I Like It Like That Page 16

  Plus there was something Blair needed to ask her.

  The cafeteria was crowded with girls pouring ketchup over their sweet potato fries and trading gossip about spring break.

  “I heard Serena and Nate Archibald got arrested for doing it on a chairlift,” Rain Hoffstetter whispered to Laura Salmon.

  “I heard she's moving to Amsterdam after graduation. She met this guy from the Dutch Olympic snowboarding team. They're getting married,” Kati Farkas told them.

  “And Blair's dad is trying to get her into Brown now,” Isabel Coates piped up. “Because she and Erik van der Woodsen are totally in love.”

  “Nothing happened, you know, between Nate and me,”

  Serena declared after she'd sat down. She took a sip of her tea. Actually, something had happened between them, but that was a long time ago. “I mean, after Georgie's party.”

  Blair stirred her tea. She and Serena had been ignoring each other ever since the party in Sun Valley, mostly because it was easier and more exciting to let the other girl imagine what had happened than to admit the embarrassing truth.

  She pushed her tea aside and rested her elbows on the table, staring at Serena intently. “What was it like?”

  Serena put down her tea and blew her nose into a paper napkin. She, too, had a terrible cold. “What?”

  “Sex. With Nate.”

  Serena crumpled up the napkin and stuck it under her tray so they both wouldn't have to look at it. Was this a trick question? Was Blair just waiting for her to say the wrong thing so she could pounce on her with her claws out and rip Serena's head off with her teeth?

  “It was really …” She paused, waiting for Blair's expression to turn ugly, but Blair just sat there looking genuinely interested. She really wants to know, Serena realized.

  “It was amazing. We were both kind of scared, but because it was with Nate, it was fun.” She smiled, remembering. “And we weren't embarrassed about it afterward.”

  Blair nodded and looked down at the table. That was all well and good, but what about her? How were she and Nate ever going to do it if they weren't—?

  Over Serena's shoulder Blair could see the girls from their ninth-grade peer group heading toward the table. It was time to change the subject. “Never mind,” she muttered, grabbing her bag off the floor to get out the materials for peer group.

  “Hey, guys, how was your break?” Mary Goldberg, Vicky Reinerson, and Cassie Inwirth asked the two seniors in unison. The three perky freshman girls were all wearing matching black V-neck sweaters. They set their lunch trays on the table and sat down practically on top of one another. “Ours was totally crazy.”

  “Good,” Blair said without much enthusiasm. She gave each of them a handout. “If you could just read this before we get started.”

  The girls glanced down at the handout and giggled as if to say, Like we're really going to talk about that? “So, Serena, did you have to do any modeling over break? I heard you were in a shoot with the Dutch Olympic snowboarding team, like for some lip balm or something?” Mary Goldberg asked.

  Serena flashed them a wry smile. The shit people made up about her was so insane, she almost wished it were true. “Yeah, it was awesome!”

  The other two members of the group, Jenny Humphrey and Elise Wells, came over carrying their lunches in brown paper bags. Instead of the tired cafeteria salad bar or hot lunch of fish sticks with sweet potato fries, they were eating egg rolls from the Chinese restaurant over on Lex, which they'd had delivered right to the school doors. It was always surprising to discover how crafty the two girls could be when—except for Jenny's gigantic chest—they were the picture of innocence and goodness.

  “Jenny is depressed,” Elise announced as she sat down. She pulled a piece of shrimp out of her egg roll and popped it into her mouth. “She needs advice. Bad.”

  Jenny nudged her friend irritably. “I'm fine.” She stared at her egg roll, which was soaking, untouched, in a deep bath of sweet-and-sour sauce. After what she'd done to it, it was basically inedible.

  “See, Leo turned out to be totally normal instead of a French duke or something,” Elise explained, as if they all knew exactly who Leo was, or even cared. “And the only reason he knows stuff about fur and dog boots is because he walks Madame T's dog for her, and we all know she wears a ton of fur.”

  Blair yawned rudely and dumped a packet of Equal into her tea just for something to do. Hopefully Serena would take care of this one.

  Suddenly, Serena grabbed the empty Equal packet out of Blair's hand and wrote something on it. Then she passed it back.

