Psycho Killer (20 page)

“I’m fucking hallucinating! It’s this fucking pot!”

Nate staggered outside, waving his arms wildly. A cab pulled over and he got in.

“Hurry!” he shouted after giving his address. Maybe he was just anxious about Blair discovering that he’d cheated. Maybe he was worried about their hookup this Friday night. Or maybe his eyeballs were really about to explode all over the taxi before he even made it home.

Poor thing. He needs a hot bath and a cup of chamomile tea. And a hug, or two, or three.

Vanessa was in the back of a pedicab, filming background shots for her fucked-up remake of
Natural Born Killers
. She’d instructed the heavy, bearded driver to pedal slowly along the gutter, so as not to shake the camera. Up Madison they went, past Ralph Lauren and E.A.T. and Agnès B. and Crewcuts and Williams-Sonoma. Vanessa wanted to get footage of the ritzy sort of places Mickey and Mallory Knox’s victims shopped in before they died.

As the cab cycled past the pizzeria she zoomed in on a body sprawled on top of a pile of bloody pizza boxes. Perfect. A pair of adolescent male vultures swooped in and perched on the body’s bare knees. The vultures squawked and strutted and fought for the best feasting spot, flapping their black and brown feathered wings, undulating their raw, pink, white-ruffed necks, and blinking their black, glass bead eyes. Their sharp, hooked, yellowish-gray beaks were punctuated by little pink nostril dents, giving them an almost human appearance.

“Hold it,” Vanessa told the pedicab driver. “I have to get this.”

She got out of the pedicab and approached the murder scene. The vultures were pecking at the ground now, tossing their heads back as they swallowed the larger morsels. And it wasn’t pizza they were eating.

I was in an interschool play once. I had one great line: “Iceberg!” Guess which play I was in and what I was dressed as? The one hundredth person to get it right will win a Remi brothers original print.

But enough about me.

S
’S MODELING DEBUT!

Be on the lookout this weekend for the cool new poster decorating the sides of buses, the insides of subways, the tops of taxis, and available online through yours truly. It’s a great big picture of
S
—not her face, but it has her name on it so you’ll know it’s her. A particular part of her, anyway. Congratulations to
S
on her modeling debut!

SIGHTINGS

B
,
L
, and
R
all in
3 Guys
eating fries and hot chocolates with big fat
Bendel’s
bags under the table. Don’t those girls have anywhere else to go? And we thought they were always out boozing it up and partying down. So disappointing. I did see
B
slip a few splashes of brandy into her hot chocolate,
though. Naughty girl, that’s more like it. Also saw that same wigged girl going into the STD clinic downtown. If that is
S
, she’s definitely got a bad case of the nasties. Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I frequent the neighborhood of the STD clinic—I get my hair trimmed at a very trendy salon across the street.

YOUR E-MAIL

If I can stay intact. It’s time to start watching our backs, people, and our heads. You’ve seen the vultures hovering.

I’ve got your back if you’ve got mine.

You know you love me,

“Yum!” Serena crowed, eyeing the cookies laid out on a table in the Constance lunchroom on Thursday. Peanut butter cream, chocolate chip, oatmeal. Next to the cookies were plastic cups full of orange juice or milk. An angry-looking, mustachioed lunch lady doled out the cookies two at a time, rapping students’ knuckles with a pair of plastic serving tongs if they tried to take more. This was recess, the daily twenty-minute break Constance gave its girls after second period, no matter what grade they were in.

When the lunch lady’s head was turned, Serena grabbed a fistful of peanut butter creams and glided away to stuff her face. It wasn’t exactly a healthy breakfast, but it would have to do. She’d stayed up most of the night watching the original
Natural Born Killers
so she’d be better prepared for Vanessa’s film, and had woken up five minutes before school began.

Not even enough time to knock someone off on the way.

Vanessa stood on the other side of the cafeteria, blowing into a cup of hot black tea, wearing her usual black turtleneck and bored, angry expression. Serena waved a cookie at her and strode over to say hello.

“Hi,” Serena greeted her cheerfully. “Oh my God. I totally took your knife yesterday. I’m such a dope with stuff like that. I steal pens, lip gloss, knives. I’m an idiot.” She shook her blond mane to indicate how scatterbrained she was. “I’ll get it back to you eventually. Anyway, I watched the original movie last night. Insane—loved it! Yours is going to be even better though. When do we start shooting?”

