I Like It Like That

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  the greatest story ever told

  We learned in our eleventh-grade creative writing class this week that most great stories begin in one of the following fashions: someone mysteriously disappears, or a stranger comes to town. The tale I'm about to tell is of the “someone mysteriously disappears” variety.

  To be specific, S is gone. The steps of the Met are no longer graced with her blond splendor. We are no longer distracted in Latin class by the sight of her twirling her pale locks around and around her long, slim fingers while she daydreams about a certain emerald-eyed boy.

  But keep your panties on, I'll get to that in a moment.

  The point is, S has disappeared. And in order to solve the mystery of why she's left and where she's gone, I'm going to have to backtrack to last winter—the winter of our sophomore year—when the La Mer skin cream hit the fan and our pretty pink rose-scented bubble burst. It all began with three inseparable, perfectly innocent, über-gorgeous fifteen-year-olds. Well, they're sixteen now, and let's just say that two of them are not that innocent.

  An epic such as this requires an observant, quick-witted scribe. That would be me, since I was at the scene of every crime, and I happen to have an impeccable eye for the most outrageous details. So sit back while I unravel the past and reveal everyone's secrets, because I know everything, and what I don't know I'll invent elaborately.

  Admit it, you're already falling for me.

  You know I love you,

  gossip girl

  like most juicy stories, it started with one boy and two girls

  “Truce!” Serena van der Woodsen screamed as Nate Archibald body-checked her into a three-foot-high drift of powdery white snow. Cold and wet, it tunneled into her ears and down her pants. Nate dove on top of her, all five foot eleven inches of his perfect, golden-brown-haired, glittering-green-eyed, fifteen-year-old boyness. He smelled like Downy and the L'Occitane sandalwood soap the maid stocked his bathroom with. Serena just lay there, trying to breathe with him on top of her. “My scalp is cold,” she pleaded, getting a mouthful of Nate's snow-dampened, godlike curls as she spoke.

  Nate sighed reluctantly, as if he could have spent the rest of the morning outside in the frigid February meat locker that was the back garden of his family's Eighty-second-Street-just-off-Park-Avenue Manhattan town house. He rolled onto his back and wriggled like Serena's long-dead golden retriever, Guppy, when she used to let him loose on the green grass of the Great Lawn in Central Park. Then he stood up, awkwardly dusting off the seat of his neatly pressed Brooks Brothers khakis. It was Saturday, but he still wore the same clothes he wore every weekday as a sophomore at the St. Jude's School for Boys over on East End Avenue. It was the unofficial Prince of the Upper East Side uniform, the same uniform he and his classmates had been wearing since they'd started nursery school together at Park Avenue Presbyterian.

  Nate held out his hand to help Serena to her feet. Behind him rose the clean-looking limestone prewar luxury buildings of Park Avenue's Golden Mile, with their terraced penthouses and plate-glass windows. Still, nothing beat living in an actual house with an entire wing of one's own and a back garden with a fountain and cherry trees in it, within walking distance of one's best friends' houses, Serendipity 3, and Barneys. Serena frowned cautiously up at Nate, worried that he was only faking her out and was about to tackle her again. “I really am cold,” she insisted.

  He flapped his hand at her impatiently. “I know. Come on.”

  She pretended to pick her nose and then grabbed his hand with her faux-snotty one. “Thanks, pal.” She staggered to her feet. “You're a real chum.”

  Nate led the way inside. The backs of his pant legs were damp and she could see the outline of his tighty-whiteys. Really, how gay of him! He held the glass-paned French doors open and stood aside to let her pass. Serena kicked off her baby blue Uggs and scuffed her bare, Urban Decay Piggy Bank Pink-toenailed feet down the long hall to the stately town house's enormous, barely used all-white Italian Modern kitchen. Nate's father, Captain Archibald, was a former sea captain-turned-banker, and his mother was a French society hostess. They were basically never home, and when they were home, they were at the opera.

