Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  “Whoa,” Serena said, watching Blair stuff her face. “You must be hungry.” She felt a bit nauseated herself, after the whole Jeremy fiasco.

  Blair nodded and shoveled a forkful of chard into her mouth. She washed it down with a gulp of wine. “I’m starving,” she said.

  “So, Serena,” Cyrus called down from the head of the table. “Tell me about France. Your mother says you were in the South of France this summer. Is it true the French girls don’t wear tops on the beach?”

  “Yes, it’s true,” Serena said. She raised one eyebrow playfully. “But it’s not just the French girls. I never wore a top down there, either. How else could I get a decent tan?”

  Blair gagged on an enormous bite of soufflé and spat it into her wine. Was Serena flirting with Cyrus? She imagined them both drowned and bloated, floating on the crimson liquid in her wine glass beside the chunk of soufflé. Then Esther whisked it away and brought her a clean glass.

  Serena kept her audience captive right through dessert with heavily edited stories of her travels in Europe, omitting the parts where people lost limbs or died. Blair finished her second plate of duck, followed by a huge bowl full of chocolate-laced tapioca pudding, tuning out Serena’s voice as she spooned it into her mouth. Finally her stomach rebelled and she shot to her feet, scraping her chair back and running down the hall to her bedroom and into its adjoining bathroom.

  “Blair?” Serena called after her. She stood up and hurried off to follow.

  Several seats away, Chuck nudged Isabel with his elbow. “Beware the shit storm. Heads are about to fly.”

  Nate watched the two girls flee the table with a mounting sense of unease. He was pretty sure the only thing girls talked about in the bathroom was sex.

  And mostly he’d be right.

  Blair kneeled over the toilet and stuck her middle finger as far down her throat as it would go. Her eyes began to tear and then her stomach convulsed. She’d done this before, many times. It was disgusting and horrible, and she knew she shouldn’t do it, but at least she was only hurting herself, which was more than she could say for some people.

  The door to her bathroom was only half closed, and Serena could hear her friend retching inside.

  “Blair, it’s me,” she said quietly. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” Blair snapped, wiping her mouth. She stood up and flushed the toilet.

  Serena pushed the door open and Blair turned and glared at her. “I’m fine,” she said. “Really.”

  Serena put the lid down on the toilet seat and sat down. “Oh, don’t be such a bitch, Blair,” she said, exasperated. “What’s the deal? It’s me, remember? We know everything about each other.”

  Blair reached for her toothbrush and toothpaste. “We used to,” she said and began brushing her teeth furiously. She spat out a wad of green foam laced with blood from her bleeding gums. “When was the last time we talked, anyway? Like, the summer before last?”

  Serena looked down at her scuffed brown leather boots. “I know. I’m sorry. I suck.”

  Blair rinsed her toothbrush off and stuck it back in the holder. She stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Well, you missed a lot,” she said, wiping a smudge of mascara from beneath her eye with the tip of her pinky. “I mean, last year was really… different.” She’d been about to say “hard,” but “hard” made her sound like a victim. Like she’d barely survived without Serena around. “Different” was better.

  With a sudden sense of power, Blair glanced down at Serena, seated on the toilet. “Nate and I have become really close, you know. We tell each other everything.”

  Yeah, right.

  The two girls eyed each other warily for a moment.

  Then Serena inhaled and let it all out in one giant confused breath. Blair needed to know the truth. “Well, you don’t have to worry about me and Nate,” she began. “I sort of wanted to kill him, but Jeremy got to the pot first and smoked the poison and now he’s dead instead of Nate, which I’m glad about, because you love Nate, and I just want everyone to be happy, especially you.”

  She gazed up at her friend hopefully. Maybe that was all she needed to do to make things right—just spill her guts so they could both move on.

  The corners of Blair’s mouth curled up in a sneer. So Serena had poisoned Jeremy. She’d even tried to murder Nate—her Nate. Blair tugged her sweater down and glanced at her reflection in the mirror. A coldhearted, steely eyed warrior stared back at her.

