Nothing Can Keep Us Together (3 page)

“So just drink some coffee and read poetry quietly to yourself, okay, Dad?” Jenny Humphrey pleaded with her uncooperative father, Rufus, as they stood in front of the dapper wrought-iron gates of Hanover Academy, just outside the quaint and lovely town of Hanover, New Hampshire. After appearing semiclothed on the Internet and in the pages of various fashion magazines, and colluding with post-college-age rock stars in their suite at the Plaza Hotel, Jenny had been given an ultimatum by Mrs. McLean, headmistress of Constance Billard. She had to stop making headlines and finish up her freshman year at Constance behaving like the demure school girl she was supposed to be or she’d have to find some other school to attend in the fall. Jenny had taken this as a challenge and wound up spending an entire weekend with the Raves in the lead guitarist’s Bedford Street town house. She’d even recorded a song with them! The following Monday, Mrs. McLean and everyone else in the city had read all about it in the gossip columns.

Say good-bye to Constance Billard and hello to … boarding school!

Now it was the following Monday and Jenny had taken the day off from school to look at Hanover, the famously wild and crazy boarding school of her dreams. Hanover was where party girl extraordinaire Serena van der Woodsen had gone for two years before getting kicked out last October, and Jenny imagined that Serena had never been replaced. Well, here she was to replace her. She was going to bring Hanover to new heights of infamy, and if, for some reason—which was hard to imagine—Hanover didn’t appeal to her, or worse, didn’t accept her, she would also visit the Croton School. Croton was only an hour and a half away from the city, in Croton Falls, New York, and according to all the prep school guidebooks Jenny had been reading, it was almost as wild as Hanover.

“I might get a haircut, too,” Rufus replied, sounding chipper. His wiry salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back into a straggly ponytail held by a rainbow-colored twist-tie that had come on a bag of flaxseed bagels from the Whole Foods near their Upper West Side apartment building. To go with his fancy hairstyle, Rufus was wearing a red-and-white checked Western-style snap-up-the-front short-sleeved shirt, heavy brown canvas Carhartt work shorts, and scuffed beige suede Birkenstock clogs with black wool socks.

Nothing like the country to bring out one’s sense of fashion.

“Oh. Good.” Jenny tried not to get too excited. The last time Rufus had gotten his hair cut—sometime around her thirteenth birthday—he had gone to a Lower East Side salon popular with drag queens and gotten bangs with purple streaks in them. “So, I’ll just go on my tour and meet you at that place in town,” she added, referring to the bookstore café they’d passed on the way through the town of Hanover. The campus was a mile-and-a-half walk from town along a nice tree-lined path. It would be reassuring to have that distance between herself and Rufus, in case he decided to start a political movement or something equally insane out of sheer anxiety at having to leave the city.

“You got it!” Rufus pecked her on the cheek with his grizzly mouth before striding down the path with exaggerated jauntiness. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” he called out behind him.

As if there were anything he wouldn’t do.

Jenny tugged on the pretty jade green cap-sleeved blouse she’d bought at Scoop in Soho on Saturday. It was Japanese and had little dragonflies stenciled all over it. She’d buttoned it up all the way to the collar, but now that her dad was on his way, she unbuttoned the top two buttons, revealing her most surprising assets—her 34 double-Ds.

No reason the boys at Hanover shouldn’t know what they were in for.

She extracted her laminated campus map from her bought-on-the-street-outside-of-Bloomingdales-but-looked-just-like-Serena’s imitation Louis Vuitton Calla Lily bag. The school’s ivy-covered old brick buildings were right out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, but Jenny was disappointed not to see any gorgeous, half-naked, sun-dappled boys playing Frisbee out on the lawns. Riley, the girls’ dormitory where she’d arranged to meet her host, was on the other side of the parking lot, perched on top of a grassy hillock. It was a gorgeous summer day, and the air smelled like fresh-cut grass.

“I already love it here,” Jenny whispered, her skin tingling with excitement. Her whole life was about to change. No more uniforms. No more bitchy, cliquey girls who would spend hours dissecting a girl’s choice of mauve lip gloss over pink. No more being known only for her excellent calligraphy, her overhyped Internet scandal, or her supposedly pornographic photo shoots. No more rumors, no more scandal.

