Nothing Can Keep Us Together (7 page)

When Aaron came home from band practice Vanessa was standing in front of the bathroom sink, contemplating her hair—or lack thereof—in the round, toothpaste-spattered mirror, still wet from her shower. She’d ridded herself of Dan’s musty smell and was horrified to discover that she sort of enjoyed the fact that Aaron had absolutely no clue.

When she’s bad, she’s bad.

“Nice towel,” Aaron observed, planting a kiss on the nape of her neck.

“Thanks.” Vanessa batted her eyes and placed her hands on her hips, modeling the lavender-and-black chintz floral bath towel, one of the many Blair had purchased for the apartment during her short but sweet stay.

Aaron wrapped his arms around Vanessa’s waist. “Did you get my present?”

He looked cute in an orange T-shirt and baggy green army shorts, and he smelled like hay from the herbal cigarettes he was always smoking.

“Blair moved out,” Vanessa told him evenly, ignoring his question about the cheesy love/friendship ring he’d left on the kitchen counter that morning. “She couldn’t stand living so far away from Barneys in a walk-up with graffiti on the door.”

“Well, can you blame her?” Aaron smiled at their reflection in the mirror—two dark shaved heads, two pairs of brown eyes, two pairs of thin red lips. “Did you get my e-mail?”

We could almost be twins, Vanessa thought, creeping herself out. She was suddenly reminded of those freaky old V.C. Andrews books she’d read when she was twelve, about a brother and sister who were locked together in an attic and eventually gave birth to twins. “Blair wants to be our senior speaker. If I miss graduation, she’ll kill me.”

Aaron rolled his eyes, flipped the cracked white toilet seat lid down, and sat down on it. He sighed. “I don’t know how she does it.”

“What do you mean?” Vanessa couldn’t help observing that this little bathroom chat was the longest they’d ever talked without forgetting what they were talking about and ripping each other’s clothes off.

“You’re like the most righteous person I know, but she even manages to get you to do her bidding.” Aaron explained, rubbing the back of his neck where the supershort shaved bits were growing in.

“It’s not like that. We’re friends. Anyway,” Vanessa quickly changed the subject. “I think driving across the country and camping out and stuff sounds … cool.” She put her hands in her pockets, hoping that Aaron would forget all about the ring. “I mean, as long as there’s, like, a bathroom and a shower we can use.”

Sounds like she doesn’t quite know the meaning of “camping out.”

“Really?” Aaron stood up, grinning as he turned her around to face him. “So, are you, like, completely naked underneath that towel?” he asked, kissing her neck and shoulders.

Vanessa knew she ought to have been overwhelmed by her outrageous deception. Dan had left only an hour ago. Now here she was with Aaron, her real boyfriend, pretending it was perfectly natural to be taking a shower in the late afternoon, when she normally only took one in the morning. Maybe she was just losing her mind, but somehow it made being with Aaron and Dan all the more exciting.

Aaron turned on the shower and pulled his shirt off over his head. “I say we both need to get really, really clean.” He tugged on Vanessa’s towel. “Come on, I’ll wash your hair for you.”

The towel fell to the floor and Vanessa laughed out loud, amazed at how unguilty she felt. The truth was, in the very near future she wouldn’t be seeing much of these boys at all, so why not enjoy them now, while they were standing right in front of her—naked?

After their steaming hot shower, Aaron busied himself cooking wheat gluten chicken nuggets with sweet potato fries, while Vanessa edited her final film project, a series of interviews with seniors from Constance and other private schools that she’d filmed over the course of the past few months.

Some of the interviews were funny and insightful, but some of them could be interpreted in kind of a bad way if you didn’t know the people. She decided to start with Blair’s interview. Blair looked totally awesome sitting in front of Bethesda Fountain in Central Park wearing a black polo shirt and her jade-and-Swarovski-crystal chandelier earrings. A group of shirtless boys were playing Frisbee in the background, girls in bikinis sprawled at their feet.

“For me it’s not just about having sex, though. It’s about my whole future. Yale and Nate: the two things I’ve always wanted …” Blair declared, sounding unusually psychotic. “And if I don’t get in … someone is going to fucking pay. This is, like, my one chance to be happy, and I think I deserve it, you know?”

Well, hello, crazy bitch.

Vanessa winced. Of course it was good film, but considering how things had turned out with Nate, it would hurt Blair’s feelings too much to use it.

Aaron came out of the kitchen to peer over her shoulder at the little screen on her digital video camera, a carrot stick in his mouth. “When’s my part?”

Vanessa fast-forwarded until she got to Aaron’s interview, taken late one night in her bedroom—which explained why he was wearing only a lavender-and-celery-green striped sheet. The interview had been done before he cut his hair, and brown mini dreadlocks stuck out in all directions from his head.

