Don't You Forget About Me

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  “Are you hungry?” Nate asked, following her. “I’m so sick of takeout. My parents have been in Venezuela or Santa Domingo or wherever they go in February for like two weeks, and I’ve been eating burritos, pizza, or sushi every freaking night. I asked Regina to buy ham, Swiss, Pepperidge Farm white bread, Grammy Smith apples, and peanut butter. All I want is the food I ate in kindergarten.” He tugged anxiously on his wavy, golden brown hair. “Maybe I’m going through some sort of midlife crisis or something.” Like his life is so stressful?

  “It’s Granny Smith, silly,” Serena informed him fondly. She opened a glossy white cupboard and found an unopened box of cinnamon-and-brown-sugar Pop-Tarts. Ripping open the box, she removed one of the packets from inside, tore it open with her neat, white teeth, and pulled out a thickly frosted pastry. She sucked on the Pop-Tart’s sweet, crumbly corner and hopped up on the counter, kicking the cupboards below with her size-eight-and-a-half feet. Pop-Tarts at Nate’s. She’d been having them there since she was five years old. And now . . . and now . . .

  Serena sighed heavily. “Mom and Dad want me to go to boarding school next year,” she announced, her enormous, almost navy blue eyes growing huge and glassy as they welled up with unexpected tears. Go away to boarding school and leave Nate? It hurt too much to even think about.

  Nate flinched as if he’d been slapped in the face by an invisible hand. He grabbed the other Pop-Tart from out of the packet and hopped up on the counter next to Serena. “No way,” he responded decisively. She couldn’t leave. He wouldn’t allow it.

  “They want to travel more,” Serena explained. The pink, perfect curve of her lower lip trembled dangerously. “If I’m home, they feel like they need to be home more. Like I want them around? Anyway, they’ve arranged for me to meet some of the deans of admissions and stuff. It’s like I have no choice.” Nate scooted over a few inches and put his arm around her. “The city is going to suck if you’re not here,” he told her earnestly. “You can’t go.” Serena took a deep shuddering breath and rested her pale blond head on his shoulder. “I love you,” she murmured, closing her delicate eyelids. Their bodies were so close the entire Nate-side of her hummed. If she turned her head and tilted her chin just so, she could have easily kissed his warm, lovely neck. And she wanted to. She was actually dying to, because she really did love him, with all her heart.

  She did? Hello? Since when?!

  Maybe since ballroom-dancing school way back in fourth grade. She was tall for her age, and Nate was always such a gentleman about her lack of rhythm and the way she stepped on his insteps and jutted her bony elbows into his sides. He’d finesse it by grabbing her hand and spinning her around so that the skirt of her puffy, oyster-colored satin tea-length Bonpoint dress twirled out magnificently. Their teacher, Mrs. Jaffe, who had long blue hair that she kept in place with a pearl-adorned black hairnet, worshipped Nate. So did Serena’s best friend, Blair Waldorf. And so did Serena—she just hadn’t realized it until now. Serena shuddered and her perfect skin broke out in a rash of goose bumps. Her whole body seemed to be having an adverse reaction to the idea of revealing something she’d kept so well hidden for so long, even from herself.

  Nate wrapped his lacrosse-toned arms around her long, narrow waist and pulled her close, tucking her pale gold head into the crook of his neck and massaging the ruts between the ribs on her back with his fingertips. The best thing about Serena was her total lack of embarrassing flab. Her entire body was as long and lean and taut as the strings on his Prince titanium tennis racket.

  It was painful having such a ridiculously hot best friend. Why couldn’t his best friend be some lard-assed dude with zits and dandruff? Instead he had Serena and Blair Waldorf, hands down the two hottest girls on the Upper East Side, and maybe all of Manhattan, or even the whole world.

  Serena was an absolute goddess—every guy Nate knew talked about her—but she was mysterious. She’d laugh for hours if she spotted a cloud shaped like a toilet seat or something equally ridiculous, and the next moment she’d be wistful and sad. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking most of the time. Sometimes Nate wondered if she would’ve been more comfortable in a body that was slightly less perfect, because it would’ve given her more incentive, to use an SAT vocabulary word. Like she wasn’t sure what she had to aspire to, since she basically had everything a girl could possibly want.

