Because I'm Worth It

  Copyright © 2003 by 17th Street Productions, an Alloy company

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  First eBook Edition: August 2008

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.hachettebookgroupusa.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN 978-0-316-04203-1

  Contents

  Gossip Girl novels

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: b bonds with j over breast size

  Chapter 2: a very different kind of homework

  Chapter 3: waspoid prince tries to score

  Chapter 4: sex poems are full of lies

  Chapter 5: s is in love

  Chapter 6: b does j a little favor

  Chapter 7: as if he didn’t have it good enough already

  Chapter 8: scrawny westside poet has first taste of fame

  Chapter 9: the scoop on the stoop

  Chapter 10: n buys a dime bag

  Chapter 11: introducing the new d

  Chapter 12: s has just what they’ve been looking for

  Chapter 13: v rocks people’s worlds

  Chapter 14: j and e explore their problem areas

  Chapter 15: b has hots for older man

  Chapter 16: kindred spirits connect in rehab

  Chapter 17: s wears her love like a baby tee

  Chapter 18: way better than naked

  Chapter 19: v poses as a poser

  Chapter 20: just like that scene in titanic

  Chapter 21: some like it hot

  Chapter 22: s can’t find her boyfriend, but so what?

  Chapter 23: romancing the stoner

  Chapter 24: our bodies, ourselves

  Chapter 25: the next keats meets his next muse

  Chapter 26: the girl behind the camera

  Chapter 27: audrey keeps her clothes on

  Chapter 28: some girls have all the fun

  Chapter 29: experimentation may be overrated

  Chapter 30: n facilitates recovery of messed-up orphan heiress

  Chapter 31: the icing on b’s cake

  Chapter 32: apathy vs. poetry

  Chapter 33: girls go gaga over secret admirers

  Chapter 34: hugs, not drugs

  Chapter 35: v-day turned d-day for b

  Chapter 36: lifestyles of the rich and famous

  Chapter 37: l is for love

  Chapter 38: v turns down chance to film decomposing fish bodies!

  Chapter 39: s reinvents the tear

  Chapter 40: rehab is the new spa

  Chapter 41: for the sake of her art

  Chapter 42: diva makes her entrance

  Chapter 43: what we talk about when we’re not talking about love

  Gossip Girl novels by Cecily von Ziegesar:

  Gossip Girl

  You Know You Love Me

  All I Want Is Everything

  Because I’m Worth It

  It makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. . . .

  —Ernest Hemingway

  The Sun Also Rises

  Disclaimer: All the real names of places, people, and events have been altered or abbreviated to protect the innocent. Namely, me.

  hey people!

  February is like the girl at that party I threw when my parents took a “second honeymoon” in Cabo last week (I know: sad). You remember—the girl who puked all over the Spanish marble floor in the guest bathroom and then refused to leave? We had to throw her Dior saddlebag and Oscar de la Renta embroidered sheepskin coat into the elevator before she finally got the message. Unlike most places in the world, though, New York refuses to fall into a February-induced depression and become a cold, gray, dismal wasteland. At least, my New York does. Here on the Upper East Side we all know the cure for the drearies: one of Jedediah Angel’s crazy-sexy party dresses, a pair of black satin Manolos, that new “Ready or Not” red lipstick you can only get at Bendel’s, a good Brazilian bikini wax, and a generous slathering of Estée Lauder self-tanner, in case your St. Barts tan left over from Christmas break has finally faded. Most of us are second-semester seniors—at last. Our college applications are in and our schedules are light, with a double free period every day during which we can catch a Fashion Week runway show or head back to a friend’s penthouse apartment to drink skinny lattes, smoke cigarettes, and help pick out the evening’s screw-homework party outfit.

