Psycho Killer (18 page)

As soon as they were finished with their Wednesday after-school activities, the remaining members of the
Kiss Me or Die
organizing committee had convened over french fries and hot chocolate in a booth at the 3 Guys Coffee Shop to deal with the last-minute preparations for the party. Blair Waldorf, Laura Salmon, Rain Hoffstetter, and Tina Ford, from the Seaton Arms School, were all present. Nicki Button, Kati Farkas, and Isabel Coates were not, because they were dead.

The crisis at hand was the fact that the party was only nine days away, and no one had received an invitation yet. The invitations had been ordered weeks ago, but due to a mix-up, the location of the party had to be changed from Pier 60 in Chelsea
to the Frick, an old mansion on Fifth Avenue, rendering the invitations useless. The girls were in a tight spot. They had to get a new set of invitations out, and fast, or there wasn’t going to be a party at all.

“But Alaric is the
only
place to get flower centerpieces for the tables. I know it’s expensive but it’s so worth it. Oh, come on, Blair, think how cool they’ll be,” Tina whined.

“There are plenty of other places to get flowers,” Blair insisted.

“Or maybe we can ask the birds of prey people to pitch in,” Rain suggested. She reached for a french fry, dunked it in ketchup, and popped it into her mouth. “They’ve barely done anything.”

Blair rolled her eyes and blew into her hot chocolate. “That’s the whole point.
We’re
raising money for
them
. It’s a
cause
.”

Rain wound a lock of her gleaming dark hair around her finger. “What is a bird of prey anyway?” she said. “Is it like a woodpecker?”

“No, they’re like eagles and vultures,” Tina said. “And they eat other animals, like rabbits and mice and squirrels and stuff. Even if they’re already dead.”

“Gross,” Rain said.

“I just read a definition,” Laura mused. “I can’t remember where I saw it.”

On the Internet, perhaps?

“They’re almost extinct,” Blair added. “Which is sort of the whole point.” She thumbed through the list of people they were inviting. Three hundred and sixteen. All young people—no parents, thank God.

Blair’s eyes were automatically drawn to a name toward the bottom of the list: Serena van der Woodsen. The address given
was her dorm room at Hanover Academy, in New Hampshire. Blair put the list back down on the table without correcting it.

“We’re going to have to spend the extra money on the printer and cut corners where we can,” she said quickly. “I can tell Alaric to use lilies instead of orchids and forget about the peacock feathers around the rims of the vases.”

“I can do the invitations,” a small, young-sounding voice spoke up from behind them. “For free.”

The four girls turned around to see who it was.

Oh look, it’s that little Ginny girl
, Blair thought.
The ninth grader who did the calligraphy and creepy dead angel drawings in our school hymnals
.

“I can do them all by hand tonight. The materials are the only cost, but I know where to get good quality paper cheap,” Jenny Humphrey said.

“She did all our hymnals at school,” Laura whispered to Tina. “They look really good.”

“Yeah,” Rain agreed. “They’re pretty cool.”

Jenny blushed and stared at the shiny linoleum floor of the coffee shop, waiting for Blair to make up her mind. She knew Blair was the one who mattered.

“And you’ll do it all for free?” Blair demanded suspiciously.

Jenny lifted her gaze. “I was kind of hoping that if I did the invites, maybe I could come to the party?”

Blair weighed the pros and cons in her mind. Pros: The invitations would be unique and, best of all, free, so they wouldn’t have to skimp on the flowers. Cons: There really weren’t any, except that the little freshman’s boobs were going to take up a lot of space at the party.

Blair looked the Ginny girl up and down. Their cute little
ninth-grade helper with the huge chest. She was a total glutton for punishment, and she’d be totally out of place at the party. But who cared?

“Sure, you can make yourself an invitation. Make one for one of your girlfriends, too,” Blair said, handing the guest list over to Jenny.

How generous. Too bad she already disposed of Jenny’s only girlfriend.

