Because I'm Worth It, Page 2

  “I just think we should follow the handout,” Blair insisted stubbornly.

  “It’s up to you guys,” Serena told the younger girls.

  Mary, Vicky, and Cassie waited, ears pricked, for the scoop on Serena’s love life. Elise reached out and poked a greasy onion ring with a trembling, chewed-on fingernail and then snatched her hand away again as if she’d been burned. Jenny licked her winter-chapped lips. “Since we’re supposed to talk about body image, I guess I have something to say,” she told the group, her voice wavering. She looked up to find Blair nodding and smiling at her encouragingly.

  “Yes, Ginny?”

  Jenny looked down at the table again. Why was she even telling them this? Because I need to tell someone, she realized. She forced herself to keep talking despite the furious red-hot blush of embarrassment burning her face. “This weekend I almost had a consultation for a breast reduction.”

  Mary, Vicky, and Cassie scooted forward in their chairs to listen. Not only was peer group going to be the place to pick up the latest fashion trends from the two coolest girls in school, it was going to be a major resource for gossip!

  “I made the appointment,” Jenny continued, “but then I didn’t go.” She pushed her plate away and took a sip of water, trying to ignore the curious stares of the other girls. The group was riveted, and stealing the spotlight from Blair and Serena was no easy feat.

  Elise picked up an onion ring, took a tiny bite, and dropped it on the plate again. “What made you change your mind?” she asked.

  “You don’t have to answer that,” Blair interrupted, remembering something Ms. Doherty had said in their training session about not pushing the members of the group to open up before they were ready. She glanced at her coleader. Serena was busy examining her split ends with a dreamy, faraway look, as if she hadn’t heard a word anyone had said. Blair turned back to Jenny and tried to think of something reassuring to say so Jenny wouldn’t feel like she was the only one in the group with breast-size issues.

  “I always wanted bigger breasts. I’ve seriously considered getting implants.” It wasn’t a total lie. She was only a B cup and had always aspired to a C.

  Who hasn’t?

  “Really?” Serena demanded, drifting back to earth. “Since when?”

  Blair took another angry bite of cake. Was Serena purposely trying to sabotage her leadership skills? “You don’t know everything about me,” she snapped.

  Cassie, Vicky, and Mary kicked each other under the table. This was so exciting! Serena van der Woodsen and Blair Waldorf were having a fight, and they were witnessing every word of it!

  Elise combed her chewed-on fingernails through her thick blond bob. “I think it was really, um, amazing of you to tell us about that, Jenny.” She smiled shyly at Jenny. “And I think it was brave of you not to do it.”

  Blair scowled. Why hadn’t she said something about how brave Jenny was instead of making that outrageous statement about wanting implants? Who knew what these stupid freshmen were going to say about her once the group broke up? Then she remembered something else Ms. Doherty had gone over in their training session.

  “Oops. I think we were supposed to say something about confidentiality before we started. You know, like, nothing we say here will be repeated outside the group, or whatever?”

  Too late. In a matter of minutes every girl in the school would be discussing Blair Waldorf’s upcoming breast-implant job. I heard she’s waiting until the day after graduation . . . etc., etc.

  Jenny shrugged. “It’s okay. I don’t care who you tell.” It wasn’t like she could hide her enormous boobs anyway. They were just there.

  Elise bent down and picked up her beige Kenneth Cole backpack. “Um, there are only eight minutes left before the bell rings. Is it all right if I go out and buy a yogurt now?” she asked.

  Serena nudged the plate of onion rings towards Elise. “Have some more of these,” she offered generously.

  Elise shook her head, her freckled face flushed pink. “No, thanks. I don’t eat in public.”

  Serena frowned. “Really? That’s weird.” She winced as Blair elbowed her in the arm, hard. “Ow! God, what was that for?”

  “Maybe if you’d actually gone to peer group leader training, you’d get it,” Blair growled under her breath.

  “Can I go now?” Elise asked again.

  It occurred to Blair that the peer group freshmen would really love her if she let them all go early. She could use the extra eight minutes to get to the hair salon on time anyway. “You can all go,” she said, smiling sweetly, “unless you really want to stay and listen to Serena talk about love for the rest of the period.”

