Nobody Does It Better Read online

  Nate leaned over his desk and shot his friend an annoyed look that said, “Please explain.”

  KID FRM YALE PRTY THT HKEDUP W B, Jeremy clarified.

  So that was who was in Blair's bed last night. Nate was too bummed to even reply. He'd left Blair alone for a little more than a day, and she'd had to go and hook up with some asshole at a stupid Yale party that she probably wasn't even invited to? He ought to have been furious. Instead, he just felt depressed. He was supposed to have been at that party. He could even have brought Blair with him. They could have talked about the future and then had sex afterwards. It might have been romantic. But as usual he'd messed everything up.

  Well, now he knows—it may not suck to be the cheater, but it definitely sucks to be cheated on.

  Fuck it, Nate decided. He held up his hand. “Mr. Knoeder, may I be excused? I think I have food poisoning or something.”

  Oh, come now. You can do better than that.

  Mr. Knoeder didn't even notice. His back was turned as he busily drew a detailed map of Saigon in purple chalk. Nate texted a despondent SEE YA to Jeremy, gathered up his things, and slipped out of the classroom, leaving the rest of the St. Jude's senior U.S. history class to stare after him and wonder why they didn't have the balls to do the same.

  Nate stuffed his books in his basement locker and slammed the door. Fuck homework, and fuck school. He was already into college, and now that he was grounded, he might as well just stay at home, eating brownies and getting high. He'd cut the rest of the day's classes, light up a big fatty, fill out the appropriate forms, and send in his deposit to Yale. So what that he'd promised Blair he wouldn't go to Yale unless she got in? Every promise they'd ever made to each other had been broken, and the truth was, Yale had the best lacrosse team and had promised to make him captain his sophomore year. He wanted to go there whether Blair got in or not.

  With grim determination, he headed home, trying to rid himself of the image of that skinny, snoring, girlfriend-stealing asswipe sleeping in Blair's hotel bed. Mailing in his Yale deposit wasn't exactly going to be a victory without losses though. Blair was going to spit fire when she heard about it.

  Unless she didn't care anymore, which was almost even scarier.

  D, The Future of Hip-Hop

  Riverside Prep was housed in a redbrick church built in the late 1900s, the quaintest little schoolhouse on the Upper West Side. The school's main entrance was on West End Avenue—a cute bright red door over which hung a sign that said RIVERSIDE PREPARATORY SCHOOL FOR BOYS, which sounded embarrassingly like some sort of rich boys' finishing school. Thankfully, the upper-school boys entered from the side entrance, a normal-looking black door on Seventy-seventh Street, the perfect place to slip into school nearly two hours late.

  Dan swaggered into the last ten minutes of first-period AP English wearing his hip-hop pants and black-and-yellow sneakers from the Raves gig the night before, and a dark gray APC T-shirt given to him by Monique with MR. WONDERFUL stenciled in bold red letters across the chest. Last night he'd drunk his ass off, sung like a sickass motherfucker, and then had crazy, totally undeserved sex with a beautiful French girl on a giant bed in a Plaza Hotel suite. Being a rock star was actually kind of excellent.

  You don't say.

  “Well, if it isn't my most famous student,” Ms. Solomon observed tersely as Dan wandered to the back of the room and slouched behind a desk. Ms. Solomon was right out of graduate school and was incredibly ashamed of the major crush she had on Dan. Instead of showering him with praise—there was no question he was the most accomplished and intellectual student in the class—she was either snide and critical, or she ignored him completely. Once, just to test her, he'd even copied an essay on Virginia Woolf's writing habits, written by the famous literary critic Harold Bloom, her advisor at Princeton, and handed it in, pretending he'd written it. Ms. Solomon had given him a B+, just like she did on every one of his English assignments, no matter how bad or good it was.

  “The class and I were just discussing whether or not we should have a final essay on our unit on Shakespeare's tragedies instead of a final exam. Any opinion, Dan?” She clamped a hand over her mouth and added sarcastically. “I do apologize—perhaps you have a stage name now?”

  Dan frowned down at his desktop, where someone had etched the words Bitch Face with a green ballpoint pen. Normally he would have welcomed the chance to write a paper over taking an exam, but papers required research and outlining and hours of writing, whereas an exam required a single two-hour appearance.

