Nothing Can Keep Us Together (16 page)

It was almost surreal how graduation changed everything and everybody. The party was like being at a reunion, except that they’d only just graduated that morning. Some of the girls were still wearing their white graduation dresses with rubber flip-flops and their hair all undone, looking like runaway brides. The boys had rolled the cuffs up on their neatly pressed khakis, and their school ties hung askew on their bare, sun-kissed chests, so that they resembled models in a Ralph Lauren menswear campaign, dressed up for cocktails but sitting on a dock with their feet dangling in a lake as if they’d rather drink beers together than go back inside to the stuffy cocktail party.

Serena thought of herself as an emotional person. The fashion designer Les Best had even named a perfume Serena’s Tears when he’d caught her weeping in the snow at a photo shoot in Central Park. She’d always thought she’d be a basket case during graduation. After all, she’d grown up with these people, shared the same ups and downs, suffered the same disappointments and triumphs. But here she was, nothing short of ecstatic. Even Nate’s mopey, distracted disposition couldn’t bring her down, because she’d gotten the part!

Yes, we heard her the first time.

In his usual pretentious, oddball manner, Ken Mogul hadn’t even watched her second audition. He’d kept his back turned, trying to ascertain whether she radiated the right energy for the part. When she finished delivering her lines, he didn’t turn around, just held up his hand and said, “Thank you.”

The second audition had taken place in an old warehouse in the Meatpacking District, on the opposite end of Manhattan from Brick Church. Serena was already dressed for graduation, and she’d promised to pay her taxi driver handsomely if he waited for her outside. Within seconds, she was hurtling east on Fourteenth Street, praying that Mrs. M wouldn’t make her repeat her senior year and realizing too late that she’d left her shoes behind.

After graduation, over lunch at Tavern on the Green, her mom had been more miffed over the missing white Jimmy Choos than the fact that Serena had nearly skipped the ceremony. “What kind of girl goes around barefoot?” Mrs. van der Woodsen wanted to know. Then Ken Mogul had called Serena’s cell.

“I don’t like tans or freckles, so please, try and stay out of the sun. We start shooting at Fred’s next month,” he announced gruffly. Serena just sat there with the phone pressed against her ear, trying to figure out what he was talking about. Then she realized: I got the part. I got the part!

Hello? Can we change the subject now please?

Her parents considered acting in movies somewhat déclassé, but less than nine months after getting kicked out of boarding school, Serena had been accepted at Yale, Harvard, Brown, and Princeton and was about to star in a remake of Breakfast at Tiffany’s: They could hardly complain.

I got the part, I got the part! Serena kept screaming to herself. Her first real part in her first real movie. For the first time in her life she realized that this was something she really wanted. And it hadn’t just happened. She’d made it happen. Good thing she was now at a party, because there was an excited little girl on a trampoline inside her, bouncing and bouncing and bouncing.

Boing!

“I heard she and Ken Mogul went on a drug binge last night and she totally talked him into giving her the lead in his movie. He was all set to skew it older and cast Natalie Portman, but Serena brainwashed him,” someone whispered.

“She even tried to get him to cast Nate as her costar, but he’s always so baked, he forgot his lines during his tryout,” whispered someone else.

“And didn’t you hear? Nate totally didn’t graduate. He got busted for stealing painkillers from the nurse’s office at his school, and now he has to go to some drug rehab prison thing in the bad part of the Hamptons, like, all summer,” Rain Hoffstetter informed all who would listen. She’d hooked up with Charlie Dern when their parents had parked next to each other at a drive-in movie theater out on the Cape last weekend. They’d been talking on the phone every night since, so she was very up-to-date on her Nate information.

Nate was grateful for his role as Serena’s mute piece of arm candy. He felt like he’d been encased in six inches of clear plastic. Everyone’s voice sounded muffled and distant. It didn’t help that Blair looked radiant on Marcus’s knee, or that Serena clearly didn’t need a boyfriend right now, or that he was incredibly stoned.

“Blair?! Did you hear? I got the part!” Serena threw herself at Blair and Lord Marcus, dragging Nate along with her. She squeezed Blair’s shoulders exuberantly. “You’re not mad, are you?”

Me, mad? Blair smiled tensely, still intent on impressing Marcus with her sweet, forgiving nature.

Ha!

“You’re such an excellent actress,” she finally told her ex-friend politely. “You totally deserve it.”

Serena’s ear-to-ear smile faded slightly. She knew Blair too well not to be able to gauge that she was less than pleased and more than pissed. Blair was complicated: It was best to flee when she was acting volatile. “Is Vanessa around? I can’t wait to tell her—I’m totally talking to Ken Mogul about hiring her to film the movie!”

Her face resolutely blank, Blair pointed to where Vanessa was sitting in the corner with her own personal bottle of Stoli, happily signing the yearbooks of all the nonseniors at the party who thought she was beyond cool.