  He's still in love with you, Blair read.

  The ninth-graders looked back and forth between the two seniors. “What are you guys doing?” Mary Goldberg and Vicky Reinerson whined with annoyance at being left out.

  Blair folded up the packet of Equal and dropped it into her bag. “So, who here knows how to knit?”

  Jenny wasn't sure what the hell was going on. “I do. I learned at arts camp last summer.”

  Blair blew her nose. “Doesn't everyone learn to knit up at boarding school?” she sniffed in Serena's direction.

  Serena shrugged. “I never learned, but all the models are doing it. It's all they do backstage at the shows.”

  “We've always wanted to learn!” Cassie, Mary, and Vicky piped up.

  “Knit?” Elise asked, completely lost.

  Blair zipped up her Coach hobo bag and stood up. “Come on,” she told them. “We're going out to buy yarn. And after school, we're all knitting booties at my house.”

  Across the cafeteria, that shaved-headed senior weirdo, Vanessa Abrams, was filming their meeting, a crazy pink plastic spaceship whirling and blinking on the table in the foreground.

  Serena stood up and gathered her things. “You mean socks,” she countered.

  “No. Booties,” Blair corrected with a smile.

  At least it was something they could do with their hands besides smoking. And after school would be a great time to start, especially with the boys otherwise occupied.

  The ninth-graders trailed Serena and Blair out the school's great blue doors, thrilled by the idea of being on a field trip led by the two coolest girls in the entire school.

  After so many cold months, the warmth of the sun was so intense, it was shocking.

  “I'm sorry we were fighting,” Serena told Blair as the group of girls walked east toward Third Avenue. “It's not even worth it if we always wind up friends again, anyway.”

  “That's okay,” Blair said, blinking her eyes slowly like a cat in the sun. Maybe it was the weather, but all of a sudden, she felt strangely optimistic. Every day babies were born and given cool names like Yale; boys and girls who were broken up got back together; best friends fought and made up; and people got into college—particularly a college called Yale. “It's such a nice day. I think we'd better go to the park after school instead of to my house.”

  “I can run home and get a blanket,” Serena offered. “We can meet in the meadow.”

  Uh-oh.

  They couldn't stay away

  “Fifty bucks says she won't show,” Anthony Avuldsen challenged his friends. Nate, Anthony, Charlie, and Jeremy had walked over to Sheep Meadow directly after school let out, just to see if a certain popular online personality was actually going to show her face.

  The weather was fine and a bunch of guys were already throwing a Frisbee around. Nate recognized Jason Pressman, a junior from the St. Jude's lax team, and went over to say hello.

  “Didja hear about Holmes?” Jason asked. There was a big bag of pot in his lap, and he was busy rolling tight little joints and lining them up inside an old Altoids tin.

  “I heard he was missing.” Nate licked his lips as he watched Jason sprinkle pot inside a neatly folded rolling paper.

  “Busted,” Jason said. “Dude got caught in the Miami airport with like, a bale of hash.” He sealed the joint and dropped it into the tin. “He's been expelled. Coach says you gotta
be lax captain now.”

  Anthony, Charlie, and Jeremy were rolling their own joints just a little ways away. Nate turned around and grinned at them. It was an even better story that he'd given up lax captain only to get it in the end. Besides, he'd earned it.

  Jason reached up and slapped Nate's hand, passing him a joint as he did so. “Nice work, man. Congratulations.”

  “Hey, thanks.” Nate held the joint in his fist. “What a day,” he observed, throwing his head back to catch the sun.

  Good thing there were more guys around than girls, otherwise the grass would've been wet with drool.

  The meadow was filling up with private-school boys pretending they just happened to all be in the park at the same time for absolutely no reason. Chuck Bass was sitting cross-legged on a red camping blanket, wearing a black baseball cap with Sun Valley Ski Patrol printed on it. Perched on his shoulder was a small white monkey.

  Yes, that's right. A live one.

  Chuck was an asshole, but he never ceased to entertain. Nate was too intrigued not to check it out. He lit the joint Jason had given him and walked over. “What is that, anyway?” he asked, sucking on the joint.