  No way was Serena going to get away with this. Blair was the one who wanted to kill people—all the time. And if Serena could actually go through with it, then so could she. Murder was probably a lot easier than she thought. Jeremy’s exploding eyeballs weren’t even that bad. The maid had already cleaned up most of it. Serena thought she was such a trendsetter, such a revolutionary. But Blair was the better student, and she wasn’t taking AP Physics for nothing. She could come up with something way more impressive than exploding eyeballs. Guillotines, garrotes, rapiers, machetes! She would excel at killing, just as she excelled at everything else.

  “We’re missing the espresso,” she announced, and abruptly left the bathroom.

  Damn, Serena thought, staying put. Wasn’t Blair even remotely surprised that she, Serena van der Woodsen, was the one responsible for Jeremy’s gruesome death? That she had tried to kill Nate? Well, it was no use going after Blair now, while she was obviously in such a crappy mood. Things would be better tomorrow at school. She and Blair would have one of their famous heart-to-hearts in the lunchroom over lemon yogurts and romaine lettuce. It wasn’t like they could just stop being friends.

  She stood up and examined her eyebrows in the bathroom mirror, using Blair’s tweezers to pluck out a few stray hairs. She pulled a tube of Urban Decay Gash lip gloss from her pocket and smeared another layer on her lips. When she returned to the table, Blair was eating her second helping of pudding and Nate was drawing a small-scale picture of his kickass sailboat for Cyrus on the back of a matchbook. Across the table, Chuck raised his wine glass and Serena raised hers in return. She had no idea what she was toasting, but she was always up for anything.

  Even murder.

  Blair reached for her wine glass, gripping the stem in a viselike fist. The glass’s delicate base broke and the remaining red wine sloshed onto the table. It seeped through the tablecloth and bled between her fingers.

  Someone, someone at that very table, was going to die.

  hey people!

  S SEEN DANGLING HEAD OUT WINDOW

  Is it just me, or is everyone a little jumpy of late? Is it the change of seasons? One day it’s hot, one day it’s freezing. Is it the harvest moon? Is it that extra shot of espresso Starbucks puts in their venti latte? Is it due to lack of sleep, jet lag, PMS, STDs, S.E.X.?

  No?

  Yet we can’t throw off that haunting, horror movie feeling that something or someone is watching us, waiting for us, just around the corner or behind the next tree.

  Can we just make a little pinky swear right now and promise not to wander the streets of the Upper East Side alone, especially after dark?

  Jeepers creepers. I’ve got the willies just thinking about it.

  On a lighter note, we’re certainly off to a good start. You sent me tons of e-mail, and I had the best time reading it all. Thanks so much. Doesn’t it feel good to be bad?

  YOUR E-MAIL

  q:

  hey gossip girl,

  i heard about a girl up in New Hampshire who the police found naked in a field, with a bunch of dead chickens. ew. they thought she was into some kind of voodoo or something. do you think that was S? i mean it sounds like her, right? l8ter.

  —catee3

  a:

  Dear catee3,

  I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised. S isn’t such a big fan of chickens. Once, in the park, I saw her ripping the wings off a whole bucket of fried chicken without taking a single bite. I wouldn’t put anything past her.
r />   —GG

  q:

  Dear GG,

  My name starts with S and I have blond hair!!! I also just came back from boarding school to my old school in NYC. I was just so sick of all the rules, like no drinking or smoking or boys in your room. : ( Anyway, I have my own apartment now and I’m having a party next Saturday—wanna come? :)

  —S969

  a:

  Dear S969,

  The S I’m writing about still lives with her parents like most of us seventeen-year-olds. But that certainly doesn’t cramp her style. Check your closets though—she might just use your pad to store her bodies in. Don’t say I didn’t warn you if it starts to smell.

  —GG

  q:

  whassup, gossip girl?

  last night some guys I know got a handful of pills from some blond chick on the steps of the metropolitan museum of art. they had the letter S stamped all over them. coincidink, or what?

