Nobody Does It Better Page 16

  “Why don't we play a game or something?” she suggested once they were seated around the table. Normally she wouldn't have cared, but right now she'd do anything to stop them all from smiling at each other so … moronically.

  Blair took a huge bite of pizza and washed it down with vodka tonic. “Yes!” she agreed, practically screaming. “Truth or dare!”

  Serena poked at her pizza. As long as she stuck with dares, she'd be fine.

  Aaron folded his slice of pizza in half and took two enormous bites. Vanessa liked the way his cute little ears moved up and down when he chewed. “I'll start,” he volunteered, wiping his mouth on a paper napkin. “Dare.”

  Blair shoved her pizza at him. Big rounds of pepperoni sat on top of the greasy cheese. “That's easy. I dare you to eat this.”

  Aaron rolled his eyes. “No way. Truth, then.”

  Blair tried to think of a good question to ask him, but Vanessa beat him to it.

  “Do you believe in love at first sight?” She kept her eyes focused on her pizza, picking the little green buds off a piece of broccoli to keep from blushing with shame for asking such a totally cheesy question.

  Aaron's leg seemed to edge ever so slightly in her direction until the knee of his army pants very lightly grazed her jeans. He picked the rest of his pizza up and then put it down again without taking a bite. “Hell yes,” he declared, his thin red lips spreading wide across his straight white teeth. “I do now.”

  Blair nudged Vanessa's foot underneath the table and Vanessa's entire head flushed the color of Constance Billard's maroon wool uniform. “I told you so,” Blair mouthed with silent delight. She picked a piece of pepperoni off her slice and popped into her mouth. “Now me. Dare.”

  Everyone tried to think of a good one. The thing about dares was they were always something silly. Truths were always far more interesting.

  Not necessarily.

  “I dare you to kiss me,” Stan 5 said quietly, pushing back his chair to give Blair access. “For five minutes.”

  How totally seventh grade.

  “Fine.” Blair stood up and pushed her dark hair behind her ears. Did he think she wouldn't kiss him unless he dared her to? Well, she was planning to do a lot more than kiss later on. She perched on his knee and wrapped her arms around his neck. A little blob of pizza sauce had collected in the corner of his mouth, and because she'd drunk just a wee bit too much and eaten her pizza a wee bit too fast, the sight of it made her gag. She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of Polo for Men. “Someone start timing,” she directed.

  She pressed her lips against his, trying to relax and get into it, but it was hard, especially in front of an audience. Stan 5's lips were salty, unfamiliar, and weirdly wet. She was about to break away, just to catch her breath, when she remembered the time she and Nate were in a kissing contest at a party at Serena's house at the end of seventh grade. They went into Serena's walk-in closet and Serena stood outside and timed them while they made out. They lasted forty-seven minutes, but the truth was, they weren't really kissing the whole time. They were whispering ever so softly with their lips pressed together so it was almost like they were kissing when they were talking, and vice versa. Which was actually way more romantic.

  “Time's up,” Aaron called.

  Blair broke away from Stan 5. Thinking about Nate while she was kissing him had made his lips taste much better. “I could've lasted longer,” she declared, sliding off his lap. She sat down in her chair and polished off her drink. “You're next,” she told Stan 5. “Truth or dare.”

  “Truth.”

  Blair tried to think of something juicy to ask him, but she only knew him in the context of Yale. “If your grandfather wasn't on the board at Yale, would you have gone to another school?”

  Stan 5 cleared his throat and loosened his preppy pink-and-green-striped tie. His neck was red. “The truth?” he asked. He glanced at Blair and swiped his hand over his face. “I'm not going to Yale,” he said quietly. “I didn't get in.”

  Nobody said anything. Blair felt bile rise in her throat. She scooted her chair back and lunged across the room toward the bathroom.

  Serena smiled her mother's cool, fuck-off-and-die smile at Stanford Parris V. “I dare you to leave right now,” she told him pleasantly.

  Stan 5 shrugged his shoulders as if he didn't see what the big deal was. “Is she going to be okay?”

  As if he really cared.

  “She'll be fine,” Serena assured him.