“Vanessa Marigold Abrams!” Serena cried and dashed across the room, leaving Nate behind.

Nate stood in front of Blair and Lord Marcus all cuddled up in their wing-back chair, his hands in his pockets, feeling like a jerk.

“How’s it feel?” Lord Marcus asked, reaching up to shake Nate’s hand.

Nate didn’t know who knew about his graduation predicament, and he didn’t much want to talk about it. “I’m just glad it’s over,” he mumbled. Lord Marcus looked bigger than he remembered, and even though he was a guy, Nate could appreciate how handsome he was. Blair had really scored.

“That’s how I feel,” Blair agreed with a perky smile. She reached up and casually stroked the back of Lord Marcus’s tanned, muscular neck, showing off how comfortable she was talking to Nate while sitting on Marcus’s lap.

Nate suddenly perked up, remembering the reason he’d come to the party in the first place. “Blair, can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked, although to him it sounded like he’d said, “Woo shee ga ga?”

Blair had always been the needy one in their on-again-off-again relationship, so it was a new experience to see Nate hovering over her, looking uncomfortable and a little desperate, with something bulky stuffed under his arm. Was he going to give her a present? she wondered. God knew she’d given him enough presents in their time together, and he’d hardly given her anything except flowers a few times, when he’d thought of it.

“Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back,” she murmured to Marcus. She slipped off his knee, flashing him a sultry I’m-only-tolerating-this-party-for-a-half-hour-more-before-I-tear-your-clothes-off look. Then she followed Nate into a semiquiet corner of the crowded room, trying to appear impatient and indifferent while her heart thundered so furiously in her chest, she wouldn’t have been surprised if it were visible through her nearly transparent cream-colored camisole.

Nate pulled the thing out from under his arm—a navy blue paper Gap shopping bag, folded in half. Blair was slightly appalled. He’d bought her a gift at the Gap?

“Here,” he murmured, yanking something out of the bag and handing it to her. Blair recognized it at once: the moss green cashmere V-neck sweater she’d given him over a year ago.

“But you love this sweater,” she complained, feeling for the gold heart she’d sewn into the left sleeve before she gave it to him so he would always be wearing her heart on his sleeve. It wasn’t there. Blair felt inside the right sleeve, although she was absolutely positive she’d sewn it into the left. Nope. Where the fuck was it?

“I just don’t think it’d be right to keep it,” Nate replied solemnly. He blinked hard, willing the tears not to fall. He wondered if Blair even remembered the gold heart, which was now sitting in a sailboat-shaped blue-and-green sea glass ashtray beside his bed, a constant reminder of their failed relationship.

Hey, maybe he should talk to Les Best about a new men’s cologne—Nate’s Tears!

“It’s just a sweater,” Blair insisted, feeling completely confused. Why couldn’t Nate just be normal and give her a boring Tiffany chain-link bracelet or something to congratulate her on graduating? Was this his way of saying sorry, or that he wanted her back? Well, it was a little late for that. “Please, keep it.”

“I can’t,” Nate gasped, choking up. He wished he could confide in Blair, tell her all about how he’d screwed up graduating; how he’d screwed up in general. But Nate had never truly confided in Blair, and now probably wasn’t the best time to start.

“Fine.” She folded the sweater neatly and placed it on a Yale-blue-upholstered armchair nearby. She put her hands on her hips, determined not to allow herself to waver. She had a new boyfriend now. A much, much better one. “Was that all?”

Nate nodded. Then he took a step forward, closed his emerald green eyes, and placed a careful kiss on Blair’s smooth, soft cheek. He opened his eyes. “Congratulations,” he murmured before turning away.

Blair stood there for a moment with her arms folded across her chest, ignoring the stares of her whispering classmates. It’s just a sweater, she repeated silently to herself.

Yeah. Right.

Nothing Can Keep us Together

Dan kept his hunter green Riverside Prep school tie on for Blair’s party. He wanted to look his handsomest when he announced to Vanessa that he’d deferred admission to Evergreen and wanted to spend next year and possibly the rest of his life with her. As soon as they arrived at the party, Jenny went right to the bar to score a glass of champagne, but Dan lingered by the door, his arms full of red roses, transfixed by the sight of Vanessa looking resplendent in her sexy low-cut white graduation dress and funky white wedge-heeled shoes. There was a pink flush to her cheeks and a sparkle to her dark brown eyes as she chatted with Serena van der Woodsen. Serena was gorgeous as usual, with her mane of pale blond hair cascading between her bare shoulder blades and her endless legs, but the sight of her didn’t turn Dan on the way the sight of Vanessa did.

“Hey, hot stuff, get your ass over here!” Vanessa shouted at him from across the room. She’d been drunk since one o’clock in the afternoon and the sight of Dan, his arms full of roses, was less a turn-on than a revelation. A drunken one.

