Psycho Killer (10 page)

“Oh yeah,” Jeffrey said. “And I bet there’s going to be a lot more than kissing going on.” He sniggered. “Especially if Serena’s there.”

The boys laughed, congratulating each other on their incredible wit.

Dan had had enough. He tossed his cigarette on the sidewalk only inches from Chuck’s shoes and headed for the school doors. As he passed the three boys he turned his head and puckered his lips, making a smooching sound three times as if he were giving each boy a big, fat kiss. Then he turned and went inside, banging the door shut behind him.

Kiss that and die, assholes.

“What I’m going for is tension,” Vanessa Abrams explained to Constance’s small Advanced Film Studies class. She stood at the front of the room, presenting her idea for the new film she was making, a loose adaptation of
Natural Born Killers
, the gleefully violent and weirdly beautiful Oliver Stone film about a pair of murderous, lovestruck psychopaths. Vanessa’s earlier repertoire included a short animated film using Legos and featuring the owls of
Harry Potter
during a rabies epidemic, and an underwater version of
Twilight
starring a cast of catfish and one piranha. Oliver Stone seemed like a logical next step. Besides, fairy tales about wizards and vampires weren’t really her thing. Fairy tales about serial killers were.

Vanessa reveled in the idea of an audience of her peers, munching popcorn while they watched the most vile and graphic images of violence she was capable of producing onscreen. They all acted like such goody-goodies. She wanted to show them the gritty underside of the very world they in which lived. Shove their faces in it and force it down their diamond-studded throats. She wanted to lure them in with a love story, and then make them gag.

“First I’m going to shoot the wedding scene, when Mallory and Mickey become Mallory and Mickey Knox, but only she talks. Actually, her voice is my voice, not the actress’s voice, in voice-over. And he never has any lines.” Vanessa paused dramatically, waiting for one of her classmates to say something. Mr. Beckham, their teacher, was always telling them to keep their scenes alive with dialogue and action, and Vanessa was deliberately doing just the opposite. “And then I’m going to film the mayhem and destruction that happens every day all over the city, as if it’s them causing the chaos. And then I’m going to show them dying, violently.”

“So just a voice-over for the whole film? There’s no actual dialogue?” Mr. Beckham observed from where he was standing in the back of the classroom. He was painfully aware that no one else in the class was listening to a word Vanessa said.

“It’s going to be pretty graphic,” Vanessa insisted. “I want the images to scream. I don’t need much talk.”

She reached for the slide projector’s remote control and began clicking through slides of the black and white pictures she’d taken to demonstrate the mayhem and destruction she’d already captured. A pigeon pecking at a bloody paper towel. A headless black wig draped on a park bench. A homeless person’s pale, dead-looking, dirty-fingernailed hand. A bloody, openmouthed rat smushed flat by a car on the street.

“Ha!” someone exclaimed from the back of the room. It was Blair Waldorf, laughing out loud as she read the note Rain Hoffstetter had just passed to her.

For a good time

call Serena v.d. Woodsen

Get it—VD??

Vanessa glared at Blair. Film was Vanessa’s favorite class, the only reason she came to school at all. She took it very seriously, while most of the other girls, like Blair, were only taking Film as a break from Advanced Placement hell—AP Calculus, AP Bio, AP History, AP English Literature, AP French. They were on the straight and narrow path to Yale or Harvard or Brown, where their families had all gone for generations. Vanessa wasn’t like them. Her parents hadn’t even gone to college. They were artists, and Vanessa wanted only one thing in life: to go to NYU and major in film and make the artiest slasher films ever made.

Actually, there was something else she coveted. Or some
one
else, to be precise, but we’ll get to that soon.

Vanessa was an anomaly at Constance, the only girl in the school who had a nearly shaved head, wore black turtlenecks every day, read
The Silence of the Lambs
over and over like it was the Bible, listened to the Smiths, and drank unsweetened black tea. She had no friends at all at Constance and lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her twenty-two-year-old sister, Ruby. So what was she doing at a tiny, exclusive private girls’ school on the Upper East Side with Gucci-Pucci-tutu-wearing competitive princess freaks like Blair Waldorf? It was a question Vanessa asked herself every day.

