Because I'm Worth It Page 15

  Of course our Prince Charming was completely unaware that he might have just saved Snow White’s life. But it’s the reluctant heroes of fairy tales that we fall in love with over and over, despite their flaws.

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

  hey people!

  Do we really need to look like Little Red Riding Hood?

  Every Fashion Week I find myself asking, Why are all the models in the shows wearing space suits, or dressed like Hansel and Gretel, or basically naked, when I wouldn’t be caught dead looking like that on the street? Then I have to remind myself that the shows are really a spectacle and that the whole point of fashion is to entertain and spark the imagination and make the world a better place. Fashion is art, and art imitates life; there’s no reason to it. The more I think about it, the more I can’t wait to dress up like Little Red Riding Hood myself and prowl around looking for wolves. Time to shop for a red cape!

  What happened to all that snow?!

  How come whenever there’s a serious snowstorm in the city, it only takes a few hours for the snow to melt off the sidewalks and then everything is back to normal again, just in time for school on Monday? I think it’s a plot to ensure that we all have to go to school on Valentine’s Day, which should totally be a national no-school holiday. I think I’m going to take the day off anyway. How else am I going to enjoy the roses, chocolates, and jewelry I’m going to get from my secret admirers?

  Your e-mail

  Q: Dear GG,

  I’m bummed that this girl I like maybe doesn’t like me in the same way. Your site cheers me up.

  —blue

  A: Hey blue,

  How do you know she doesn’t like you? Have you asked her? Remember, though, I’m always here for you when that girl lets you down.

  —GG

  Q: dear gg,

  you are hot. will you be my valentine?

  —oskar

  A: Dear oskar,

  Thank you for the compliment. Unfortunately I’m already spoken for, and I have an extremely hot evening planned. But if you still want to shower me with gifts, I definitely won’t complain.

  —GG

  Sightings

  B leaving a downtown hotel alone Friday late night and taking the subway uptown, of all shockingly pedestrian things. Guess that’s one place she thought she wouldn’t be spotted. Wrong. S, Les Best’s Chief d’Affairs, and Les Best himself, wearing his signature black ski suit, outside the offices of the Little Hearts children’s charity early yesterday morning, looking like they’d been up all night. Serena was wearing a pink bra and some guy’s ski jacket. Whatever happened to her boyfriend? N arriving at Grand Central yesterday afternoon, looking dazed and confused but still gorgeous, of course. D stumbling out of a cab and into Agnès B. Homme to shop. Wait, are we talking about the same D? I guess Agnès B. is French, and he always fancied himself an existentialist, which is a French concept, but wait—I digress. V filming a bullterrier trailing yellow pee behind it in the white snow. Well, it’s nice to know she hasn’t changed.

  May your Valentine’s Day be filled with adoration, pampering, and a pair of gorgeous, tiny-heeled Jimmy Choo sandals that are completely useless in this weather. Just remember: You are totally worth it.

  You know you love me.

  gossip girl

  the icing on b’s cake

  All Monday morning Blair had been dreading peer group. Not that she minded talking about hooking up with boys, or peer pressure, or whatever else the freshmen wanted to talk about. After all, today was Valentine’s Day, so everyone at Constance was talking about hooking up with boys. What she dreaded were all the questions the ninth graders in the group were going to ask Serena about walking the runway in the Les Best show, what it had been like to hang out with all those famous models, and blah, blah, blah. They’d probably ask about her stupid I LOVE AARON T-shirt and what was going on with her and Aaron, because they’d heard blah, blah, blah. As if it was all so very interesting.

  Not.

  Why was it that the world was so full of followers when there were so many choices in life? Blair slipped an extra slice of chocolate cake onto her tray just to make sure she’d have something to do while the girls in peer group were boring her to death.

  “Hello,” she practically yawned when she sat down at the crowded table a few minutes after the group had begun. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “That’s okay,” Serena replied gaily. She’d gotten a complimentary trim and highlight job before the fashion show, and her long blond hair was even shinier and more perfect than it had been before. “We were just talking about Elise’s parental problems. She thinks her dad might be having an affair.”