  “There's a car service place around the corner,” Vanessa informed him, too giddy to get what was going on.

  Stan 5 stood up and straightened his tie. Serena walked him to the door. “Thanks for the pizza,” he said lamely before leaving.

  Vanessa and Aaron's fingers touched beneath the table. “Truth or dare?” she whispered.

  “Truth,” Aaron responded.

  “Do you think I should grow my hair?”

  Aaron leaned over and kissed her quickly on the lips. “No fucking way.”

  Serena went to check on Blair, expecting to find her kneeling in front of the toilet, where she'd found her countless times before. Instead, Blair was sprawled naked in the bathtub, covered in green Vitabath bubbles, a wet washcloth folded over her eyes, looking like an overworked drama queen.

  “I don't know what I was thinking,” she moaned, turning her head toward Serena. She was just so mad at Nate, and she wanted to go to Yale so badly, and Stan 5 had made it seem like she didn't have anything to worry about. …

  Serena kicked off her shoes and rolled up her jeans. Then she sat on the edge of the tub and dunked her feet into the water. “I don't know either.” She wiggled her pink-polished toes underneath the bubbles, daring herself to tell Blair about going to Yale next year.

  Blair reached out blindly and plopped a big pouf of bubbles on Serena's cheek. “I dare you to get in with me.”

  Serena giggled and began to unbutton her jeans. They could talk about Yale some other time.

  Back in the living room, things were just as steamy.

  “Is this what you're supposed to do when you're about to graduate from high school?” Vanessa asked, helping Aaron remove his flimsy orange shirt. She kissed her way up his neck to those thin red lips she'd loved the moment she'd seen them.

  “You mean make friends with the bitchiest, most high-maintenance girl in your class and then hook up with her stepbrother?” he responded honestly, then laughed. “I'm not sure.” He traced his finger over the stubbly top of Vanessa's shaved head. “I guess at this point we're all ready to try new things.”

  Guess so!

  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!

  A star is born and she couldn't care less

  Remember a few months back when a certain shaven-headed, Brooklyn dwelling, filmmaking genius won her school film contest? The prize was a trip to the Cannes Film Festival to compete for the Most Promising New Filmmaker award. Any normal girl would have been shopping for the right dress, the right shoes, the right hairstyle, the right escort, as soon as she'd found out that she'd won. She would have been counting the days. Winning the award would be like being queen for a day. Not that our filmmaking-genius friend even cares. She skipped the whole thing, and festival MC and independent filmmaker Ken Mogul had to accept the award on her behalf, calling her “the most original voice in filmmaking since Charlie Chaplin.” Not necessarily a compliment, since Charlie Chaplin made silent films. Still, it's not every day that thousands of fabulously dressed celebrities rise to their feet to applaud you. Most of us would have wanted to be there. One thing's for sure, she's not in it for the clothes or the fame—something I find impossible to understand!

  Now about her film …

  Remember last month when that same shaven-headed filmmaker was camped out in the park, interviewing any senior kid who was willing to talk
about what schools they'd gotten into or not gotten into and how their lives sucked or didn't suck? Well, guess what film won the New Filmmaker award in Cannes? Do we dare show our faces in France ever again?

  Your e-mail

  Q: Dear GG,

  I was wait-listed at Yale and I just got a letter from them this morning. A rejection letter. I heard no one's getting off the wait list cuz everyone who applied is going. 2 bad 4 me.

  —dumdum

  A: Dear dumdum,

  You are so not a dumdum for not getting in. Your guidance counselor wouldn't have let you apply if she didn't think you had a chance. I know lots of crazily smart people who didn't get in, and some dumdums who did. Anyway, does this mean everyone who's on the wait list will be hearing back this week? Guess we'll find out soon enough …

  —GG

  Q: Dear GG,

  Please tell me how to win back the heart of the boy I love. He is depressed because his father won't let him go out of the house because he is being punished for a crime. But I love him and I must see him or I will die.

  —tristesse

  A: Dear tristesse,

  I take it English is not your first language. Let me put it into simple terms: Maybe the boy in question isn't as into you as you are into him, n'est ce pas?