  Blair was petite, with a pretty, foxlike face, blue eyes, and wavy chestnut-colored hair. She let everyone know what she was thinking, and she was fiercely competitive. For instance, she always found opportunities to point out that her chest was almost a whole cup size larger than Serena’s and that she’d scored almost 100 points higher than Serena on the practice SAT.

  Way back in fifth grade, Serena had told Nate she was pretty sure Blair had a crush on him. He started to notice that Blair did stick her chest out when he was looking, and she was always either bossing him around or fixing his hair. Of course Blair never admitted that she liked him, which made him like her even more.

  Nate sighed deeply. No one understood how difficult it was being best friends with two such beautiful, impossible girls.

  Like he would have been friends with them if they were awkward and butt-ugly?

  He closed his eyes and breathed in the sweet scent of Serena’s Frédéric Fekkai Apple Cider clarifying shampoo. He’d kissed lots of girls and had even gone to third base last June with L’Wren Knowes, a very experienced older Seaton Arms School senior who really did seem to know everything. But kissing Serena would be . . . different. He loved her. It was as simple as that. She was his best friend, and he loved her.

  And if you can’t kiss your best friend, who can you kiss?

  upper east side schoolgirl uncovers shocking sex scandal!

  “Ew,” Blair Waldorf muttered at her reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door. She liked to keep her closet organized, but not too organized. Whites with whites, off-whites with off-whites, navy with navy, black with black. But that was it. Jeans were tossed in a heap on the closet floor. And there were dozens of them. It was almost a game to close her eyes and feel around and come up with a pair that used to be too tight in the ass but fit a little loosely now that she’d cut out her daily after-dinner milk-and-Chips-Ahoy routine.

  Blair looked at the mirror, assessing her outfit. Her Marc by Marc Jacobs shell pink sheer cotton blouse was fine. It was the fuchsia La Perla bra that was the problem. It showed right through the blouse so that she looked like a stripper. But she was only going to Nate’s house to hang out with him and Serena. And Nate liked to talk about bras. He was genuinely curious about, for instance, what the purpose of an underwire was, or why some bras fastened in front and some fastened in back. It was a big turn-on for him, obviously, but it was also sort of sweet. He was a lonely only child, craving sisterhood.

  Right.

  She decided to leave the bra on for Nate’s sake, hiding the whole ensemble under her favorite belted black cashmere Lora Piano cardigan, which would come off the minute she stepped into his well-heated town house. Maybe, just maybe, the sight of her hot pink bra would be the thing to make Nate realize that he’d been in love with her just as long as she’d been in love with him.

  Maybe.

  She opened her bedroom door and yelled down the long hall and across the East Seventy-second Street penthouse’s vast expanse of period furniture, parquet floors, crown moldings, and French Impressionist paintings. “Mom! Dad? I’m going over to Nate’s house! Serena and I are spending the night!” When there was no reply, she clomped her way to her parents’ huge master suite in her noisy Kors wooden-heeled sheepskin clogs, opened their bedroom door, and made a beeline for her mom’s dressing room. Eleanor Waldorf kept a tall stack of crisp emergency twenties in her lingerie drawer for Blair and her ten-year-old brother, Tyler, to parse from—for taxis, cappuccinos, and, in Blair’s case, the occasional much-needed pair of Manolo Blahnik heels. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred. T
wenty, forty, sixty, eighty, two hundred. Blair counted out the bills, folding them neatly before stuffing them into the back pocket of her peg-legged Seven jeans.

  “If I were a cabernet,” Blair’s father’s dramatically playful lawyer’s voice echoed out of the adjoining dressing room, “how would you describe my bouquet?”

  Excusez-moi?

  Blair clomped out of her mom’s dressing room and reached for the chocolate brown velvet curtain hanging in the doorway of her dad’s. “If you guys are in there together, like, doing it while I’m home, then that’s really gross,” she declared flatly. “Anyway, I’m going over to Nate’s, so—” Her father, Harold J. Waldorf, Esquire, pulled aside the velvet curtain, dressed in his cashmere tweed Paul Smith bathrobe and nothing else, his nicely tanned, handsome face looking slightly flushed. “Mom’s out looking at dishes for the Guggenheim benefit. I thought you were out. Where are you going exactly?” Blair stared at him. He wasn’t holding a phone, and if her mom was out, then who the fuck had he just been talking to? She stood blinking at him with her hands on her hips, tempted to peek inside his dressing room to see who he was hiding in there.

