Because I'm Worth It Read online

  “Are you interested?” the guy asked, raising his blond-tinted eyebrows hopefully. “You’re just what we’ve been looking for.”

  Serena fiddled with the ties on her white cashmere earflap hat. This Friday she and Aaron had planned to spend the whole night together, drinking at Soap on the Lower East Side, watching late-night TV in her bedroom, and . . . hanging out.

  Whatever that means.

  Yes, I am interested, Serena thought. She and Aaron could hang out any time. They had the rest of their lives to hang out together! Getting asked to be in Les Best’s show during New York Fashion Week was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It wasn’t like she wanted to make a career of modeling or anything, but this was her chance to show Les Best how much she truly appreciated his clothes. Plus, it would be fun. Aaron would understand that. In fact, he was such a wonderful boyfriend, he’d probably encourage her to do it.

  “I’d love to,” Serena answered finally. She pursed her not-too-full, not-too-thin lips and then grinned at her own ballsiness. “But only if I can have your jacket. I was looking for that exact one for my boyfriend and a little bird told me you took the last one.”

  “Oh my God, totally.” The blond guy whipped off the bright green jacket and folded it expertly. Walking over to the register, he wrapped the jacket in black tissue paper and tucked it into a prized white Les Best shopping bag. “There you are, darling.” He offered the bag to Serena. “I’ve only worn it for like, an hour. And it’s on us, gratis. So, we’ll see you in Les’s tent in Bryant Park on Friday at 4 P.M. sharp, okay? You’ll be on the list and you can invite four friends. Look for the girls holding clipboards and wearing headsets. They’ll tell you exactly where to go.”

  Serena took the bag. Score!

  “Don’t I need to be fitted for anything, or practice walking on the runway, or whatever?” she asked, pulling her white cashmere cap down over her ears.

  The guy rolled his eyes in a camp, don’t-be-silly way. “Honey, you’re a natural. Trust me, you’ll look good no matter what you do.” He handed her his card. Guy Reed, Chief d’Affairs, Les Best Couture, it read. “If you have any questions, just call.” He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Hey, what is that scent you’re wearing?”

  Serena smiled. She was used to people asking about her scent, too. “I mix it myself,” she told him, fully aware that her answer was just as mysterious as the scent.

  Guy closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. “Mmm. Dee-lish.” He opened his eyes again. “I’m going to have to tell Les about that, too. He’s been searching for a signature scent.” He reached up and gave Serena’s hat strings a playful tug with his tanned fingers. “See you Friday, doll. Stay warm. And don’t forget, the after-party is even better than the show!”

  Serena gave him a quick air kiss and then headed out into the cold. She couldn’t wait to give Aaron his present and tell him the news. He could wear the jacket to the show and then they could drop by the after-party together so she could show him off.

  Outside, she no sooner lifted her cashmere-mittened hand than four cabs on West Fourteenth Street screeched to a halt and honked for her attention.

  See how difficult it is to be so beautiful?

  v rocks people’s worlds

  Ruby was on another Martha Stewart spree, and the tantalizing scent of freshly baked brownies wafted into Vanessa’s bedroom as she sorted through submissions for Rancor, the Constance Billard student-run arts magazine of which she was editor-in-chief. Heat blasted from the steaming radiators, and the sounds of ambulance sirens and car horns wailed through the two open windows. Vanessa’s bare wooden floor was scattered with the usual Rancor submissions: twenty black-and-white photographs of clouds, feet, eyes, or the family dog; three short stories about learning to drive and feeling the tug of independence despite the writer’s appreciation for her parents and all they’d done for her; and seven poems discussing the meaning of friendship.

  Boring.

  After the third short story, Vanessa retrieved Ruby’s sugaring kit from the bathroom. Sugaring was an extremely messy, all-natural, and “virtually painless” way of removing the hair on your legs. You covered your legs with sticky brown goo, applied a strip of white cloth, and then ripped the strip of cloth away from your leg, taking the hair with it.

  Painless? Yeah, right.