  Elise’s thick, straw-colored bangs were pulled back and clipped to the sides of her head with tiny pink heart barrettes. There were dark circles under her bright blue eyes, like she’d been up all night worrying. “That sucks,” Blair said sympathetically. “Believe me, I know.” She decided to leave it at that. Peer group might have been a place for sharing, but she wasn’t about to go into the details of her father’s affairs with other men while he was still married to her mother.

  Serena nodded vigorously. “I was just telling them how all families are totally fucked up. Actually, Blair, your family is a perfect example,” she added cheerfully.

  Blair bristled. “Thanks a lot,” she shot back. “But I don’t think everyone needs to hear about my problems right now.”

  Jenny bit a cuticle and banged her foot nervously against the leg of her chair. She’d been fretting all morning that as soon as peer group started, Elise was going to dive right in and start talking about same-sex kissing. Thank God Elise had other things on her mind.

  “Anyway, we don’t have to talk about our messed-up families if it’s going bother you,” Blair told Elise, trying to be supportive.

  Elise nodded unhappily. “Actually there was something else I wanted to talk about.”

  Jenny winced.

  Oops.

  Blair nodded encouragingly, “Yes? What is it?” Vicky Reinerson waved her hand in the air. She was wearing a red wool cape similar to the one Serena had modeled in the Les Best show, except hers was a little used looking, like she’d borrowed it from her grandmother or something.

  Guess she didn’t get the message that capes are back in style this fall, not this spring.

  “Oh, but after she’s done will you please tell us all about the Les Best show, Serena?” Vicky pleaded. “You promised.”

  Serena giggled as if she had tons of crazy stories to tell. Blair wanted to smack her. “The craziest thing was that I had a snowball fight with Les Best himself and I didn’t even know it was him!” Serena glanced at Blair, who was glaring at her. “Anyway, I’ll save it for the end, if there’s time.” She turned back to Elise. “What was it you were saying?”

  Elise’s face turned purple as a plum. “I-I wanted to talk about kissing,” she stammered. “About kissing girls.”

  Jenny kicked the legs of Elise’s chair. Mary, Cassie, and Vicky snickered and nudged each other’s elbows. This was going to be good. A rumor had gone around awhile back that Blair and Serena had kissed each other in the hot tub in the hotel suite Chuck Bass’s family kept downtown in the Tribeca Star.

  “I think anyone should be able to kiss anyone,” Serena replied. “Kissing is fun!”

  Blair forked a giant piece of chocolate cake into her mouth, trying to come up with something to top what Serena had just said. “Guys like to watch girls kiss,” she declared with her mouth full. “They do it all the time in the movies, just to turn guys on.” This was true. They’d even talked about it in Mr. Beckham’s film class.

  “So Serena, what was it like to wear all those cool Les Best clothes?” Jenny asked, desperate to change the subject.

  Serena stretched her long, lithe arms over her gorgeous blond head and sighed happily. “You really want to know?
”

  Everyone in the group except Blair and Elise nodded eagerly. “Okay, I’ll tell you.”

  Blair rolled her eyes, daring herself to shut Serena up by announcing the news of her torrid affair with a married thirty-eight-year-old man, which was a hell of a lot more interesting than prancing around on a runway in dumb clothes no one wanted to wear anyway. She glanced down at the table where Elise was furiously scribbling her name over and over on a sheet of notebook paper. Elise Wells. Miss Elise Wells. Miss Elise Patricia Wells. E.P. Wells.

  Suddenly Blair felt the entire contents of her stomach do a back walkover into her throat. Wells? That was Owen’s last name. And Elise had just said she thought her father was having an affair. Owen hadn’t said anything to her about a daughter, but now that she thought about it, Elise had his same eyes, and on the stoop Elise had lit two cigarettes exactly the same way Owen had Friday night in the bar. Christ. For all Blair knew, Owen had ten children that he’d just happened to forget to mention. Fuck!