She also asked herself every day why she didn’t kill them all and torch the school.

Vanessa’s parents were older, revolutionary artists who lived in Vermont in a rubber house made out of recycled car tires. When she turned fifteen, Vanessa had shaved her head and stopped smiling. She threatened to transform the woodstove into a live bomb and melt the house unless her parents let her move in with her bass guitarist older sister in Brooklyn. Her parents finally gave in, but they wanted to be sure the perpetually
unhappy Vanessa got a good, safe high school education. So they made her go to Constance, which she soon found out was the worst form of torture imaginable.

Vanessa loathed Constance and every other girl who went there, but she never said anything to her parents. At least she was in New York, and there were only eight months left until graduation. Eight more months and she could blow this fuckhole sky-high and escape downtown to NYU.

Eight more months of bitchy Blair Waldorf—that is, if Vanessa didn’t kill her sooner—and even worse, Serena van der Woodsen, who was back in all her splendor. Blair Waldorf looked like she was absolutely orgasmic over the return of her best friend. In fact, the whole back row of Film Studies was atwitter, passing notes. Fuck them. Vanessa wanted to stuff their notes down their throats and strangle each one of them with the arms of their annoying cashmere sweaters.

But she had a film to make. She lifted her chin and went on with her presentation. She was above their petty bullshit anyway.
Only eight more months
.

Perhaps if Vanessa had seen the note Kati Farkas had just passed to Blair, she might have had a tad more sympathy for Serena.

Blair, Rain, and Kati giggled noisily.

“Shhssh,” Mr. Beckham whispered, glancing at Vanessa sympathetically. Blair turned the note over and scrawled a reply.

Blair handed the note back to Kati, feeling not the tiniest speck of remorse for being so mean. There were so many stories about Serena flying around she honestly didn’t know what to believe anymore. Maybe some of it was true. Maybe some of this stuff had really happened. After all, Serena had admitted to accidentally engineering Jeremy’s death while intending to kill Nate. Who knew what else she was capable of? Besides, passing notes distracted everyone from Nicki’s rather abrupt disappearance this morning.

And passing notes is much more fun than taking them.

“Attention, ladies and faculty,” Mrs. McLean’s voice sounded over the school-wide sound system. “Due to an earlier incident, the auditorium will be closed for maintenance for the remainder of the day. Drama and dance classes will be relocated to the gymnasium. Thank you.”

So Nicki’s body had finally been discovered. Blair wondered if Serena had killed anyone yet today. For every person Serena offed, she planned to off someone too.

Vanessa cleared her throat. “I’m going to be writing, directing, and filming. I’ve already cast my friend Daniel Humphrey from Riverside Prep as Mickey Knox.”

Her cheeks heated up when she uttered Dan’s name. He didn’t talk much and was very morbid, but he’d let her in out of the cold when she was locked out at a party two years ago and she’d been bossing him around ever since. Dan was her only friend in the entire city, although she would kill for them to be more than just friends.

“I still need a Mallory. I’m casting her tomorrow on the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk.” Secretly she wanted to don a wig and play Mallory herself, but then there’d be no one to hold the camera. The original Mickey and Mallory Knox had been played by the hugely muscular bald cowboy Woody Harrelson and the gangly doe-eyed Southern teen bride Juliette Lewis. Dan and Vanessa couldn’t have looked more different. But that was the fun of an adaptation—she could use the story and fuck with it.

“Anyone interested?” she asked. The question was a private little joke with herself. Vanessa knew no one in the room was even listening.

Blair’s arm shot up. “I’ll be the director!” she announced. Obviously she hadn’t heard the question, but Blair was so desperate to impress the admissions office at Yale, she was always the first to volunteer for anything.