  —GG

  Sightings

  B and S at the Five and Dime in Williamsburg on movie night, drinking cosmos and lip-synching along with Audrey Hepburn in Charade. V and A at the Mousy Brown hair salon in Williamsburg. Tell me he's not getting his head shaved to match hers! K and I making laminated NO BOYS ALLOWED signs at an Upper East Side Kinko's. Silly girls, don't they know that's just asking for trouble? A dark-haired French girl in a fringed Prada poncho and Fendi moccasins scaling the walls of N's East-Side town house. He certainly has a penchant for crazy women. J and the rest of the Raves, on the lead singer's roof, singing her heart out in the middle of the night—Sunday night, that is. Guess who spent the whole weekend partying at a certain rock star's house? Now there's a girl who's in it for the fame. Is she trying to get her face in the papers, or does it just come naturally to her?

  Now we have something to talk about in school on Monday—as if we're ever lacking for things to talk about!

  P.S. Thursday night is the long-awaited Archibald Benefit Cruise to the Hamptons. Don't forget to bring your monogrammed Louis Vuitton life jacket!

  You know you love me,

  gossip girl

  A Mind Is a Terrible Thing

  Tuesday morning, as Jenny was lining her eyelids with Chanel's black liquid liner for a smoky, up-all-night effect that went perfectly with her new enormous pink Gucci sunglasses that would be the envy of Constance Billard's entire ninth grade, her dad knocked on her door and announced, “You're not going to school today, babe.”

  Jenny put down her eyeliner and opened the door. “What do you mean? Why not?”

  Rufus was wearing a child-sized Mets baseball cap that he'd bought for Dan when he was eight. It sat like a beanie atop a nest of wild and woolly gray hair. He was also wearing blue-and-white-striped elastic-waist cotton pants that looked exactly like pajama bottoms.

  “Mrs. M and I had a little talk last night,” Rufus told her.

  Uh-oh.

  Jenny tugged on her supershort seersucker school uniform. “How come?” she asked innocently, even though she knew perfectly well how come.

  Rufus ignored her Miss I-Didn't-Do-Anything act. “She basically laid it on the line. Either you repeat ninth grade, or next year you're going to school somewhere else.”

  Jenny resisted hurling herself at her father and smothering him in a bear hug. She was going to boarding school! It was really happening!

  Not so fast, missy.

  “I'm not going here,” Jenny insisted before the cab even stopped.

  “That's what you think,” her father grumbled. He paid the cabbie and opened the door. “Come, Your Tartiness. Let's take a look.”

  They'd pulled up in front of the Sloan Center for Bright Minds, a hippie experimental school on a flat, wide strip of boring-looking three-story buildings in Flushing, Queens. It was miles away from Manhattan and nothing like the ivy-trimmed brick buildings of the boarding school of her dreams. On the way over Rufus had shoved a Sloan Center brochure at her, and she'd thumbed through it. There was no real dress code, the lunchroom was organic and vegetarian, the students all had greasy hair and acne, and none of the teachers wore Chanel suits. In other words, Jenny hated it already.

  A giant birchbark peace sign greeted them as they passed through the biodynamically grown natural oak school doors. The peace sign was hanging from the ceiling of the entryway, spinning round and round in the breeze created by the student-built watermill standing at the base of the stairs. Pure spring water cascaded down a bamboo gutter at the center of the stairs, feeding the mill.

  “Our upper-schoolers built the water mill last winter,” explained Calliope Trask, the school's director, at the start of their tour. “Every January we have what's called Winter Work. There are no academics, and the students focus on building something functional with their hands. The year before we had a chicken coop with twenty laying hens, right here in our gym. We had so many eggs we had an egg sale and raised the money to buy new hemp mats for our preschoolers to nap on!”

  Woo-hoo!

  Calliope Trask's hair hung in a gray braid down to her bottom and she was wearing a mustard-yellow-linen Eileen Fisher tank dress that did wonders for her frizzy black underarm hair. Her legs were unshaven too, and coarse black leg hairs stuck out between the straps of her tied-at-the-ankle beige canvas Earth shoes.

