I Will Always Love You (2 page)

“Oh my God, you should totally date him. His agent has ridiculous connections.” Amanda Atkins yanked on the sleeve of Serena’s
black Row scoop-neck jersey dress in excitement. “Can we get some shots down here?” she called to the bartender. Serena smiled
sheepishly. Amanda was an eighteen-year-old recent LA transplant best known for her role in a dorky sitcom about a fashionista
girl from Paris who moves to a farm in Tennessee to live with her redneck uncle Hank. Recently, though, she’d been cast in
an indie film about snowboarders who dropped acid, and was trying to break free from her good-girl reputation.

Another shot and she’s almost there.

“Maybe,” Serena responded unconvincingly to Amanda’s comment about Breckin. She stared at the clear bubbles fizzing to the
top of her glass as if they held the secrets to the universe. If she looked around her, she’d see tons of Breckin O’Dell look-alikes
with gel in their hair and fitted pressed shirts from Thomas Pink. They buzzed around Serena, Amanda, and her other two actress
friends, Alysia and Alison. They called themselves the three A’s, even though Alysia’s real name was actually Jennifer.

The three A’s were admittedly a little too into material things, but they were also goofy and fun and never turned down a
party. Usually Serena had a blast hanging out with them, but tonight, she felt a little… off. It was two days after Christmas
and her parents had just left for their villa in St. Barts, while her brother, Erik, was already back in Melbourne, Australia,
where he was spending his sophomore year abroad. It wasn’t like Serena wanted to spend New Year’s Eve with her family, but
she also didn’t like waking up in their huge Fifth Avenue apartment alone. She downed her champagne in one gulp, telling herself
that she just needed to have fun.

After all, she is the expert.

“Hey, you’re that farm chick!” one spiky-haired brunet guy stuttered, not looking Amanda in the eye. He wore a pink and white
striped button-down and his teeth were Chiclet white.

“Yes.” Amanda sighed. “I am. But I have to stand over here now.” She took two steps away as Alysia and Alison snorted in laughter.
Serena offered the guy a sympathetic smile. Even though she was beautiful, she was never mean.

An infuriating combination.

“God, you’d think Knowledge would know to not to let guys like that in. Did you see his hair? It was, like, sprayed on.” Amanda
flipped her long blond extensions over her shoulder as she named the beefy bouncer whose job was to keep Saucebox as exclusive
as possible, even though, to Serena, it felt exactly the same as every other bar she’d been to recently.

“Serena?”

Serena whirled around, ready to have another one of those so what are you working on now? conversations with someone in the industry she’d probably met once. Instead, she saw a familiar, smiling face that immediately
took her back in time, and eighty blocks north.

“Oh my God, Iz!” Serena squealed excitedly. She slid off the smooth oak bar stool and threw her arms around Isabel Coates,
a fellow Constance Billard alum who’d gone to Rollins College down in Florida. Her skin was deeply tanned and her thick dark
shoulder-length hair had been straightened. Her chest looked suspiciously larger than it did the last time Serena saw her.
She automatically looked over Isabel’s shoulder, sure she’d see Kati Farkas, Isabel’s BFF and constant wingwoman. Isabel and
Kati had done everything together since the fourth grade. Kati had even turned down admission to Princeton so she and Isabel
wouldn’t have to be separated. But instead of Kati, a girl with a ski-jump nose and chin-length straight brown hair stood
next to Isabel. She wore a tight black sleeveless satin dress and looked like she could be Kati’s slightly older sister. But
Kati didn’t have sisters.

“This is my girlfriend, Casey,” Isabel announced proudly. She readjusted her white Marc Jacobs tote strap on her shoulder.

Girlfriend girlfriend? Serena noticed Isabel’s hand intertwined with the girl’s.

“We met in a women’s studies class.” Isabel smiled adoringly at Casey.

There’s her answer.

“This is Serena van der Woodsen. We went to school together,” Isabel explained, her hand now resting lightly on Casey’s back.

“Nice to meet you, Casey.” Serena smiled, holding out her hand to the tall girl, who took it gingerly.

“Nice to meet you too. I haven’t seen any of your movies,” Casey announced bluntly.

As if anyone asked.

“Oh, that’s okay. How’s Kati?” Serena asked Isabel, easing back onto her stool. She couldn’t help but wonder if Isabel was
really gay, or just going through the fashionable bisexual phase of college she’d heard about.

