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  Serena continued down the hall and up a narrower staircase to Nate’s private floor. There were his boxers on the bathroom tile where he’d left them. There was the rumpled plaid quilt lying askew on his bed. There were his model sailboats and the picture of him and Serena and Blair on the beach behind Blair’s house up in Newport. Nate’s eyes glittered greener than the ocean behind them. Blair was laughing. Serena studied her own face. She’d had freckles then, and an easy smile. Could she still smile like that?

  With a gloved hand she grasped the sleeve of the heather gray Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirt Nate had worn to play lacrosse that morning and held it to her nose, breathing in the heady soap and sweat scent of him. Nate, her Nate. Blair’s Nate.

  Again she stared at the photograph. Her carefree twelve-year-old arms were wound around Nate and Blair’s shoulders as they laughed. Tiny, happy dimples creased her freckled cheeks. She blinked, and then, just like that, Nate was gone. She’d vanished him from the picture. All she saw was herself and Blair, the two girls. Nate was just a tiny speck, drifting and dissolving as he floated out to sea.

  Still wearing her gloves, Serena dropped her bag on the desk and removed the giant syringe she’d procured from the groundsman’s shed up at Hanover. Two skulls with Xs through them and the word POISON were emblazoned on the oversized syringe in large black capital letters. She’d smuggled the syringe into the city in a violin case stolen from a Hanover sophomore who used to play first string in the school’s orchestra—before he went snowboarding with Serena and had to be air-lifted to the hospital with a fractured jaw, a severed tongue, a punctured lung, and two shattered wrists.

  Serena opened Nate’s sock drawer and rooted around until she found the pair of balled-up neon yellow polyester Adidas soccer socks where he kept his stash of pot.

  “What a loser,” she could hear Blair scoff at Nate, her voice pregnant with love and longing. “I might finally do it with you if it wasn’t for those horrible neon things.”

  Serena held the marijuana-stuffed socks in one hand and thrust the needle of the syringe into them with the other. The socks grew steadily heavier as they swelled with poison.

  Nate’s tiny sailboat alarm clock ticked quietly. The silence in the house was excruciating.

  Serena had always hated silence, and her time at Hanover Academy in New Hampshire had been full of it. Sure, she’d met some okay people up there, but as soon as she got close to someone, something always happened to spoil it.

  There was Jude, for instance. Sweet Jude. One sunny autumn Saturday he’d taken her apple picking at a hilly farm a few miles from campus. It was very romantic. But when they reached the arbor of shiny green Granny Smith apples, she’d thought of Nate. How Nate loved to snack on the crisp, tart flesh of a Granny Smith. How the green skin of his favorite apples matched the green irises of his eyes. Jude’s eyes were a dull gray, not gorgeous green. Jude’s hair was thin and straight and auburn, not thick and wavy and golden brown. Jude was from Massachusetts, not Manhattan. And although the apple picking stick in his hand resembled a lacrosse stick, Jude simply wasn’t Nate. So Serena had rammed the stick down Jude’s throat, catching his tongue and epiglottis in the little metal basket meant for catching apples and killing him instantly.

  Then there was Milos from Milan. He’d taken Serena sailing. Big mistake. Milos was still missing, his shark-eaten body floating to and fro in the icy waters between Cape Cod and the Bay of Fundy, in Canada.

  Sexy Soren, captain of the ski team, had built her a snowman, just like the snowmen she and Nate used to make in the garden behind Nate’s townhouse. When she finally made it back to her dorm, the bloody snowman was wearing Soren’s head.

  Nate was the only sailor in her life, the only builder of snowmen, the only apple-loving boy. Oh, how she missed him. How she missed New York. The thought of Blair and Nate together in Manhattan without her made her want to kill her roommate, the dean, and everyone else at Hanover.

  But the more Serena thought about it, the more she came to understand that three was not a good number. Before Nate showed up in kindergarten, she and Blair had been the inseparable-since-birth twosome, the pair. In preschool, they’d cut their hands with corkscrews and made a blood sister pact. Their friendship wasn’t supposed to die, not ever. And they were meant to be together—stopping for scones at Sant Ambroeus on their walk to school and buying the same undies at Barneys—not separated by miles and miles of pretty New England roads. Because without Blair, she was just another beautiful, angry, misunderstood girl.

