Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer

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  There’s blood on thy face.

  —Macbeth, William Shakespeare

  hey people!

  Ever wondered what the lives of the chosen ones are really like? Well, I’m going to tell you, because I’m one of them. I’m not talking about models or actors, royalty or reality show stars, cult leaders or the undead. I’m talking about the people who are born to it—those of us who have everything anyone could possibly wish for and who take it all completely for granted. The ones who literally get away with murder.

  Welcome to New York City’s Upper East Side, where my friends and I live, and go to school, and play—and sometimes kill each other. We all live in huge apartments with our own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines. We have unlimited access to money, booze, antique weaponry, apocalyptic poisons, the best carpet cleaners, bespoke luggage, Town Cars, and whatever else we need. Our parents are rarely home, so we have tons of privacy and unlimited opportunities to commit outrageously messy crimes. We’re smart, we’ve inherited classic good looks, we wear fantastic clothes, and we know how to party. Our shit still stinks, but you can’t smell it because the penthouse is decontaminated hourly and then sprayed by the maid with a refreshing scent made exclusively for us by French perfumers.

  It’s a luxe life, but someone’s got to live it… until they die.

  Our apartments are all within walking distance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, and the single-sex private schools, like Constance Billard, which most of us go to. Even with a hangover and a charley horse from last night’s killing spree, Fifth Avenue always looks so beautiful in the morning with the sunlight glimmering on the bobbing heads of the sexy St. Jude’s School boys.

  But something is rotten on Museum Mile….

  SIGHTINGS

  B shooting daggers at her mother in a taxi in front of Barneys. N firing up a joint on the steps of the Met, his lacrosse stick at his feet. C spending a killing on new school shoes at Hermès. And a familiar, tall, eerily beautiful blond girl emerging from a New Haven–line train in Grand Central Terminal carrying a duffel bag large enough to stuff a body into, and a violin case, even though she doesn’t play. Approximate age: seventeen. By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Could it be?S is back?!

  THE GIRL WHO LEAVES FOR BOARDING SCHOOL, GETS KICKED OUT, AND COMES BACK TO HAUNT US, OR WORSE

  Yes, S is back from boarding school. Her hair is longer, paler. Her blue eyes have the depth and mystery of a closet so full of skeletons the door won’t close. She is wearing the same old fabulous clothes, now in rags from fending off bewitched boarding school boys and the stakelike icicles of long New England winters. This morning S’s creepily jubilant laughter echoed off the steps of the Met, where we will no longer be able to enjoy a quick smoke and a cappuccino without seeing her waving to us with one of her victims’ severed hands from the window of her parents’ penthouse apartment across the street. She has picked up the habit of biting her fingernails bloody, which makes us wonder about her even more, and while we are all dying to ask her why she got kicked out of boarding school, we won’t, because we’d really rather she stayed away. But S is definitely here to haunt us.

  Just to be safe, we should all synchronize our watches, warn the doorman, change the locks, and keep a baseball bat or golf club handy. If we aren’t careful, S is going to win over our teachers, wear that dress we couldn’t fit into, eat the last olive, have sex in our parents’ beds, spill Campari on our rugs, wrench out our brothers’ and our boyfriends’ hearts, strangle us in our sleep, and basically ruin our lives and piss us all off in a major way.

  I’ll be watching closely. I’ll be watching all of us as we drop like flies. It’s going to be a wild and wicked year. I can smell it.

  Love,

  like most killer stories, it started at a party

  “I watched Dexter reruns all morning in my room so I wouldn’t have to eat breakfast with them,” Blair Waldorf told her two best friends and Constance Billard School classmates, Kati Farkas and Isabel Coates. “My mother cooked him a piece of fried liver. I didn’t even know she knew how to use the stove.”

  Blair tucked her long, dark brown hair behind her ears and swigged her mother’s fine vintage scotch from the crystal tumbler in her hand. She was already on her second glass and planned on drinking several more. Anything to ward off the murderous rage that threatened to overcome her. Her forehead got all wrinkly and unattractive when she was mad.