  —N00name

  a:

  Dear N00name,

  Whoa, is all I have to say. Oh, and if you savor the use of your basic bodily functions and want to keep your eyeballs intact, don’t ingest those pills. They’ll take you on a trip with no return ticket, and no one wants to clean up the blood-spattered mess you’ll leave behind.

  —GG

  3 GUYS AND 2 GIRLS

  I and K are going to have a little trouble fitting into those cute dresses they picked up at Bendel’s if they keep stopping in at the 3 Guys Coffee Shop for hot chocolate and French fries every day. I went in there myself to see what the fuss was about, and I guess I could say my waiter was cute, if you like ear fuzz, but the food is worse than at Jackson Hole and the average person in there is like, 100 years old. It is safe in there, though. Which is a lot more than I can say for the rest of the neighborhood now that you-know-who is back.

  SIGHTINGS

  C at Hermès picking up yet another pair of those custom-made pigskin loafers he likes. The boy practically lives in that store. B’s mother holding hands with her new man in Cartier. Hmmm, when’s the wedding? Also: a girl bearing a striking resemblance to S, coming out of one of those warehouses in the meatpacking district that have not been turned into a boutique hotel or fashion boutique and still have walk-in freezers full of carcasses inside them. Booking her own private freezer? B in Hammacher Schlemmer on Fifty-seventh Street, trying out the darts, the knives, the bowling balls, and the golf clubs, looking fiercely determined, as usual. Wedding gifts for Mom, or is she gearing up for battle? And finally, very late last night, S was seen leaning out her bedroom window over Fifth Avenue, looking a little lost.

  Well, don’t jump, sweetie. Things are just starting to get good.

  That’s all for now. See you in school tomorrow—if we survive the night.

  You know you love me,

  i know what you did last winter

  “Serena? Aren’t you up?” Lillian van der Woodsen glided into her daughter’s room and swept back the heavy white curtains cloaking the windows. “You’re going to school today, remember? They’re expecting you.”

  A streak of morning light fell upon Serena’s closed, long-lashed eyelids. I must look so peaceful and innocent, she mused as she pretended to be sound asleep.

  Her mother ducked under the bed’s white eyelet canopy and tugged back the white eyelet quilt. “Serena, honestly. We don’t want any trouble on your first day.”

  As if being late was such a terrible crime. If her mother only knew.

  “But Mommy,” Serena moaned, yanking her skimpy gray Calvin Klein cashmere slip down over her hips. “It’s freezing!”

  Ignoring her daughter’s protests, Lillian opened the closet door and rifled through the clothes. Something scratchy and heavy landed on Serena’s long, bare legs.

  “There’s your new uniform,” her mother instructed. “Hurry up and put it on.”

  Before leaving for boarding school, Serena had burned all her old school uniforms and flushed them down the toilet. Last week Lillian had purchased two new ones from Constance Billard’s online store. One for winter and one for spring.

  Serena sat up and fingered the pleated maroon skirt. “Pretty,” she yawned with lazy disinterest. She glanced outside. The Metropolitan Museum of Art stared coldly back at her from across Fifth Avenue, its cool limestone steps abandoned and lifeless save for a lone tourist wearing a backpack and a beret. “Wait,” she demanded. “Where is everybody?”

  Her mother pulled open the top drawer of her dresser, frowning with displeasure at the mess inside. “Where do you think they are? At school already. Tights. Where do you keep your tights?”

  Beneath the tangled array of bras, underpants, socks, and tights, tucked inside a black velvet sleeve, was an Italian switchblade with a mother-of-pearl handle, custom-made to fit Serena’s hand. She bolted out of bed and shoved her mother out of the way. “Thank you. I’ve got it. I can dress myself.”

  Ten minutes later, Serena stood in the penthouse foyer, chewing a morsel of croissant as she waited for the elevator. Her Burberry raincoat was unbuttoned. Her Ralph Lauren boots were untied. Her Wolford tights were old and holey. Her Brooks Brothers boy’s shirt was tattered and frayed. And her hair was unbrushed. But at least she was on her way.

  The elevator pinged perkily and the doors rolled open. Serena went inside and perched on the tiny red velvet bench in the corner, bending over to tie her boots as the elevator plummeted toward the lobby.