“I’ve been feeling really, really good about myself since I heard from Harvard,” the practically naked, dreadlocked Aaron told the camera. “I mean, I used to be this skinny kid with braces and frizzy hair, and now I’m, like, the king. It totally rocks!”

Good for you, dude. Good for you.

Behind them, the timer on the oven went off. “I sound like an asshole,” Aaron observed casually as he headed back into the kitchen. “But you can use it. I don’t mind.”

Vanessa went back to Blair’s segment, watching it over and over and trying to edit it in such a way that Blair wouldn’t sound totally demonic. Maybe Blair didn’t have Nate anymore, but she had gotten into Yale in the end. As she scrolled over and over through the footage in her film, listening to her classmates’ and peers’ hilariously self-absorbed statements and sad truths, she grew more and more reticent about missing graduation. Not that she was actually into group hugs or white dresses, but it seemed kind of wrong to miss out on the one day she’d been waiting for since she started at Constance Billard in ninth grade.

Like hooking up with two guys on the same day wasn’t wrong?

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 Daniel Humphrey,

I was so excited with hiring you for my summer assistant, I forgot to tell you the subject of my book: sex poems. I mean, poems that are about making sex through the ages, which is interesting to me because I teach poetry and biology, and I am Greek! The book has no title yet but maybe you will help me think of a good one! I also did not explain that you will live in my small home with my two dogs, Plato and Plato Jr., and my son, Mick, because Evergreen does not allow students to move in until orientation in end of August. Hammock in attic is fixed, so come! We will make a good time with Micky’s homemade ouzo!

Sincerely,

Pierre

Nothing Can Keep us Together

Dan sat in the back of AP English class, his hands trembling as he reread the letter. Professor Papadametriou sounded like a nice man, and he’d probably make a good advisor. Dan could totally picture enjoying a few glasses of wine in the professor’s home while he talked about the fall of Troy and his son stuffed grape leaves or whatever. The thing was, Dan didn’t want to go to Evergreen at all anymore.

“Dan, could you enlighten us as to who the narrator is in this poem?” Ms. Solomon asked. She was wearing a tight black lace mini tank dress, her nearly translucent, thin, spidery arms and bony legs poking out of it, making her look like a cartoon witch in a Halloween TV special. She wound a strand of mousy dark blond hair around her index finger, a gesture she probably thought was irresistible to Dan. Ms. Solomon had a serious crush on him, and whenever she suspected he wasn’t paying attention in class, she stomped her feet like a petulant child and asked him a question, demanding his attention.

He wasn’t even sure which poem she was talking about, although he knew it was Robert Frost, and he’d memorized most of Frost.

“It’s either the guy or the horse,” Dan answered mechanically without even looking up.

“Thanks, Stormfield,” Ms. Solomon cracked sarcastically.

“Even I could do better than that,” Chuck Bass jeered from the front of the room, where he’d decided to sit every day up until the final exam, in his last-ditch effort to get better than a D in English. Chuck was wearing orange-and-white plaid Bermuda shorts, a white polo shirt, white patent leather shoes, and a matching white patent leather belt. It was the sort of outfit a Park Avenue mom would dress her three-year-old son in for church, only Chuck had chosen the outfit himself. Sweetie sat in Chuck’s lap, wearing a tiny rhinestone tiara.

Dan shrugged. He was beyond Chuck’s nasty wisecracks, and beyond Ms. Solomon’s insolent crush. Way beyond. In fact, right now he was so consumed with love for Vanessa, he wasn’t sure what to do with himself.

Uh-oh.

On the subway he’d started writing his graduation speech, modeling it after all the stupid graduation speeches he’d heard in movies. We are the future. The ticket to a successful life is a good education. The world awaits us with all it has to teach. But that had been before he and Vanessa had sex on her roof. Now he was pretty sure he was changing the topic. For how could he not write about love?

Double uh-oh.

He glanced down at the letter again, picked up his chewed-on black Paper Mate pen, and turned to a clean sheet of paper in his loose-leaf binder.

Dear Professor Papadametriou,

Thank you for offering me the opportunity to work with you this summer. However, something has come up and I will not be able to accept the position. I would very much like to meet you and your dogs and your son sometime. Until then, good luck, and good luck with your book.

All the best,

Daniel Humphrey

P. S. I’ve enclosed a poem you might want to include in your book.

He turned to another fresh page.

view from the roof

The view is better from up here.

See her factories, her rivers.

If her hills weren’t in the way

I could see into the windows of the apartment across the street.

See a woman pouring milk as she sets the table for dinner.

Oh there. There’s the table. There.

I can see everything from here.

There. Yes. Right there.