  “Which episodes did you watch?” Isabel asked, removing a stray strand of hair from Blair’s black cashmere cardigan.

  “Who cares?” Blair said, stamping her foot. She wore her new black ballet flats—very bow tie proper preppy, which she could get away with because in an instant she could change her mind, smudge her lipstick, tease her hair, and put on her trashy, pointed, knee-high boots and that murderously short metallic skirt her mother hated. Poof: escaped convict meets rock star sex kitten.

  Meow.

  “The point is, I was trapped in my room all morning because they were busy having a gross romantic breakfast in their matching red silk bathrobes. They didn’t even take showers.” Blair took another gulp of her drink. The only way to tolerate the thought of her mother sleeping with that man was to get drunk, very drunk, and imagine them both dying from the Mad Cow bacteria in their fried liver.

  Luckily, Blair and her friends came from the kind of families for whom drinking was as commonplace as a bloody nose or a surgical scar. Their parents believed in the quasi-European idea that the more access kids have to alcohol, the less likely they are to abuse it. So Blair and her friends could drink whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, as long as they maintained their grades and their looks and didn’t embarrass themselves or the family by puking in public, pissing their pants, or ranting in the streets. The same thing went for everything else, like sex or drugs or murder—as long as you kept up appearances, you were all right.

  But keep your panties on. That’s coming later.

  The man Blair was so upset about was Cyrus Rose, her mother’s new boyfriend. At that very moment Cyrus Rose was standing on the other side of the living room, greeting the dinner guests. He looked like someone who might help you pick out shoes at Saks—bald, except for a small, bushy mustache, his fat stomach barely hidden in a shiny blue double-breasted suit—or someone you’d pay to finish off that filthy rich great-aunt who refused to die. He jingled the change in his pocket incessantly, and when he removed his jacket, there were big, nasty sweat marks on his underarms. He had a loud laugh and was very sweet to Blair’s mother. But he wasn’t Blair’s father. Last year Blair’s father had run off to France with another man, who could have been a very handsome psychopath for all Blair knew.

  Although the private-label wine they produce at their chateau is excellent.

  Of course none of that was Cyrus Rose’s fault, but that didn’t matter to Blair. As far as she was concerned, Cyrus Rose was a completely annoying, fat loser who deserved to die—by strangulation perhaps, after getting his bulbous neck stuck in the cord of his horrible red silk bathrobe.

  But not tonight. Tonight Blair was going to have to tolerate Cyrus Rose, because her mother’s dinner party was in his honor, and all the Waldorfs’ family friends were there to meet him: the blue-blooded Basses and their sons, Chuck and Donald; the tragic widower Mr. Farkas and his daughter, Kati; the 1980s slasher film producer Arthur Coates, his grave-digging wife, Titi, and their daughters, Isabel, Regina, and Camilla; dead English royalty offspring Patty and Roger Scott Tompkinson and their son, Jeremy (who hadn’t actually shown his face, but was probably ju
st getting high in the maid’s bathroom); Captain “Kill or Be Killed” Archibald, his wife, Mrs. Archibald, and their son, Nate. The only ones still missing were Mr. and Mrs. van der Woodsen, whose teenage daughter, Serena, and son, Erik, were both away at school.

  Blair’s mother was famous for her dinner parties, and this was the first since her infamous divorce. The Waldorf penthouse had been expensively redecorated that summer in bruised reds and molten browns, and it was full of impressive antiques and artwork cleverly scavenged by her decorator from the estates of recently deceased art collectors before they went to auction. In the center of the dining room table was an enormous silver bowl full of white lilies, petrified scarab beetles, and desiccated pussy willows. Gold-leafed place cards lay on every red-lacquered plate. In the kitchen, Myrtle, the cook, was whisper-shouting Ozzy Osbourne songs to the soufflé, and the sloppy Irish maid, Esther, hadn’t dropped her famous blood pudding and Ritz cracker canapés down anyone’s dress yet, thank goodness.