  Blair scraped her chair back and bolted for the nurse’s office behind the cafeteria, getting there just in time to spew chocolate cake all over Nurse O’Donnell’s hand-hooked farmhouse rug. It wasn’t pretty, but it was the quickest way to get sent home sick from school.

  As soon as she left, the cafeteria began to hum with the sound of girls trading versions of what was wrong with Blair Waldorf.

  “I heard she has some rare disease. She lost all her hair. That’s really a wig,” announced Laura Salmon.

  “I heard she’s pregnant with some old guy’s kid. He’s married to a member of the royal family and he wants to marry her, but his wife won’t give him a divorce,” Rain Hoffstetter explained.

  “Oh my God. So she and her mom could like, have babies at the same time!” Kati Farkas shrieked.

  “She’s not pregnant, stupid. It’s her eating disorder,” Isabel Coates told the girls at the same table in a confidential whisper. “She’s been struggling with it for years.”

  At the peer group table, Serena unwittingly set the record straight. “She’ll be fine just as soon as she finds out she’s into Yale.”

  apathy vs. poetry

  “Happy Valentine’s Day, loverboy,” Zeke Freedman greeted Dan as fourth-period U.S. history was about to begin. He handed Dan a pink paper shopping bag. “Aggie asked me to give this to you. A messenger just brought it to the front desk.”

  The handles of the bag were tied with red satin ribbon. Dan tugged on the bow and emptied the contents of the bag out onto his desk: a small white box and a slim red leather book. Inside the white box was a stubby silver pen on a silver chain. A card inside the box described it as an antigravity pen, the kind used by astronauts in space. Dan put the chain around his neck and opened the leather book up to the first page where someone had scrawled a note: Kick gravity’s ass, you charmer. Dig?

  Dan reread the note, completely dumbfounded. It was too bizarre for Vanessa, which meant it was definitely from Mystery. The final bell rang and Mr. Dube strode into the room and started erasing the blackboard. Dan tucked the bag of presents under his seat and opened his notebook, pretending to listen to what Mr. Dube was saying about Vietnam and apathy. School seemed so lame and inconsequential when a big-time agent like Rusty Klein wanted to represent him, and an obviously brilliant, intriguingly sexy poet had sent him those exquisitely astute Valentine’s Day gifts.

  Then Dan remembered Vanessa and his hands began to tremble. He hadn’t sent her anything for Valentine’s Day— not that Vanessa was at all into such a “commercial bullshit holiday,” as she called it, but he hadn’t even called her. Actually, his biggest problem was . . . he’d cheated on her. And not just kissing cheating either. Cheating cheating.

  Whoops.

  It was all Mystery’s fault. With her see-through slip and crooked yellow teeth she’d made him feel like he was living inside of one of his poems, kissing a beguilingly odd girl he’d created at a raucous, screwball party he’d invented. He hadn’t been able to help but let his imagination run amok, sending him stumbling across the snowy landscape to her ramshackle Chinatown studio apartment and making love to her in all sorts of odd yogalike positions on her uncomfortable futon bed as the sun was rising over the bleak, snow-covered city. It was almost as if none of it had actually happened. It was fiction.

  Except it wasn’t fiction. He’d cheated.

  Dan had been dreadfully hungover for the remainder of the weekend and too deeply mired in existential guilt and self-loathing to answer Vanessa’s countless messages on his cell phone.

  He flipped to the back of his history notebook. What if he wrote Vanessa a poem and e-mailed it to her during lunch next period? That would be more meaningful than flowers or chocolate or a cheesy Valentine’s Day card. The best thing about it was that he wouldn’t have to talk to her and possibly admit that he’d cheated on her, because he’d never been any good at telling lies.

  Mr. Dube was writing on the board now. Dan pretended to makes notes in his notebook.

  Chalk angels, he wrote. Making meaning.

  Then he thought about something Mystery had said when they were drinking their fourth or fifth Red Bull cocktails. Something about how she was tired of writing obscure poems that skirted around what she was really trying to say. Subtle was out. Direct was in.