Dan wasn’t sure if he really had the guts to send such a sexually explicit poem to a professor he’d never even met, but it would be cool if Professor Papadametriou actually used the poem in his book.

Ms. Solomon sat down at her desk and rested her pointy, unpleasant chin in her hands, looking completely defeated because she’d worn her sexiest dress just for Dan and he’d barely looked at her for the last forty minutes.

“I’d like you to open your notebooks and take the last ten minutes of class to write whatever you feel like writing,” she instructed with unusual generosity. Normally she droned on about Wordsworth or some other dead poet until five minutes after the bell had rung, driving the boys apeshit. Dan took the opportunity to get started on a new graduation speech.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered here today to celebrate the end of the first chapter in our lives and the beginning of the second. We already know what comes next. Four years of college, and then another graduation. But whoop-dee-doo! Now is the time to be in love. …

Whoop-dee-doo? Triple, super-duper uh-oh.

Nothing Can Keep us Together

Senior homeroom was last period on Tuesday in the Constance Billard senior lounge, a windowless room above the library that had been a storage area until it was given to the seniors as a place to relax and escape from all the underclassmen. No teacher was present, which meant that none of the girls were paying any attention to Mimi Halperin, the perky but lame president of the senior class, as she made announcements about senior privileges during exam week.

“No uniforms all week, girls. And we only have to come to school for our exams. Awesome, huh?” Mimi clapped her chubby hands together and pushed her thick black hair behind her weirdly small ears. The other girls yawned and looked at their watches, eager to leave so they could continue their quest for the perfect graduation dress or work on their tans. Mimi had been the class clown and everyone’s buddy way back in third grade, but now that they were all grown up, no one thought she was funny. Still, they’d voted for her for president at the end of junior year because she was the only one who seemed to want to do it. Because it went on your transcript for college, class president was a coveted position, up until senior year. The class president had to attend weekly student council meetings at 7:30 A.M. and help out at all the school functions, like the book fair and the scholarship fund drive. It was a lot of work, and now that it was the end of senior year and everyone was already into college, no one cared.

“Moving on, I’m pleased to announce—drumroll, please—our senior class graduation speaker is … Blair Waldorf! Yay, Blair!!” Mimi jumped up and down on her stubby legs and clapped her hands over her head like this was the best thing that had ever happened.

Take that, you bitch! Blair gloated silently at the back of Serena’s pale blond head. That’s what you get for trying to sabotage me.

The lounge hummed with gossip as everyone discussed the results. No one had really wanted Blair to be speaker, because her whole speech was going to be about herself, but they questioned Serena’s ability to write a coherent speech.

“She’s so dumb from all the drugs she did up at boarding school, she’d probably have to bribe Blair to write the speech for her anyway,” Laura Salmon whispered to Rain Hoffstetter.

“I heard Serena dropped out,” Rain whispered back. “Nate gave her some gross STD and she’s going to miss graduation anyway because she has to go to some clinic in Belgium to try and get cured.”

“Is that true?” Blair wondered out loud. Not about the STD part, but about the dropping-out-of-the-running-for-senior-speaker part. She was reluctant to prolong homeroom, because there were only five more minutes left for her to get changed, powdered, glossed, and perfumed before she was scheduled to meet up with a very hot English lord who’d promised to spend the afternoon dress shopping with her. Last night over Ketel One martinis, Lord Marcus had confessed that his squash game had been a total disaster because he’d been thinking about her the whole time. And Blair had confessed to Googling him the minute she’d unpacked her laptop. His family, the Beaton-Rhodeses, owned the largest textile mill in England and lived in a very huge and historical old mansion outside of London. They also owned a villa near Milan and a beach compound in Barbados. Marcus’s parents were special friends of the royal family, and Marcus himself had even attended Princess Diana’s funeral. He was listed by Hello! magazine as one of the most eligible young bachelors in England, and Blair was determined to win his heart before any of those greedy English bitches got to him. But first she needed to know if she’d beaten Serena by getting elected senior speaker or if she’d only won because she was the only girl left in the running. She glared at Serena and repeated, “Is that true?”

Serena squirmed in her seat, pulling her school uniform down over her bare knees and pulling up her pale yellow ankle socks so they looked nerdy and ridiculous. She’d wanted her act of martyrdom to go unnoticed by the rest of the senior class. Now everyone knew about it. “Is there a problem?” she responded, sounding a lot bitchier than she’d intended.

“But Blair, you want to be our speaker, right?” Vanessa Abrams asked from her seat right next to Blair’s. Vanessa was wearing a black tank top and no bra and should have been sent home for being inappropriate and out of uniform. Normally this sort of go-class-go type of homeroom drove her nuts, but she’d been feeling so nostalgic about graduating lately, she was actually sort of into it.

“Yes,” Blair admitted. “I do.”