Well, maybe that was taking it a little too far. There was nothing wrong with a little scandal. It was just that at a boarding school like Hanover, the bar for scandal would be considerably higher.

Jenny’s host, Fiona Castagnoli, was waiting for her outside the door to Riley. Fiona looked like a forty-five-year-old soccer mom—short and pudgy, in a coral-pink-and-white striped J.Crew oxford shirt tucked into stone-colored L.L. Bean Bermuda shorts. Her white socks were folded neatly at the ankle, and her white-on-white Reebok sneakers were brand-spanking-new. “Jennifer?” she asked eagerly, her supercurly, tight auburn ponytail bouncing between her shoulder blades. “We have to hurry. I’m taking you to study hall and we’re already five minutes late!”

Fiona was lugging a lime green Lands’ End backpack with every book she owned in it. Jenny blinked at her. When she’d thought about coming to visit Hanover, she’d imagined hanging out in a dorm room with chic skinny blond girls, drinking vodka gimlets and flirting with boys smoking pipes, their school neckties flopping loosely against their tanned bare chests. “If you have lots of work to do I could, like, hang out here and wait for you,” she offered.

“Oh, could you?” Fiona cried. She seemed immensely relieved. “You see, it’s finals week next week, and I have forty-seven Spanish irregulars to study and thirteen proofs to do for geometry.”

Jenny peered inside the open door. A few girls lounged in leather armchairs in the crystal-chandeliered common room reading magazines and listening to their iPod minis. Jenny recognized a red-and-white rose-patterned Marc Jacobs top on one of them. And one girl was wearing the pair of gold Belle by Sigerson Morrison flats she’d coveted all spring but had never saved up enough to buy. They looked exactly like the types of girls she would have wanted to be friends with. All that was missing were the boys with the pipes and the vodka.

“I’ll stay here,” she told Fiona firmly.

“Okay.” Fiona hitched her ugly green backpack up on her shoulder. “I’ll come back and get you in, like, an hour and ten. We can get bagels in the café and I’ll show you my room.”

Whoa, sounds like a party.

Jenny was already sure she was never going to see Fiona again because Fiona was going to get so caught up in her irregular verbs or whatever, she’d forget all about how she’d left Jenny with the coolest, worst-behaved girls at Hanover. She pulled a tube of Chanel Stroppy lip gloss out of her bag and smeared some on. Then she stepped inside the common room. “Hi,” she announced shyly. “I’m Jennifer. I’m visiting from the city? I go to Constance Billard—you know, where Serena van der Woodsen went?” She knew it was lame to mention Serena right away, but she wanted these girls to know that she was cool, that she was one of them.

One girl with short black hair and beautifully painted Chanel Vamp toenails glanced her way but then looked quickly away again. Other than that, no one seemed to hear what she’d said. The wood paneling in the common room gave off an amber glow, and the oriental carpet beneath Jenny’s feet was in perfect condition. She felt like she was in the den of some old mansion rather than in a school.

“So, I hear Hanover can get pretty crazy sometimes. At least, that’s what Serena told me,” Jenny babbled on, still standing in the doorway like an idiot. She wanted to make it very clear that she didn’t just know of Serena. They were pals.

“Shush,” whispered a beautiful blond girl with legs so long and so tan, they looked fake. “You’re going to get us in trouble.”

Hello? Since when were Hanover girls worried about getting into trouble?

“Sorry,” Jenny muttered meekly. She sat down in an empty leather chair, wincing at the noisy farting sound it made when her bare legs rubbed against it. She placed her faux Louis Vuitton bag primly on her lap, wishing she’d at least thought to bring a book. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the girl with short black hair checking her out once more. Jenny pulled an old receipt from Duane Reade out of the side pocket of her bag and then hunted for the stubby Hello Kitty pencil she’d had since fifth grade.