  “Are you hungry?” Nate asked, following her across the gleaming white marble floor. “I'm so sick of takeout. My parents have been in Venezuela or Santa Domingo or wherever for like two weeks, and I've been eating 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 a messy lock of 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 it open, 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 …

  “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 even 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 the packet and hopped up on the counter next to her. “No way,” he responded decisively. She couldn't leave. He wouldn't allow it.

  “They want to travel more,” she explained, the pink, perfect curve of her lower lip trembling 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 wrapped his arm around her sharply defined shoulders. “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 without thinking. 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. She shivered and her perfect, still-tan-from-Christmas-in-the-Caribbean skin broke out in a rash of goosebumps. 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 slipped 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 U
pper 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 perplexingly unpredictable. 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, cobalt blue eyes, and wavy chestnut-colored hair. Way back in fifth grade, Serena had told Nate she was convinced Blair had a crush on him. He started to notice that Blair did sort of stick her chest out when she knew 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 to be 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 Frederic Fekkai Apple Cider clarifying shampoo. He'd kissed a few 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, scrutinizing her outfit. Her Marc by Marc Jacobs shell pink sheer cotton blouse was fine, as were her peg-legged Seven jeans. It was the fuchsia La Perla bra that was the problem. It showed right through the blouse so that she looked like a lap dancer from Scores. 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. Obviously it was a big turn-on for him, 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 cash-mere Loro Piana cardigan, which would come off the minute she stepped into his well-heated town house. 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 that she'd bought on impulse at Scoop, 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. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, two hundred. Blair counted out the crisp bills, folding them neatly before stuffing them into her back pocket.

  “If I were a cabernet,” her father's playfully confidential lawyer's voice echoed out of the adjoining dressing room, “how would you describe my bouquet?”

  Excusez-moi?

  Blair clomped over to the chocolate brown velvet curtain that separated her mother's dressing room from her father'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 III, Esquire, poked his head out from behind the velvet curtain, holding it firmly in his grasp so that Blair couldn't pull it aside. The one shoulder she could see appeared to be dressed in his favorite charcoal tweed Paul Smith cashmere bathrobe. But if he wasn't naked, then why wouldn't he let her open the curtain?

  “Your mom's with Misty Bass looking at dishes for the Guggenheim benefit,” he said, his nicely tanned, handsome face looking slightly flushed. “I thought you were out. Where are you going exactly?”

  Blair glared at him and then yanked the curtain aside, catching him as he tucked his rather bulky BlackBerry into his bathrobe pocket. She shoved him aside and stood amongst his custom-tailored Valentino and Dior suits with her hands on her hips. Who had he just been talking to? His intern? His secretary? A salesgirl from Hermes, his favorite store?

  “What's up, Bear?” Her father smiled tensely back at her, his crystalline blue eyes looking a little too innocent. What was he hiding?

  Does she really want to know?

  Her stomach roiling with bilious outrage and her blue eyes shining with angry tears, Blair stumbled out of the master suite and clomped her way across the penthouse to the foyer. She grabbed her blood-orange-colored Jimmy Choo Treasure Chest hobo and ran for the elevator.

  February had been unusually cruel. Outside it was breathtakingly cold, and fat snowflakes fell at random. Usually Blair walked the twelve blocks to Nate's house, but today she had no patience for walking. She couldn't wait to see her friends and tell them what a scumbag her father was. A cab was waiting for her downstairs. Or rather, a cab was waiting for Mrs. Solomon in 4A, but when Alfie, 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 on the corner. Blair's cab hurtled recklessly up Madison Avenue, past Zitomer, Agnès B., and the Three Guys coffee shop where all the Constance Billard girls gathered after school, turned east on Eighty-second Street, and finally pulled up in front of 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 an impatient hand.

  Before Vanessa filmed her first movie,

  Dan wrote his first poem,

  and Jenny bought her first bra.

  Before Blair watched her first Audrey Hepburn movie,

  Serena left for boarding school,

  and before Nate came between them. …

  It had to be you

  the gossip girl prequel

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