  Try merciless killer freak?

  All she’d thought about all year was how to repair their friendship. Eventually it became clear how much easier things would be if Nate were out of the picture—literally. Math wasn’t Serena’s best subject, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Nate was the constant variable that fucked everything up:

  let Nate = x

  sx + b = guilt and shame that drove her away in the first place

  s + bx = sorrow, rage, murder, and more guilt and shame

  s + b = 1 + 1

  Thus, x must die.

  The notion of eliminating Nate altogether first occurred to Serena last spring, during her Concepts in Political Philosophy class. The class spent an entire week discussing consequentialism. Machiavelli, John Stuart Mill, Henry Kissinger. The theory went like this: Improving the lives of the people was the final goal, regardless of how that goal was achieved. A good outcome was a good outcome, no matter how that outcome was attained.

  Or who had to die in the process.

  The way Serena had come to see it, Nate was the only obstacle. Once he was eliminated, both she and Blair would be happy again. Everything could go back to the way it used to be. They would cut class and lie on their backs in Sheep Meadow in Central Park, watching the clouds drift by overhead. They’d stay up all night dancing in their underwear. They’d watch The Hunger—that oddly addictive classic vampire movie starring David Bowie and Susan Sarandon when they were young and beautiful—and Cat People, another good one. They’d get their nails done at J. Sisters together, ordering Waldorf salads from the Waldorf Hotel to the pedicure station just to be super-cheesy because they’d make their appointments under the name Waldorf. Everyone would secretly or not-so-secretly be jealous of them, but they’d both pretend not to notice because they didn’t need anyone else when they had each other.

  The poison was all gone. Serena withdrew the needle, tucked the syringe back into her bag, and tossed the heavy, balled-up pair of yellow socks back into the drawer. There. Now all Nate had to do was pack a nice big bong hit, smoke it up, and…

  And?

  She’d asked the groundskeeper at Hanover how he kept the school’s rodent population under control. He explained in detail how he injected piles of leaves with poison and burned them at nighttime. When the squirrels and rats and moles and groundhogs inhaled the smoke, the poison triggered a sudden rush of blood to the head, causing the vermin’s eyeballs to explode.

  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

  Best not to think about that, Serena scolded herself as she made her way downstairs, across the gleaming foyer, and out the front gate.

  It was dark out now. Yellow taxis zoomed up and down Park Avenue, ferrying Upper East Siders to their various dining appointments. Fuck walking. Serena raised her hand to flag one down. She couldn’t wait to see Blair again.

  An occupied cab pulled to a stop directly in front of her. The passenger door opened and a boy she knew well—Jeremy Scott Tompkinson, one of Nate’s St. Jude’s friends—stumbled out. Jeremy’s parents were cousins of James Hewitt, the polo player who’d had a dalliance with Princess Diana and who was thought to be Prince Harry’s real father. They’d come to America after an insurance scandal involving a string of dead polo ponies and a fire at their home in Kent, and had never looked back. Jeremy was a cross between Mick Jagger (skinny, full lips, long hair in his eyes) and Jerry Garcia (perpetually stoned).

  “Yo
Serena jeez whatcha doing back hope ya didn’t get kicked outta boarding school aren’t you hot in that coat with those gloves on it’s like seventy degrees tonight,” Jeremy wheezed. It was safe to presume that he was already high, hence his lack of punctuation.

  “Hello.” Serena clutched her bag to her chest, afraid he might catch a glimpse of the poisonous syringe. If only she’d bought the regular-sized hobo instead of this stupid microhobo. “May I take this cab?”

  Jeremy stepped aside and she ducked into the backseat. He slammed the door closed behind her, swaying in his oversized khaki pants. His rock star haircut had grown out over the summer into something halfway between a mullet and a Sally Hershberger shag.

  “You’re really freaking hot,” he told her with a stoned leer through the open window. “I just have a quick errand to run, otherwise I’d like, take you out on the town or something.”

  “Too bad,” Serena replied with a wan smile. She pressed the UP arrow on the window control, closing it. “Seventy-second and Fifth,” she told the driver.