  Kiss me. Be mine. Dan wrote, imitating the little slogans on those candy hearts girls were always passing around on Valentine’s Day. Hot stuff!

  He reread the words without really seeing them. His mind was still too full of his night with Mystery to process anything else. Her stringy dirty blond hair had smelled like toast and when she’d touched his bare stomach with her cold, clammy hands, his whole body had rippled. He’d never even asked her what she meant by premature death or how his poem “Sluts” had saved her life, but he’d been so intoxicated by the taurine in the Red Bull and by her appallingly yellow teeth, he probably wouldn’t have remembered anyway.

  Lost my virginity again, Dan wrote, which was the truth. Doing it with Mystery was like losing it again. Was it possible that every time he made love to a new woman it would feel that way?

  Before he could imagine who the next lucky girl would be, the bell rang and Dan snapped out of his reverie, slapping the notebook closed and tucking it under his arm. “Hey,” he called to Zeke. “I’ll buy you some sushi for lunch if you wait for me to whip off an e-mail in the lab.”

  “Okay.” Zeke shrugged, trying not to look too excited that his old friend was actually deigning to pay attention to him again. Since when did Dan Humphrey, king of cheap egg rolls and bad coffee, eat sushi?

  “Heard you got lucky Friday night!” Chuck Bass shouted Dan’s way as they passed each other on the stairwell. Chuck was wearing his Riverside Prep uniform navy blue V-neck sweater with nothing on underneath it. “Nice work.”

  “Thanks,” Dan muttered, hurrying upstairs to the computer lab. He was kidding himself if he thought Vanessa wasn’t going to find out about him and Mystery, but as soon as she received his latest poem he was convinced she’d forgive him. Just as Mystery had written in her note—he was a charmer.

  girls go gaga over secret admirers

  Vanessa felt a little ridiculous hanging out with the desperate girls in the packed, overheated Constance Billard computer lab, all checking their e-mail for the hundredth time to see who’d sent them a pathetic e-card for Valentine’s Day or posted a message on their Secret Admirer page, the alarmingly uncreative new tradition the school had started last Valentine’s Day. But Dan usually logged on at least once a day, and since he’d been so busy this weekend meeting Rusty Klein at the Better Than Naked show and hadn’t had a chance to call her back all weekend, she figured he might try to e-mail her today, especially since it was Valentine’s Day— not that either of them really bought into that commercial holiday bullshit.

  Of course not.

  “Hey,” she heard someone say. It was Dan’s little sister, checking out her Secret Admirer page at the next
terminal.

  “Hey Jennifer.”

  Jenny rolled herself backwards on her black swivel chair and then pulled herself forward again. Her curly brown hair was blow-dried straight and she looked older and more sophisticated than usual. “So you and Dan must have had fun at that fashion show. He didn’t get home until like, Saturday afternoon. My dad was grumbling about how spoiled and irresponsible we both are, but then he completely forgot to yell at Dan. As usual.”

  Vanessa smoothed her hand over her practically shaved head. “Actually, I didn’t go to the same show he went to. I got invited to another one.”

  Jenny looked confused. “Oh.”

  In the back of her mind Vanessa sensed that something was wrong. What had Dan been doing out all that time anyway? But then again, everything had gotten screwed up in the snow. Maybe he’d spent the night at Zeke’s house or something. Zeke lived downtown.

  She logged on as hairlesscat, password meow, and clicked on her inbox. Sure enough, there was a message from Dan, and—big surprise—it was a poem. Vanessa read the poem eagerly, grimacing when she recognized that Dan had put absolutely no effort into it at all. Hot stuff? What was that all about? And what was up with “I lost my virginity again”? Who was he fucking kidding?

  She hit reply and wrote back: Ha ha. I laughed. I cried. What’s your deal anyway? We’re supposed to be making a film together, remember?

  As she waited for Dan to respond, she logged onto her Secret Admirer page. To her surprise there were four messages:

  I can’t stop raving about you to all my boyfriends. No one mixes form with meaning the way you do, milady. —prettyboy

  You give this fucked-up world a new kind of beauty. Keep your freak on. —d.