Don't You Forget About Me (3 page)

Serena shrugged her shoulders, not at all fazed by Eleanor’s outrageous behavior. At least there was one thing around here that wasn’t going to change. She just wished she had Blair or Nate to giggle with her about it.

Davita flounced back into the room, snapping her cell phone shut with a decisive click. “Okay, ladies,” she said, breaking into an enormous smile, her obvious veneers as wide and white as Scrabble tiles. “Where were we?” “Well . . .” Eleanor motioned to Serena, her gold Cartier Love bracelets clinking loudly against one another. “I was just telling Serena we have a lot to celebrate right now. In addition to everyone leaving for college, there’s—”

“We’re hoooooooome!” A taunting, singsongy girl’s voice called out from the foyer, a voice Serena would know anywhere. Her heart fluttered. The sound of bags being thrown onto the marble floor was followed by the unmistakable patter of Blair’s light, quick steps. Serena swallowed hard, watching as Nate and Blair appeared in the doorway of the Waldorf Roses’ massive, antique-strewn living room, hands clasped, looking sun-kissed, glowing, and more gorgeous than ever.

As if that were even possible.

Nate’s green eyes lit up when he spotted Serena sitting on the couch, and she smiled weakly, her stomach folding like pancake batter. Just the sight of him in his stained and wrinkled cutoff khakis and ratty gray T-shirt made her feel lightheaded. The last time she’d seen him, standing at the top of the staircase at her family’s house in Ridgefield while she hovered at the bottom, the whole world had gone quiet as she overheard him telling Blair he loved her.
Loved
. With those words ringing in her ears, something in Serena had finally clicked. She’d watched him lead Blair upstairs and right then she knew as surely as she’d ever known anything that
she
loved Nate. And now that he was standing right in front of her with her on-again-off-again best friend, she knew it was really true. She loved Nate with her entire heart. It was something she’d always known, deep down. Why hadn’t she done anything about it until it was too late?

She shook her long blond locks, trying to remember to act like a normal friend and not a love-struck freak. She jumped to her feet and ran across the room, her fuchsia flowered Calypso flip-flops thwacking all the way, and threw her arms around Blair, squeezing tightly. All at once Serena felt suffocated by the scent of Nate’s Right Guard deodorant clinging to her best friend’s skin. She pulled back, looking hopefully at Blair, who was still latched onto Nate’s hand. “I missed you.” But Blair wasn’t smiling back. In fact, she looked less than pleased to see Serena—she looked downright pissed. Serena began to gnaw on her Sephora Supernova-polished thumbnail. Blair could be so scary sometimes. Had
she
found the letter? Oh God.Why hadn’t she thought of that before?

As she wrapped her arms again around Blair’s rigid, sun-baked body, she couldn’t help looking over Blair’s shoulder at Nate. His golden-brown hair was wavier than usual from the salt water. It fell across his tanned forehead and he pushed it away, smiling widely as they made eye contact. His lips looked chapped and swollen, like he’d been making out with Blair all night long—which he probably had been. The thought nearly made her choke.

“Looking good, Natie,” Serena sighed wistfully, unable to keep the words from escaping her lips. She pulled gently away from Blair, tendrils of golden hairs escaping her ponytail. Nate dropped Blair’s hand abruptly and moved toward Serena, opening his arms. Serena rushed in to hug him, wrapping her arms around his taut waist and holding on tight. He squeezed her back with a fierceness that Blair’s hug had lacked. Had he found her letter after all?

“What are you guys doing here?!” Serena’s voice was breathless as she buried her face in Nate’s warm, soft neck. Blair stared at them, her blue eyes narrowing.

Shouldn’t they be asking
her
that question?

a yabba-dabba-doo time, we’ll have a gay ol’ time!

Vanessa Abrams staggered out of the Humphreys’ living room, her pale arms weighed down with piles of old coffee-stained newspapers. Her army green Triple 5 Soul cargo pants were rolled up to the knees, and her fitted black Old Navy wifebeater was soaked in sweat.
“God.”
She exhaled heavily as she dumped a pile of decades-old New Yorkers in a large blue recycling bin, exposing the dusty parquet floor beneath. “It’s amazing these piles of crap haven’t toppled over in the night, killing us in our sleep.”

