Nobody Does It Better Page 14

  Vanessa's brown eyes had ceased blinking. “But we hate each other,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Blair rolled her eyes and knocked her tanned bony knee against Vanessa's pale round one. “Oh, don't be such a snob,” she huffed, really getting into her new role as Vanessa's long-lost hipster sister. “Now, about your boyfriend problem,” she continued, as if the matter was already closed. “The thing is, and no offense, but I bet you're only attracted to guys who are kind of ‘alternative,’ like you—” Blair clamped her mouth shut, as her brain underwent a lightbulb moment. Why she'd never thought of it before she didn't know, but her dread-locked so-called alternative stepbrother Aaron and the shaven-headed, black-wearing Vanessa were absolutely the perfect couple! They could paint each other's toenails black, cook vegan sushi, film each other's hair or lack thereof, and otherwise entertain themselves while she was busy seducing the boy who was going to get her into Yale.

  See, maybe Williamsburg really is for lovers!

  Gossipgirl.net

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

  hey people!

  The odd couple

  Who would've thunk it? A girl married to her eight-hundred-dollar Manolos has tentatively moved in with a classmate who has never worn anything on her feet but steel-toed Doc Marten boots and black Danskin kneesocks. One thing is for sure, they won't be sharing clothes. But since they come from two entirely different planets, they definitely have a lot to talk about and a lot to learn. A sample conversation:

  “Have you seen the brush for my Stila bronzing powder?”

  “Oh, are you doing an art project?”

  I'm taking bets for how long this crazy sleepover is going to last!

  Quel désastre!

  Word also has it that a certain French tie-dye-wearing hippie chick has told the entire world that she and our favorite stoner lacrosse jock aren't just seeing each other—they're in love. Uh-oh.

  Your e-mail

  Q: Dear GG,

  I volunteer in the admissions office at my college, which happens to be one of the lvies, and my friends and I have spent a lot of time courting this one incoming freshman because we think she'd be the perfect pledge for our sorority. She's gorgeous and smart and talented—just like we are. The thing is, she hasn't answered a single one of our e-mails. I know it sounds corny, but what if we sent her, like, a care package or something—do you think it would help?

  —PrincetonBabe

  A: Dear PrincetonBabe,

  I hate to break it to you, but I don't think so.

  —GG

  Sightings

  C at Tower Records buying a pirated version of the latest Raves single starring none other than D, who is supposedly his least-favorite person of all time. Is it the music or the words that he can't resist? K and I sampling acne-clearing Origins products at the Madison Avenue store and inadvertently slipping a few freebies into their Tod's bags when the sales assistant turned her back. B and V plying the grocery store delivery man with a box of Godiva truffles to get him to carry their shopping bags up three flights to their apartment door. And were those black-and-white toile curtains with balloon valances we saw in the windows? Guess they're both learning to compromise!

  The calm before the storm

  This week I've actually witnessed my classmates hanging around in front of school after it gets out, chatting about their summer plans, and drinking iced lattes. A few weeks ago we were skipping class to sunbathe in the park, listening to our MP3s, and barely speaking to one another. Now we don't know what to do with ourselves, and we can't stand to be alone. Chalk it up to the cloudy, humid, airless May weather, and the fact that in less than four weeks some of us will never see each other again. I'm also convinced that something's cooking. Just watch: Come Friday, all hell will break loose.

  I'll be there with bells on!

  You know you love me,

  gossip girl

  S Is Unimpressed

  A nice-sized trust fund from his great-grandfather, who was involved in the invention of Velcro, and the money from the Raves' bestselling first album, Jimmy and Jane, had bought twenty-three-year-old Damian Polk a cute four-story white town house with red shutters on quaint Bedford Street in the West Village. Bedford Street was only three blocks long, dotted with intimate restaurants, cozy cafes, historic houses, a famous speakeasy, and gorgeous gay men walking their toy dogs. Outside, the house looked like an antique dollhouse, but inside it was a showplace for modern, minimalist white furniture. Rumor had it that although Damian wore all sorts of colors onstage, he never wore anything but white inside his house, and never allowed his guests to wear anything but white either, not even blue jeans.

