Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  YOUR E-MAIL

  q:

  dear gossip girl,

  are u really even a girl? u seem like the type 2 pretend to be a girl when u’r really a 50-yrs-old bored journalist with nothing better 2 do than to harsh on kids like me. loser.

  —jdwack

  a:

  Dearest jdwack,

  I’m the girliest girl you’d ever want to meet. And I’m pre-college, pre–voting age, too. How do I know you’re not some bitter fifty-year-old geometry teacher with boils on her face taking her inner angst out on innocent girls like me—with a really sharp and scary protractor? Well, my ovoids are bigger than your ovoids. So there.

  —GG

  q:

  Dear GG,

  I loooove your column so much I showed it to my dad, and he was like, Wow. Everyone wants to know what’s going on at the private schools because of all the murders and disappearances. And you have the inside story! Anyway, he has friends who work at the Observer and the New Yorker. Don’t be surprised if your column gets much, much bigger!! I hope you don’t mind!!! Love always!!!

  —JNYHY

  a:

  Mind? No way. I’m all about being big. I’m going to be huge. No more crappy one-line parts in interschool plays for me. You might even see me on the side of a bus sometime soon.

  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,

  dissed at recess

  “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.

  “Blair!” Serena shouted when she saw Blair by the milk table. She rushed over excitedly. “I need your help,” she gushed, squeezing Blair’s arm.

  Blair kept her body stiff until Serena let go.

  “Sorry.” Serena let her hand drop. “But I have the best, best, best idea! I want to make a movie, but I have no idea how to work the cameras and stuff and you do, because you take Film. Remember how we always wanted to make movies together? Well, here’s our chance! I’
ll be the director, and you can be the star!”

  Blair glanced at Rain and Laura, quietly sipping their milk. She smiled grimly and shook her head. “Sorry, I can’t. I’ve got activities every single day after school. I don’t have time.”

  “Oh please, Blair,” Serena begged, grabbing her old friend’s hand. “Remember, you can be Janet Leigh. And I’ll be… Oliver Stone!”

  Blair dragged her hand away and folded her arms across her chest so Serena couldn’t touch her anymore.

  “I’ll do all the work,” Serena added desperately. “All you have to do is show me how to use the camera and the lighting and stuff. And we can go shopping and pick out the coolest costumes. We can go to Chanel—”

  “I can’t,” Blair interrupted her. “Sorry.”

  Serena couldn’t have been more hurt if Blair had drawn a serrated knife across her cheek and then stabbed her in the liver. She mashed her lips together to keep them from trembling. Her eyes seemed to be growing larger and larger, and her face was turning splotchy.

  Blair had seen this transformation in Serena many times as they grew up together. Serena was about to have a tantrum. Once, when they were both eight, they had walked the three miles from Serena’s country house into the town of Ridgefield to buy ice cream cones. Serena stepped out of the ice cream shop with her triple strawberry cone with chocolate sprinkles and bent down to pet a puppy tied up outside. All three scoops fell splat into the dirt. Serena’s eyes had grown huge and her face looked like she had the measles. Serena was collecting rocks to throw at the puppy and at the shop window when the nice ice cream man came out with a fresh cone and made it all better.

  Seeing Serena on the verge of a tantrum once more touched something deep inside of Blair, like an involuntary reflex. Perhaps she wanted to protect herself. Perhaps she wanted to protect her friends—the few who were still living. Perhaps she wanted to protect the school, where she had gone every day since she was five.

  “Want to meet up on Friday?” she asked Serena in a neutral tone. “Drinks around eight at the Tribeca Star?”

  Serena took a deep breath and swallowed her rage. “Just like old times?” she asked, her voice quavering.

  “Right,” Blair assured her. “Exactly.”

  She made a note in her mental Google calendar to tell Nate not to meet her until later now that Serena was coming out. The new plan was to knock back a few calming, highly alcoholic drinks with Serena at the Tribeca Star, leave early, go home, fill her room with candles, take a bath, and wait for Nate to arrive. Then they’d have sex all night long while listening to the weird Hawaiian music she’d loaded on to her iPod late last night. She wanted Friday night to feel special and different. Like she and Nate were on the beach in Kauai with nothing but the waves and their warm naked bodies, thousands of miles away from any slutty French girls or boyfriend-stealing freakshows.

  “Cool,” Serena agreed. She sniffed and wiped her nose on the sleeve of the camel-colored Max Mara cardigan she’d stolen from her mom. “Can’t wait ’til Friday.”

  The bell rang and the girls went their separate ways to class; Blair and Rain to their AP Academic Achievers afternoon, and Serena to her plain old Kraft American slices classes.

  On her way, Serena popped her head into the photography lab to see if there was any equipment she could steal to make the film she had absolutely no idea how to make, especially not without Blair’s help. God, Blair was mean. Serena still didn’t feel one hundred percent calmed down. In fact, she was still sort of shaking.

  It was dark in the lab. Anna Quintana swished some undeveloped film around in a washtub full of clear, potent fixer, using a pair of black plastic tongs. Her short blond bob was tucked into a navy blue Constance Billard softball cap and her muscular legs rippled in a pair of silver Lycra jogging pants. She whipped her head around and glared at Serena.