  Another redeeming thing about February is my all-time favorite should-be-a-national-no-school-holiday, Valentine’s Day. If you already have a sweetheart, lucky you. If you don’t, now’s the chance to put the moves on that hottie you’ve been drooling over all winter. Who knows? You might find true love, or at least true lust, and soon every day will feel like Valentine’s Day. Either that or you can just sit at home IMing sad, anonymous notes to people and eating heart-shaped chocolates until you can’t fit into your favorite pair of Seven jeans anymore. It’s up to you. . . .

  Sightings

  S and A holding hands and wandering slowly down Fifth Avenue to the bar at the Compton Hotel, where they can be seen most Friday nights, quaffing Red Bull and Veuve Clicquot cocktails and chuckling to themselves with the heady knowledge that they are without a doubt the hottest couple in the room. B refusing to go inside Veronique—a maternity store on Madison—with her glowingly pregnant mom. D and V wearing matching black turtlenecks, their legs intertwined as they watched that twisted, depressing Ken Mogul film downtown at the Angelika. They’re two morbid, artistic, weirdo peas in a pod—so insanely perfect for each other, you want to shout at them, “Hey, what took you so long?!” J on the Ninety-sixth Street crosstown bus, carefully studying a billboard for breast-reduction surgery. I’d definitely go for it if I were in her double-D cups . . . um, I mean shoes. The ever-adorable N playing a stoned game of ice-hockey golf with his buddies at Sky Rink. He doesn’t seem to mind being girlfriendless. It’s not like he’ll have any trouble finding a new one. . . .

  And finally: Who’s getting in early??

  This week an annoying little group of us is going to find out whether or not we got early admission to the top colleges in the country. This is it. There’s no more time for our parents to build another new wing on the library. No time to bribe another esteemed alum into sending the dean of admissions a letter of recommendation. No time to star in another school play. The envelopes are already in the mail.

  I’d like to take a moment to point out that the decision is completely arbitrary because basically we’re all perfect specimens. We’re gorgeous, intelligent, well mannered and eloquent, with influential parents and perfect transcripts (except for the occasional blip, like getting kicked out of boarding school or having to take the SATs eight times).

  I’d also like to give a word of advice to those of us who do get in early: Try not to talk about it too much, okay? The rest of us have a couple more months of waiting to do, and if you want to get invited out with us, you’d better not even mention the words Ivy League in our presence. Our parents do that quite enough already, thank you very much. Not that it’s a sore subject or anything.

  I think it’s safe to say we’re all suffering from late-winter waiting-to-hear-from-colleges cabin fever. It’s time to run a little wild! Just think, the later we stay out, the quicker the days will blur by. And believe me, every wicked thing we get up to will be glamorized, dissected, and blown to
tally out of proportion right here by yours truly. Have I ever let you down?

  You know you love me.

  gossip girl

  b bonds with j over breast size

  “Just a few fries and some ketchup, please,” Jenny Humphrey told Irene, the one-hundred-year-old bearded lunch lady behind the counter in the basement cafeteria of the Constance Billard School for Girls. “Just a few,” Jenny repeated. Today was the first day of peer group, and Jenny didn’t want her senior peer group leaders to think she was a total pig.

  Peer group was a new program the school was trying out. Every Monday at lunchtime the freshman girls were to meet in groups of five with two senior girls to discuss peer pressure, body image, boys, sex, drugs, alcohol, and any other issues that might be bothering the freshman girls or that the two senior peer group leaders deemed important enough to talk about. The idea was that if the older girls shared their experiences with the younger girls and started a sympathetic dialogue, the younger girls would make informed decisions instead of stupid high-school-career-damaging mistakes that might embarrass their parents or the school.

  With its beamed ceiling, mirrored walls, and birchwood modernist tables and chairs, the Constance Billard School cafeteria looked more like a hot new restaurant than an institutional dining room. The dingy old cafeteria had been redone last summer because so many students had been going out for lunch or bringing their own that the school had been losing money on wasted food. The new cafeteria had won an architectural prize for its appealing design and high-tech kitchen, and it was now the students’ favorite in-school hangout, despite the fact that Irene and her mean, stingy, grubby-fingernailed old cronies were still the ones serving the food from the cafeteria’s updated, nouvelle American menu.