  Does she really want to know?

  Instead, she stumbled out of the master suite, clomped her way across the penthouse, grabbed her blood orange-colored Jimmy Choo treasure chest hobo, and ran for the elevator.

  Outside it was breathtakingly cold, and fat flakes fell at random. Usually she walked the twelve blocks to Nate’s house, but today Blair had no patience for walking—she had just discovered that her father was a lying, cheating scum-bag, after all, and a cab was waiting for her downstairs. Or rather, a cab was waiting for Mrs. Solomon in 4A, but when the hunter green uniform-clad doorman saw the terrifying look on Blair’s normally pretty face, he let her take it.

  Besides, hailing cabs in the snow was probably the highlight of his day.

  The stone walls bordering Central Park were blanketed in snow. A tall, elderly woman and her Yorkshire terrier, dressed in matching red Chanel quilted coats with matching black velvet bows in their white hair, crossed Seventy-second Street and entered the Ralph Lauren flagship store. Blair’s cab hurtled recklessly up Madison Avenue, past Agnès B. and Williams-Sonoma and the Three Guys coffee shop where all the Constance Billard girls gathered after school, and finally pulled up to Nate’s town house.

  “Let me in!” she yelled into the intercom outside the Archibalds’ elegant wrought-iron-and-glass front door as she swatted the buzzer over and over with her hand.

  Inside, Nate and Serena were still cuddling in the kitchen. Serena raised her head from his shoulder and opened her eyes, as if from a dream. The kiss they’d both been fantasizing about had never actually happened, which was probably for the best.

  “I think I’m warm now,” she announced and hopped off the counter, composing her face so that she looked totally calm and cool, like they hadn’t just had a moment. And maybe they hadn’t—she couldn’t be sure. She grinned at the monitor’s distorted image of Blair giving her the finger. “Come on in, sweetness!” she shouted back, buzzing her friend in.

  Nate tried to erase the disturbing thought that Blair had caught him and Serena together. They weren’t together. They were just friends, hanging out, which is what friends do when they’re together. There was nothing to catch. It was all in his mind.

  Or was it?

  “Hey, hornyheads.” Blair greeted them with snow in her shoulder-length chestnut brown hair. Her cheeks were pink with cold, her blue eyes were slightly bloodshot, and her carefully plucked dark brown eyebrows were askew, as if she’d been crying or rubbing her eyes like crazy. “I have a fucked-up story to tell you guys.” She flung her orange bag down on the floor and took a deep breath, her eyes rolling around dramatically, milking the moment for all it was worth. “As it turns out, my totally boring, Mr. Lawyer father, Harold Waldorf, Esquire, is like totally having an affair. Only moments ago, I caught him asking some random babe, ‘If I was a wine, how would you describe my bouquet?’ and they were, like, totally hiding in his closet.” She clapped her hand over her mouth, as if to keep the words in.

  Or her breakfast.

  “Whoa,” Serena and Nate responded in unison.

  “He just sounded so . . . slimy,” Blair wailed through her fingers.

  Serena knew this might be even grosser, but she just had to get it out there. “Well, maybe he was just having phone sex with your mom.” “Sure,” Nate agreed. “My parents do that all the time,” he added, feeling a little sick as he said it. His navy admiral dad was so uptight he probably wouldn’t have phone sex for fear of being court-marshaled.

  Blair grimaced. The idea of her tennis-toned-but-still-plump, St. Barts-tanned, gold-jewelry-loving mom having any kind of sex, let alone cabernet phone sex, with her skinny, preppy, argyle-socks-wearing dad, was so unlikely and so completely icky she refused to even think about it.

  “No,” she insisted, wolfing down the uneaten half of Serena’s Pop-Tart. “It was definitely another woman. I mean, face it,” she said, still chewing, “Dad is totally hot and dresses really well, and he’s an important lawyer and everything. And my mom is totally insane and doesn’t really do anything and she has varicose veins and a flabby ass. Of course he’s having an affair.” Serena and Nate nodded their glossy golden heads like that made complete sense. Then Serena grabbed Blair and hugged her hard. Blair was the sister she’d never had. In fourth grade they’d pretended they were fraternal twins for an entire month. Their Constance Billard gym teacher, Ms. Etro, who’d gotten fired midyear for inappropriate touching—which she called “spotting”—during tumbling classes, had even believed them. They’d worn matching pink Izod shirts and cut their hair exactly the same length. They even wore matching gold Cartier hoop earrings, until they decided they were tacky and switched to Tiffany diamond studs.