Vanessa rolled her eyes and gave her friend’s arm a gentle little shove. “Then what do you care?”

Blair shrugged. “Can we go now?” she asked Mimi, eager to get out of her uniform and into the tight white Juicy Couture clamdiggers and green Marni halter top she’d brought to wear shopping with Lord Marcus.

Serena shot Vanessa a grateful glance. She really hadn’t meant to make a fuss. And maybe, when she thought about it later—like, years later, when they both had blue old-lady hair and had retired to Mustique or some other hot and sunny place, Blair might hate her a little less.

After homeroom, the senior girls congregated outside Constance Billard’s great blue doors, still buzzing about the senior speaker situation. They couldn’t help but notice the gorgeous, tall, golden-haired boy who was standing on the sidewalk only a few feet away, wearing perfectly ironed jeans and the cutest salmon-pink-and-white checked Thomas Pink button-down shirt. Blair brushed by them wearing a completely different outfit from what she’d worn to school that day, sprinted down the steps, and, to their complete amazement, kissed the boy on the cheek without even stopping for air.

“Nice to see you too,” Lord Marcus chuckled, holding her arms and looking her up and down appreciatively.

Blair blushed hot pink down to her jade green Kate Spade flats. God, he was dreamy—even better than the boy she’d dreamed up to star opposite her in the movie in her mind, because he was real, and royal, and more perfect than Nate could ever attempt to be.

Last night at the Yale Club bar, when she’d begun to slur her words from drinking too much Ketel One, he’d held her hand all the way back to their rooms, kissing it gently before he said good night. Blair had swooned so hard she almost puked. How could something so insanely sexy come so effortlessly to him? It had been all she could do to keep herself from sledgehammering the wall between them with her black salon-size Vidal Sassoon hair dryer and jumping his adorable bones.

The group of senior girls clustered in front of the school in their matching light blue seersucker uniforms, looking a little like the pigeons roosting in the eaves of the school roof as they stared incredulously at Blair and her hot British lord.

“What, did she, like, create him in a lab or something?” Laura Salmon demanded with a mixture of jealousy and awe.

She pulled her white eyelet blouse down tight across her chest in a lame attempt to show off her new red DKNY demicup bra.

“He’s completely perfect,” Isabel Coates breathed, yanking out some of the bobby pins holding down her grown-out brown bangs. “But I bet he, like, washes dishes at the Yale Club or something.”

“Actually, I think he’s her cousin—you know how she has that aunt in Scotland?” Rain improvised. “She’s just pretending he’s her hunky new boyfriend to make Nate jealous.”

“But Nate’s not even here,” Kati Farkas pouted, her shiny pink lower lip jutting out in a way that made her look even dumber than she actually was.

“No, but Serena is,” Isabel remarked insightfully.

The girls turned to stare at Serena, who had just stepped outside the blue doors. She adjusted the earphones on her pink iPod mini and blinked her gigantic lake-blue eyes, her long, pale blond hair gleaming in the bright, hot sun. She waved to the other girls and then started on her merry way, traipsing down the steps until she caught sight of Blair, hanging on the lapels of her royal British hunk.

Lord Marcus was about to hail them a cab down to the Oscar de la Renta boutique on Madison and Sixty-sixth Street, where he’d promised to help Blair sort out her graduation dress issues, when Blair suddenly grabbed his pink-and-white checked shirt, nearly ripping it off his body.

“Kiss me now,” she told him urgently. Of course it was sort of unexpected—they’d only just met yesterday—but didn’t that make it all the more romantic?

Or all the more bizarre.

“Because somebody’s looking or because you want me to?” Lord Marcus responded with an amused, irresistible smile that made it very clear he didn’t care either way.

“Both.” Blair closed her eyes in anticipation of the kiss. Of course she wasn’t in love, yet. It was the idea of Lord Marcus she loved. But their first kiss lasted longer than an on-screen kiss, tasted better than steak frites, and felt better than a day-dream—way better. It certainly wouldn’t take much for her to fall genuinely in love. She was definitely almost there.

A cab pulled to a stop beside them and, his lips still pressed against Blair’s, Lord Marcus raised his hand to flag it. But the cab was already occupied by a very tense Nate Archibald. Nate opened the cab door, and Lord Marcus and Blair stepped aside to allow Serena to breeze past them and into the backseat. She pulled the door closed, looking up at Blair and Lord Marcus through the window with her huge blue eyes. Blair stared back, her body pressed against Lord Marcus. Serena lifted her hand to wave at them, her perfect lips parting in a smile as the cab took off toward Fifth Avenue.

And even though Serena was already gone, Blair smiled back. Because for once in her life, she honestly didn’t give a damn where they were going.

Nothing Can Keep us Together