Nothing Can Keep Us Together

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  Vanessa blushed, which was weird for her. Since when did she blush? “Blair kind of spruced it up a little. You like?”

  Dan was sweaty from the subway ride, and because he’d run all the way from the L stop, thirteen blocks away. He traced a sticky finger over the freshly painted wall, his heart beating fast. “It’s different, I guess,” he responded nervously. Vanessa was checking him out in that unabashed, direct way of hers, making him sweat even harder.

  When Vanessa had gotten home from school, there’d been a little white box waiting for her on the kitchen counter. She’d opened it to find a silver ring in the shape of two hands holding hearts that were welded together. Inside the ring was the inscription FOREVER AND ALWAYS. LOVE, A. Except for a brief dalliance with a lip ring, Vanessa rarely wore jewelry, and this type of friendship/love ring was so corny it made her laugh. She’d certainly never have considered wearing it, no matter who had given it to her. She’d dropped the ring back inside the box and tucked it into the silverware drawer. It was possible Aaron had given her the ring as a joke, but then why would he have bothered to have it inscribed? Even when they were going out, Dan would never have given her such a sappy gift. Come to think of it, he’d never asked her to camp out under the stars with him, either. Vanessa was a running-water-and-flushing-toilets sort of girl. She hated the sun, and the outdoors, with its spiders, ants, bees, and mosquitoes, creeped her out. Of course, Aaron meant well. It was the thought that counted and all that. But she and he would have to talk—something they hadn’t really done much of since they’d hooked up. Despite Aaron pouring on the love notes, giving her gifts, and sleeping over all the time, their relationship had been purely physical thus far.

  Not that she minded. There was something about the stress of finals and graduation and turning a new page in life that was secretly freaking Vanessa out. She simply wasn’t herself. Or maybe living in an apartment with lavender walls with a girl who owned one hundred seventeen pairs of shoes, including thirty-four pairs of Manolo Blahniks, had turned her into someone else. Formerly a loner, Vanessa could no longer bear to be alone, and she’d found that the best way to keep her mind off the future was to drink a little vodka and then fool around.

  She’s only just discovered this?

  “You look pale,” Vanessa told Dan. Then she took a step toward him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the cheek. She squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled his cute, musty Dan scent. “Pale, but really good.”

  Vanessa was wearing a black ribbed tank top and no bra. Her head was freshly shaved, but she’d allowed the dark hair around her face to grow half an inch or so, softening her broad white forehead and big brown eyes. And she’d given up on her lip ring.

  Which was a good thing.

  She was also wearing a flippy black miniskirt that she never would have considered before Blair Waldorf moved in. But she’d paired the miniskirt with black-and-white argyle kneesocks and her ever-present Doc Martens, making it very clear that, despite her roommate’s influence, she wasn’t about to buy a pair of snakeskin Manolo Blahnik stilettos anytime soon, even if they came in black.

  The smooth slope of her pale upper arms, the mocking curve of her red lips, and the defiant glow in her big brown eyes made Dan wonder how he’d ever functioned without her. He resisted the urge to whip out his leather-bound notebook and scribble down a poem. Instead he pulled a Camel out of the pack and stuck it between his lips without lighting it. “So, you want to take a walk? Get some coffee or something?” he ventured, trying to sound vaguely normal.

  Vanessa shrugged her shoulders without moving away from him. “I’m having a major déjà vu,” she confessed with a bemused smile. Wasn’t this how they’d gotten together again the last time? He’d come over and then they’d basically ripped each other’s clothes off.

  “Me too,” he admitted, secretly hoping that history would repeat itself.

  “Blair and I just discovered a door to the roof of the building. All this time I thought it was padlocked, but the lock is totally broken. It’s pretty cool up there—want to check it out?”

  So was Vanessa into sunbathing now too? “Sure,” Dan agreed.

  To his surprise, she collected a quart of Absolut and a bottle of tonic water from the fridge, tucking them into a paper bag with two plastic Scooby-Doo glasses, which she filled with ice. “I’ve kind of developed a taste for this stuff,” she admitted with a wicked grin.

  Dan stared at her in amazement, his whole body trembling with anticipation. Vanessa never could hold her liquor; neither could he.