  Too bad he forgot to tell certain people that particular rule.

  The front door was standing open, and Serena climbed the white marble steps to the second floor, wearing her favorite pair of Blue Cult flares, a cropped hot pink T-shirt, and a crazy pair of Hollywould hot pink platform flip-flops that were a challenge to walk in. She could hear some sort of psychedelic jazz music playing, the clink of glasses, and the murmur of voices.

  Jenny Humphrey was sitting cross-legged on the white lacquered countertop of the island in Damian's white open kitchen, drinking a glass of milk. Her hair was in pigtails and she was wearing a white cotton undershirt and white cotton boxer shorts.

  “Hey!” she cried, bouncing off the counter to greet Serena. “Damian said you were coming. He's in the shower.” She tiptoed over in her bare feet and tilted her lily white chin up to kiss Serena's cheek. “I'm so glad you're here.”

  Well, hello, little hostess to the mostest! What a change from the Jenny who only last week was completely gaga at the opportunity to be invited into Serena's home. And wasn't she like banned from hanging out with the Raves ever again?

  As if that made any difference.

  “I snuck out,” Jenny whispered. “Dad was watching some totally boring Allen Ginsberg documentary. He thinks I'm in my room, like, painting or something.”

  Ah, painting. It used to be her only pastime, back when she was young and innocent.

  Serena smiled down at her petite, curly-haired protégé, feeling oddly out of place. The other party-goers lounged on the white suede sectional sofa in the vaulted white living room adjoining the kitchen, dressed head-to-toe in white, drinking giant gin martinis with hard-boiled eggs floating in them. One wall of the living room was decorated with white paper snowflake cut-outs like the kind you make in kindergarten, and another wall was painted to look like bookshelves filled with white books.

  Because real books are too colorful?

  A tall skinny guy was sitting on a wooly white polar bear rug, wearing only a white terrycloth bathrobe. A huge brown-and-black dog lay beside him, its enormous brown-and-black head buried in his lap—the only bit of color in an entirely white room.

  “Ooh la la!” Jenny chirped giddily as Damian appeared, still damp from the shower and wearing nothing but a pair of white cashmere sweatpants. His reddish blond hair was still damp, and drops of water had collected in the indentations of his collarbone. His arms and chest were covered with tiny freckles and big muscles, and yes, he was even more good-looking in person than on his album covers.

  “Hello,” Serena greeted him, feeling uncharacteristically starstruck. And how come no one had told her about the all-white dress code? Was she just supposed to know?

  “Now I know why everyone said I had to meet you,” he said automatically when he saw Serena.

  Serena blushed at the compliment, but she couldn't think of anything to say. A rare occasion for her—the van der Woodsens were bred to say the right thing at the right time at all times.

  Jenny took Serena's hand and then Damian's, standing between them like a buxom flower girl at an arranged marriage. “You have to show Serena your bedroom,” she told Damian. She turned to Serena. “His bedroom is so cool.”

  Yea
h? How would she know?

  Damian shrugged and starting walking into the living room, pulling Jenny and Serena along with him. “Come, sit down. Kelly and Ping should be here any minute.”

  “Cool,” Serena responded, although she had no idea who he was talking about. Kelly and Ping—were they another band? A clown act? DJs?

  “Yum. They have the best pad Thai ever,” Jenny said, like she'd been ordering from the SoHo Asian eatery all her life.

  “Yum,” Serena agreed. What was wrong with her? She wasn't even hungry.

  Jenny broke away from them and perched on some guy's knee. He had dark hair and dimpled cheeks and was wearing white painter's overalls, looking every bit like the Raves' drummer, Lloyd Collins.

  Cuz that's exactly who he was.

  “Hi Serena,” Lloyd greeted her in that taunting, cocky way of his. “I feel like we're sisters already,” he added, flapping his wrists and pretending to be Damian's long-lost gay twin.

  “Damian just made a recording of me singing ‘Happy Birthday to Me.’ He's going to sample it on the band's next track,” Jenny announced gaily to anyone who was listening. “I can't wait for Dan to hear it.”

