.”

“Not really,” Dan said, pissily. “What do I care?”

Jenny sighed loudly. Dan could be so irritating. Why couldn’t he just act happy for once? She was so tired of his pale, miserable, introspective poet act. Half the reason she called him during the school day was to make sure he hadn’t thrown himself in front of a bus or locked himself in the furnace room at school. Dan courted death the way most teenage boys court pretty girls. Someone had to make sure he was still alive.

He’d be way more fun if he tried killing other people instead of himself.

“I’m pretty sure she had blood on her sleeve,” Jenny continued breathlessly, sure this little tidbit of information would grab Dan’s attention. “And everyone’s talking about how she got kicked out of boarding school for killing boys. This one guy already died at a party this weekend, and I’m pretty sure she did something to this girl in the senior class just now during Prayers. I have the chills. I mean, it’s like she’s come back to save us all from something, you know? I mean, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but oh my God, she’s like, so cool it’s scary!”

Dan wasn’t even listening. He was too distracted by his golden memories of Serena: her deep blue eyes, her swinging swath of luxurious blond hair, the way the world always seemed to be perfectly lit in her presence.
Serena
. He closed his eyes dizzily and then opened them again.
Serena
.

“Dan? Hello? Are you alive?”

“Watch it!” a bicycle messenger shouted as Dan stepped blindly off the curb. He was always stepping blindly off curbs, as if willing that moment’s sudden intake of breath to be his very last. But now Serena was back in town. He stepped up onto the curb again.

“Never mind,” he heard his sister sigh. “Forget it. Eat something. Drink something other than coffee. Get some exercise. I’ll talk to you later.”

She clicked off and Dan shoved his cell phone back into the pocket of his saggy black corduroys. He lit another cigarette with the burning stub of the one he was already smoking, singeing his thumbnail. He didn’t even feel it.

Serena van der Woodsen
.

They had first met at a party. No, that wasn’t exactly true. He and Jenny had stared at her for hours at a party—his party, the
only one he’d ever had at his family’s apartment on Ninety-ninth and West End Avenue.

It was April of eighth grade, when Dan was thirteen. The party was ten-year-old Jenny’s idea, and their father, Rufus Humphrey, the infamous retired editor of lesser-known beat poets and a party animal himself, was happy to oblige. Rufus had been watching
Criminal Minds
and had realized that Dan had all the makings of a serial killer: abandoned by his mother at a young age; still wet the bed sometimes; loved to set things on fire, including his sister’s hair and their large domestic shorthair cat, Marx; engaged in animal torture—see Marx. So far Dan hadn’t shown any interest in actually killing anyone but himself, but Rufus thought his son needed to get out more, engage with kids his own age.

Rufus had sent out an e-mail from Dan’s account inviting Dan’s entire class to the party and asking them to invite as many people as they wanted. More than a hundred kids showed up, and Rufus kept the beer flowing out of a keg in the bathtub, getting many of the kids drunk for the first time. It was the only party Dan had ever been to, but it was also the best. Not because of the booze, but because Serena van der Woodsen had been there. Never mind that she had gotten wasted and wound up playing a stupid Latin drinking game and kissing some guy’s stomach with pictures scrawled all over it in permanent marker. Dan couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Finally, he’d found a reason to live.

After the party Jenny told him that Serena went to Constance, and from then on Jenny was his little emissary, reporting everything she’d seen Serena do, say, wear, etc. at school, and informing Dan about any upcoming events where he might catch a glimpse of Serena again. Those events were rare. Not because there weren’t a lot of them—there were—but because there
weren’t many Dan had even a chance of going to. Dan didn’t inhabit the same world as Serena and Blair and Nate and Chuck. He wasn’t anybody—just a depressed and lonely wraith from the Upper West Side.

For two years Dan stalked Serena, yearningly, from a distance. He never spoke to her. When she went away to boarding school, he tried to forget about her, sure that he would be dead by the time she returned to the city.

But now she was back.

Dan walked halfway down the block, then turned around and walked back again. His mind was racing. He could have another party. He could make invitations and get Jenny to slip one into Serena’s locker at school. When Serena came to his apartment, Dan would go right up to her and take her mink coat and graciously welcome her back to New York.

I died every day you were gone
, he’d say, poetically.

Then they would sneak into his father’s library and take each other’s clothes off and kiss on the leather couch in front of the fire. And when everyone left the party, they would share a bowl of Red Hots, one of the few foods Dan ate. From then on they would spend every minute together. They would even transfer to a coed high school like Trinity for the rest of senior year because they couldn’t stand to be apart. Then they would go to Columbia and live in a cramped, unheated studio apartment on a high floor with a view of the same cold Hudson River that Dan had wanted to jump into on so many bleak nights. Serena’s friends would try to lure her back to her old life, but no charity ball, no exclusive black tie dinner, no expensive party favor would tempt her. She wouldn’t care if she had to give up her trust fund and her great-grandmother’s diamonds. Serena would be willing to live
in squalor if it meant she could be with Dan. And when they died, they would die together, holding hands, like Romeo and Juliet, only better.