  Vanessa kicked her black leggings onto the floor, laid a black bath towel over her black-and-gray patchwork bedspread, and sat down on top of it. She basted her pale, stocky calves with the sugary stuff, feeling like a giant glazed donut. Usually she was extremely low-maintenance, but if Dan was going to be hanging out with supermodels and agents and fashion designers, she thought she should at least try to make an effort and do something about the hair on her legs. Besides, spring was just around the corner. She might even go crazy and try sporting a miniskirt.

  “Fuck!” she yelped, ripping off the first strip of gauze. Who’d come up with the idea that women were supposed to be all smooth and hairless like babies? What the hell was wrong with a little hair? Most men were covered with it.

  She ripped off another strip. “Christ!” Okay, this was officially insane. Her skin was so raw and red she wouldn’t have been surprised to see blood gushing from the hair follicles.

  Her phone rang and she snatched it up and growled into it, “If this is you, Dan, I want you to know that I’m frigging ripping the hair off my body with my bare hands right now, and I’m doing it all for you, which is pretty fucking poetic if you ask me!”

  “Hello? Vanessa Abrams? This is Ken Mogul, filmmaker. You sent me your New York film essay a few weeks ago. We met in the park on New Year’s Eve?”

  Vanessa sat up straight and adjusted the phone against her ear. Ken Mogul was only, like, one of the most famous alternative film directors ever. At Christmastime he’d happened upon a clip of Vanessa’s work on the Web and had been so impressed he’d flown all the way from California to look her up. The problem was, he’d found her at exactly midnight on New Year’s Eve, which had been exactly the same moment Dan had shown up to give her a big fat New Year’s Eve kiss. Needless to say, Vanessa had sort of blown Ken Mogul off, although she had made the effort to send him her New York film essay when it was finished.

  “Yes, I remember,” she answered quickly, completely amazed that the director even wanted to speak to her again. “What’s up?”

  “Well, I hope you don’t mind, but I showed your film to Jedediah Angel, who’s a personal friend of mine, and he wants to use it as a backdrop for his Fashion Week show this weekend.”

  Vanessa wrapped the black bath towel around her legs. It was sort of embarrassing talking to Ken Mogul when she was practically naked and covered in sugary brown goo. “Jeremiah what?” she asked. Ken always seemed to speak in Hollywoodese, and this time she had absolutely no clue what he was talking about.

  “Jedediah Angel. He’s a fashion designer. His label is called Cult of Humanity by Jedediah Angel? Very hot. Jed says you’re the next Bertolucci. Your film’s like the anti–La Dolce Vita. You really rocked his world.”

  Vanessa grinned. Why did people have to sound so cheesy just because they’d made it? She’d rocked his world? “Great,” she replied, unsure of what to say. “Is there anything you need me to do?”

  “Just come to the show and enjoy. I’ll be there of course, and there are some people I want you to meet. You’re already a moviemaking goddess, babe. You totally rock.”

  “Cool,” Vanessa replied, slightly appalled that he’d actually told her she rocked not once but twice. “So what’s the designer’s name again?”

  “Cult of Humanity by Jedediah Angel,” Ken repeated slowly. “Six P.M. Friday at Highway 1. It’s a club in Chelsea.”

  “I’ve heard of it.” It was the type of place Vanessa normally avoided like the plague. “I guess I’ll see you there.”

  “Fan-fucking-tastic!” Ken enthused. “Ciao!”

  Vanessa hung up and rubbed at a glop of dried sugaring paste on
her wrist. Then she picked up the phone and dialed Dan’s number without even looking at the keypad.

  “Hello?” Jenny answered on the first ring.

  “Hey Jennifer, it’s Vanessa.” Vanessa always called Jenny Jennifer because Jenny had asked her to.

  “I’m not sure if Dan will talk to you. He wouldn’t talk to me, and he’s been locked in his room ever since he got home. It’s so gross—there’s cigarette smoke, like, pouring out from under the door.”

  Vanessa laughed and flopped back on her black pillows. Everything in her room was black, except the walls, which were dark red. “How do you know he’s not in there putting gel in his hair? That new haircut looks pretty high maintenance.”

  The two girls snickered.