  Serena stretched her arms over her head and grinned up at the ceiling. “I could talk about love all day.”

  Jenny stood up. Ever since Nate had ditched her, love was the last thing she wanted to talk about. Funny—she’d thought Blair was going to be the peer group leader she couldn’t deal with, but it was turning out to be Serena.

  Elise stood up, too, tugging on her oversized pink turtle-neck sweater as if it was too tight. “No offense, but if I don’t eat a yogurt before lunch is over, I’m going to pass out in geometry.”

  “I’ll come buy one with you,” Jenny told her, using that as an excuse to leave the table.

  “I may as well walk out with you guys,” Blair yawned, standing up, too.

  “Where are you going?” Serena demanded innocently. Normally on Mondays after lunch the two girls spent their luxurious double free period at Jackson Hole, drinking cappuccinos and making wild and fabulous plans for the summer after graduation.

  “None of your business,” Blair snapped. She’d been going to invite Serena to come with her to the salon, but now that Serena was being such a self-involved princess bitch, that was totally out of the question. She flipped her hair over her shoulder and slung her bag over her arm. “See you guys next week,” she added to Mary, Vicky, and Cassie as she followed Jenny and Elise through the exit and up the back stairs to Ninety-third Street.

  Back in the crowded cafeteria, Vicky leaned forward across the half-empty table. “So, tell us,” she urged Serena.

  Mary took a sip of one-percent milk and nodded eagerly. “Yes, yes. Tell.”

  Cassie tightened her light brown ponytail. “Tell us everything.”

  a very different kind of homework

  “So what do you want to film first?” Daniel Humphrey asked his best friend and girlfriend of six weeks, Vanessa Abrams. Dan attended renowned Upper West Side boys school Riverside Prep, while Vanessa attended Constance Billard, but they had gotten permission to collaborate on a special senior project called Making Poetry. Vanessa, a budding film director, was going to film Dan, a budding poet and occasional star of Vanessa’s films, writing and revising his poems.

  Not exactly box-office-smash material, but Dan was so cute in a scruffy, rumpled, angst-ridden-artist sort of way that people would probably want to see it anyway.

  “Just sit down at your desk and write something in one of those black notebooks like you always do,” Vanessa instructed, peering through the lens of her digital video camera to see if the light was okay. “Can you clear some of that shit off your desk?”

  Dan swept his arm over the desk and sent pens, paper clips, scraps of paper, rubber bands, books, empty packs of unfiltered Camels, matchbooks, and empty Coke cans crashing to the brown-carpeted floor. They were filming in Dan’s room because that was where he usually worked. Besides, it was a straight shot through the park from Constance Billard on East Ninety-third Street between Fifth and Madison to Dan’s apartment building on West Ninety-ninth Street and West End Avenue.

  “And maybe take your shirt off, too,” Vanessa suggested. Making Poetry was going to be about the artistic process, illustrating that what doesn’t go into the work is just as important as what does. There would be lots of shots of Dan crumpling up paper and throwing it angrily across the room. Vanessa wanted to show that writing—or creating an
ything, for that matter—wasn’t just a mental exercise: it was physical. Plus, Dan had these great little muscles in his back that she couldn’t wait to get on film.

  Dan stood up and peeled off his plain black T-shirt, tossing it onto his unmade bed where the Humphreys’ fat old cat, Marx, lay asleep on his back like a furry beached whale. Everything about the apartment Dan shared with his father, Rufus, an editor of lesser-known Beat poets, and his little sister, Jenny, was unmade, falling apart, or at the very least completely covered with cat hair and dust bunnies. It was a large, bright, high-ceilinged apartment, but it hadn’t been properly cleaned in twenty years, and the crumbling walls were gasping for a new coat of paint. Dan and his father and sister rarely threw anything away, either, so the sagging furniture and scratched wooden floors were strewn with old newspapers and magazines, out-of-print books, incomplete decks of cards, used batteries, and unsharpened pencils. It was the kind of place where your coffee got cat hair in it the minute you poured it, which was a problem Dan dealt with constantly because he was completely addicted to caffeine.