  Blair was the one getting sloppy. And if Cyrus Rose didn’t stop harassing Nate, her boyfriend, she was going to have to go over there, spill her scotch all over his tacky Italian loafers, and bludgeon him to death with her empty tumbler. Not that she’d ever actually kill anyone, but it was fun to imagine it.

  Such fun.

  “You and Blair have been going out a long time, am I right?” Cyrus said, punching Nate in the arm. He was trying to get the kid to loosen up a little. All these Upper East Side kids were wound way too tight.

  Hence the high mortality rate.

  “You sleep with her yet?” Cyrus asked.

  Nate turned redder than the gore smeared on a butcher’s apron. “Well, we’ve known each other practically since we were born,” he stuttered. “But we’ve only been going out for like, a year. We don’t want to ruin it by, you know, rushing, before we’re ready?” Nate was just spitting back the line that Blair always gave him when he asked her if she was ready to do it or not. But he was talking to his girlfriend’s mother’s boyfriend. What was he supposed to say? “Dude, if I had my way we’d be doing it right now”?

  “Absolutely,” Cyrus Rose said. He clasped Nate’s shoulder with a red, meaty hand. Around his fleshy wrist was one of those gold Cartier cuff bracelets—very popular in the 1980s and not so popular now—that you screw on permanently and never take off, unless you cut off your own arm.

  Or someone cuts it off for you.

  “Let me give you some advice,” Cyrus told Nate, as if Nate had a choice. “Don’t listen to a word that girl says. Girls like surprises. They want you to keep things interesting. Know what I mean?”

  Nate nodded, frowning. He tried to remember the last time he’d surprised Blair. The only thing that came to mind was the time he’d brought her an ice cream cone when he picked her up at her tennis lesson. That had been over a month ago, and it was a pretty lame surprise by any standard. At this rate he and Blair might never have sex.

  Nate was one of those boys you look at, and while you’re looking at them you know they’re thinking, That girl can’t take her eyes off me, I’m so hot. Although he didn’t act at all conceited about it. He couldn’t help being hot—he was born that way. Poor guy.

  That night Nate was wearing the moss green cashmere V-neck sweater Blair had given him last Easter, when her father had taken them skiing in Sun Valley for a week. Secretly, Blair had sewn a tiny gold heart pendant inside one of the sweater’s sleeves, so that Nate would always be wearing her heart on his sleeve. Blair liked to think of herself as a hopeless romantic in the style of old movie actresses like Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Sissy Spacek in Carrie, or Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. She was always coming up with plot twists for the movie she was starring in at the moment. And usually someone wound up dead.

  C’est la vie.

  “I love you,” Blair had told Nate breathily when she gave him the sweater.

  “Me too,” Nate had said back, although he wasn’t exactly sure if it was true.

  When he put on the sweater, it looked so good on him that Blair wanted to howl like a werewolf, rip off all her clothes, and jump him. But it seemed unattractive to scream in the heat of the moment—more Janet Leigh in Psycho than Marilyn in Some Like It Hot—so Blair kept quiet, trying to remain fragile and baby bird–like in Nate’s arms. They kissed for a long time, their cheeks hot and cold at the same time from being out on the slopes all day. Nate twined his fingers in Blair’s hair and pulled her down on the hotel bed. Blair put her arms above her head and let Nate begin to undress her, until she realized where this was all heading, and that it wasn’t a movie after all—it was real. So, like the well-trained, civilized girl she was supposed to be, she sat up and made Nate stop.

  She’d kept on making him stop right on up until today. Only two nights ago, Nate had come over after a party with a half-drunk flask of brandy in his pocket, gotten into bed with her, and murmured, “I want you, Blair.” Once again, Blair had wanted to scream bloody murder, jump on top of him, and smother him with kisses. But she resisted. Nate fell asleep, snoring softly, and Blair lay down next to him, imagining they were the stars in a movie in which they were married and he had a drinking problem and possibly a multiple personality disorder, but she would stand by him always and love him forever, even if he occasionally spoke in tongues and wet the bed.