  “Those are wonderful sunglasses.” She pointed at the gigantic pair of pink Gucci shades masking Jenny's smoldering brown eyes. “But at Bright Minds we don't allow designer labels or emblems on clothing or accessories of any sort.”

  Before Jenny could even say, “What the fuck?” Rufus had whipped the glasses off her face and stuck them in his gray sweatpants-material jacket pocket.

  “That's better. Now we can see your beautiful face,” Calliope trilled, as Jenny scowled hideously at her.

  She followed Calliope and her father up the stairs, tempted to tell them both to take the Sloan Center for Bright Minds' hemp mats and smoke them while she ran away to the Czech Republic to live with her crazy, selfish, and neglectful mother. The Raves could do a tour of Eastern Europe and she could buy all the Gucci she wanted for half-price on the black market.

  They reached the second floor and Calliope opened the door to one of the classrooms. “Our classes are mixed-age and broken up into ‘bundles’ named for the endangered species of the Galapagos. Jennifer, you'd be in one of the thirteen-to-fifteen-year-old bundles. I'll walk you to the area where the Giant Tortoise bundle is gathered for this morning's work and then let your student guide take over.”

  The floor of the classroom was covered in sand, the walls were lined with stalks of bamboo, and the ceiling was plastered with palm fronds. NO SMOKING, read a huge hand-painted sign overhead.

  Jenny had never really been much of a smoker, but she was dying for a cigarette. She pulled off her white Miss Sixty cardigan to reveal the cute little Lacoste alligator marching across the left boob of her new pink shirt, given to her by Lloyd Collins of the Raves. Anything to avoid becoming a Giant Tortoise.

  “Hakuna matata, Miss Calliope,” a pudgy girl wearing what looked like a goatskin bikini greeted them.

  “Hakuna matata, Cherisse,” Calliope replied with a smile. “The Giant Tortoise bundle is exploring the country of Namibia in Africa this week,” she told Jenny and Rufus, as if that explained everything. Jenny stared as the rest of the Giant Tortoises—five greasy-haired, pudgy, crooked-toothed girls and three skinny, glasses-wearing, acne-ridden boys—all wearing some form of goatskin clothing that might have been stylish if it had been designed by Stella McCartney instead of Hippies R Us. They stood in a circle, their hands joined as they sang a Namibian rain chant.

  E
ven Rufus looked a little startled. “Do you have any data on where your graduates go to college?” he asked, sounding a lot like the parents of Jenny's Constance Billard classmates. Although he'd never have admitted it, Rufus was deadly serious about the whole college admission thing and had nearly opened all of Dan's acceptance letters before he even got home from school. He might have been an anarchist, but he was a strong believer in formal education.

  Calliope frowned. “We try to keep our school as noncompetitive as possible. Our students are encouraged to take some time off and explore the world. Live off the grid. Once they decide what their calling is, they may or may not seek further training.”

  Whatever the hell that meant.

  “I hear you're an artist.” Cherisse smiled at Jenny with crooked yellow teeth. “Come, I'll show you our mural. It's done entirely in buck's dung.”

  Rufus held Jenny's hand protectively as Cherisse led them over to a bizarre mural of elephants and zebras cavorting in the grass. Cherisse dipped her hand into a clay bowl on the floor and smeared something brown on the back of one of the elephants. Rufus shook his head tiredly and pulled Jenny over to a table in the corner of the room, where he sat down. He loved the idea of an alternative school, but deep down he wanted his daughter to graduate from Berkeley or Columbia, not wander around the world painting murals with deer shit.

  Jenny sat down across from him and pulled a vial of Chanel Vamp nail polish out of her pink DKNY hobo bag. “So, why are we here again?” she demanded. She unscrewed the vial and began painting her nails.

  Rufus readjusted his baseball cap and rubbed his bleary eyes, looking like he needed about six more hours of sleep and three more cups of coffee. “Look, Jen,” he told her earnestly. “You can't just shack up with rock stars in hotels and lie to your father all the time. But I want you to be happy. What do you want to do?”