Dan Humphrey grunted in assent as he walked down the hall to the kitchen and washed out his coffee-grit-encrusted blue plastic Evergreen mug for the third time that day. He wouldn’t mind being dead right about now. They’d been cleaning out the Humphreys’ ramshackle, grime-coated Upper West Side apartment for a grueling two hours, but it felt more like two days. Dan just wasn’t cut out for hard labor, and he could feel the heart palpitations coming on. At least if he died now, he’d die young, like his idol, the poet John Keats, which he always thought was sort of romantic.

They could bury him beneath the Strand, a copy of Baudelaire’s
Fleurs du Mal
over his ashen face. Maybe Vanessa would weep dramatically as she said her final goodbyes. Or wait, maybe Greg would. This was one of the many problems with recently discovering you might be gay—it was totally unclear whether your future widower would be your longtime ex-girlfriend or your newish-maybe-boyfriend.

After he and Dan had shared a semi-conscious drunken kiss at their literary salon earlier in the summer, Greg seemed to have decided two things: that Dan was gay, and that they were a couple. Dan wasn’t sure how he felt about either of those conclusions, but he hadn’t had very long to think about it, because Greg’s grandmother had passed away a few days later, and Greg had left for Phoenix for the funeral and to spend time with his extended family. He’d been gone nearly a month, and in that time Greg had sent Dan dozens of beautifully crafted e-mails, all with the same theme: absence makes the heart grow fonder. But every time Dan wrote back, he wasn’t sure if he was growing any fonder of Greg . . . or just more confused.

Dan tried to shake his uncertainty away. “I’m going to keep cleaning,” he announced with a sudden surge of determination, and marched into the living room with the purposeful steps of a military general.

Dan in the army? Don’t ask, don’t tell!

“Be my guest,” Vanessa retorted as she threw another huge stack of newspapers into the recycling bin. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a lost cause.” Earlier that summer, her older sister Ruby had returned from Europe with her new Czech boyfriend, Piotr, in tow and had proceeded to kick Vanessa out of the cozy Williamsburg apartment they’d shared for the last three years. Thanks, sis! Since then, Vanessa had been living in Dan’s sister Jenny’s room while Jenny was at art school in Prague for the summer. Since Dan was heading to Evergreen College in Washington State in less than two weeks and Jenny would be off to boarding school in upstate New York, it looked like Vanessa would be keeping her room in the Humphreys’ apartment when she started NYU—after all, somebody had to keep Rufus, Dan and Jenny’s lesser-known Beat poet editor father, company. So she’d decided to spend the weekend redecorating the totally dismal pad. And really, what better way to try out Dan’s new
Queer Eye
decorating skills? If he even had any. He was so fresh out of the closet it was hard for her to believe it was really true. But maybe that’s because she didn’t
want
it to be true.

Didn’t she?

Dan closed his eyes, remembering the feel of Greg’s lips on his, his scratchy blond chin stubble scraping against Dan’s jaw. The more he went over it in his mind, Dan wasn’t even sure how he felt about the kiss anymore—or about Greg—except that he was pretty sure he didn’t really have any desire to do it again anytime soon. He’d promised himself he was going to get to the bottom of this before he hopped into the 1977 Buick Skylark his dad had given him for graduation and drove to Evergreen in ten days. If he were going to reinvent himself in college, which was basically the whole point of going to college in the first place, figuring out his sexuality would be a good place to start. He’d even picked up a book at the Strand, where he’d worked all summer, called
Unlocking the Closet
. It explained that feelings of confusion and despair were natural while you were transitioning from one sexual identity to another, and said that one should be totally willing to ask oneself the really “tough” questions. Which he really was trying to do. Like, if he wasn’t truly gay, then why had he kissed Greg in the first place? Then again, why was Vanessa suddenly looking so hot with newsprint smudges across her pale cheek?

Good question.

Dan moved over to the sad gray curtains shading the floor-to-ceiling windows in the musty living room and attempted to tie one limp side back with a twist tie he’d found with the garbage bags under the kitchen sink. The yellow twist tie fell to the ground and he bent down to pick it up.

Vanessa sighed as she watched him. He was really going to have to get in touch with his inner diva if he was going to make a go of it as a New York City-bred gay man.