  Blair wasn’t trying to be a tease; she just wasn’t ready. She and Nate had barely seen each other at all over the summer because she had gone to that horrible boot camp of a tennis school in North Carolina where she had tried to poison everyone’s Kool-Aid, and Nate had gone sailing with his father off the coast of Maine. Blair wanted to make sure that after spending the whole summer apart they still loved each other as much as ever. She’d wanted to wait to have sex until her seventeenth birthday next month.

  But now she was through with waiting.

  Nate was looking better than ever. The moss green sweater had turned his eyes a dark, sparkling green, and his wavy brown hair was streaked with golden blond from his summer on the ocean. And, just like that, Blair knew she was ready. She took another sip of her scotch and cocked her fingers around the glass tumbler as if she were firing a shiny .38 caliber pistol.

  If only she could take Cyrus out of the picture—bam! And everyone else at the party for that matter—bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Then she and Nate could do it right there in the living room, naked, with the whole damned penthouse to themselves, save for the corpses.

  She finished her drink and set the tumbler down on a marble side table with such force that both the glass and the marble cracked.

  Oh, yes. She was definitely ready.

  the end justifies the means

  “Keep the change,” Serena van der Woodsen called as she stepped out of a cab on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street, three blocks from the Archibalds’ townhouse. The trip uptown from Grand Central had gone too quickly. She needed some fresh air, and she certainly didn’t need to be spotted right in front of Nate’s house. Not today. Of course, anyone who mattered was already at Eleanor Waldorf’s autumn soiree. Besides, no one would believe their eyes if they saw Serena van der Woodsen here, on the Upper East Side, when she was supposed to be away at boarding school.

  Her scuffed brown Ralph Lauren lace-up paddock boots were silent on the sidewalk as she made her way toward the townhouse, a pair of huge tortoiseshell Céline sunglasses masking her enormous navy blue eyes. A bicyclist paused to let her pass. Park Avenue wasn’t as wide as she remembered, and the tulips in the median were long gone. A bored doorman glared accusingly at her as she turned the corner, the green awning above him casting a gloomy shadow across her path. Soon the iron gates of Nate Archibald’s stately limestone townhouse loomed before her. Serena tightened the belt of the translucent brown plaid plastic Burberry trench coat she’d purchased from Bluefly.com in case things got messy—the only item of clothing she’d ever bought online, off-season, and at a discount—took a deep b
reath, and rang the bell.

  No answer. She rang it again and waited. Again, no answer. It was after five o’clock. Hopefully Lourdes and Angel—the couple who served as the Archibalds’ housekeepers, cooks, gardeners, handymen, manicurists, hairdressers, masseurs, chimneysweeps, exterminators, launderers, tailors, EMTs, and answering service—-had gone home.

  Serena donned her taupe cashmere-lined goatskin Sermoneta gloves and dug the key out of her eelskin Dolce & Gabbana Harpoon microhobo—the key Nate had given her the summer before last, when everything had gone so very wrong, or so very right, depending on whose side you were on. The gate creaked open and a black squirrel streaked out of the green hedgerow bordering the walk. Oh, the irony! She just happened to have enough squirrel poison in her bag to kill an entire army of black squirrels. Are the black ones the juveniles? she wondered aimlessly, as if trying to distract herself from the true nature of her break-in.

  Which is? We’re all dying to know.

  The black and white tiles of the foyer gleamed with clean familiarity. Growing up, Serena had spent almost as much time at Nate’s house as she had in her own home. Serena and Blair and Nate—always an inseparable, precocious trio. In first grade they’d doused each other with the garden hose out back. In third grade they’d practiced kissing, determined to get it right before they were all cursed with braces or retainers. In fifth grade they’d stolen half the bottles in the liquor cabinet and mixed cocktails from a recipe book Blair had shoplifted from the Corner Bookstore.

  Pushing her sunglasses up onto the crown of her head, Serena mounted the elegant red-carpeted staircase and trotted up to the second floor. She paused in the doorway of the master bedroom, so gilded and nautical with its Louis XVI décor, porthole-shaped skylight over the bed, and red, blue, and gold Persian carpet that had been rescued from the Titanic. Looking up, the sky was a torpid turquoise sea. October was weird like that.