  “Isn't he here?” Serena asked, looking around for the cloud of Camel smoke that usually engulfed Dan Humphrey's head.

  “Not yet,” Damian replied, and Serena thought she detected a note of malice in his voice.

  Dan and Serena had gotten together that fall, but it had been short-lived—just like all of her relationships—and they hadn't exactly stayed in touch. But there were no hard feelings, and it might be nice to hang out and be friends now that they were both graduating. She wondered where he was going to college next year, or if he was going to take some time off to tour with the band.

  “Cigar?” Damian asked, holding a box out to her. “They came in from Cuba last night.”

  “Breadstick?” Lloyd asked, flipping a breadstick up in the air like one of his drumsticks and catching it in his teeth. “They're Italian and supercrisp.”

  “No, thanks,” Serena responded quietly to both offers. Here she was, a notorious party girl at what was bound to become a notorious party, yet she felt completely uninspired. Maybe the fact that everyone thought she and Damian were already together was ruining it for her. Or maybe seeing Jenny, the image of herself two or three years ago, was making her realize that she was ready to try something new. Or maybe it was because these were the very last weeks of her senior year, before the summer, and before Yale. She didn't care so much about meeting rock stars; she just wanted to hang out with her friends.

  Blair was at Vanessa's apartment in Williamsburg right now—probably wallpapering the bathroom with little pink rosebuds or something—and there was no place Serena would rather be.

  “Mind if I use your bathroom?” she asked.

  Damian directed her through a set of white velvet drapes and down a long white corridor to a white-tiled, mirror-ceilinged, marble-bathed bathroom. Serena closed the door, yanked her tube of MAC Cherry Ice lip gloss from her back pocket, and smeared some on. Down the corridor, on the other side of the white velvet drapes, came the sounds of the doorbell ringing and Kelly and Ping delivering their Asian delicacies. She pushed opened the bathroom door again and hurried down the corridor, slipping past the cluster of arriving caterers and out onto the steamy sidewalk once more.

  This from a girl known for dancing on tables in bars throughout France? This from the girl who'd had an unmentionable part of her body photographed and plastered on the sides of buses and in subways all over the city? Ditching a party before it even got started?

  Then again, it didn't really matter whether she stayed at the party or not. Whatever Serena did was bound to make headlines.

  The Odd Couple

  “So, this drawer is where we'll keep all our cleansers, moisturizers, toners, exfoliators, masks, and makeup removers. All the bath gel is in the bottom drawer, closest to the tub. And see? That's an Egyptian cotton bath rug to cover that icky gray linoleum tile.” Blair pointed to the new peach-colored rug that she'd just installed in Vanessa's bathroom.

  Vanessa pulled open the drawers in the cracked, cream-colored vanity beneath the bathroom sink. Everything had been alphabetized and color-coded to Blair's control-freak specifications. Not that Vanessa owned any beauty products herself. It was all Blair's stuff anyway.

  “You can borrow whatever you want,” Blair offered generously. She pulled out a tiny porcelain jar of La Mer eye cream and started dabbing some under her eyes. “This stuff is amazing,” she declared, “I just wish it didn't smell like cold cream.” She reached out and dabbed some under Vanessa's eyes. One application wouldn't do much, but if she could get Vanessa to use it once a day, in a week those eggplant-sized puffs would be totally gone. Maybe Vanessa would even let her do a total makeover on her. They could go jeans shopping together at Bloomingdale's SoHo, and even buy Vanessa a nice wig!

  Nice try.

  “Where's my shaver?” Vanessa grumbled, twisting her face away from Blair like a kid who hates to have her face cleaned. “I have to reshave my head like once a week, you know.”

  “Shavers?” Blair repeated cluelessly. She pointed to a bag of trash slumped against the door outside the bathroom. “I think they might be in there.” She grabbed an eyebrow brush from out of a freshly organized drawer and ran it over Vanessa's prickly head stubble. “Have you ever thought about maybe growing it—?”

  “No!” Vanessa told her adamantly, swiping the eyebrow brush away. She dumped the bag of trash out onto the peach-colored carpet and rescued her electric shaver, placing it in the top vanity drawer next to Blair's eyelash curlers.