  “Do you want me to face the camera?” he asked, sitting down on his worn wooden desk chair and swiveling it toward Vanessa. “I could hold the notebook in my lap and write like this,” he demonstrated.

  Vanessa knelt down and squinted through the camera lens. She was wearing her gray pleated Constance Billard uniform with black tights, and the brown shag carpet felt bristly against her knees. “Yes, that’s nice,” she murmured. Oh, just look how pale and smooth Dan’s chest was! She could see every rib, and that nice line of tawny peach fuzz that ran up his belly to his navel! She inched forward on her knees, trying to get as close as possible without ruining the frame.

  Dan bit the end of his pen, smiled to himself, and then wrote, She’s got a shaved head, she wears black all the time, she needs a new pair of combat boots, and she hates to wear makeup. But she’s the kind of girl who believes in you and secretly gets your best poem published in The New Yorker. I guess you could say I love her.

  It was probably the corniest thing he’d ever written, but it wasn’t like he was going to publish it in his “Greatest Works” or anything.

  Vanessa inched forward some more, trying to capture the fervent white of Dan’s knuckles as he scribbled away. “What are you writing?” She pressed the record-sound button on her camera.

  Dan looked up, grinning at her through his messy bangs, his golden brown eyes shining. “It’s not a poem. It’s just a little story about you.”

  Vanessa felt her whole body warm up. “Read it out loud.”

  Dan scratched his chin self-consciously and then cleared his throat. “Okay. ‘She’s got a shaved head . . . ,’” he began, reading what he’d written.

  Vanessa blushed as she listened and then dropped the camera on the floor. She walked on her knees over to where Dan was sitting, pushed his notebook out of the way, and laid her head in his lap.

  “You know how we’re always talking about having sex but we’ve never done it?” she whispered, her lips brushing the rough cloth of his army-green cargo pants. “Why don’t we do it right now?”

  Beneath her cheek she felt Dan’s thigh muscle tighten. “Now?” He looked down and traced his finger along the edge of Vanessa’s ear. She had four piercings in each ear, but none of them had earrings in them. He took a deep breath. He’d been saving sex for a moment when it seemed poetic and right. Maybe that time was right now, a spontaneous moment. It seemed especially apt and ironic when in exactly an hour he’d be back at Riverside Prep, sitting in last-period AP Latin, listening to Dr. Werd read Ovid in his over-the-top Latin-nerd accent.

  Introducing double-free-period sex—the latest offering on the spring curriculum.

  “Okay,” Dan agreed. “Let’s do it.”

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

  hey people!

  Early rejection

  So I heard the Ivies have come up with a conspiracy to maintain their intrigue and exclusivity: This year they’re not accepting anyone early. Maybe it’s only a false rumor. But if you don’t get in early, try to think of it this way: Maybe you were too perfect. They just couldn’t handle it. And just think how much fun we’ll have if we all wind up at the same community college!

  To surgically enhance or not, that is the question

  The idea of surgically altering one’s body in any way has always freaked me out, not because I don’t think Dolly Parton looks great. She doesn’t look a day over forty and she must be two hundred by now. But I’d be worried the doctors would make a mistake and deflate one breast entirely or leave out a nostril or something. Of course I’m as girly a girl as girls come, and I know how important it is to feel good about my appearance. I try to think of it this way though: You know when you see a gorgeous boy on the street and you say to your friend, “Look at him!” and then your friend makes a face like, ugly? We all have such totally varied tastes that someone is going to look at you and think, yum-yum dee-lish, no matter what you think you look like. You just have to learn to see what they see.

  Your e-mail

  Q: Dear G-Girl,

  I heard you got in early to Bryn Mawr and you’re psyched because you like going to school with girls and you’re this huge volleyball-playing lesbo. Tee hee.

  —dorf

  A: Hello dorf,

  What kind of a name is dorf, anyway? I refuse to stoop to your level of humor or tell you where I applied to college, but my mother and sister both happened to go to Bryn Mawr, and guess what? They’re both hot.