  Ping.

  The doors rolled open and she stood up, only to be confronted by a short girl with a prim auburn bob and fearful gray eyes. The elevator had not yet reached the lobby. It had stopped on the third floor.

  “Oh!” the girl gasped, hesitating between the doors. She wore a new Constance uniform, just like Serena’s. “I—”

  “Nice skirt,” Serena commented with a friendly smile. “Come on, get in. I think we’re late.”

  But the girl just stood there blocking the doors.

  “Parlez-vous français?” Serena tried. “Viens, viens. Vite, vite!”

  Ping, ping, ping, went the doors as they attempted to close.

  “Serena,” the girl whispered slowly, her mouth agape. “Serena van der Woodsen.”

  “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out,” Serena quipped, borrowing a phrase Blair used to repeat over and over again back in third grade. She frowned at the younger girl. “Are you coming or what?”

  The girl’s cheeks were pale. “I know what you did,” she stammered. “Up at Hanover… You killed him—my brother Jude. I saw from the window. I was visiting.”

  Now it was Serena’s turn to stare. She’d always thought of those Hanover boys as disposable, without identities or connections. But perhaps Jude wasn’t so obscure after all.

  “Jude was from Massachusetts.”

  The girl nodded. “Our parents are divorced. Dad got Jude and took him to Boston.” She adjusted her white turtleneck and buttoned the top button of her navy blue J.Crew cardigan, as if to protect her bare neck from harm. “Mom got me.”

  Serena chewed on her thumbnail, reopening a scab on the cuticle. Blood smeared her bottom lip, staining it red. “Lucky Mom,” she said, staring the girl down.

  Ping, ping, ping, went the doors. The switchblade hung heavy in the pocket of Serena’s plastic Burberry raincoat.

  “Get in here.” She grabbed the girl’s wrist and pulled her inside the elevator. “We’re late for school.”

  As soon as the doors closed and the elevator began to descend, Serena pulled out the red STOP button and the elevator froze, suspended mid-floor.

  “You shouldn’t even be in school,” the girl whimpered. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, leaving a trail of slimy green mucous on the blue cashmere. “You should be in prison. Murderer.”

  Serena grasped the switchblade and removed it from her pocket. It wasn’t as though she enjoyed killing people. All she wanted was for things to go back to normal. But she couldn’t very well allow this girl to go blabbing all over Const
ance about how Serena had shish-kebabbed her brother. She took a deep breath. She was already late for her first day back, and now she had to deal with this. She flicked her wrist and the razor-sharp knife blade sprang to attention with a gratifyingly efficient click.

  The joys of fine Italian craftsmanship.

  The girl backed against the smooth, mahogany-paneled wall of the elevator. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Please, don’t.”

  Serena raised her hand. The girl lunged for the STOP button, hoping to depress it and get to the lobby before it was too late. But when she reached it she found that her right hand was no longer attached to her wrist. Soon her pretty auburn scalp was no longer attached to her head, nor were her piercing gray eyeballs attached to their sockets.

  Unfortunately the carpeting in the elevator was fine, camel-colored lambswool, donated to the building by the wife of the Greek shipping magnate in 12A. It would have to be replaced.

  Ping. The elevator doors opened onto the lobby and Serena stepped out, her cheeks rosy from all that exercise.

  A dapper uniformed doorman swung open the building’s heavy glass and cast iron door. “Have a grand day, dear,” he greeted her in an Irish accent, tipping his hat. “ ’Tis a pleasure to have you back.”

  Just wait until he sees the mess she left in the elevator.

  Serena smiled winningly in reply and hurried up Fifth Avenue toward school. Across the street in Central Park the Hamptons-tanned moms were already out jogging around the reservoir while their attentive nannies pushed their charges toward the playground. Autumn leaves rustled on the bridle path as yellow taxis and loud buses roared past. Serena inhaled deeply, the sights and sounds and smells of the city a tonic to her tormented soul. Oh, it was so good to be back!

  And with a bit of Irish luck she’d make the ten blocks to Constance without shedding any more blood.