  That is, if you have no intention of studying for it, which he didn't.

  Now that he was a rock star he'd be touring, shooting videos, signing albums, and fending off women and the paparazzi. Two hours out of one day for a stupid English exam was definitely preferable.

  Ms. Solomon was the type of dried-apple skinny that made her look forty years older than she probably was, and her hair, which she kept pulled back in a low ponytail, was an ashy dark blond color that looked gray under the school's harsh fluorescent lights. She loved lace, and preferred cream-colored blouses with lace collars and ruffles at the sleeves, paired with black wool knee-length skirts, black stockings, and bizarrely high, skinny-heeled black pumps. Her skirts were always seriously tight, too, leading the boys to suspect that she probably thought she was the sexiest female alive.

  Ew.

  “Half the class wants a paper and half the class wants an exam. Yours is the swing vote,” she explained.

  Meaning that no matter what Dan said, half the class would hate him for it.

  He cleared his throat. “I think an exam would be a better indicator of how much we've learned over the course of the year,” he declared, sounding like a total schmo.

  “Oh, would it now?” Chuck Bass sneered from two desks away. Riverside Prep's dress code was plain-colored khaki pants or cords, brown or black belt, white or pastel-colored button-down shirt, and brown or black loafers with dark-colored socks. Chuck Bass was wearing a black Prada jumpsuit, unzipped so his tanned, recently waxed chest was clearly visible, and creamy white leather Camper sandals that showed off his smooth, manicured feet. On the floor beneath his desk, Chuck's pet snow monkey, Sweetie, poked his fuzzy white head out of Chuck's orange-and-red leather Dooney & Bourke tote bag and bared his teeth.

  Chuck hardly deserved to be in AP English. He could barely spell, had never read a book in its entirety, and thought Beowulf was a type of fur used for lining coats. But in an effort to get him into college, his parents had insisted he be placed in all the APs, which turned out to be a big fat mistake. Due to the fact that Chuck preferred to shop and attend fashion shows instead of going to school and doing his homework, he had gotten Ds in all his classes last semester, failed to get into any of the colleges he'd applied to, and was now bound for military school.

  And was he bitter? Definitely.

  “Hey Mr. Wonderful,” Chuck hissed at Dan. “Don't look now, but your days as a Rave are over.”

  Huh?

  Dan slouched in his chair and dug at the desk with his ballpoint pen. He was a rock star; he didn't have to take this shit. Someone's foot nudged the base of his spine. “You're out,” whispered Bryce James, one of Chuck's bullish friends. “Unless your slut of a sister can get you back in.”

  Dan's hackles rose. What did Jenny have to do with it? As far as he knew, Jenny was only going along for the ride, just like she'd always done. After all, if your big brother was in a major band, wouldn't you want to hang out with him and his bandmates, too?

  “I heard she wants to be a singer,” Bryce elaborated. “So she slept with every one of them.”

  Dan whipped around and gave Bryce the finger simply because he was too hungover to think of anything intelligent to say. Jenny had left the suite by the time he and Monique had gotten up that morning, but what exactly had she been up to while he was getting busy last night? And how come everyone already seemed to know about it?

  “An exam it is, then,” Ms. So
lomon announced. She scribbled something in a notepad and then stood up and approached Dan's desk. “I'm a bit of a Raves fan myself,” she murmured, her cheeks slightly flushed. “And it's sort of killing me.” She stopped in front of Dan, put her palms on his desk, and leaned toward him so that he could smell the everything bagel with scallion cream cheese she'd eaten for breakfast. “Is it true that Damian is married to his high-school sweetheart? Some French girl?” she asked loudly, obviously thinking it was totally hip for a teacher to know anything about a cool band like the Raves.

  Dan's hands were sweating, and he fingered the pack of unfiltered Camels in the back pocket of his baggy pants. Didn't Riverside Prep have rules about teachers harassing the students?

  There were only two minutes left before the end of class. Still hoping to hear the answer to Ms. Solomon's question, the other boys quietly gathered their books and zipped up their backpacks.

  The minute hand on the clock over the blackboard crept forward and the hallway outside the classroom buzzed to life. Dan stood up, brushed past his nosy teacher, and headed for the door.