Blair gave Jenny all the necessary information and Jenny dashed out of the coffee shop breathlessly. The stores would be closing soon, and she didn’t have much time. The guest list was longer than she’d anticipated, and she’d have to stay up all night working on the invitations, but she was going to the party; that was all that mattered.

Just wait until she told Dan. He was going to
freak
. And she was going to make him come with her to the party, whether he liked it or not—especially since Elise seemed to have moved away without telling her and totally didn’t respond to her texts.

She hailed a cab, and told the cabbie to take her to Michaels, the huge crafts store on upper Broadway. The cab’s window was halfway down and the crisp late afternoon air had the distinct scent of New York in autumn—a mixture of smoking fireplaces, dried leaves, decomposing bodies, dog pee, and bus exhaust—a scent that to Jenny seemed full of promise. She hugged herself. It was happening: She was going to
Kiss Me or Die
. She’d buy a cool new dress and wear the highest heels she could get away with. She’d straighten her hair—or at least try to—and curl her eyelashes. And at the party she was going to get kissed.

Or die?

Two martinis and three rolls of Remi brothers’ film later, Serena jumped out of a cab in front of Constance and ran up the stairs to the auditorium, where the interschool play rehearsal had already begun. After having her photograph taken from every possible angle, she’d had a crisis of conscience, realizing that this sort of extracurricular activity wasn’t going to get her into college either. As always, she was half an hour late.

Jaunty piano music drifted down the hallway. Serena pushed open the auditorium door to find an old preschool acquaintance, Ralph Bottoms III, onstage singing “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” with passion. He was dressed as an old-fashioned barber, complete with fake mustache, open white shirt, suspenders, shiny black boots, and a bloody straight razor. Ralph had gained weight in the last few years, and his face was ruddy, as if he’d been eating too much rare steak. He held hands with a stocky girl with straight black hair and a heart-shaped face, wearing a red velvet nineteenth-century prostitute dress. She was singing too, belting out the words in a thick Korean accent.

“He shaved the faces of gentlemen who never thereafter were heard of again.”

Serena leaned against the wall to watch with a mixture of horror and fascination. The scene at the art gallery hadn’t fazed her, but this—this was scary. Even the opportunity to wield the bloody straight razor couldn’t tempt her.

The drama teacher, a sweaty, enthusiastic Englishwoman in clogs, finished the song with a prolonged piano chord. The rest of the Interschool Drama Club whistled and cheered. Then the drama teacher began to direct the next scene.

“Put your hands on your hips,” she instructed. “Show me, show me. That’s it. Imagine you’re the Justin Bieber of Fleet Street!”

Serena turned to gaze out the window and saw three girls get out of a cab together on the corner of Ninety-third and Madison. She squinted, recognizing Blair, Laura, and Rain. Serena hugged herself, warding off the strange feeling that had been stalking her since she’d come back to the city. For the first time in her entire life, she felt left out.

Without a word to anyone in the drama club—
Hello? Goodbye!
—Serena slipped out of the auditorium and into the hallway outside. The wall was littered with flyers and notices and she stopped to read them. One of the flyers advertised the tryout for Vanessa Abrams’s film:
Natural Born Killers, a modern retelling of the violently romantic Oliver Stone classic. Try out for Mallory. Wednesday, sunset. Brooklyn Bridge
.

Knowing what little she did about Vanessa, the film was going to be very serious and obscure, but it was better than shouting goofy songs and doing the Hokey-Pokey with fat, red-faced Ralph Bottoms III. It was still light out. Hopefully the tryout
wasn’t over. Once again, Serena found herself running for a cab, headed downtown.

“This is how I want you to do it,” Vanessa told Marjorie Jaffe, a sophomore at Constance and the only girl who had shown up to try out for the role of Mallory Knox, the murderous teen bride in Vanessa’s film. Marjorie was short and stocky, with curly auburn hair, freckles, and a little pug nose. She chewed gum while she talked, had flabby arms that jiggled when she moved them, and was completely, nightmarishly wrong for the part.