What’s the deal? I thought Hanover was supposed to be totally WILD, she scribbled on the back of the receipt. Then she folded up the receipt and daringly tossed it in the short-haired girl’s lap. Less than a minute later the receipt came back with blue pen all over it. Well, basically, the little episode with your friend Serena (who used to be my neighbor here in Riley—when she was actually around) ruined everything. After getting rid of her, they instituted the disciplinary code, which basically says that if you tell on your friends, you get privileges. There’s so much incentive to tell on your friends that no one ever does anything worth talking about anymore. This place is totally dry, quiet, and B.O.R.I.N.G!!! I’m a senior, though, so I’m outta here—YAY!

Jenny looked up from the note and studied the other girls in the room more carefully. One of the iPod listeners was muttering to herself, and Jenny realized she wasn’t listening to the latest downloads but rather memorizing Spanish conjugations. A petite Asian girl with thick pigtails who Jenny had thought was reading a fashion magazine was actually completely engrossed in Science Digest.

Uh-oh.

I probably wouldn’t get in anyway, Jenny scribbled back. She tossed the note to the girl, then stood up. Applications for boarding school were supposed to have been done in the fall, so she was pushing it timewise wherever she decided to go, never mind who would have her. But surely there were other schools that weren’t quite as strict as Hanover clearly was now.

She went outside and wound her way back to the school gates, wishing that she hadn’t sent her father away in such a hurry. Heading down the path toward town she came upon a blond boy in a red Ralph Lauren baseball cap, a white V-neck T-shirt, and floppy aqua-colored J.Crew linen pants, smoking a Marlboro as he shuffled slowly back toward campus. He was completely adorable.

Jenny smiled shyly at him as he approached, mustering up the courage to ask him if Hanover was really as bad as that short-haired girl back in Riley had made it out to be.

“You’re not going to tell on me, are you?” the boy demanded, glaring at her with more hostility than anyone deserves.

“N-no,” Jenny stammered. Was everyone at Hanover totally paranoid?

“Right,” he sneered back, still glaring as he shuffled away.

When she arrived at the coffee shop, her dad was behind the counter whipping up a soy milk chai latte, even though he and Dan had spent an hour one day lecturing Jenny on how chai was just some made-up Starbucks bullshit and how the only real hot drink on the planet was Folgers instant coffee. “The air is so fine, I was thinking I might move up here. They even offered me a job here in the café,” he crowed, beaming at her. “Dan’s off to Evergreen in the fall anyway. We’ll sublet our place—make a fortune!”

“Sorry, Dad, but I don’t think so,” Jenny sighed. “I mean, I don’t think I want to go here.”

Rufus carried the paper cup of frothy hot liquid around the counter and handed it to Jenny. “You mean you want to stay home with me?” he asked, his bushy salt-and-pepper eye-brows arched hopefully.

Jenny smelled the drink, made a face, and then handed it back. “No. I just have to keep looking. Croton’s on the way home anyway.”

Rufus winked at the big-hipped, hemp-dress-wearing, frizzy-haired woman coming out of the kitchen with a tray of buckwheat scones in her hands. He sighed. “You sure?”

From what Jenny could remember, the prep school guidebook she’d read from cover to cover in the corner by the window upstairs at the Broadway Barnes & Noble had listed Croton Academy in Croton Falls second on the list of party schools, right after Hanover. Croton was supposed to be full of kids who’d been kicked out of their New York City private schools for bad behavior. Obviously the book hadn’t been updated recently if it still listed Hanover as the number one party school, but maybe what it said about Croton was still true.

“Come on, let’s go.” Jenny tugged on the pocket of her father’s Carhartt shorts, all excited about Croton now.

It sounded way cooler than Hanover. And hopefully it had no disciplinary code.

Professor Pierre Papadametriou

English Dept., The Evergreen State College

2700 Evergreen Parkway NW

Olympia, WA 98505

Daniel Humphrey

815 West End Avenue, Apt. 8D

New York, NY 10024

Dear Mr. Daniel Humphrey,

I saw your query in Seeking Paid Summer Internship on college employment site. I am poetry and biology professor at college and I seek summer intern. You live in my house. I have two dogs and a son. My wife left for Greece. Son is fisherman. Dogs live outside. You work on my very interesting book with me. I feed you good Greek food! Tell me when you come and I will fix hammock in attic. Must go feed dogs. They love my moussaka!