  He followed her out of the apartment, down the dirty, cement-floored hall, and up the building’s cruddy stairs, which were painted black and smelled of turpentine. Two flights up, Vanessa pushed open a black metal door marked DO NOT ENTER and stepped out into the bright hot light of the rooftop. Suddenly the city was all around them, and the Williamsburg Bridge seemed close enough to touch. Off to the right, the East River looked glassy and cool as a sailing yacht glided past a barge pulling a load of Porta Johns, its white sails luffing in the thick afternoon air. To their left was the sugar factory, billowing smoke out of great smokestacks and adding to the smog. Across the bridge, Manhattan loomed large and full of promises. A born Manhattanite, Dan could never get over the feeling when he was in Brooklyn that something exciting was going on across the water, and that he was missing out.

  “Over here,” Vanessa called over the roar of interborough traffic. She ducked under a metal beam supporting the giant wooden water tower that dominated the roof. “We’re totally protected from the sun and rain under here. And see, the condensation from the water tower even keeps the air kind of cool.”

  Dan went over and ducked under the water tower. A black futon was spread out on the ground, complete with an assortment of black fake fur throw pillows. Vanessa seemed to have her own outdoor love den.

  “You and Aaron must spend a lot of time up here,” he commented awkwardly.

  She sat down on the futon and began pouring vodka into the plastic Scooby-Doo glasses. “Actually, I promised Blair not to hog it. We only just discovered it on Saturday, and yesterday it was raining, so actually Aaron’s never even been up here.”

  Meaning she and Aaron had never done it up there, which kind of made Dan feel better about sitting down on the futon. Vanessa handed him a vodka tonic. “Sorry, no limes.”

  He sat down and lit a cigarette. A helicopter motored loudly by. He had to admit, this was kind of a cool place to be.

  “So, graduation speaker, huh? I was even thinking about maybe skipping my graduation.” Vanessa clicked her glass against his and then took a big, long sip. “To us.”

  Dan squinted at her as he drank, holding the plastic glass with his cigarette hand, his pale face to the sun. There was something different about Vanessa this time. Something lazy and dangerous and sexy.

  Cobra curled on hot cement, his mind began writing furiously, because it couldn’t help itself.

  Vanessa grinned, returning his intense stare with a self-conscious chuckle. “I don’t know why I’m doing this but …” she began. Then she put down her glass, leaned slowly toward him, and shoved her tongue down his throat.

  Whoa!

  Dan’s dreamy brown eyes grew huge. He wondered if maybe Vanessa had been drinking all day and had somehow confused him with Aaron. Or maybe he and Aaron had gotten caught in some sort of mind-melt-time-warp-space-time-continuum-body-swapping ordeal straight out of the type of bad comic book he used to read when he was nine, and he really was Aaron. Nevertheless, it was sheer ecstasy kissing Vanessa again, and sheer agony to even think of pulling away. But after a few minutes, he forced himself to do it. “Um, can I just ask you—what are we doing?”

  Vanessa grabbed the hem of his faded red Stussy T-shirt and lifted it up, peeking at his pale, flat stomach. “Don’t you sometimes wonder what the big deal is?” she asked, as if that were answer enough.

  Dan didn’t say anything. Vanessa seemed to be goin
g through some sort of experimental period, and he wasn’t about to get in the way, especially since it seemed to involve wanting to take his shirt off. And his pants. Even his socks seemed to be getting in the way of her need to express herself. And just so she wouldn’t feel left out, he helped her off with her clothes, too. Before long they were kneeling on the futon beneath the water tower, naked.

  Talk about déjà vu!

  You can take the girl out of 212, but you can’t take the 212 out of the girl

  “Do you have anything that isn’t … shiny?” Blair Waldorf demanded as she fingered the dresses on the circular rack in the back of Isn’t She Lovely, a tiny Williamsburg bridal and special-occasion-dresses boutique a block away from the apartment she shared with Vanessa. She walked by the boutique every day on her way to and from the coffee shop where a car service town car picked her up in the morning after she bought her large latte with an extra shot of espresso and dropped her off after school. Today she’d wandered inside, thinking it might be cool to buy a graduation dress in a place so completely off the map that no other girl in the senior class at Constance Billard could possibly have the same one she did. The problem was, with no designer label to show their merit, she wasn’t sure if the dresses were ugly in a cool way or just plain ugly.