  “I’ll go see if I can get him. Hold on.”

  “What’s up?” Dan picked up the phone a minute or two later. He sounded distracted. “Jenny said it was an emergency.”

  Vanessa lifted her leg in the air and tugged at another sugaring strip. It appeared to be glued permanently to her skin. Talk about emergencies!

  “I thought you’d want to know that Ken Mogul just called. He said some designer named Jedediah Angel who has this fashion label called Culture of Humanitarianism or something is using my film essay as a backdrop for his fashion show on Friday night. Ken said I really ‘rocked’ Jedediah Angel’s world.” She snorted. “Isn’t that hilarious?”

  “That’s fantastic,” Dan responded earnestly. “Seriously. Congratulations.”

  Fantastic? Since when did Daniel Humphrey use words like fantastic? Vanessa didn’t know what to say. Dan hadn’t caught the sarcasm in her voice at all. As if she’d only called him to gloat about her success.

  “Okay,” she said evenly. “I just thought you’d want to know. I’ll let you get back to work now.” She thought of cracking a joke about how one day when they were both rich and famous they could buy big-ass mansions next door to each other in Beverly Hills. But then she decided against it. Dan would probably think she was serious. “Call me later if you feel like it, okay?”

  “Okay,” Dan replied, obviously distracted by whatever new poem he was working on.

  After hanging up, Vanessa scooted off the bed. A corner of the black towel was now glued to the back of her left knee. She waddled into the bathroom to try and shower off the sugaring crap. Maybe one day when she was disgustingly rich and famous she’d have her own personal waxing and sugaring staff, but for now she’d have to get rid of the rest of the hair on her legs the old-fashioned way—with a pink plastic Daisy shaver.

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

  hey people!

  The flavor-of-the-month club

  So what ever became of that fake-breasted fake blond pop princess with the permanently bare midriff whose songs were always on the radio when you woke up in the morning and stayed in your head all day, driving you insane. I’ll call her “Sally” here, so as not to offend any of her adoring fans, but I’m sure you know who I’m talking about. I heard she had a nervous breakdown and has been in rehab in Palm Springs ever since. She likes it so much there she’s buying a ranch right next door, redoing it in shades of pink, and calling it Sallyland. If we’re lucky, she’ll stay there forever, only busting out in her late sixties to do overproduced cabaret shows on the Vegas Strip to prove that she can still lip-sync with the best of them despite her advanced age and drug-addled mind.

  What about our favorite twenty-something actress who got into that bit of trouble with the law—something to do with carrying shopping bags full of items that didn’t exactly belong to her out of a well-known department store? She’s in rehab, too, but don’t worry—the film industry will find a way to bring her back. In fact, that’s what distinguishes the flavors of the month from the real stars. We kind of want to see her again. We want to know that there’s life after being busted. We want to see her rise to new heights, whereas we don’t much care what happens to Sally. At nineteen, she was already tired.

  The ins and outs of rehab

  Rehab and college are actually very similar as far as status is concerned. There are the select few, which are filled with celebrities and the children of the very rich, and then there are the rest of them, which are filled with regular people. Getting into the best ones is highly competitive, but once you’re in, you’re in. So I wouldn’t worry about our darling N. He may be in trouble, but his parents aren’t about to send him to the rehab equivalent of community college.

  Your e-mail

  Q: Dear GG,

  I’m an intern at Les Best Couture, and I heard Les sent a spy to S’s school to check out what she looked like. He was kind of mad that she was hired without him even seeing her.

  —lilintern

  A: Dear lil,

  I bet he’s not mad anymore though, right?

  —GG

  Q: dear gossip girl,

  how come you never mention K and I anymore? It makes me wonder if maybe you are one of them.

  —eyespy

  A: Dear eyespy,

  I’ll never tell, so wonder away!