Please write back soon.

Pierre

Nothing Can Keep us Together

“Wow. Your place looks really … lavender,” Dan remarked when Vanessa let him in. When he’d lived there the walls of the small, nondescript apartment had been plain, peeling, and white, and there’d been black Halloween sheets hanging in the windows in place of curtains. Now the walls were painted a delicate light lavender with celery green trim, and black-and-white chintz curtains hung from real curtain rods in the windows. There were a nice Danish modern wooden table and chairs in the living room and a cool, modern gray sofa. The place looked like it had been decorated by a real decorator.

Vanessa blushed, which was weird for her. Since when did she blush? “Blair kind of spruced it up a little. You like?”

Dan was sweaty from the subway ride, and because he’d run all the way from the L stop, thirteen blocks away. He traced a sticky finger over the freshly painted wall, his heart beating fast. “It’s different, I guess,” he responded nervously. Vanessa was checking him out in that unabashed, direct way of hers, making him sweat even harder.

When Vanessa had gotten home from school, there’d been a little white box waiting for her on the kitchen counter. She’d opened it to find a silver ring in the shape of two hands holding hearts that were welded together. Inside the ring was the inscription FOREVER AND ALWAYS. LOVE, A. Except for a brief dalliance with a lip ring, Vanessa rarely wore jewelry, and this type of friendship/love ring was so corny it made her laugh. She’d certainly never have considered wearing it, no matter who had given it to her. She’d dropped the ring back inside the box and tucked it into the silverware drawer. It was possible Aaron had given her the ring as a joke, but then why would he have bothered to have it inscribed? Even when they were going out, Dan would never have given her such a sappy gift. Come to think of it, he’d never asked her to camp out under the stars with him, either. Vanessa was a running-water-and-flushing-toilets sort of girl. She hated the sun, and the outdoors, with its spiders, ants, bees, and mosquitoes, creeped her out. Of course, Aaron meant well. It was the thought that counted and all that. But she and he would have to talk—something they hadn’t really done much of since they’d hooked up. Despite Aaron pouring on the love notes, giving her gifts, and sleeping over all the time, their relationship had been purely physical thus far.

Not that she minded. There was something about the stress of finals and graduation and turning a new page in life that was secretly freaking Vanessa out. She simply wasn’t herself. Or maybe living in an apartment with lavender walls with a girl who owned one hundred seventeen pairs of shoes, including thirty-four pairs of Manolo Blahniks, had turned her into someone else. Formerly a loner, Vanessa could no longer bear to be alone, and she’d found that the best way to keep her mind off the future was to drink a little vodka and then fool around.

She’s only just discovered this?

“You look pale,” Vanessa told Dan. Then she took a step toward him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the cheek. She squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled his cute, musty Dan scent. “Pale, but really good.”

Vanessa was wearing a black ribbed tank top and no bra. Her head was freshly shaved, but she’d allowed the dark hair around her face to grow half an inch or so, softening her broad white forehead and big brown eyes. And she’d given up on her lip ring.

Which was a good thing.

She was also wearing a flippy black miniskirt that she never would have considered before Blair Waldorf moved in. But she’d paired the miniskirt with black-and-white argyle kneesocks and her ever-present Doc Martens, making it very clear that, despite her roommate’s influence, she wasn’t about to buy a pair of snakeskin Manolo Blahnik stilettos anytime soon, even if they came in black.

The smooth slope of her pale upper arms, the mocking curve of her red lips, and the defiant glow in her big brown eyes made Dan wonder how he’d ever functioned without her. He resisted the urge to whip out his leather-bound notebook and scribble down a poem. Instead he pulled a Camel out of the pack and stuck it between his lips without lighting it. “So, you want to take a walk? Get some coffee or something?” he ventured, trying to sound vaguely normal.

Vanessa shrugged her shoulders without moving away from him. “I’m having a major déjà vu,” she confessed with a bemused smile. Wasn’t this how they’d gotten together again the last time? He’d come over and then they’d basically ripped each other’s clothes off.

“Me too,” he admitted, secretly hoping that history would repeat itself.