  —GG

  Gotta dash home and check the mail for an important-looking business-sized envelope that may or may not determine my entire near future. Wish me luck!

  You know you love me.

  gossip girl

  waspoid prince tries to score

  When last-period French was finally over, Nate Archibald bid a hasty à demain to his St. Jude’s School classmates and hurried up Madison Avenue to the pizza place on the corner of Eighty-sixth Street, the workplace of his dependable pot dealer, Mitchell. Lucky for Nate, St. Jude’s was the oldest boys’ school in Manhattan and had kept its tradition of ending the school day at 2 P.M. for both lower- and upper-school boys, even though most of the other city schools let out at 4 P.M. The school’s reasoning was that it gave the boys extra time to play sports and do the copious amounts of homework they were sent home with every afternoon. It also gave them plenty of time to kick back and get high before, during, and after they played sports and did their homework.

  The last time Nate had seen Mitchell, the wisecracking Kangol hat–wearing dealer had said he’d be moving back home to Amsterdam very soon. Today was Nate’s last chance to score the biggest bag of sweet, Peruvian-grown weed Mitchell could provide. Blair had always complained about Nate’s pot-smoking when they were together, whining about how boring it was to watch him staring at the Persian rug on her bedroom floor for ten minutes when they could have been fooling around or at a party somewhere. Nate had always maintained that his pot-smoking was a mere indulgence, like eating chocolate—something he could give up any time. And just to prove it—not that he needed to prove anything to Blair anymore—he was going to go cold turkey after he’d smoked every last leaf of pot from the giant bag he was going to buy today. If he were careful, he could make the bag last a good eight weeks. Until then he preferred not to even think about quitting.

  “Two plain slices,” Nate told the gangly, balding pizza chef wearing a bright purple WELCOME TO LOSERVILLE T-shirt. He rested his elbows on the pizza joint’s red linoleum counter-top, nudging aside plastic containers filled with garlic salt, red pepper flakes, and oregano. “Where’s Mitchell?”

  Mitchell’s little side business was no secret in the pizza parlor. The pizza chef raised his bushy black eyebrows. His name might actually have been Ray, but even after years of buying pizza and pot there Nate still wasn’t sur
e. “Mitchell’s gone already. You missed him.”

  Nate patted the back pocket of his khakis, where he’d shoved his bulging Coach wallet, a sour lump of panic rising in his throat. Of course he wasn’t addicted, but he didn’t like being stuck without any weed at all when he’d been planning to roll a nice big fatty to while away the afternoon. And tomorrow afternoon, and the day after that . . .

  “What? You mean he left for Amsterdam already?”

  Ray—or maybe it was Roy—pulled open the shiny chrome door of the pizza oven and in one expert motion slipped two hot slices onto a double layer of paper plates and slid them across the counter in Nate’s direction. “Sorry, buddy,” he said only half sympathetically. “But from now on we sell pizza and soda and only pizza and soda. Got it?”

  Nate picked up the plate of pizza and then put it down on the counter again. He couldn’t believe his bad luck. He pulled out his wallet and removed a ten-dollar bill from the fat wad inside. “Keep the change,” he muttered, dropping the bill on the counter before leaving with his pizza.

  Out on the street, he wandered aimlessly toward the park, feeling like an abandoned dog. He’d been buying weed from Mitchell ever since eighth grade. One random May afternoon, Nate and his buddy Jeremy Scott Tompkinson had gone into the pizza place to buy a slice, and Mitchell had overheard Jeremy daring Nate to steal the container of oregano so they could take it home and smoke it. Mitchell had proposed to sell them something even more mood-enhancing, and Nate and his buddies had been coming back ever since. What was he supposed to do now, buy dime bags from one of those random, shifty-looking dudes in Central Park? Most of those guys sold crappy, dry, Texas-grown stuff anyway, not the succulent green buds Mitchell got directly from his uncle in Peru. Besides, he’d heard half the Central Park dealers were narcs just waiting to bust a kid like him.