  Her stomach rumbled as the cab eased away from the curb. Hopefully she hadn’t missed dinner. And hopefully Eleanor was serving those little red velvet cake petits fours from Petrossian for dessert. The ones with the blood orange frosting were her favorite.

  As the cab headed west across Madison, she pressed the DOWN button on the window control and tossed the syringe out onto the avenue, where it rolled silently into the gutter. Closing the window once more, she sat back in her seat, removed her goatskin gloves, and tucked her diaphanous blond hair behind her small, diamond-studded ears. She wouldn’t have minded a little ramekin of venison tartare with chilled béarnaise sauce, either.

  Nothing like a little murder to whet the appetite.

  an hour of sex burns 360 calories

  “What are you two talking about?” Blair’s mother asked, sidling up to Nate and squeezing Cyrus’s hand.

  “Sex,” Cyrus said, giving her a wet kiss on the ear.

  Yuck.

  “Oh!” Eleanor Waldorf squealed, patting her blown-out blond bob.

  Blair’s mother wore the fitted, graphite-beaded cashmere dress that Blair had helped her pick out from Armani, and a pair of black velvet mules. A year ago she wouldn’t have fit into the dress, but Cyrus had paid for her to have thirty pounds of fat sucked out of her thighs and waist and she looked fantastic. Everyone thought so.

  “She does look thinner,” Blair heard Mrs. Bass whisper to Mrs. Coates. “And I’ll bet she’s had her chin stapled.”

  “I think you’re right. She’s grown her hair out—that’s the telltale sign. It hides the scars,” Mrs. Coates whispered back.

  Of course, she would know.

  The room was abuzz with snatches of gossip about Blair’s mother and Cyrus Rose. From what Blair could hear, her mother’s friends felt exactly the same way about him as she did… minus the fantasies of impaling him with the fireplace poker, ripping out his entrails, and tossing them out the window.

  “I smell Old Spice,” Mrs. Coates whispered to Mrs. Archibald. “Do you think he’s actually wearing Old Spice?”

  “I’m not sure,” Mrs. Archibald whispered back. “But I think he might be.” She snatched a warm blood pudding canapé off Esther’s platter, popped it into her mouth, and chewed it vigorously, refusing to say anything more. She couldn’t bear for Eleanor Waldorf to overhear them. Gossip and idle chat were amusing, but not at the expense of an old friend’s feelings.

  Bullshit! Blair would have said if she could have heard Mrs. Archibald’s thoughts. Hypocrite! All of these people were terrible gossips. And if you’re going to do it, why not enjoy it? Pretending not to be the biggest gossip in the room when you so obviously were was like standing in a room full of slashed-up corpses with a bloody hunting knife in your hand and demanding, “Who did this?”

  Across the room, Cyrus grabbed Eleanor and kissed her on the lips in full view of everyone. Blair shrank away from the revolting sight of her mother and Cyrus acting like lovestruck teens and turned to look out the penthouse window at Fifth Avenue and Central Park. The fall foliage was on fire—not literally, but figuratively. If it were really on fire she would have tossed Cyrus out into it and watched him burn like fat-streaked bacon. A lone bicyclist rode out of the Seventy-second Street entrance to the park and stopped at the hot dog vendor on the corner to buy a bottle of water. Blair had never noticed the hot dog vendor before, and she wondered if he always parked there, or if he was new, and if he usually stayed there after the sun had gone down. This hot dog vendor was using a long, sharp knife to spear his hot dogs out of the steaming water. Didn’t they usually use tongs, or was it always a knife?

  It’s funny how much you miss in what you see every day.

  Suddenly Blair was starving, and she knew just what she wanted: a hot dog. She wanted one right now—a warm Sabrett hot dog with mustard and ketchup and onions and sauerkraut. If Cyrus could stick his tongue down her mother’s throat in front of all of her friends, then she could eat a stupid hot dog.

  “I’ll be right back,” Blair told Kati and Isabel.

  She whirled around and began to walk across the room to the front hall. She was going to put on her coat, go outside, get a hot dog from the vendor, eat it in three bites, borrow his knife, come back, burp in her mother’s face, amputate Cyrus’s gross tongue, have another drink, and then have sex with Nate.