“Blair and I just discovered a door to the roof of the building. All this time I thought it was padlocked, but the lock is totally broken. It’s pretty cool up there—want to check it out?”

So was Vanessa into sunbathing now too? “Sure,” Dan agreed.

To his surprise, she collected a quart of Absolut and a bottle of tonic water from the fridge, tucking them into a paper bag with two plastic Scooby-Doo glasses, which she filled with ice. “I’ve kind of developed a taste for this stuff,” she admitted with a wicked grin.

Dan stared at her in amazement, his whole body trembling with anticipation. Vanessa never could hold her liquor; neither could he.

He followed her out of the apartment, down the dirty, cement-floored hall, and up the building’s cruddy stairs, which were painted black and smelled of turpentine. Two flights up, Vanessa pushed open a black metal door marked DO NOT ENTER and stepped out into the bright hot light of the rooftop. Suddenly the city was all around them, and the Williamsburg Bridge seemed close enough to touch. Off to the right, the East River looked glassy and cool as a sailing yacht glided past a barge pulling a load of Porta Johns, its white sails luffing in the thick afternoon air. To their left was the sugar factory, billowing smoke out of great smokestacks and adding to the smog. Across the bridge, Manhattan loomed large and full of promises. A born Manhattanite, Dan could never get over the feeling when he was in Brooklyn that something exciting was going on across the water, and that he was missing out.

“Over here,” Vanessa called over the roar of interborough traffic. She ducked under a metal beam supporting the giant wooden water tower that dominated the roof. “We’re totally protected from the sun and rain under here. And see, the condensation from the water tower even keeps the air kind of cool.”

Dan went over and ducked under the water tower. A black futon was spread out on the ground, complete with an assortment of black fake fur throw pillows. Vanessa seemed to have her own outdoor love den.

“You and Aaron must spend a lot of time up here,” he commented awkwardly.

She sat down on the futon and began pouring vodka into the plastic Scooby-Doo glasses. “Actually, I promised Blair not to hog it. We only just discovered it on Saturday, and yesterday it was raining, so actually Aaron’s never even been up here.”

Meaning she and Aaron had never done it up there, which kind of made Dan feel better about sitting down on the futon. Vanessa handed him a vodka tonic. “Sorry, no limes.”

He sat down and lit a cigarette. A helicopter motored loudly by. He had to admit, this was kind of a cool place to be.

“So, graduation speaker, huh? I was even thinking about maybe skipping my graduation.” Vanessa clicked her glass against his and then took a big, long sip. “To us.”

Dan squinted at her as he drank, holding the plastic glass with his cigarette hand, his pale face to the sun. There was something different about Vanessa this time. Something lazy and dangerous and sexy.

Cobra curled on hot cement, his mind began writing furiously, because it couldn’t help itself.

Vanessa grinned, returning his intense stare with a self-conscious chuckle. “I don’t know why I’m doing this but …” she began. Then she put down her glass, leaned slowly toward him, and shoved her tongue down his throat.

Whoa!

Dan’s dreamy brown eyes grew huge. He wondered if maybe Vanessa had been drinking all day and had somehow confused him with Aaron. Or maybe he and Aaron had gotten caught in some sort of mind-melt-time-warp-space-time-continuum-body-swapping ordeal straight out of the type of bad comic book he used to read when he was nine, and he really was Aaron. Nevertheless, it was sheer ecstasy kissing Vanessa again, and sheer agony to even think of pulling away. But after a few minutes, he forced himself to do it. “Um, can I just ask you—what are we doing?”

Vanessa grabbed the hem of his faded red Stussy T-shirt and lifted it up, peeking at his pale, flat stomach. “Don’t you sometimes wonder what the big deal is?” she asked, as if that were answer enough.

Dan didn’t say anything. Vanessa seemed to be going through some sort of experimental period, and he wasn’t about to get in the way, especially since it seemed to involve wanting to take his shirt off. And his pants. Even his socks seemed to be getting in the way of her need to express herself. And just so she wouldn’t feel left out, he helped her off with her clothes, too. Before long they were kneeling on the futon beneath the water tower, naked.

Talk about déjà vu!

Nothing Can Keep us Together