  “A snow monkey. From South America.” Chuck scratched the monkey under the chin while the monkey looked up at Nate with trusting golden eyes. “Sweetie, meet Natie. Natie, meet Sweetie.”

  “Where'd you get her?”

  Chuck sneezed and blew his nose into a pink silk handkerchief. “Him. Georgie's mom sent him to my parents as a thank-you gift—you know, for getting her out of the whole indecent-exposure fiasco?” He stroked Sweetie's long white tail where it draped over his left shoulder, as though he were wearing an expensive fur stole, only it was still alive. “Actually, they have snow monkeys in the zoo right here in Central Park, but they're really rare as pets. Mom thinks Sweetie smells, but I have my own apartment now over on Sutton Place. So I get to keep him.”

  Well, isn't he just the luckiest?

  “Cool.” Nate was pretty much over the monkey now and ready to move on to something else.

  “Hey, Nate!” Jeremy shouted at him. “This kid's seeing your old girlfriend. The ninth-grader with the huge boobies!”

  Twenty feet away, Jeremy, Charlie, and Anthony were talking to some kid with platinum blond hair whom Nate thought looked familiar, but he wasn't sure. He walked over and shook the kid's hand, holding the joint between his lips as he did so, like Humphrey Bogart or something.

  “We're not seeing each other,” Leo insisted nervously. “We sort of met online and then became friends and then—” He stopped and frowned at Nate. “Hey, I never knew she'd gone out with you.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and kicked at the grass. “Anyway, now we're not even talking.”

  Just then, Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf walked into the meadow, trailed by five younger girls, including Jenny Humphrey, the notorious “ninth-grader with the huge boobies.” The girls helped Serena spread out a huge red fleece stadium blanket. Then they all sat down cross-legged on top of the blanket in a tight circle. Blair handed each girl a ball of pale yellow yarn and a set of pink metal knitting needles.

  “First we have to cast the yarn onto one needle,” Jenny instructed. She made a loop of yarn, stuck the tip of her needle through it, and began casting on. The other girls leaned in, watching closely.

  Not fifty feet away, Nate continued to puff on his joint. “But you like her. I mean, admit it. She's pretty hard not to like.”

  Leo blushed. “Yeah.”

  “So what are you doing? Why don't you just walk over there”— Nate pointed to the circle of girls on the red blanket—“and kiss her? That's what I'd do.” As soon as he'd said it, he realized that was what he needed to do with Blair—just walk up and kiss her. He'd been horny the whole time he'd been off pot, but when he was stoned he was romantic. It was one of the things Blair loved about him.

  “I don't know,” Leo said quietly. “Maybe some other time.”

  “Yeah,” Nate agreed. Now really wasn't such a good time.

  The five boys were still watching the group of knitting girls when Dan walked up, looking ragged and overcaffeinated as usual, a damp Camel dangling from his pale, trembling fingers.

  “Hey, did you and my sister break up or something?” he asked Leo.

  Leo looked at him helplessly. “I'm not sure.”

  Dan swiveled his scruffy head around to check out the scene. His classmate and Asshole Extraordinaire, Chuck Bass, was sitting on the ground with a white monkey on his shoulder. Chuck had even brought the monkey to school with him that morning, but the teachers had made him take it home. Then Dan saw something that made him drop his still-burning cigarette in the wet grass.

  Vanessa was kneeling on a red blanket ten feet behind Chuck, her face obscured by her camera. In front of her was the pink plastic UFO toy he'd sent her, whirling and blinking crazily on top of a little fold-up stool. Dan could just make out the crazed Japanese pop song emanating from the toy, and it made him want to dance a happy little jig.

  Not that he was about to go ahead and actually dance.

  Nate sucked at the dregs of his joint and nodded at Vanessa. “Think that's her?”

  “No way,” Dan said. Although he secretly wondered if Vanessa might be the sexy Web mistress they'd all come to see. It would be just like her to do something totally out of character like that and freak everyone out. “Maybe she's not coming.”

  Nate flicked the dead roach in Chuck's direction. “Not unless she's already here.”

