Nothing Can Keep Us Together (4 page)

“Do you have anything that isn’t … shiny?” Blair Waldorf demanded as she fingered the dresses on the circular rack in the back of Isn’t She Lovely, a tiny Williamsburg bridal and special-occasion-dresses boutique a block away from the apartment she shared with Vanessa. She walked by the boutique every day on her way to and from the coffee shop where a car service town car picked her up in the morning after she bought her large latte with an extra shot of espresso and dropped her off after school. Today she’d wandered inside, thinking it might be cool to buy a graduation dress in a place so completely off the map that no other girl in the senior class at Constance Billard could possibly have the same one she did. The problem was, with no designer label to show their merit, she wasn’t sure if the dresses were ugly in a cool way or just plain ugly.

“This one is very popular for confirmations,” the overly perfumed saleslady told her in heavily accented English. She held up a dazzling white, rhinestone-encrusted, polyester-lace-bodiced sundress with a pleated skirt that was so stiff and shiny, it looked like it had been laminated.

Blair glanced in one of the many mirrors all over the store and glared at the haughty brunette in a short light-blue-and-white seersucker Constance Billard uniform skirt and neat white-collared, baby pink polo shirt staring back at her, furious with herself all of a sudden. Who was she kidding, pretending not to need a graduation dress that was made to order by Oscar de la Renta or Chanel? She hitched her nude pink Fendi purse up on her shoulder and slid her tortoiseshell Parsol sunglasses up on her nose, tempted to buy the hideous dress the saleslady had just shown her and bring it home to Vanessa as a joke, pretending she was going to wear it to graduation. But the thought of spending money on anything so hideous, even in jest, made her even more furious. When had her life become so base?

Maybe when she decided to ditch Manhattan and become a Brooklyn hipster?

Usually Blair couldn’t leave a store without buying at least one thing, but usually the stores she went into were stocked with irresistibles. As far as Blair was concerned, Isn’t She Lovely should have been named Isn’t She Ugly.

Across the litter-strewn expanse of Broadway from Vanessa’s crumbling gray, five-story walk-up apartment building, a cluster of people stood looking up, their mouths agape.

Hmm, wonder why?

Oblivious and not at all curious about anything the locals might find interesting, Blair hurried across the street, mounted the crumbling cement stoop, and unlocked the building’s graffitied front door. She held her breath as she climbed the steps up to Vanessa’s second-story apartment. The building was practically sitting on top of a sugar factory, and the air around it was as sweet and heavy as syrup-logged French toast—mixed with a twinge of stray cat pee.

Yum.

“Foul,” Blair muttered aloud while still trying to hold her breath. How she longed for the immaculate putty-colored marble lobby of the Seventy-second Street full-service, white-glove, luxury apartment building where she’d lived until now. Oh, how she missed the sweep of the doorman’s hunter green wool cape as he opened the door to her cab and helped her with her bags, shielding her from the rain with his enormous black umbrella. How she yearned for the hum of the burgundy velvet-upholstered-elevator as it whisked her up to the penthouse.

The black-painted door to the apartment was standing open, shedding little chips of old black paint onto the dusty cement floor of the hallway. “Honey, I’m home!” Blair called out tentatively as she stepped inside the apartment that she’d gladly redecorated only a few weeks before in shades of lavender, dove gray, and celery. The small, low-ceilinged one-bedroom looked so much prettier than it had when she’d moved in, especially without those revolting black sheets in the windows. She and Vanessa had even bonded—they really had. And it was fun to live somewhere so different from the place where she’d grown up. Really, it was. But she was still a little homesick. After all, Isn’t She Lovely was hardly a replacement for Barneys.

“Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes!” a boy’s voice, hoarse with ecstasy, echoed down the back stairway and into the apartment.

Ew.

Blair’s lips curled into a grimace. Vanessa and Aaron were at it again, up on the roof. Not that they hadn’t spent the entire night last night moaning and howling like wild dogs. Blair’s stomach turned and she poured herself a glass of water from the Brita filter she’d bought because she didn’t trust the water in Brooklyn. Since breaking up with Nate, she hadn’t once made herself sick—that would be the ultimate sign of weakness, and she was no longer weak—but the image of Vanessa and Aaron, their shaved heads locked and their pale bodies thrashing up on the roof in broad daylight, was too similar to the image of Serena and Nate thrashing around in Isabel Coates’s pool house bathtub. It was enough to make her want to violently hurl the mango smoothie she’d drunk three hours ago.

Gulping her glass of water, she gripped the cracked white Formica countertop to steady herself. On the ancient electric stove was a pot of stale water with two cold, gray-pink tofu dogs lolling inside—leftovers from her stepbrother Aaron’s disgusting breakfast, or lunch, or dinner. What with the awful dresses in the store across the street, the yucky-smelling entryway, the moaning sex from the rooftop that was supposed to be reserved for twilight v&t’s with Vanessa while they planned a way to sabotage Serena’s run for senior speaker, Blair had had enough. She dug into her Fendi purse and grabbed her cell phone, pressing the buttons frantically.

“Blair darling? To what do I owe the pleasure, chica?” Chuck Bass answered in a loud voice, sounding more gay than usual. “Don’t tell me, you’ve secretly been in love with me all these years and now that we’re about to graduate, you’re finally bold enough to tell me.”

“Not exactly,” Blair snapped. “You’re the only one I know with a car.”