“There, how’s that?” Dan secured the garbage tie and stood back to admire his handiwork, looking more optimistic than he had all day. He placed both hands on his hips. “
So
much better, right?” The fabric hung to the side, exposing the dirty hand-printed and dust-streaked window. Vanessa looked from the window to her ex-boyfriend—who now apparently had boyfriends of his own. “Uh . . . yeah,” she intoned, fluffing a lumpy brown leather sofa pillow that resembled a giant potato. “That’s just great. I’m sure we’ll be featured in
Town & Country
next month.” The truth was, Vanessa kind of missed him. After returning from a hellish stint as a nanny and then some sort of fashion muse out in the Hamptons, and since Greg had left for Phoenix, she and Dan had spent the last month hanging out in the city, but it had been . . . different. They had fallen into a comfortable, friendly sort of small-talk-making rapport—with none of the sexual tension or heated argument you’d expect from two exes living in such close quarters.

With so little time before Dan left for college, Vanessa couldn’t believe that this was the way they were going to leave things. Not even one last lingering kiss or one last roll in the hay? Every time Dan brushed past her when he was making his umpteenth cup of Folgers crystals, or on the way to the bathroom, when she caught a whiff of stale Camels and coffee grounds, she had to stop herself from throwing him down on the dust-bunny-littered floor and ripping off his brown, frayed-at-the-bottom, zillion-year-old cords. In fact, now that Dan was gay—and completely unattainable—the thought was more appealing than ever.

A key jiggled in the front door and it swung open with a bang as Rufus Humphrey’s bulk filled the doorway. He wore a pair of denim overalls splattered in white paint with a faded brown ANTEATERS HAVE FEELINGS TOO T-shirt underneath, and scuffed, red bowling shoes on his feet. A white straw Panama hat was perched jauntily atop his wiry, shoulder-length gray hair, and his bushy salt-and-pepper beard was partially braided, with a hot pink elastic at the end.

“Hey Dad,” Dan called from his station at the window. “Check out—” “Close your eyes, Dan!” Rufus boomed, holding up one hand, palm out in a stop-in-the-name-of-love pose, as if he were auditioning to be the next Supreme. Dan was too surprised to do anything but comply. He closed his eyes, his mind racing with the possibilities. Chinese food for lunch? He was starving. An iPod to take to college with him? A first edition of his favorite novel of all time,
The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Goethe?

“Danny, darrrrrrrling!” A preening, soprano-pitched voice sang out behind Rufus. Dan’s eyes snapped open. Whatever he was expecting, it definitely wasn’t this.

“Mom?!”

Jeanette Humphrey flew into the room like an exotic bird just released from captivity, dressed in a turquoise floor-length sundress and carrying two large brown shopping bags. She threw her long, gray-streaked mousy brown hair over one shoulder, elbowed Rufus aside with an exasperated sigh, and flung her skinny arms around Dan in a cloud of poisonously strong floral perfume. Dan just stood there in a state of shock, his arms like chow fun noodles as he tried to wrap his mind around the fact that this was actually happening. What the fuck? Was this really his mother, after, what,
ten
years? Or was this an acid flashback, like a real-life Howl poem? Oh wait, he had never done acid. What was she
doing
here?

Vanessa watched with a fascination that bordered on horror as the mythical Mrs. Humphrey proceeded to kiss Dan all over his face, leaving violent tracks of bright pink lipstick smeared across his sunken cheeks.

“How
are
you, my pet?” Jeanette chirped as she squeezed her son so tightly it looked like he might suffer internal organ damage. “It’s been absolutely
ages
!” She cupped Dan’s pained, mortified face and led him, zombielike, to the couch. Vanessa had never seen him get whisked around before and with so little complaint. Rufus winked merrily at Vanessa from beneath his white hat, and sauntered through the chipped, oak-trimmed doorway into the kitchen. Vanessa followed him, not quite sure where to go. Rufus pulled out a clear Tupperware container full of weird brown goo that had been shoved in the back of the fridge, peeling back the lid and sniffing happily.

“Redecorating?” His voice boomed as he opened the utensil drawer and rummaged through it. “The curtains look phenomenal! That your golden touch, Dan?” Rufus yelled toward the living room. “This place could use
something
, that’s for sure.” He pulled out a lime green spatula and began using it as a spoon.

“It could use something—like a wrecking ball!” Jeanette’s voice rang out from the other room. “Or a can of gasoline and a lit match!” She came striding into the kitchen, the blue folds of her sundress flying to and fro, while Dan trailed behind, carrying her bags. Gliding up to Vanessa, she smiled broadly and extended one hand laden with turquoise rings for Vanessa to shake . . . or kiss . . . or high-five? It was hard to tell, the way she was holding it, and finally Vanessa just bumped fists with her like they were old homies.