Adored (7 page)

All three girls twittered in excitement. Jenny grabbed her brushes and turpentine. The camera followed her over to the giant metal sinks, and Izzy whispered instructions as Jenny poured turpentine on her brushes and scrubbed out the oil paint residue. “What about the barn at Miller’s farm burning down? Did you have anything to do with that at all?”

Jenny smiled mysteriously as if to say,
I’ll never tell
. She tried not to splatter water on her blouse as she patted the brushes dry with paper towels.

“Come on, you have to give us something!” Claire squealed, pushing up the sleeves of her pale purple J.Crew button-down.

“How did you end up at Waverly in the first place? Did you really get kicked out of Constance Billard?” Kaitlin asked eagerly, sticking her head out from behind her camcorder. Her glasses sat crookedly on her freckled nose.

Jenny tossed her dark curls—which she’d treated to some of Callie’s Frédéric Fekkai deep conditioning last night in preparation for her day on camera—over her shoulder. The girls followed her back to her desk, where she put her brushes away into her art bin. “Let’s just say I wasn’t invited back.”

The girls looked at each other and smiled, their eyes lighting up at this bit of information.

“
Told
you,” Izzy whispered to Kaitlin, taking another swipe at her nose with a crumpled tissue. Then Izzy suggested heading over to Maxwell Hall to get some “crowd shots.” Jenny felt her stomach flutter at the thought of people actually seeing her being followed by cameras. She zipped up her orange quilted Guess? jacket and slung her black canvas messenger bag over her shoulder.

“Is it also true that you modeled for Les Best?” Claire asked, tugging a pair of white fuzzy mittens onto her hands as the girls exited the art studio. In front of them, the afternoon sun lit up the white-blanketed Waverly campus. Students in colorful parkas and scarves rushed out of the aged brick academic buildings, eager to be released from afternoon classes. As the girls strode down the freshly shoveled walkway in the direction of Maxwell Hall, video camera rolling, Jenny kind of felt like she was starring in a New England prep school reality show. Which she kind of was.

“Yes, but…,” Jenny answered, a smile spreading across her face at the memory of her short-lived modeling career. She and Serena van der Woodsen, her friend and total Manhattan glamour girl, had done one shoot for the famous designer, and it had been featured in
W
magazine. She kicked the toe of her hunter green wellies into a clump of snow. “I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time,” she answered modestly.

Izzy eyed her. “What was it like, then?”

Jenny loosened her striped scarf. In the distance, she saw a clump of guys in lacrosse jackets, and she wondered if one of them was Drew Gately, the senior she’d had an almost disastrous flirtation with. She kind of wished it was him, so that he could see her talking to the camera. “I was hanging out with Serena van der Woodsen, who was one of their perfume models. And the designer saw us together and somehow came up with the idea of putting us on a motorcycle, riding off into the sunset down this deserted beach.” She shrugged, as if it was no big deal, but she still had a couple of photos from the shoot at home under her bed. She’d been shocked at how arty and elegant the black-and-white shots had turned out. She looked natural and beautiful, even next to Serena. Professional photographers were like an expensive pair of jeans: they made you look so effortlessly
good
.

“Excuse me.” A voice spoke out from the door to the mailroom as the girls hurried into the foyer of Maxwell Hall. Jenny recognized the guy who worked behind the counter in the Waverly mailroom. He had a button saying package too large for box pinned to his chest. “Are you Jenny Humphrey?”

Jenny blushed, feeling the camera on her face. “Y-yes,” she stammered, wondering how the mailroom guy knew who she was when she’d probably only picked up a handful of packages. Out of four hundred students, he remembered her? It was kind of flattering.

“Mailroom was closing, and someone left a package for you,” he said, producing a daintily wrapped box the size of an engagement ring. “Just need you to sign for it.”

“Oh, we need to get this on camera!” Izzy nudged Kaitlin in the ribs, even though the handheld camera had been taking in the whole scene.

“I got it,” Kaitlin replied, zooming in on Jenny’s face.

The mailroom guy—kind of cute, in a Nintendo-playing way—eyed the video camera curiously. Jenny signed her name with a flourish on the clipboard in his hand, pretending he’d asked for her autograph. “Thanks,” he replied, holding on to the pen she gave him for a second too long.

“Mailroom guy totally likes her!” Claire whispered to Izzy, who leaned toward the camera screen. The tiny package Jenny held in her hand was wrapped in red paper and tied with a white bow. Her heart raced. Her first Secret Santa gift at Waverly!

“Who is it from?” Claire whispered excitedly, although there was clearly no card or label. Jenny held a corner of the ribbon in her fingers and let the package hang delicately in the air, twirling it around for all the girls to admire.

“It’s from my Secret Satan.” Jenny slid the ribbon off a corner of the box, hoping it didn’t contain something dirty. Ever since the mysterious “Secret Satan” e-mail had gone out last night, Waverly students had been bombarding each other with slightly scandalous gifts. That morning, Jenny had seen Emily Jenkins open an envelope in her mailbox and pull out a pair of panties with a giant bunch of cherries printed on them. At lunch, Kara Whalen had showed her the hot pink feather duster she’d found on her doorstep, with a note that said,
For use on naked skin only.
Jenny herself had been assigned Yvonne Stidder—boring!—but hadn’t gotten her anything yet.

“Don’t you mean Secret
Santa
?” Claire asked innocently.

Jenny arched her eyebrow at the camera. “Do I?”