  “This one is very popular for confirmations,” the overly perfumed saleslady told her in heavily accented English. She held up a dazzling white, rhinestone-encrusted, polyester-lace-bodiced sundress with a pleated skirt that was so stiff and shiny, it looked like it had been laminated.

  Blair glanced in one of the many mirrors all over the store and glared at the haughty brunette in a short light-blue-and-white seersucker Constance Billard uniform skirt and neat white-collared, baby pink polo shirt staring back at her, furious with herself all of a sudden. Who was she kidding, pretending not to need a graduation dress that was made to order by Oscar de la Renta or Chanel? She hitched her nude pink Fendi purse up on her shoulder and slid her tortoiseshell Parsol sunglasses up on her nose, tempted to buy the hideous dress the saleslady had just shown her and bring it home to Vanessa as a joke, pretending she was going to wear it to graduation. But the thought of spending money on anything so hideous, even in jest, made her even more furious. When had her life become so base?

  Maybe when she decided to ditch Manhattan and become a Brooklyn hipster?

  Usually Blair couldn’t leave a store without buying at least one thing, but usually the stores she went into were stocked with irresistibles. As far as Blair was concerned, Isn’t She Lovely should have been named Isn’t She Ugly.

  Across the litter-strewn expanse of Broadway from Vanessa’s crumbling gray, five-story walk-up apartment building, a cluster of people stood looking up, their mouths agape.

  Hmm, wonder why?

  Oblivious and not at all curious about anything the locals might find interesting, Blair hurried across the street, mounted the crumbling cement stoop, and unlocked the building’s graffitied front door. She held her breath as she climbed the steps up to Vanessa’s second-story apartment. The building was practically sitting on top of a sugar factory, and the air around it was as sweet and heavy as syrup-logged French toast—mixed with a twinge of stray cat pee.

  Yum.

  “Foul,” Blair muttered aloud while still trying to hold her breath. How she longed for the immaculate putty-colored marble lobby of the Seventy-second Street full-service, white-glove, luxury apartment building where she’d lived until now. Oh, how she missed the sweep of the doorman’s hunter green wool cape as he opened the door to her cab and helped her with her bags, shielding her from the rain with his enormous black umbrella. How she yearned for the hum of the burgundy velvet-upholstered-elevator as it whisked her up to the penthouse.

  The black-painted door to the apartment was standing open, shedding little chips of old black paint onto the dusty cement floor of the hallway. “Honey, I’m home!” Blair called out tentatively as she stepped inside the apartment that she’d gladly redecorated only a few weeks before in shades of lavender, dove gray, and celery. The small, low-ceilinged one-bedroom looked so much prettier than it had when she’d moved in, especially without those revolting black sheets in the windows. She and Vanessa had even bonded—they really had. And it was fun to live somewhere so different from the place where she’d grown up. Really, it was. But she was still a little homesick. After all, Isn’t She Lovely was hardly a replacement for Barneys.

  “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes!” a boy’s voice, hoarse with ecstasy, echoed down the back stairway and into the apartment.

  Ew.

  Blair’s lips curled into a grimace. Vanessa and Aaron were at it again, up on the roof. Not that they hadn’t spent the entire night last night moaning and howling like wild dogs. Blair’s stomach turned and she poured herself a glass of water from the Brita filter she’d bought because she didn’t trust the water in Brooklyn. Since breaking up with Nate, she hadn’t once made herself sick—that would be the ultimate sign of weakness, and she was no longer weak—but the image of Vanessa and Aaron, their shaved heads locked and their pale bodies thrashing up on the roof in broad daylight, was too similar to the image of Serena and Nate thrashing around in Isabel Coates’s pool house bathtub. It was enough to make her want to violently hurl the mango smoothie she’d drunk three hours ago.