The sun was setting and the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian footpath basked in a pretty pink glow. Ferries, container ships, barges, cruise ships, tugboats, yachts, small motor craft, and sailboats traversed the busy harbor. Cars zoomed back and forth over the bridge and helicopters policed the sky—all under the blandly imperious watch of the Statue of Liberty. The gusty sea air was fresh and cool, but tainted with the scent of New Jersey and the landfill on Staten Island. As always, the footpath was crawling with camera-toting tourists, eager to capture themselves in front of the most famous backdrop in the world.

Dan hung over the side of the bridge, waiting for the enormous orange Staten Island ferry to go off course and crash into Governor’s Island. A favorite haiku by Bash
came to mind:

A fishy smell—

perch guts

in the water weeds
.

Dan was dressed in his Mickey Knox costume, with the Paragon Sports price tags tucked in so they wouldn’t show,
and armed with the bowie knife, a crowbar, and a baseball bat, all hanging from the black yoga mat harness strapped over his shoulders and across his chest. Dan’s hollow cheeks and sunken eyes looked almost grotesque in the pinkish-gray twilight, and his ribs stuck out impossibly through the tight white sleeveless rash guard. In him Vanessa thought she had created a very believable psychopath.

“Watch,” Vanessa told Marjorie. She yanked the bowie knife out of the hand-stitched leather sheath tied to the harness strapped to Dan’s chest, and pretended to cut open her own hand.

“Is that a real knife?” Marjorie whined, chomping on her gum. “What if I cut myself for real?”

Vanessa put her video camera down on the ground.

“Why don’t I run through the scene with Dan while you watch?” she said. “We’re going to say our lines this time. When you do it you don’t need to say them, you just need to think them. Got it?”

She slipped the bowie knife back into its sheath and smiled up at Dan. God, he looked hot. In a starving, miserable sort of way.

“Okay. Let’s go. Action!”

Dan swung from the bridge’s cables and gaped at the water with a crazed smile. “Life is fragile and absurd. Murdering someone’s not so hard.” It was the most he’d spoken all day.

Vanessa put her arms around him and yanked the knife from out of its sheath, praying the tourists on the bridge would be too busy taking photographs to pay them any mind. She mimed cutting her hand open, baring her teeth at the pain.

“Mickey Knox, will you marry me?” she asked, wondering if in real life she would ever get to utter those words to Dan.
Will you marry me?

Dan reached for the knife and cut his own hand open for real. Man, he loved that sharp, sharp knife. “I will,” he said. “I will.”

It was just a shallow cut, like a paper cut, but still. Vanessa was pissed that he’d gotten the knife dirty. They reached out and clasped each other’s hands in a bloody handshake.

“We’re Mickey and Mallory Knox now,” she proclaimed. “And we’ll stay together until we die and die and die again!”

“I love you, Mallory,” Dan said quietly, swinging in for a kiss.

Whoa. Vanessa’s face flushed red. She’d imagined them kissing hundreds of times, but not like this, in front of an audience, playing other people—playing psychopaths! Before their lips met, she braced her hands against his bony chest and pushed him away. Dan wiped the blood on his hand onto his new white shirt.

So much for returning it.

Vanessa collected her wits. “Now your turn,” she told Marjorie.

“ ’Kay,” Marjorie said, chewing her gum with her mouth open. She pulled the purple metallic scrunchy out of her wiry red hair and fluffed it up with her hand. “I’m still kinda scared of that knife though.” She held up her script. “ ’Kay,” she said again, bravely. “Let’s do it.”

Dan slipped the knife back into place and swung his arms around in circles a few times. The crowbar was digging into his back and the baseball bat was giving him splinters.

Vanessa picked up her camera. “Action!”

Dan swung from the cables and said his line, thinking of how much he hated that asshole Chuck Bass and sounding even more convincing this time.

“Mickey Fox, will you marry me?” Marjorie said, batting her eyes flirtatiously and cracking her gum.