  Blair pressed her face into Serena’s perfectly defined collarbone and heaved an exhausted, trembling sigh. “It’s just so fucked up it makes me feel sick.” Serena patted Blair’s back and met Nate’s gaze over Blair’s Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon-glossed brown head. No way was she going to bring up the whole being-sent-away-to-boarding-school problem—not when her best friend was so upset. And she didn’t want Nate to mention it either. “Come on, let’s go mix martinis and watch a stupid movie or something.” Nate jumped off the counter, feeling completely confused. Suddenly all he really wanted to do was hug Blair and kiss away her tears.Was he hot for her now, too?

  It’s hard to keep a clear head when you’re surrounded by beautiful girls who are in love with you.

  “All we have is vodka and champagne. My parents keep all the good wine and whiskey locked up in the cabinet for when they have company,” he apologized.

  Serena slid open the bread pantry, where most families would actually keep bread, but where Nate’s mom stored the cartons of Gitanes cigarettes her sister sent from France via FedEx twice a month because the ones sold in the States simply did not taste fresh.

  “I’m sure we can make do,” she said, ripping open a carton with her thumbnail. “Come.” She stuck two cigarettes in her mouth like tusks and beckoned Nate and Blair to follow her out of the kitchen and upstairs to the master suite. If anyone was an expert at changing the mood, it was Serena. That was one of the things they loved about her. “I’ll show you a good time,” she added goofily.

  She always did.

  The Archibalds’ vast bedroom had been decorated by Nate’s mother in the style of Louis XVI, with a giant gilt mirror over the head of the enormous red-and-gold toile canopy bed, and heavy gold curtains in the windows. The walls were adorned with red-and-gold fleur-de-lis wallpaper and renderings of Mrs. Archibald’s family’s summer château near Nice. On the floor was a red, blue, and gold Persian rug rescued from the Titanic and bought at auction by Mrs. Archibald for her husband at Sotheby’s.

  “Bus Stop? Some Like It Hot? Or the digitally remastered version of Some Like It Hot?” Serena asked, flipping through Na
te’s parents’ limited DVD collection. Obviously Captain Archibald liked Marilyn Monroe movies—a lot. Of course, Nate had his own collection of DVDs in his room, including a play-by-play of the last twenty years of America’s Cup sailing races. Thanks, but no thanks. His parents’ taste was far more girl-friendly. “Or we could just watch Nate play Nintendo, which is always hot,” she joked, although she kind of meant it.

  “Only if he does it naked,” Blair quipped hopefully. She sat down and bounced up and down on the end of the huge bed.

  Nate blushed. Blair loved to make him blush and he knew it. “Okay,” he responded boldly, sitting down next to her on the bed.

  Blair snatched a Kleenex out of the silver tissue box on Nate’s mom’s bedside table and blew her nose noisily. Not that she really needed to blow her nose. She just needed a distraction from the overwhelming urge to throw Nate down on his parents’ bed and tackle him. He was so goddamned adorable it made her feel like she was going to explode. God, she loved him.

  There had never been a time when she didn’t love him. She’d loved the stupid lobster shorts he wore to the club in Newport when their dads played tennis together in the summer, back when they were, what—five? She’d loved the way he always had a Spider-Man Band-Aid on some part of his body until he was at least twelve, not because he’d hurt himself but because he thought it looked cool. She loved the way his whole head reflected the sunlight, glowing gold. She loved his glittering green eyes—eyes that were almost too pretty for a boy. She loved the way he so obviously knew he was hot but didn’t quite know what to do about it. She loved him. Oh, how she loved him.

  Oh, oh, oh!

  She blew her nose with one last trumpeting snort and then grabbed a pink, tacky-looking DVD case from off the floor. She turned the case over, studying it. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’ve never seen it, but she’s so beautiful.” She held the DVD up so Serena could see Audrey Hepburn in her long black dress and pearl choker. “Isn’t she?” “She is pretty,” Serena agreed, still sorting through the movies.