Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  Dan wasn’t even listening. He was too distracted by his golden memories of Serena: her deep blue eyes, her swinging swath of luxurious blond hair, the way the world always seemed to be perfectly lit in her presence. Serena. He closed his eyes dizzily and then opened them again. Serena.

  “Dan? Hello? Are you alive?”

  “Watch it!” a bicycle messenger shouted as Dan stepped blindly off the curb. He was always stepping blindly off curbs, as if willing that moment’s sudden intake of breath to be his very last. But now Serena was back in town. He stepped up onto the curb again.

  “Never mind,” he heard his sister sigh. “Forget it. Eat something. Drink something other than coffee. Get some exercise. I’ll talk to you later.”

  She clicked off and Dan shoved his cell phone back into the pocket of his saggy black corduroys. He lit another cigarette with the burning stub of the one he was already smoking, singeing his thumbnail. He didn’t even feel it.

  Serena van der Woodsen.

  They had first met at a party. No, that wasn’t exactly true. He and Jenny had stared at her for hours at a party—his party, the only one he’d ever had at his family’s apartment on Ninety-ninth and West End Avenue.

  It was April of eighth grade, when Dan was thirteen. The party was ten-year-old Jenny’s idea, and their father, Rufus Humphrey, the infamous retired editor of lesser-known beat poets and a party animal himself, was happy to oblige. Rufus had been watching Criminal Minds and had realized that Dan had all the makings of a serial killer: abandoned by his mother at a young age; still wet the bed sometimes; loved to set things on fire, including his sister’s hair and their large domestic shorthair cat, Marx; engaged in animal torture—see Marx. So far Dan hadn’t shown any interest in actually killing anyone but himself, but Rufus thought his son needed to get out more, engage with kids his own age.

  Rufus had sent out an e-mail from Dan’s account inviting Dan’s entire class to the party and asking them to invite as many people as they wanted. More than a hundred kids showed up, and Rufus kept the beer flowing out of a keg in the bathtub, getting many of the kids drunk for the first time. It was the only party Dan had ever been to, but it was also the best. Not because of the booze, but because Serena van der Woodsen had been there. Never mind that she had gotten wasted and wound up playing a stupid Latin drinking game and kissing some guy’s stomach with pictures scrawled all over it in permanent marker. Dan couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Finally, he’d found a reason to live.

  After the party Jenny told him that Serena went to Constance, and from then on Jenny was his little emissary, reporting everything she’d seen Serena do, say, wear, etc. at school, and informing Dan about any upcoming events where he might catch a glimpse of Serena again. Those events were rare. Not because there weren’t a lot of them—there were—but because there weren’t many Dan had even a chance of going to. Dan didn’t inhabit the same world as Serena and Blair and Nate and Chuck. He wasn’t anybody—just a depressed and lonely wraith from the Upper West Side.

  For two years Dan stalked Serena, yearningly, from a distance. He never spoke to her. When she went away to boarding school, he tried to forget about her, sure that he would be dead by the time she returned to the city.

  But now she was back.

  Dan walked halfway down the block, then turned around and walked back again. His mind was racing. He could have another party. He could make invitations and get Jenny to slip one into Serena’s locker at school. When Serena came to his apartment, Dan would go right up to her and take her mink coat and graciously welcome her back to New York.

  I died every day you were gone, he’d say, poetically.

  Then they would sneak into his father’s library and take each other’s clothes off and kiss on the leather couch in front of the fire. And when everyone left the party, they would share a bowl of Red Hots, one of the few foods Dan ate. From then on they would spend every minute together. They would even transfer to a coed high school like Trinity for the rest of senior year because they couldn’t stand to be apart. Then they would go to Columbia and live in a cramped, unheated studio apartment on a high floor with a view of the same cold Hudson River that Dan had wanted to jump into on so many bleak nights. Serena’s friends would try to lure her back to her old life, but no charity ball, no exclusive black tie dinner, no expensive party favor would tempt her. She wouldn’t care if she had to give up her trust fund and her great-grandmother’s diamonds. Serena would be willing to live in squalor if it meant she could be with Dan. And when they died, they would die together, holding hands, like Romeo and Juliet, only better.

  Brittle bones, hot lips—

  Spring, summer, autumn, winter.

  Only the worms know.

  “Fucking hell, we’ve only got five minutes until the bell rings,” Dan heard someone say in an obnoxious voice.