  Saved by the bell.

  An E-Mail Worth Responding to

  That afternoon during computer lab, Serena was tempted to e-mail that melodramatic artist at Brown, those perky sorority weirdos at Princeton, and that lovelorn jock at Harvard, telling them to have nice lives, because from now on she was all about Yale. Instead, she permanently expunged them from her trash folder. At lunchtime she'd actually mailed in her deposit to Yale, and what a relief it was to have finally come to a decision—even if she couldn't tell her best friend in the whole world about it. She skimmed the rest of her e-mail until she came to one from an unknown source.

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: don't believe everything you read

  So, we're an item. It's all very flattering. Problem is, we've never met. Want to? A bunch of people will be at my place in the Village Friday night. Hope you can make it.

  Damian

  Serena giggled and stood up partway out of her chair, searching the Constance Billard computer lab for Blair's dark shiny head. But Blair was working intently at her computer and didn't even notice Serena waving at her. Mr. Schneider, the uptight computer proctor with the deformed nostrils, glared at her, and Serena went back to her e-mail. She knew from their videos that the Raves' lead guitarist was extremely handsome and talented, and wouldn't it be crazy if they actually hit it off, turning myth into reality? So what if she'd kind of decided to take the serious route and be a full-time student next year? That was next year, and the rest of this year was all about having fun, fun, fun. Who knew—she might even change her mind, defer her admission, become a Raves groupie, and tour with the band for the next five years!

  And only just a moment ago she was all pleased with herself for being so decisive.

  Serena bit her nails for a few seconds, then hit reply and typed three letters using only her partially chewed-on, partially pink-polished index finger.

  Y-E-S.

  An Unlikely Match

  Blair trolled the Internet for the exquisite Jimmy Choo shoes she'd seen in W but had yet to find in her size. They were made of green silk, hand-sewn with tiny mother-of-pearl hearts all over the heels. They'd only distributed three hundred pairs of the shoes worldwide, but surely there had to be one size-seven-and-a-half that hadn't been claimed—in Mexico City, maybe, or Hong Kong, where feet tended to be small.

  Next to her, Vanessa Abrams was furiously typing, building some sort of feminist Web page or something. Blair glanced at her neighbor's screen. Roommate Wanted, she read in big, bold letters. Female Only.

  Blair had never been too fond of her shaven-headed, black-wearing, film auteur classmate. Every word Vanessa uttered in class was said with an air of I'm-only-talking-to-you-because-you-asked-me-a-question, like she was so much smarter and more astute than even the teachers. And she'd always suspected that Vanessa preferred girls to boys.

  “I interviewed this guy this weekend. Turned out to be a serious weirdo.”

  Blair glanced at her neighbor and discovered that Vanessa was actually addressing her.

  “I decided to stick with female applicants only,” Vanessa added, clicking the enter button on her keyboard for emphasis.

  Blair pressed her lips together and shifted in her chair. Vanessa really did seem to be talking to her. “I met a guy this weekend, too,” she confessed. She bit her lip and pointed to Vanessa's screen. “Why do you want a roommate anyway? I'd kill to live on my own.”

  Vanessa shrugged her shoulders. It was weird enough conversing with bitchy Blair Waldorf, but even weirder still that Blair's question was actually worth thinking about.

  “My sister's on tour in Europe. I don't know, I guess I get lonely,” Vanessa admitted before she could stop herself. As soon as she'd said it she felt like clamping her hand over her mouth. Why would Blair Waldorf of all people even care?

  “What about your boyfriend—that geek—?” Blair bit her lip and corrected herself. “That boy with the … notebook.”

  “We broke up.”

  Blair nodded, tempted to explain how she'd just broken up with her boyfriend, and how sometimes she felt lonely too. Discreetly, she sized Vanessa up. She kind of liked how Vanessa didn't gush about what a loser her ex-boyfriend was, complaining about the gifts he'd given her, imitating the stupid way he tied his shoes, and reiterating the whole sad saga. Vanessa was weird, but at least she wasn't predictable. And it was well known that Vanessa's parents lived in Vermont, so if her sister was away, she really was all on her own.