This morning she’d almost driven off with the wrong boy. It was Dan she loved. How could she not—with his scruffy looks, his painfully wrought poems, and the way he kept showing up unexpectedly on her roof with his clothes off.

As Dan approached, she sort of oofed herself out of the Yale-blue-and-white striped wing-back chair she was sitting in but then gave up and fell back into it again. “I’m trying to hug you,” she explained, laughing at herself.

She’s drunk, he realized.

Serena grabbed him and kissed him on the cheek, then pushed him into Vanessa’s lap. “You’re always so cute,” she cooed, ruffling Dan’s scraggly light brown hair as red roses fell out of his arms and scattered around their feet.

Vanessa tickled him under the arms and he shrugged her needling fingers away, suddenly feeling more like someone’s cute four-year-old brother than Vanessa’s stud-muffin boyfriend.

“So, the big news is Serena’s going to be a movie star, and I’m going to help make her cheesy big-budget movie, because if we sell out, we’ll make selling out look cool,” Vanessa told him with drunken excitement.

Serena and Vanessa slapped each other five like old soccer teammates. Then Serena refilled her glass of Dom out of the magnum on the floor next to Vanessa’s chair and handed the overflowing flute to Dan. “To Hollywood,” she cried gleefully, waiting for Dan to chug it down.

Dan perched on Vanessa’s pale bare knee, trying not to spill his champagne. He’d prepared a Pablo Neruda love poem to recite, but maybe now wasn’t such a great time.

“Do you think I should tell them to turn the music up so we can dance?” Serena burped loudly.

“Definitely.” Vanessa bounced up and down on the chair cushion, causing Dan to tumble onto the floor. “Dan will dance with us, won’t you, Dan?”

Dan clambered to his feet, eager for Serena to leave him alone with Vanessa. “Sure.”

Serena whirled away, a vision of yellow silk and golden hair. The room was packed with people and the air was thick with cigarette smoke and perfume. Everyone had been celebrating since morning, so it felt like four A.M. instead of ten P.M. For old times’ sake, a group of girls from Seaton Arms and Constance were playing Spin the Bottle with a group of boys from Riverside.

“Me first!” Chuck Bass crowed, kneeling down to give the empty Stoli bottle an energetic spin.

Typical.

“Dad got pretty mad at me today,” Dan confessed. He perched on the arm of Vanessa’s chair, suddenly so nervous, he couldn’t drink his champagne. She wasn’t looking at him, but he hoped she was listening. “I guess I should’ve told him before I made my speech.”

Vanessa was watching Serena as she flirted with Jarvis Cocker—the crazy cool British DJ wearing a black top hat at his station across the room. She had to admire how completely shameless Serena was. She’d do anything as long as it wasn’t too illegal or humiliating, just because it amused her. The thing Vanessa most admired, though, was that Serena wasn’t conceited—she was just Serena. And she didn’t seem to need anyone else to be Serena. She was just fine being herself.

“See, I kind of changed my mind about going to Evergreen,” Dan continued. “At least, not right away.”

Vanessa could feel Dan staring at her and she realized he was trying to tell her something important and that she’d missed half of it. “Wait. What?”

Dan slid off the arm of the chair and knelt down on the burnished amber wood floor, grasping her hands in his. “I do not love you except because I love you,” he recited.

Vanessa was glad the room was so crowded; otherwise she might have been a little embarrassed.

“I can’t imagine not sharing the air you breathe, living all those miles away,” Dan told her earnestly, in his own words this time. “Like I said in my speech, I can go to college any time, but I’m in love with you now. And the only thing I want, my only requirement, is to be with you.”

Vanessa’s face turned hot and prickly. Yes, she loved him, but did he have to be so darned dramatic? “So you’re …” Her voice trailed off uncertainly.

“Staying here,” Dan filled in, gazing up at her with adoring brown eyes. “With you.”

All of a sudden that new OutKast song that no one could listen to without jumping to their feet and wiggling their ass came blasting out of the speakers ten decibels louder than the smooth R&B that had been playing before. Serena bounded over, grabbed Vanessa’s hand, and pulled her out of the chair. “Come on, groovy girl,” she coaxed. “Show me what you got.”

Vanessa had always loathed dancing, at least in public, but she needed to get away from Dan right now, and all his intensity. Serena bumped hips with her and Vanessa laughed and bumped her back. She could feel Dan watching them intently, but she didn’t turn around. The music was good, and she felt vibrant and beautiful in her slippery, shimmering white Morgane Le Fay dress. Dan must have been crazy to think not going to college next year was a good idea. Of course he was going, but they could spend the summer together working it out. The music grew louder still, and Vanessa raised her bare arms in the air, grooving to it. Dan was completely nuts, but so was she for ever having said she didn’t dance.

Nothing Can Keep us Together