Isabel sighed and shook her head. “She has this, like, football player boyfriend and is pledging a sorority that wears pink
sweat suits to class. It’s awful. Casey and I pretty much do our own thing. But what about you? I saw the movie. You were pretty good,” Isabel allowed.

“Thanks.” Serena blushed. She hoped Isabel really meant it and wasn’t just being polite. “Things are okay. Just working a
lot. We’re filming a sequel to Breakfast at Fred’s that’s coming out in the summer, so that’s fun….” Serena trailed off. Even though she’d been on the cover of the October
issue of Vanity Fair, part of her felt stuck. She’d come home from her big premiere, thinking it would be the greatest night of her life, to her
same pink childhood bedroom in her parents’ sprawling Upper East Side penthouse. If possible, she almost felt less grown-up than she had before graduating, especially since she now had an agent and a publicist who told her exactly what
to wear, what to say, and who to be seen with. The real world felt a lot different than she’d imagined.

“A sequel sounds great!” Isabel cooed. “Anyway, I was just showing Casey all of our old haunts. Remember hours trying things
on at Barneys, and then so much time just eating spaghetti and meatballs upstairs at Fred’s? That all feels like so long ago
now,” she mused, nuzzling her head against Casey’s. The guys standing around them were all drooling over the lesbian-chic
couple.

“It does,” Serena agreed wholeheartedly. Just a matter of months ago, she and Blair and Kati and Isabel would meet before
school to smoke Merits on the Met steps and imagine their lives in college. Now, Blair was pre-law at Yale, Isabel was a lesbian,
Kati was running around with pink Greek letters on her ass, and Serena was trying to make a go of it in the movies.

“So, have you seen anyone yet?” Isabel asked.

“No.” Serena shook her head. For her, only two people really mattered: Blair and Nate. She and Blair had kept in touch since
Blair headed up to New Haven, and once Serena had sent Blair a package full of Wolford stockings and black-and-white cookies,
in a bow-tied Barneys bag—some of Blair’s favorite New York things. Blair had reciprocated with a stuffed bulldog wearing
a Yale T-shirt. It was sitting on Serena’s dresser, next to a silver-framed picture of the two of them wearing enormous hats
at a Kentucky Derby party sophomore year. They’d send e-mails and texts, but never anything long or involved. It was fine,
though. Blair and Serena were the type of friends who could go for weeks and even, one time, months without speaking, then
pick up right where they left off.

As for Nate… Serena hadn’t talked to him since he left, to sail the world for a year. He had left her crushed, and she wondered
if she’d ever see him again. But she didn’t want to think about that right now.

Or ever.

“Are you going to Chuck’s New Year’s party?” Isabel asked, draining the rest of her Grey Goose and cranberry. “I mean, I know
he’s, like, such a misogynist, but I figured, you can only protest so much, you know? I prepared Casey.”

“Wait, Chuck is back from military school?” Serena asked, suddenly eager to hear everything. She hadn’t thought about Chuck—with his sketchy history, his trademark monogrammed scarf, or his questionable sexuality—since
graduation. But the last she’d heard, after getting rejected from all twelve schools he’d applied to, he’d gone to some tiny
underground, remote-country-boot-camp men’s college. Of course her parents saw Chuck’s parents socially, but they never mentioned
what he was doing. It was an unspoken rule on the Upper East Side that parents didn’t discuss their unsuccessful children.

“He must be.” Isabel shrugged. “The party’s on. I saw Laura Salmon at City Bakery this morning and she told me she was hanging
out with Rain Hoffstetter at some lame Constance alum tea party that Mrs. M organized. Thank God we missed that. But, anyway,
I guess she talked to Chuck. I don’t know. It’s at his place at the Tribeca Star. But I guess since you’re a movie star and
all now, you probably have to host some MTV countdown special or something, right?”

“Well…” Serena trailed off. In truth, she already had an invite to a New Year’s party at Thaddeus Smith’s West Village loft.
Thaddeus had been her Breakfast at Fred’s costar and was a true friend. But he wouldn’t mind if she stopped by to say hi and then went off to Chuck’s party. Maybe
seeing old friends was all she needed to pull herself out of her mood.

Alysia tapped Serena urgently on the shoulder. “Let’s go someplace else. There’s no one fun here,” she pronounced as Amanda
and Alison nodded their bobbleheads in agreement.

“Please?” Alison whined. She stuck out her Stila-glossed lower lip and whined like a shih tzu.