  “Just so you know,” Anna growled, “Isabel texted me. Right before she and Kati disappeared?” She waved the tongs around in the air. “We’d been talking because she needed to add a sport and she wanted to try out for soccer. She said she’d just seen you, and you and Nate had hooked up. He was like, in the shower, which is so gross.”

  She swished the picture around in the fixer.

  “I mean my first thought was, I wonder what Blair would think. And I bet you threatened Kati and Is. I bet you like, murdered them, like, seconds after she texted me.”

  Anna lifted the picture out of the fixer and clothespinned it to a line overhead to dry. She leveled her green eyes at Serena and added accusingly, “You’re like… not a good person.”

  Serena gave Anna her famously luminous smile. She’d wanted to kill someone at recess. Now was her chance.

  “I’m in kind of a bad mood,” she warned. “Maybe you should be a little nicer to me.”

  Anna’s blond eyebrows shot up in alarm. “Is that a threat?”

  Serena shrugged her shoulders. “Not really.” She strode calmly across the darkroom, knocked off Anna’s softball cap, and seized the blunt blond strands of the girl’s hair. “This is more of a threat.”

  Anna tried to stomp on Serena’s foot with her soccer cleats. “Ow. Ow. Ow. Help! Stop it. Ow! Help! Ow!!”

  Serena dunked Anna’s head in the tub of fixer. “If you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

  Anna thrashed her feet. Chocolate chip cookie vomit spewed out of her mouth as she drowned. The air was filled with the fixer’s formaldehyde scent mixed with the stench of burnt sugar and rotting chocolate.

  Anna’s cleated feet kept thrashing until, at last, she was dead.

  Serena washed her hands carefully in the darkroom sink and examined the video cameras clustered on a shelf. The cameras were complicated and intimidating. Even if she stole one she wouldn’t know how to use it. Besides, she and Blair were going out for drinks tomorrow night with Nate and the rest of the gang. Maybe after a few drinks she’d be able to talk Blair into making the movie with her. And if Blair still didn’t want to, she might let loose with that tantrum after all. She wouldn’t give up so easily.

  Her picture wasn’t on the side of a bus for nothing.

  westsider’s romantic dream up in smoke

  Vanessa spent the first five minutes of Calculus in the darkroom, filming Anna Quintana’s drowned, fixer- and vomit-soaked body before someone cleaned it up. She’d gone in there for a new lens cap and was pleasantly surprised to discover even more great background footage for her film.

  Satisfied, she stepped outside school and tried to call Dan. She knew he had Study Hall fourth period on Thursdays. He was probably hanging out outside, writing suicidal haikus while he asphyxiated himself with nicotine. She paced up and down Ninety-third Street, waiting for him to venture out of his manic-depressive vow of silence and answer his fucking phone.

  The lower school boys were using the Riverside Prep courtyard for a game of dodgeball, so Dan had exiled himself to a park bench in the traffic island in the middle of Broadway. He’d just cracked open a new collection of haikus by Bash, Buson, and Issa, which he was reading in the original Japanese, just to torture himself. Dan didn’t even take Japanese. He had to use a pocket Japanese dictionary to decipher every line. It was impossible, but he felt pretty hardcore. People hurried past in a busy blur, while he, Dan, just sat there on the bench in the median, poisoning his body with caffeine and nicotine, slowly dying, with a book of indecipherable symbols. There was a certain calm about him today. A certain beauty.

  People visiting all day—

  in between

  the quiet of the peony.

  No one paid him any mind. They didn’t even realize that he was different today. They didn’t notice that the circles under his eyes were more pronounced than usual. That his pale cheeks were more hollow. They didn’t know that Dan was in love.

  He’d lain awake all night, thinking of Serena. They were starring in a movie together. They were even going to kiss. It was too good to be true.

 
; Poor dude, he has that right.

  Dan noticed his cell phone ringing.

  “Konnichiwa,” he answered in Japanese, with uncharacteristic cheer.

  “About fucking time,” Vanessa snapped. “I thought maybe you were dead.”

  “Not yet,” Dan joked. It was fun to make a joke.

  “Listen, I’m supposed to be in Math, so I have to make this quick. I just wanted you to know that I told Marjorie she has the part.”

  “You mean Serena,” Dan said, flicking his ash and taking another drag on his cigarette.

  “No, I mean Marjorie.”

  Dan exhaled and pressed the phone tight against his ear. “Wait. What are you talking about? Marjorie, with the red hair and the gum?”

  “Yes, that’s right. I haven’t got their names mixed up,” Vanessa said patiently.

  “But Marjorie stank, you can’t use her!”

  “Yeah, well, I kind of like that she stank. She’s sort of rough around the edges. I think it will make it feel edgier, you know? Like, not what you’d expect.”

  “Yeah, definitely not,” Dan sneered. “Look, you’re making a huge mistake. Serena… I don’t know why you wouldn’t want her. She’s awesome. This isn’t about the knife, is it? I’m sure she’ll bring it back.”

  “She didn’t bring it to school today,” Vanessa snapped. “Anyway, it’s my movie, so it’s my choice, and I choose Marjorie.” Vanessa really didn’t want to hear about how awesome Serena was. “Besides, I keep hearing all these stories about Serena. I don’t think she’s all that reliable.”