God, she was cocky. Vanessa waited a moment before answering, allowing the steam from her tea to open up the pores on her chin. She’d tossed and turned all night trying to decide between Serena and Marjorie. Obviously Serena was perfect—too perfect. Vanessa would never forget the moony, dazed, lovestruck expression on Dan’s face when he read with Serena. She never wanted to see that again, and she certainly didn’t want to capture it on film, unless it involved sawing Serena’s pretty head off with a chainsaw on film too.

But that would be a different movie.

Vanessa sipped her tea. “Actually,” she responded in a measured voice, “I haven’t told Marjorie yet, but I’m giving her the part.”

Serena dropped the cookie she was eating on the floor. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Vanessa scrambled for a decent reason why she was using Marjorie when Serena was obviously perfect for the part. “Marjorie’s really rough and innocent. That’s what I’m looking for. Dan and I thought your performance was just a bit too… um… polished.”

“Oh,” Serena repeated. She could hardly believe it. Even Dan had vetoed her? But he was so
sweet
. She could feel the consternation bubbling up inside her. No part meant no extracurricular, which meant no college, which meant doom. If only
she hadn’t left the knife at home in the old violin case where she’d begun to store all her weapons, she could have used it on Vanessa right now.

Stop it
, she told herself.
It’s Blair you want to kill now, remember?
Blair was the one trumping everyone with a million extra-curriculars. Blair was the one applying early to Yale, the one harboring Nate, the one acting like such a jerk. Blair was the one who was ruining her life.

“Sorry.” Vanessa felt sort of bad for bringing Dan into it. He didn’t even know what she’d decided. But it sounded more professional this way; like it wasn’t anything personal, it was strictly business. “You have talent,” she added. “And I’m going to be filming lots of background stuff. Maybe you can do a cameo, you know, if I happen to catch you in the middle of something really wild.”

“Okay,” Serena replied through tightly clenched teeth. If Vanessa really wanted something wild, she could give it to her
now
—her own entrails smeared on the cafeteria mirror, maybe, with the lunch ladies’ heads all lined up in a row on the floor beneath.

“Don’t be discouraged,” Vanessa went on. “And don’t forget about the knife. I need that fucker back.”

At sound of the word
knife
, Serena’s muscles tensed. Her anger reared and bucked and fought for its head. No halfway decent college was going to want her now. Her parents would be so disappointed. Damn, she needed to stab someone. It was all she could think about.
Stab, stab, stab
. She bit into a cookie and chewed it up, hard.
Damn, damn, damn
.

Vanessa turned away to call Marjorie and tell her the good news. At least Marjorie lived in Brooklyn. Vanessa could warn her
to stay home when she finally got the nerve and enough ammo to blow up Constance with all the pompous knife-stealing bitches like Serena still locked up inside.

She was going to have to change the entire film now that Marjorie was her star. It would have to be a comedy. Or maybe she’d wind up using more background stuff and less acting altogether. She already had that great scene from the pizzeria. At least she’d saved herself from making
Endless Love at First Sight on the Bridge After Dark
, starring the gorgeous Serena van der Woodsen and the stupid Daniel Humphrey. Blech.

Serena stood in the corner of the cafeteria, crumbling the remaining cookies in her hand as she tried to calm down.
Sweeney Todd
was a cheesefest and she was too polished for
Natural Born Killers
. What else could she do? She chewed on her thumbnail, deep in thought. Killing Vanessa and Dan wouldn’t get her anywhere. She could kill Marjorie, but that seemed sort of unsportsmanlike. She would just have to let it go.

And maybe she could make a movie of her own. When they were younger, Blair and Serena had always talked about making movies. Blair was always going to be the star, wearing cool miniskirts and screaming her head off like Mia Farrow in
Rosemary’s Baby
or Janet Leigh in
Psycho
. And Serena always wanted to direct. She would wear floppy linen pants and shout through a bullhorn and sit in a chair with the letter
S
on it.

Maybe she had it all wrong. Maybe Blair didn’t have to die after all. What was that expression—something about turning lemons into lemon juice? Maybe this was their chance to do something together and become friends again. She was Serena van der Woodsen, and lemon juice went great with ice and gin.