Serena nodded before turning to Isabel. “I’ll see you at Chuck’s,” she promised. She smiled faintly as she trailed the three
A’s toward the door. How could she not see her old high school crowd? While she might not have been thinking of them all that much recently, it wasn’t like she’d
forgotten them.

And they certainly haven’t forgotten her.

a trip can’t last forever, even for n

Nate Archibald’s elbow hit a beam, and he woke up with a start. His tanned, athletic frame was wedged in the crow’s nest of
the Belinda, the ship he called home.

Nate was traveling the world with his mentor and friend Chips. Chips had been Nate’s father’s mentor way back when he was
in the navy, and for the past four months they’d followed the wind and the stars and the moon, aided only by Chips’s antique
silver compass. It was amazing. Nate had always been a sailor, and had even taken his father’s boat, the Charlotte, up and down the eastern seaboard with his girlfriend, Blair, last June.

Doesn’t he mean ex-girlfriend?

Nate rubbed the sleep out of his glittering green eyes and yawned. They were somewhere in the Bahamas, but it felt light-years
away from the Upper East Side. Maybe it was the tropical air and the nautical living, but everything about his old life seemed
far away. Sometimes, he’d try to remember a specific event—the first time he’d bought pot from the pizza dude on Lex by asking
for two slices with extra oregano, the time he’d stolen the Charlotte and spent a weekend with Anthony and Charlie, doing bong hits and eating Oreos, cruising toward Bermuda at half a mile an
hour—but the scenes were always fuzzy. It was like remembering an old movie, where you could recall random moments, but not
the beginning or ending.

Nate leaned back against the rough-hewn beams. There were some memories, though, that he replayed almost every night. In the
moments before the subtle rocking of the ocean lulled him to sleep, he pictured Blair, and Serena van der Woodsen, his other
best friend and the girl he’d lost his virginity to. Blair cheesily posing in front of the polar-bear exhibit at the zoo;
Serena with her blond head tipped back, laughing hysterically at a joke only she found funny; Blair in front of Tiffany, her
favorite place on earth, doing her best Audrey Hepburn impression. Serena splashing around in the Venus fountain in his backyard,
looking like the goddess she was. He wondered if they ever thought about him.

If not, there are plenty of girls who do.

He knew they probably weren’t pining for him. In fact, they probably hated him. He loved them both, and of course he’d never been able to choose between them.
This past summer, he’d even cheated on Blair with Serena. Finally, when he couldn’t decide whether to go to Yale with Blair
or stay in the city with Serena, he’d chosen to travel the world with Chips. He’d been so confused. So conflicted. So afraid
to make a choice, in case he chose wrong. But now, he felt different.

He even looked different. Months of sailing had tanned his skin a dark bronze color, and his golden brown hair was now almost platinum-blond
in places. His face was angular and hardened and a blondish-brown beard covered his chin. The scruff made his green eyes stand
out that much more. He hadn’t smoked any pot since they’d left, not by choice, but still, it felt good. His head felt lighter,
clearer somehow.

Nate climbed down the crow’s nest onto the polished wood deck. It was just after sunrise and the sky was suffused with a pinkish
tint. “Hello?” he called out. “Chips?”

“Nathaniel!” Chips called from the boat’s stern. He was coiling a mass of rope, a frown etched on his weather-beaten face.
With his white linen trousers, navy windbreaker, and shock of white hair, Chips looked like a tall stocky sea captain on the
menu of a lobster restaurant. But beneath his stern veneer, he was actually a pretty cool guy, especially after he’d had his
evening tumbler of scotch.

“Take a look.” Chips passed the binoculars over to Nate. He could just make out land, fuzzy in the distance. “By New Year’s
Eve, we’ll be at the Breakers,” Chips declared, almost to himself.

“I’m sorry?” Nate asked. Wasn’t the Breakers a resort in Palm Beach? He was ready to stop somewhere, make a couple calls back
home, sure. He’d thrown his phone overboard when he’d made the decision to sail with Chips back in August, so he’d only been
able to call home occasionally, when they stopped at various islands. He hadn’t even been able to wish his parents a Merry
Christmas. Still, he’d been hoping their next stop would be somewhere a little more adventurous, like Costa Rica. He’d always
wanted to go there.

Join the club.

“So we’re stopping in Palm Beach? And where to after that?” Nate asked. Ever since they’d left, he’d trusted Chips to guide
them. But he was kind of wondering what Chips’s grand plan was.