  Jenny wove her way through the clusters of girls in pleated navy blue, gray, or maroon wool uniform skirts, picking at their wasabi-smoked tuna burgers and Red Bliss pommes frites and chatting about the parties they’d been to this past weekend. She slid her stainless steel tray onto the empty round table that had been reserved for peer group A and sat down with her back to the mirrored wall so she wouldn’t have to look at herself while she ate. She couldn’t wait to find out who her senior peer group leaders were going to be. Supposedly the competition had been fierce, since being a leader was a relatively painless way of showing colleges that you were still involved in school activities even though your applications were already in. It was like getting extra credit for eating fries and talking about sex for fifty minutes.

  Who wouldn’t want to do that?

  “Hello, Ginny.” Blair Waldorf, the bitchiest, vainest girl in the entire senior class, or maybe the entire world, slid her tray into the place across from Jenny and sat down. She tucked a wavy lock of dark brown shoulder-length hair behind her ear and muttered at her reflection in the wall of mirrors. “I can’t wait for my haircut.” She glanced at Jenny, picked up her fork, and raked it through the dollop of whipped cream on top of her chocolate angel food cake. “I’m one of the leaders for peer group A. Are you in group A?”

  Jenny nodded, clutching the seat of her chair as she stared gloomily down at her plate of cold, greasy fries. She couldn’t believe her bad luck. Not only was Blair Waldorf the most intimidating senior in the school, she was also Nate Archibald’s ex-girlfriend. Blair and Nate had always been the perfect couple; the ones destined to stay together forever and ever. Then, strange as it might have seemed, Nate had actually dumped Blair for Jenny after meeting Jenny in the park and sharing a joint with her.

  It had been Jenny’s first joint, and Nate had been her first love. She’d never dreamed of having an older boyfriend, let alone one as gorgeous and cool as Nate. But after a couple of too-good-to-be-true months, Nate had gotten bored with Jenny and had proceeded to break her heart in the cruelest way by ditching her on New Year’s Eve. So now she and Blair Waldorf actually had something in common—they’d both been dumped by the same boy. Not that that made any difference. Jenny was pretty sure that Blair still hated her guts.

  Blair knew perfectly well that Jenny was the balloon-boobed freshman whore who’d stolen her Natie away, but she also knew that Nate had dumped Jenny flat on her ass after some extremely embarrassing pictures of Jenny’s bare butt in a thong had been posted on the Web just before New Year’s Eve. Blair figured Jenny had already gotten her comeuppance, and she really couldn’t be bothered with hating her anymore.

  Jenny looked up. “Who’s your coleader?” she asked timidly. She wished the other members of the group would hurry up and get there before Blair tore her head off with her perfectly manicured opalescent-pink fingernails.

  “Serena’s coming.” Blair rolled her eyes. “You know her. She’s always late.” She combed her fingers through her hair, envisioning the cut she was going to get when she went for her appointment during double free period. She was going to have them do a mahogany rinse to get rid of the copper-colored highlights, and then she wanted it cut short, in a modern, superstylish sort of way, like Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million.

  “Oh,” Jenny replied, relieved. Serena van der Woodsen was Blair’s best friend, but she wasn’t nearly as intimidating, because she was actually nice.

  “Hi, guys. Is this peer group A?” A gangly, freckled freshman girl named Elise Wells sat down next to Jenny. She smelled like baby powder, and her strawlike blond hair was cut in a chin-length bob with thick bangs masking her forehead, exactly like the haircut Nanny gave you when you were two. “I’m just going to tell you now that I have a problem with eating,” Elise announced. “I can’t eat in public.”