Brittle bones, hot lips—

Spring, summer, autumn, winter
.

Only the worms know
.

“Fucking hell, we’ve only got five minutes until the bell rings,” Dan heard someone say in an obnoxious voice.

Dan turned around, and sure enough, it was Chuck Bass, or “Scarf Boy,” as Dan liked to call him, since Chuck always wore that ridiculous monogrammed ivory-colored cashmere scarf. Chuck stood only twenty feet away with two of his senior Riverside Prep pals, Roger Paine and Jeffrey Prescott. All three boys wore matching burgundy velvet smoking jackets and fingerless brown leather driving gloves, and Chuck had on his new custom-made pigskin loafers without socks. The three boys—whose hair was cut by Oscar Blandi in overly conditioned cheekbone-length pageboys—didn’t speak to Dan or even nod to acknowledge his presence. Why should they? These boys took the Seventy-ninth Street crosstown bus to school through Central Park each morning from the swanky Upper East Side, only venturing to the West Side for school or to attend the odd party. They were in Dan’s class at Riverside Prep, but they were certainly not in his class. He was nothing to them. They didn’t even notice him.

“Dude,” Chuck said to his friends. He lit a cigarette. Chuck smoked his cigarettes like they were joints, holding them between his index finger and thumb and sucking hard on the inhale. Too pathetic for words.

“Guess who I saw last night?” Chuck said, blowing out a stream of gray smoke.

“Amanda Sohotfried or whatever that scary-hot big-eyed blond actress’s name is?” Jeffrey said, tucking his hair behind his ears with his ridiculous fingerless-gloved hands.

“Yeah, and you let her scare off your pants and everything else, right?” Roger laughed, brushing cigarette ash off his velvet smoking jacket. “And then she gave you a shoulder ride.”

“No, not her. Serena van der Woodsen,” Chuck said.

Dan’s ears perked up. He was about to head inside for class, but he lit another cigarette and stayed put so he could listen.

“Blair Waldorf’s mom had this little party, and Serena was there with her parents,” Chuck continued. “And she was
all over
me. She’s like, the sluttiest girl I’ve ever met.” Chuck took another toke on his smoke. “Plus, she’s totally psychotic. I mean, she’s killed people. Lots of people.”

“Really?” Jeffrey said. “I’d heard that, but you know, you can’t believe everything you hear.”

“Oh yes you can,” Chuck countered. “First of all, I just found out that she’s been doing it with Nate Archibald since tenth grade. And she’s definitely gotten an education at boarding school, if you know what I mean. They had to get rid of her, she’s so slutty.”

“No way,” Roger said. “Come on, dude, you don’t get kicked out for being a slut.”

“You do if you keep a record of all the boys you slept with. If you get them hooked on the same drugs you’re doing and then you kill them. Her parents had to go up there and get her. She was like, taking over the school!” Chuck was really worked up. His face was turning red and he was spitting all over his pigskin loafers as he talked.

“I heard she’s got diseases too,” he added. “Like STDs. Someone saw her going into a clinic in the East Village. She was wearing a wig. And she has this thing for chickens. She kills them and drinks their blood.”

Chuck’s friends put their index fingers in their mouths and pretended to gag.

“Nasty!” they said, simultaneously.

“You heard about that kid Jeremy, right?” Chuck took a poignant drag on his cigarette as the other two boys nodded eagerly. “That was all Serena. She’d only been at the party for five minutes and
bam
, guy’s eyeballs are exploding all over the fucking walls. She’s a deadly weapon.” He chuckled and stamped out his cigarette. “Fully fucking loaded at all times.”

Dan had never heard such crap. Serena was no slut, and she wouldn’t kill anyone unless it was in self-defense. Serena was perfect.

Perfectly psychotic.

“So, you guys hear about that bird party?” Roger asked. “You going?”

“What bird party?” Jeffrey said, looking miffed that his best friend knew about something he didn’t.

“That benefit for the Central Park birds of prey?” Chuck said. “Blair Waldorf is planning it. At the Frick.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “Dude, everybody’s going.”

Everybody didn’t include Dan, of course. But it very definitely included Serena van der Woodsen.

“They’re sending out the invitations this week,” Roger said. “It has a funny name, I can’t remember what it is, something girly.”

“
Kiss Me or Die
,” Chuck said, stubbing out his cigarette with his obnoxious custom-made shoes. “It’s the
Kiss Me or Die
party.”