  Dan turned around, and sure enough, it was Chuck Bass, or “Scarf Boy,” as Dan liked to call him, since Chuck always wore that ridiculous monogrammed ivory-colored cashmere scarf. Chuck stood only twenty feet away with two of his senior Riverside Prep pals, Roger Paine and Jeffrey Prescott. All three boys wore matching burgundy velvet smoking jackets and fingerless brown leather driving gloves, and Chuck had on his new custom-made pigskin loafers without socks. The three boys—whose hair was cut by Oscar Blandi in overly conditioned cheekbone-length pageboys—didn’t speak to Dan or even nod to acknowledge his presence. Why should they? These boys took the Seventy-ninth Street crosstown bus to school through Central Park each morning from the swanky Upper East Side, only venturing to the West Side for school or to attend the odd party. They were in Dan’s class at Riverside Prep, but they were certainly not in his class. He was nothing to them. They didn’t even notice him.

  “Dude,” Chuck said to his friends. He lit a cigarette. Chuck smoked his cigarettes like they were joints, holding them between his index finger and thumb and sucking hard on the inhale. Too pathetic for words.

  “Guess who I saw last night?” Chuck said, blowing out a stream of gray smoke.

  “Amanda Sohotfried or whatever that scary-hot big-eyed blond actress’s name is?” Jeffrey said, tucking his hair behind his ears with his ridiculous fingerless-gloved hands.

  “Yeah, and you let her scare off your pants and everything else, right?” Roger laughed, brushing cigarette ash off his velvet smoking jacket. “And then she gave you a shoulder ride.”

  “No, not her. Serena van der Woodsen,” Chuck said.

  Dan’s ears perked up. He was about to head inside for class, but he lit another cigarette and stayed put so he could listen.

  “Blair Waldorf’s mom had this little party, and Serena was there with her parents,” Chuck continued. “And she was all over me. She’s like, the sluttiest girl I’ve ever met.” Chuck took another toke on his smoke. “Plus, she’s totally psychotic. I mean, she’s killed people. Lots of people.”

  “Really?” Jeffrey said. “I’d heard that, but you know, you can’t believe everything you hear.”

  “Oh yes you can,” Chuck countered. “First of all, I just found out that she’s been doing it with Nate Archibald since tenth grade. And she’s definitely gotten an education at boarding school, if you know what I mean. They had to get rid of her, she’s so slutty.”

  “No way,” Roger said. “Come on, dude, you don’t get kicked out for being a slut.”

  “You do if you keep a record of all the boys you slept with. If you get them hooked on the same drugs you’re doing and then you kill them. Her parents had to go up there and get her. She was like, taking over the school!” Chuck was really worked up. His face was turning red and he was spitting all over his pigskin loafers as he talked.

  “I heard she’s got diseases too,” he added. “Like STDs. Someone saw her going into a clinic in the East Village. She was wearing a wig. And she has this thing for chickens. She kills them and drinks their blood.”

  Chuck’s friends put their index fingers in their mouths and pretended to
gag.

  “Nasty!” they said, simultaneously.

  “You heard about that kid Jeremy, right?” Chuck took a poignant drag on his cigarette as the other two boys nodded eagerly. “That was all Serena. She’d only been at the party for five minutes and bam, guy’s eyeballs are exploding all over the fucking walls. She’s a deadly weapon.” He chuckled and stamped out his cigarette. “Fully fucking loaded at all times.”

  Dan had never heard such crap. Serena was no slut, and she wouldn’t kill anyone unless it was in self-defense. Serena was perfect.

  Perfectly psychotic.

  “So, you guys hear about that bird party?” Roger asked. “You going?”

  “What bird party?” Jeffrey said, looking miffed that his best friend knew about something he didn’t.

  “That benefit for the Central Park birds of prey?” Chuck said. “Blair Waldorf is planning it. At the Frick.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “Dude, everybody’s going.”

  Everybody didn’t include Dan, of course. But it very definitely included Serena van der Woodsen.

  “They’re sending out the invitations this week,” Roger said. “It has a funny name, I can’t remember what it is, something girly.”

  “Kiss Me or Die,” Chuck said, stubbing out his cigarette with his obnoxious custom-made shoes. “It’s the Kiss Me or Die party.”

  “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.

  at the heart of every socially alienated cynic is a hopeless romantic

  “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 someone 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.

  Dear Blair,

  Can I borrow five million dollars? I have to bail myself out of jail because I’ve already killed my parents and my grandparents and that nice bail bondsman and now I have no one left.

  Shit, my head itches. I think I have lice.

  Let me know about the money.

  Love,

  Serena v.d. Woodsen

  Blair, Rain, and Kati giggl
ed noisily.

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

  Sure, Serena. Whatever you need. Text me from jail and I’ll wire you the money… NOT. I hear the food is excellent in prison. Nate and I will visit you whenever we’re free, which might be… NEVER.

  Sorry about the lice. I hear mayonnaise under a shower cap gets rid of them. That’ll go great with your outfit today.

  Love,

  Blair

  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.