Vanessa opened her mouth to speak.
Direct this
, she wanted to say, before firing a bazooka and blowing up Blair’s perfectly coiffed head.

“Put your hand down, Blair,” Mr. Beckham sighed tiredly. “Vanessa just got through telling us
she
is directing and writing
and filming. Unless you’d like to try out for the part of Mallory, I suggest you focus on your own project.”

Blair glared sourly at him. She hated teachers like Mr. Beckham. He had such a chip on his shoulder because he was from Nebraska and had finally attained his sad dream of living in New York City only to find himself teaching a useless class instead of directing cutting-edge films and becoming famous. One day Mrs. McLean would probably make an announcement over the loudspeaker that Mr. Beckham had crawled into the space-saver oven in his pathetically tiny studio apartment and had never come out.

Or maybe Blair should just kill him herself and put him out of his misery.

“Whatever,” Blair said, tucking her dark hair behind her ears. “I guess I really don’t have time.”

And she didn’t.

Blair was chair of the Social Services Board and ran the French Club; she tutored third graders in reading; she worked in a soup kitchen one night a week, had SAT prep on Tuesdays, and on Thursday afternoons she took a fashion design course with Tim Gunn. On weekends she played tennis so she could keep up her national ranking. Besides all that, she was on the planning committee of every social function anyone could be bothered to go to, and the fall/winter calendar was
busy
,
busy
,
busy
.

Never mind all the murders she’d have to commit to keep up with Serena.

Vanessa flicked on the lights and walked back to her seat at the front of the room.

“It’s okay, Blair, I wanted a taller girl for Mallory anyway.” Vanessa smoothed her uniform around her stocky thighs and sat down daintily, in an almost perfect imitation of Blair.

Blair smirked at Vanessa’s prickly shaved head and glanced at Mr. Beckham. Would he notice if she pulled Vanessa’s ugly black turtleneck over her eyes and pushed her out the school doors in front of a moving Hummer?

Vanessa smirked back at her, wondering if she could get the Mason Pearson boar-bristle hairbrush sticking out of Blair’s Miu Miu handbag all the way up Blair’s ass before the bell rang.

Mr. Beckham cleared his throat and stood up. “Well, that’s it, girls. You can leave a little early today. Vanessa, why don’t you put a sign-up sheet out in the hall for your casting tomorrow?”

The girls began to pack up their bags and file out of the room. Vanessa ripped a blank sheet of paper out of her notebook and wrote the necessary details at the top of it.
Natural Born Killers, a modern retelling of the violently romantic Oliver Stone classic. Try out for Mallory. Wednesday, sunset. Brooklyn Bridge
.

She resisted writing a description of the girl she was looking for because she didn’t want to scare anyone away.

In the original, Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis were an oddly complementary couple. He was big and strong, while she was willowy and baby-faced. He looked like he could take on ten men and was totally smitten with her. She was the more brutal killer and doubted his fidelity. In her remake, Vanessa wanted to reverse the roles. Mickey would be frail, mentally unbalanced, and deadly. Mallory would be a statuesque beauty, confident and strong, and madly in love with Mickey. Like in the original, her Mickey and Mallory Knox would become icons of their own fucked-up world, a serial-killing Bonnie and Clyde. But the more they killed, the more they were doomed. Death hung around their necks like a boa constrictor, choking them. Vanessa
wanted her film to be shocking and depressing and graphic and beautiful-—like the poetry Dan wrote, only grosser.

The perfect Mallory would be the kind of girl to make Dan glow, even though he never ate and walked around all day chainsmoking and looking half-dead. Mallory would be full of movement and laughter—exactly the opposite of Dan, whose silent, caffeine- and nicotine-fueled energy caused his eyelids to twitch and made his hands shake sometimes.

Vanessa hugged herself. Just thinking about Dan made her feel like she had to pee. Under that shaved head, that pale skin, and that impossible black turtleneck, she was just another neurotic, demonic, boy-crazy girl.