  —GG

  Sightings

  K and I—there, I mentioned them—in Bryant Park, freezing their butts off in skimpy Blue Cult denim miniskirts as they tried to get the interns working the doors of the Fashion Week tents to give them first- or second-row seats for Friday and Saturday’s runway shows instead of their usual ones toward the back. B renting How to Steal a Million, starring Audrey Hepburn, for the seventeenth time at Blockbuster on Seventy-second and Lex. I guess that’s one way of preparing for your Yale alum interview. N headed up the Merritt Parkway toward Connecticut in the back seat of his parents’ black Mercedes SUV. On his way to rehab, maybe? V in Barneys, of all

  places, checking out a frayed black hemp driving coat with chain-mail seams and vintage hook-and-eye buttons by Culture of Humanity by Jedediah Angel. She looked tempted, but at that price she’d be better off ripping up her own clothes and fastening them together with paper clips.

  My problem isn’t getting into the first row—it’s which show to go to. They all want me! Sigh. Being popular can be seriously hard work.

  You know you love me.

  gossip girl

  j and e explore their problem areas

  “Five more minutes, ladies,” announced Ms. Crumb to her Constance Billard ninth-grade creative writing class. She pulled her curly black hair out of the way and prodded the wax in her right ear with the eraser of a yellow number two pencil. “Remember, it’s not what you’re writing about but how you describe it.”

  None of the girls looked up. They were too busy writing, and besides, they really didn’t want to see what Ms. Crumb was doing when she thought they weren’t looking. They’d already been grossed out enough times.

  According to the girls, all the female teachers at Constance Billard were lesbians, but Ms. Crumb was the only teacher at Constance who was officially out. She wore a rainbow pin to school every day, shared a country house in New Paltz with five other women, and often referred to her “partner”—as in, “The other night my partner was drinking Amstel Lite and watching Barbara Walters, who she has a total crush on, while I sat in the kitchen and graded your papers.” Every year the ninth graders looked forward to having Ms. Crumb’s creative writing class, assuming she’d be cool and down-to-earth since she was so forthright about her sexuality. But after a day in her classroom her students realized they weren’t just going to sit around for forty-five minutes talking about girl stuff with a woman who liked girls—they were going to have to write things every day in class, read them out loud, and then listen to Ms. Crumb and their classmates criticize what they had written in a sometimes not very nice way. Ms. Crumb was a major hardass, but as far as subjects went, creative writing was still a hell of a lot better than geometry.

  Today Ms. Crumb had asked the girls to pick a partner— in the platonic sense—a
nd write a paragraph describing a part of their partner’s body. Of course Elise and Jenny had picked each other. They were beginning to do almost everything together.

  It’s odd that we decorate our ears with earrings and don’t try to cover them, Jenny wrote. They’re just as indecent as the parts we do cover, like bare holes that go straight into our heads. My friend Elise’s ears are small, with a little blond fuzz on them. She has good hearing, too, because she never says, “What?” and asks me to repeat myself. I guess she keeps them pretty clean.

  Jenny looked up and decided to erase the last line and replace it with something else. Ms. Crumb might get offended, since she obviously had some kind of ear-cleaning fetish.

  But instead of writing something else to replace the ear-cleaning line, Jenny’s mind wandered back to her e-mail. She’d been checking it regularly, just like Blair had told her to; however, the only messages she’d gotten had been jokey ones from Elise and her brother, telling her to stop checking her e-mail and get back to her homework. She glanced at Elise, who was scribbling away, already on her second page. Jenny wished she had Dan’s knack for the written word. She was better at detailed drawings and painting and calligraphy.

  At the top of the page she drew an elaborate drawing of Elise’s ear and the side of her face, hoping she’d score points for being artistic, even if her essay sucked. Her mind wandered again, to the blond boy she’d spotted in Bendel’s. Was he artistic, too?

  The bell rang to mark the end of last period and Ms. Crumb stood up and brushed chalk dust from her dark gray wool pinafore dress that looked like it had been made by nuns somewhere cold and fashionless, like Greenland.

  “Time’s up, ladies. Pencils down. You can hand in your papers as you leave.” She tucked her maroon-stockinged feet into a pair of black felt L.L. Bean clogs. “Happy Thursday afternoon!”

  “So what’d you write about?” Jenny asked Elise after they had packed up their book bags and were on their way out the school doors.