  The six boys contemplated Chuck for a moment, chuckling to themselves. Despite the fact that this seemed to be a boys-only nonevent, there sure were a lot of girls around. Kati Farkas and Isabel Coates had wandered up to pet Chuck's monkey and spy on Blair and Serena's little knitting group.

  “What are they doing?” Kati whined. She scratched Sweetie behind the ears, and the monkey bared his teeth.

  “He has sensitive ears!” Chuck warned.

  “Maybe they're knitting things to hide drugs in. I've heard smugglers use babies to smuggle drugs into other countries,” Isabel suggested, wishing desperately that she could join the circle.

  “Don't you love how everyone's looking at us like we're … witches or something?” Serena whispered.

  The other girls giggled conspiratorially.

  Blair wiped her nose and reapplied her lip gloss. She hadn't missed the fact that Nate was among those watching. “They have no idea,” she agreed, even though she and the rest of the girls in the group were absolutely eating up the attention.

  Her stepbrother, Aaron Rose, came over with his guitar and sat down on the corner of the girls' blanket.

  “What should I play?” he asked them.

  “Anything.” They were all just getting the hang of knit-purl-knit, but the music from Vanessa's crazy pink plastic toy was driving them insane.

  “Stir it up, little darling, stir it up—” he began, singing his favorite reggae song. Aaron had only turned up to see if Blair was the girl everyone was making such a fuss over. For all he knew, it could have been any one of them.

  “You never know,” more than one of the boys in the meadow observed.

  That's right. You never know.

  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!

  About last night

  Sorry boys, but you got punk'd! I know it was totally mean of me not to reveal myself, but admit it, you bonded, and wasn't it fun? Just what you needed, right? Best of all, you got to pet that sweet little monkey. And though you hate to admit it, you kind of like that you still don't know who I am, because you love imagining what I look like. I'm the girl of your dreams.

  What we don't know and are dying to find out

  Will N and B get back together?

  Will S find someone to love?

  Will V and D forgive each other
and live unhappily ever after?

  Will we hear more from G? Do we want to?

  Will J and L figure it out? Does she want to?

  Will C come out?

  Will I?

  You know I can't wait to answer all of the above. But first, I'm building an altar to the Saint of College Admissions. Every day I will buy the saint a new gift, like that pair of beaded slip-ons I've had my eye on in the Barney's shoe department, or that hot pink bag everyone's talking about and no store seems to have. That way, if I don't get in to my number one school I'll have lots of consolation prizes. And if I do get in, I'll have an excuse to congratulate myself with even more gifts. Either way, I won't lose. None of us will!

  You know you love me,

  gossip girl

  Once upon a time on the Upper East Side of New York City, two beautiful girls fell in love with one perfect boy. …

  Turn the page for a sneak peek of

  It had to be you

  the gossip girl prequel

  and find out how it all began.

  by the #1 New York Times bestselling author

  Cecily von Ziegesar

  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!

  Ever have that totally freakish feeling that someone is listening in on your conversations, spying on you and your friends while you sip lattes on the ivory-colored steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, following you to premieres and parties, and just generally stalking you? Well, they are. Or actually, I am. And the truth is, I've been here all along, because I'm one of you. One of the Chosen Ones.

  Don't get out much? Hair so processed it's fried your brain? Perhaps you're not one of us after all and you have no clue what I'm talking about or who “we” are. Allow me to expound. We're an exclusive group of indescribably beautiful people who happen to live in those majestic, green-awninged, white-glove-doorman buildings near Central Park. We attend Manhattan's most elite single-sex private schools. Our families own yachts, estates, and vineyards in various exotic locations throughout the world. We frequent all the best beaches and the most exclusive ski resorts in Austria and Utah. We're seated immediately at the finest restaurants in the chicest neighborhoods with nary a reservation. We turn heads. But don't confuse us with Hollywood actors or models or rock stars—those people you feel like you know because you read so much about them in the tabloids, but who are actually completely boring compared to the roles they play or the ballads they sing. There's nothing boring about me or my friends, and the more I tell you about us, the more you'll be dying to know. I've kept quiet until now, but something has happened, and if I don't share it with the world I'm absolutely going to burst.