  “Where are you going?” Kati called after her. But Blair didn’t stop. She headed straight for the door.

  Nate saw Blair coming and extricated himself from Cyrus and Blair’s mother just in time.

  “Blair?” he said. “What’s up?”

  Blair stopped and looked up into Nate’s sexy green eyes. They were like the emeralds in the cufflinks her father wore with his tux when he went to the opera. One look into those adoring gems calmed the killer inside her every time.

  Well, almost every time.

  He’s wearing your heart on his sleeve, she reminded herself, forgetting all about the hot dog. In the movie of her life, Nate would pick her up and carry her away to the bedroom and ravish her.

  But real life is stranger than fiction.

  “I have to talk to you,” Blair said. She held out her glass. “Fill me up first?”

  Nate loved it when Blair bossed him around. He took her glass and let her lead him over to the marble-topped wet bar by the French doors that opened onto the dining room. He poured them each a tumblerful of scotch and then followed Blair across the living room once more. She didn’t stop walking. She was headed for her bedroom.

  “Hey, where are you two going?” Chuck Bass asked as they walked by. He raised his eyebrows, leering at them suggestively.

  Blair rolled her eyes at Chuck and kept walking, drinking as she went. Nate followed her, ignoring Chuck completely.

  Chuck Bass, the oldest son of Misty and Bartholomew Bass, was handsome—aftershave commercial handsome. In fact, he’d starred in a British Drakkar Noir commercial, much to his parents’ public dismay and secret pride. Chuck was also the horniest boy in Blair and Nate’s group of friends. Once, at a party in ninth grade, Chuck had hidden in a guest bedroom closet for two hours, waiting to crawl into bed with Kati Farkas, who was so drunk she kept throwing up pizza and vodka Jell-O shots in her sleep. Chuck didn’t mind the vomit-stained covers, as long as there was a seminaked body underneath them. He was the worst kind of predator, the kind everyone would kill if they could stand to be around him for that long.

  Of course, the only way to deal with a guy like Chuck is to laugh in his face while secretly plotting his demise, which is exactly what all the girls who knew him did. In other circles, Chuck might have been banished as a slimeball of the highest order, but these families had been friends for generations. Chuck was a Bass, and so they were stuck with him. They had even gotten used to his gold monogrammed pinky ring, his trademark cream-colored monogrammed cashmere scarf, and the copies of his headshot that littered his parents’ many houses and
apartments and spilled out of his locker at the Riverside Preparatory School for Boys. Girls threw darts at them and blacked out the eyes with Sharpies.

  “Don’t forget to use protection!” Chuck called, raising his glass at Blair and Nate as they turned down the long, red-carpeted hallway to Blair’s bedroom.

  Blair grasped the glass doorknob and turned it, surprising her Russian Blue cat, Kitty Minky, who was curled up on the red silk bedspread. Blair paused at the threshold and leaned back against Nate, pressing her body into his. She reached down to take his hand.

  At that moment, Nate’s hopes perked up. Blair was acting sort of sultry and sexy and could it be… something was about to happen?

  Oh, something’s always about to happen.

  Blair squeezed Nate’s hand and pulled him into the room. They stumbled over each other, falling toward the bed, spilling their drinks and staining the white mohair rug. Blair giggled; the scotch she’d pounded had gone right to her head.

  I’m about to have sex with Nate, she thought giddily. And then they’d both graduate in June and go to Yale in the fall and have a huge wedding four years later and find a beautiful apartment on Park Avenue and decorate the whole thing in animal skins, with fireplaces in every room, and have rabid animal sex in front of each one on a rotating basis.

  Suddenly Blair’s mother’s voice rang out, loud and clear, down the hallway.

  “Serena van der Woodsen! What a lovely surprise!”

  Nate dropped Blair’s hand and straightened up like a soldier called to attention. Blair sat down hard on the end of her bed, put her drink on the floor, closed her eyes, and grasped the bedspread in tight, white-knuckled fists—exactly how Carrie’s knuckles looked after she was soaked with pig’s blood at the prom.

  She opened her eyes and looked up at Nate.

  But Nate was already turning to go, striding back down the hall to see if it could possibly be true. Had Serena van der Woodsen really come back?