  Gulping her glass of water, she gripped the cracked white Formica countertop to steady herself. On the ancient electric stove was a pot of stale water with two cold, gray-pink tofu dogs lolling inside—leftovers from her stepbrother Aaron’s disgusting breakfast, or lunch, or dinner. What with the awful dresses in the store across the street, the yucky-smelling entryway, the moaning sex from the rooftop that was supposed to be reserved for twilight v&t’s with Vanessa while they planned a way to sabotage Serena’s run for senior speaker, Blair had had enough. She dug into her Fendi purse and grabbed her cell phone, pressing the buttons frantically.

  “Blair darling? To what do I owe the pleasure, chica?” Chuck Bass answered in a loud voice, sounding more gay than usual. “Don’t tell me, you’ve secretly been in love with me all these years and now that we’re about to graduate, you’re finally bold enough to tell me.”

  “Not exactly,” Blair snapped. “You’re the only one I know with a car.”

  “A pearl gray convertible Jag isn’t just a car, it’s a mobile pleasure den.” Chuck tooted the horn in the background. “I happen to be in ‘the car’ as we speak.”

  “Whatever.” Blair threw open the loose-hinged plywood door to the cramped, mothball-smelling coat closet in the living room and yanked out her two matching brown leather, gold-embossed Louis Vuitton duffel bags. The bags were still partially packed, since Vanessa didn’t have enough closet space to accommodate Blair’s endless wardrobe. All she had to do was fold in the dresses hanging from the closet rail and fill a shopping bag or four or five with the mere thirty-six pairs of shoes she’d brought with her, and she’d be ready to roll. “Can you come get me?”

  “Of course, my sweet.” Chuck’s voice took on a faux paternal tone. “You’re not in any sort of trouble, are you?”

  Blair grimaced at the sight of a roach motel camped in the back of the closet, a half-dead roach flailing its hind legs on its doorstep. “I’m in Williamsburg,” she wailed, as if she were being held hostage in somebody’s basement.

  “And Manhattan needs you,” Chuck intoned. “We absolutely need you!”

  Blair giggled. It felt good not pretending anymore that she was going to become one of those hipster girls who wore striped kneesocks and vintage kilts and kooky glasses, ate hummus all the time, and went to art galleries after school instead of to Barneys. She pulled her favorite red-and-white polka-dotted Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress off its hanger and put it on, shedding her black Habitual jean skirt and boring dark gray C&C California T-shirt. Manhattan needed her. Of course it did.

  “I’ll be there in five, honey. I’m just getting on the bridge now,” Chuck assured her,
the Jag’s engine roaring in the background. “So, where am I taking you, anyway? Back home?”

  Blair hadn’t thought about this. Or rather, she had, but home wasn’t her first choice. Her mother was still mentally unsound after marrying Cyrus Rose that fall and having his baby daughter that spring. Cyrus was loud and sweaty and obnoxious and preferred to wander the house wearing only a loosely tied green silk robe and nothing else. Baby Yale was adorable most of the time, but she had taken over Blair’s room, shunting Blair into Aaron’s old room, where Blair’s cat, Kitty Minky, had developed a peeing problem in reaction to the scent of Aaron’s boxer, Mookie. Speaking of—where was Mookie? He usually came with Aaron when Aaron stayed over at Vanessa’s instead of sleeping in Blair’s brother Tyler’s room or passing out on the leather sofa in the penthouse library after too many organic beers.

  Nudge, nudge.

  “Maybe now that I’m into Yale, I won’t mind being at ho …” Blair’s voice trailed off as inspiration hit and a new, fabulous idea began to form in her head.

  After her father had moved out of the penthouse and before he’d left for France to live with his gay French lover—Jacques or Jean-Claude, or whatever the fuck his name was—he’d camped out at the Yale Club for a few months. It was right across the street from Grand Central Station, but, unlike the old train station, the Yale Club had never really been renovated and still had that shabbily elegant Old New York vibe. It was the type of place Blair’s former best friend Serena would adore, while Blair would normally have preferred a more sumptuously elegant suite at the Carlyle or one of the city’s other landmark hotels. But she’d already stayed in a suite at the Plaza, where she’d been treated like just another well-to-do guest. At the Yale Club she’d be “Harold Waldorf’s daughter,” which was almost as good as being royalty.