  “Sorry,” Blair allowed. “I should have asked first.”

  “That's okay.” Vanessa fingered the eyelash curlers curiously. “What the fuck are these anyway?”

  Blair snatched them up eagerly and sat Vanessa down on top of the toilet seat. “Don't close your eyes. And don't worry, this doesn't hurt.” She held the curlers an inch away from Vanessa's lashes, squinting. Then she put them down again. “You know what?” she told her new roommate. “You don't need these. Your lashes are thick and curly.” She squinted again, as if she couldn't quite believe it. “In fact, they're completely perfect.”

  Vanessa stood up and examined her eyelashes in the bathroom mirror, feeling extremely flattered, although she'd never have admitted it. “Can we get something to eat now, goddammit? We've been redecorating all goddamned day.”

  For once Blair had been so preoccupied, she hadn't even thought about food. Tonight would be her first night in the apartment, and she'd spent the whole afternoon unpacking and organizing. What did Vanessa usually do for dinner, she wondered. Cook?

  The two girls wandered out of the bathroom and into the open kitchen, surveying the apartment with their hands on their hips. Blair's mother's baby nursery decorator had sent her team of painters over on Wednesday and Thursday while Vanessa was at school, and the whole apartment had been redone in shades of celery green and dove gray—nothing too girly, so as not to offend Vanessa. After school on Thursday, Vanessa had discovered a set of used curtains at Domsey's that she could actually tolerate, even though they were covered in an exotic-bird-and-palm-leaf-print toile, because they were black and white. And this morning the decorator had scheduled a delivery of six twentieth-century modern wooden chairs, a small oval dining table, a cool kidney bean-shaped Noguchi glass coffee table, and two gray suede beanbag chairs, which Blair and Vanessa kept moving around the living room just because it was fun.

  “I can't believe I'm saying this, but I like it,” Vanessa admitted.

  “Really?” Blair asked cautiously. It was kind of a major transformation, and she wouldn't have been surprised if Vanessa had kicked her out before she'd even unpacked her Louis Vuitton suitcases.

  “We could have a dinner party.” Vanessa mused. She walked over to the oval-shaped birch dining table and readjusted the six funky birch swivel chairs surrounding it. “Except
I don't have anyone to invite.”

  Nobody did a party better than Blair Waldorf. Even if it was just a chic little bohemian Brooklyn dinner party.

  Blair whipped her cell phone out of her James jeans pocket and speed-dialed Serena's number. “Unless you and that rock star dude are, like, in bed already, wanna come to dinner at my new place?”

  “I'm already on my way over,” Serena told her. “Sorry to disappoint you, though—I'm on my own.”

  Then Blair called Stan 5. “What took you so long?” he wanted to know.

  And she called her stepbrother, Aaron. “What are you cooking?” he asked suspiciously. “Should I bring over some tempeh?”

  Blair hadn't exactly worked out the food part. “We can order from Nobu.” She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Do they even have Nobu in Brooklyn?”

  Vanessa waved a pizza menu in her face, and Blair saw that there was something called the Cheeseless Paradise Pie under vegetarian selections. “Don't worry,” she told her step-brother. “I've got you covered.”

  “So what's Vanessa like exactly?” Aaron asked curiously.

  Blair grinned devilishly. “That's for me to know and you to find out.”

  Even French Girls Get Dissed

  “Allo?” Lexie's distinct French-accented English rang out over Nate's intercom. “Mayee I pleeze come up?”

  Locked in his room all week with a bong, playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas on his Xbox, Nate hadn't received any visitors except Jeremy, Anthony, and Charlie, who stopped by every now and then to replenish his stash and fill him in on what was going on at school. His wing of the house smelled like half-eaten burritos, spilled bong water, and pizza-flavored Pepperidge Farm goldfish—not that there was anyone around to smell it. After grounding him, his parents had taken the Charlotte up the Hudson to visit friends in Kingston and to ensure that Nate didn't steal the boat again before their benefit cruise. If only he hadn't messed things up with Blair, they'd have had the whole house to themselves and could have had sex on top of the grand piano in the living room if they'd wanted.