  “So how does it work?” Blair asked. “Are you, like, interviewing prospective roommates?”

  Vanessa had to wonder where all this was going.

  “Well, first I screen them through Instant Messenger, and if they sound normal I interview them. But so far, no one's been normal.”

  Blair couldn't believe she was even considering living with lesbo, baldo, weirdo, no-friends Vanessa, but she really did need a place to live. Her own home was intolerable, and after her run-in with Mrs. M this morning, she was pretty sure she couldn't live at the Plaza for the rest of the school year without completely ruining her chances of getting into Yale. And what if she needed to entertain … a guest? An apartment without parents or nannies or maids or cooks was the perfect place, even if it had to be in dirty, disgusting Williamsburg. She might even convince Vanessa to hire a decorator, and introduce some color to the apartment. Not that she had actually seen Vanessa's place, but after going to school with her for the last one hundred years, she was pretty sure the apartment was done entirely in black. She could make the place over completely, just like the frumpy, bookish Audrey Hepburn was made over into a fabulous fashion model in My Fair Lady!

  “Interview me,” she suggested.

  “But—” Vanessa countered. “I live in Brooklyn.”

  Blair twisted her ruby ring around and around on the ring finger of her left hand. “I know.” She sighed mournfully down at her black patent leather flats and closed her eyes, trying to picture herself as a hip, artsy Williamsburg person. She'd wear drab green T-shirts with ironic decals on them like WILLIAMSBURG IS FOR LOVERS. She'd take her coffee black. She'd wear Converse sneakers without socks and carry a vintage purple plastic handbag. She'd get orange highlights and wear black octagonally framed glasses. She'd eat falafel. She'd write poetry. She'd get a lip ring and a tattoo! Oh, wouldn't Nate just die. A smile spread across her face. “I've always wanted to live in Brooklyn.”

  Yeah, right.

  “No, you—” Vanessa began in an attempt to dissuade her

  “You have cable, TiVo, and a DVD player, right?” Blair demanded.

  Wait, who's supposed to interview who?

  “I have to watch my movies,” Blair insisted, like a TV-dinner-eating old biddy who couldn't survive without her daily dose of Regis and Kelly.

  “Movies?” Vanessa repeated, wondering if
Blair had completely lost her mind. She'd forgotten that Blair was a huge old movie fan. Back in November, Blair had even entered a film contest at school. All she'd done was replay the first ten minutes of Breakfast at Tiffany's over and over to different music, because in her opinion it was the perfect first ten minutes of any film ever. Vanessa had won the contest with her version of War and Peace, starring her former best friend Dan Humphrey as the dying Prince Andrei. That had been before they'd even kissed—what seemed like a century ago.

  “Anything starring Audrey Hepburn. Or Jimmy Stewart. Or Cary Grant. Or Lauren Bacall.” Blair clarified breathlessly. “And of course, Gone with the Wind.”

  If there was one thing Vanessa had plenty of, it was film equipment, TVs, videos, and DVDs. “Don't worry. I'm majoring in film at NYU next year. I have everything,” Vanessa assured her. “All the classics.”

  “And how do you get to school?” Blair demanded, wondering if she might have to learn to drive. Keeping her eyes on her computer screen, she wiggled her mouse to give the impression that she was hard at work. “Isn't there, like, some bridge you have to cross?”

  Considering that Manhattan is an island, then yes, probably a bridge would be involved.

  Vanessa decided to humor her. Not that Blair Waldorf really wanted to live in her dodgy, graffitied Brooklyn apartment building with its view of other dodgy, graffitied Brooklyn apartment buildings. “The L train goes to Union Square and then I change to the 6.”

  Huh?

  Blair frowned. Was she talking about the subway?

  “If the weather's really bad or I'm really late, I call a car service,” Vanessa admitted.

  Aha!

  “And do you mind … you know, visitors?” Blair asked.

  As in male visitors?

  Vanessa laughed. “As long as they don't smell and they bring food.”

  Blair nodded seriously. She'd have her very own apartment in which to have wild and crazy sex with Stan 5 or any other boy she chose, and she would turn herself into the sexiest, most pierced and tattooed girl in Williamsburg. Nate would go absolutely crazy with regret. “I think this could work out, don't you?”