  Blair nodded and pushed her slice of chocolate cake away from her. In peer group leader training the health teacher, Ms. Doherty, had told them to listen and try to be sensitive, putting themselves in the younger girls’ shoes. Ms. Doherty should talk. All she ever talked about in ninth-grade health class was the boyfriends she’d had and all the sexual positions she’d tried. Still, Ms. Doherty was one of the teachers Blair had hit up for an extra recommendation to send to the Yale admissions office, and she really wanted to stand out as the best peer group leader in the senior class. She wanted her peer group freshmen to like her—no, adore her—and if one of them had a problem with eating in public, Blair wasn’t going to sit there gorging herself on chocolate cake, especially not when she’d been planning to throw it up as soon as the bell rang anyway.

  Blair pulled a pile of handouts out of her red Louis Vuitton bowling bag. “Body image and self esteem are two of the issues we’ll be discussing today,” she told Elise and Jenny, trying to sound professional. “If my coleader and the rest of our group ever decide to get here,” she added impatiently. Was it physically possible for Serena to ever be on time?

  Apparently not.

  Just then, in a flurry of dove-gray cashmere and shimmering pale blond hair, Serena van der Woodsen slid her shapely, tanned butt into the chair next to Blair. The three other peer group A freshman girls were trailing her like baby ducklings. “Look what we suckered Irene into giving us!” Serena crowed, slapping a heaping plate full of greasy onion rings down in the middle of the table. “I told her we were having a special meeting and we were starving.”

  Blair glanced sympathetically at Elise, who was glowering at the plate of onion rings with blond-lashed blue eyes that would have been pretty if she’d tried using a little dark brown Stila lengthening mascara. “You’re late,” Blair accused, passing out the handouts to Serena and the other three freshmen. “I’m Blair,” she told them. “And you are . . . ?”

  “Mary Goldberg, Vicky Reinerson, and Cassie Inwirth,” the three girls responded in unison.

  Elise nudged Jenny’s elbow. Mary, Vicky, and Cassie were the most annoyingly inseparable threesome in the freshman class. They were always brushing each other’s hair in the hallways, and they did everything together, including pee.

  Blair glanced down at the handout and read aloud, “Body image: accepting and embracing who you are.” She looked up and smil
ed at the freshmen expectantly. “Do any of you have a particular body image issue you’d like to talk about?”

  Jenny felt the blood creep into her neck and face as she boldly considered telling them about the breast-reduction consultation. But before she could get the words out, Serena crammed an enormous onion ring into her delicate mouth and interjected, “Can I just say something first?”

  Blair frowned at her best friend, but Mary, Vicky, and Cassie were nodding eagerly. Listening to anything Serena van der Woodsen had to say was so much more interesting than any stupid body image discussion.

  Serena plunked her elbows down on top of the handout and rested her perfectly chiseled chin in her manicured hands, her enormous dark blue eyes gazing dreamily at her idyllic reflection in the mirrored wall. “I’m so in love,” she sighed.

  Blair clutched her fork and dug into the piece of chocolate cake again, forgetting about her no-eating solidarity with Elise. Serena was so goddamned insensitive. First of all, the guy she was apparently “so in love” with happened to be Blair’s new pseudohippie, guitar-playing, dreadlocked stepbrother, Aaron Rose, which was just so absurd. And second of all, even though Nate had dumped Blair way back in November, Blair was still not over Nate, and the mere mention of the world love made her want to blow chunks. “I think we’re supposed to get them to talk about their problems, not talk about ourselves,” she hissed at Serena. Of course, if Serena had actually bothered to show up for peer group training, she would have known that herself.

  Serena had blown the training off so she could go to a movie with Aaron, and, like a gullible idiot, Blair had covered for her. She’d told Ms. Doherty that Serena had a migraine but that she would personally go over all the major points they covered in training when Serena felt better. It was so typical. Whenever Blair did anything nice for someone else, she usually regretted it.

  Which kind of explained why she was such a bitch most of the time.

  Serena shrugged her halter-top-perfect shoulders. “I think love is a much better topic than body image anyway. I mean, we all talked body image to death in ninth-grade health.” She glanced at the freshmen seated around the table. “Right?”