The girls giggled and the camera shook. Jenny waited a beat for Kaitlin to steady it before she pulled off the ribbon.
Please don’t be something embarrassing
, she thought to herself, recalling the sight of some skinny freshman guy walking into class with a spray can of Whipped Body Cream. She’d die if someone had gotten her something related to her boobs, like an enormous Lady Grace bra.

“What do you think it is?” Izzy asked before stepping away from the camera to blow her nose.

“Perfume, maybe?” Kaitlin guessed, sounding as nervous as if the gift were hers.

“Too small for perfume.” Claire touched her bare earlobes absentmindedly. “Maybe earrings. Diamond ones.”

Jenny laughed. “Somehow I doubt that.” The ribbon fell away and one of the girls surreptitiously picked it up and folded it into her pocket. Jenny opened the lid on the box, slowly, in case something awful sprang from inside.

Instead, she saw a bangle bracelet made from a thick piece of translucent coral. It was beautiful. Jenny lifted it out of the box, half-expecting a note explaining that it was actually some kind of sex toy. But the box was empty. She slid the bracelet onto her wrist.

“Ohmigod, that’s like the sweetest thing in the world!” Claire exclaimed, reaching out to touch it as Jenny showed it off for the camera. “Who could it be
from
?”

By now, the foyer had started to fill with students loading up on caffeine before heading to the library for the evening. Jenny hadn’t noticed how busy Maxwell had become, but now, dozens of people were shooting curious glances her way. A cute guy in her English class, the grumpy-looking goth girl who sat across the aisle from Jenny in algebra, a couple of senior field hockey girls—they were all looking at her, seemingly impressed.

“Someone who really likes you!” Izzy squealed. “I hope it’s some hot senior.”

Jenny shook her head. She’d had enough of hot seniors after Drew. But maybe her Secret Satan could be a hot junior.

Or just hot.

“Ohmigod,” Kaitlin whispered, the camera still on Jenny. “That totally cute exchange student from Amsterdam just gave you this
look
. Maybe it’s from him.”

Was
her Secret Santa out there, watching? She resisted the urge to look up, to wildly search the passing faces for the faintest hint of a knowing smile. Instead, she twisted her wrist, watching as the lights glinted against the smooth, polished surface of the bangle. A couple of girls walked by and whispered excitedly. Just another moment in Jenny Humphrey’s glamorous life, she imagined them thinking. And she
did
feel glamorous, for once, enjoying the feel of her totally sweet Secret Santa bracelet on her wrist.
This is just the beginning
, she thought as she felt Kaitlin zooming in on her face.

Jenny couldn’t help it. She brushed her hair back and gave the camera her most glamorous smile.

Instant Message Inbox

Instant Message Inbox

Instant Message Inbox

|.
HeathFerro:
|. Don’t know what u r talking about… but I remember there being

a rule not to talk about what you’re talking about.|

C
allie paused at the third-floor landing of Dumbarton Hall, her legs feeling like they were filled with lead.
That’s what happens when you get old
, she thought, conveniently forgetting the fact that she’d just come from the gym, where she’d spent an hour pretending to read
Vogue
on a Stair-Master. She’d actually been scoping out the gym for dateable guys, without any luck. They were all either too sweaty, too skinny, or too boring… or too taken. Her mind kept turning back to the image of Sebastian casually strolling into the dining hall, his dark hair falling across his forehead.

Callie paused in the hallway and stared miserably at the dry-erase board stuck to Verena Arneval’s door. A note written in masculine handwriting read,
See you tonite, hottie
. Fuck. Even Verena, with her ugly, slightly masculine short haircut, had a guy?

The door to 303 was slightly ajar, but the lights were off. “Jenny?” she called out. Nothing. “Hello?” She flicked on the light.

The room was empty save for a small package sloppily wrapped in newspaper, propped up on her desk, absent a bow. Callie’s heart thumped excitedly in her chest. Her first Secret Satan present!
It isn’t a present unless it has a bow
, her mother used to say. But hell. Now that she didn’t have a boyfriend, even a crappily wrapped present made her heart race. How pathetic was that? The whole campus had been full of chatter about Secret Satan and the progressively tasteless gifts left in people’s rooms, and here she was, looking forward to opening a creepy-looking package that probably contained edible condoms. (Did they even make those? Ew.) She tore into the package and turned over a small box about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

It was a deck of cards. On the front, an old lady smiled over her pince-nez glasses, her hair piled on top of her head in a towering gray bun. They were…
Old Maid
cards? All the excitement drained out of her and Callie felt her fingers tremble in shock and anger. What the fuck? She hurled the cards toward her trash can. She couldn’t get fruit-scented oils? Glow-in-the-dark condoms? Even the naked cupid-shaped chocolates that Alison Quentin proudly showed off at lunch would have been better than a stupid deck of Old Maid cards. That was just
mean
. Besides, the gray-haired old maid on the box cover bore an eerily striking resemblance to Callie’s bitchy old grandmother, who lived in West Palm Beach. All she did was play bridge with other rich, wrinkled widows, wear too much jewelry, and drink gin and tonics from noon onward.

Callie threw her gym bag to the floor and jumped into the shower, hoping the hot water would make her feel better. It didn’t. As she wrapped herself in an off-white Egyptian cotton towel and stared at her bare skin and damp blond hair in the mirror, all she could think about was how hopelessly single she was. And if her Secret Satan was right, things weren’t changing anytime soon… or ever.