“A pearl gray convertible Jag isn’t just a car, it’s a mobile pleasure den.” Chuck tooted the horn in the background. “I happen to be in ‘the car’ as we speak.”

“Whatever.” Blair threw open the loose-hinged plywood door to the cramped, mothball-smelling coat closet in the living room and yanked out her two matching brown leather, gold-embossed Louis Vuitton duffel bags. The bags were still partially packed, since Vanessa didn’t have enough closet space to accommodate Blair’s endless wardrobe. All she had to do was fold in the dresses hanging from the closet rail and fill a shopping bag or four or five with the mere thirty-six pairs of shoes she’d brought with her, and she’d be ready to roll. “Can you come get me?”

“Of course, my sweet.” Chuck’s voice took on a faux paternal tone. “You’re not in any sort of trouble, are you?”

Blair grimaced at the sight of a roach motel camped in the back of the closet, a half-dead roach flailing its hind legs on its doorstep. “I’m in Williamsburg,” she wailed, as if she were being held hostage in somebody’s basement.

“And Manhattan needs you,” Chuck intoned. “We absolutely need you!”

Blair giggled. It felt good not pretending anymore that she was going to become one of those hipster girls who wore striped kneesocks and vintage kilts and kooky glasses, ate hummus all the time, and went to art galleries after school instead of to Barneys. She pulled her favorite red-and-white polka-dotted Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress off its hanger and put it on, shedding her black Habitual jean skirt and boring dark gray C&C California T-shirt. Manhattan needed her. Of course it did.

“I’ll be there in five, honey. I’m just getting on the bridge now,” Chuck assured her, the Jag’s engine roaring in the background. “So, where am I taking you, anyway? Back home?”

Blair hadn’t thought about this. Or rather, she had, but home wasn’t her first choice. Her mother was still mentally unsound after marrying Cyrus Rose that fall and having his baby daughter that spring. Cyrus was loud and sweaty and obnoxious and preferred to wander the house wearing only a loosely tied green silk robe and nothing else. Baby Yale was adorable most of the time, but she had taken over Blair’s room, shunting Blair into Aaron’s old room, where Blair’s cat, Kitty Minky, had developed a peeing problem in reaction to the scent of Aaron’s boxer, Mookie. Speaking of—where was Mookie? He usually came with Aaron when Aaron stayed over at Vanessa’s instead of sleeping in Blair’s brother Tyler’s room or passing out on the leather sofa in the penthouse library after too many organic beers.

Nudge, nudge.

“Maybe now that I’m into Yale, I won’t mind being at ho …” Blair’s voice trailed off as inspiration hit and a new, fabulous idea began to form in her head.

After her father had moved out of the penthouse and before he’d left for France to live with his gay French lover—Jacques or Jean-Claude, or whatever the fuck his name was—he’d camped out at the Yale Club for a few months. It was right across the street from Grand Central Station, but, unlike the old train station, the Yale Club had never really been renovated and still had that shabbily elegant Old New York vibe. It was the type of place Blair’s former best friend Serena would adore, while Blair would normally have preferred a more sumptuously elegant suite at the Carlyle or one of the city’s other landmark hotels. But she’d already stayed in a suite at the Plaza, where she’d been treated like just another well-to-do guest. At the Yale Club she’d be “Harold Waldorf’s daughter,” which was almost as good as being royalty.

Almost.

“Actually, I’m moving to the Yale Club—at least until I figure out what I’m doing this summer,” she announced into the phone, smiling down at her perfectly manicured coral pink fingernails as if this had been her plan all along.

“Is that so?”

Blair looked up from her overstuffed black Barneys shopping bags full of shoes. Vanessa was standing in the open doorway to the apartment, hands on her pale, round hips, wearing a black wifebeater T-shirt and black cotton Hanes underwear. That scraggly boy Blair thought Vanessa had dumped for good was standing behind her, wearing only a pair of gray Fruit of the Looms, while the rest of his worn-too-often-to-ever-come-clean clothes were bundled in his arms. A huge grapey bruise stood out on his throat, just below his Adam’s apple.

Ew—a hickey!

“It’s the one with the graffiti all over the door. I’ll be downstairs in five minutes,” Blair instructed Chuck before hanging up. She put her hands on her hips, trying to think of a nice way to tell Vanessa that she was out of there. It was amusing being friends with the shaven-headed girl everyone in her class thought was so weird, and Blair genuinely liked Vanessa for her no-bullshit approach to everything and her dark, sarcastic sense of humor. But as graduation approached, Vanessa had grown slightly manic—asking Blair to paint her toenails on an almost nightly basis and even getting Blair to try that stupid brush-on hair-highlighting kit with her. Thank God it had only been temporary. Vanessa seemed to crave company, so if two-timing Blair’s stepbrother, Aaron, with this straggly Dan guy made her happy, Blair honestly didn’t care. She personally was through with men. In just a few short minutes, Vanessa would have the apartment all to herself again—she could go ahead and have a full-fledged orgy if she wanted to.

“Someone’s coming to pick me up,” she said in lieu of an explanation.

Vanessa had just been caught cheating on Blair’s stepbrother, Aaron, with Dan, who was supposed to be history. Most people would have acted at least slightly sheepish in such a situation. Not Vanessa. She blinked her big brown eyes accusingly at Blair. “You’re leaving? How come? Are you pissed at me?” She cocked her shaved head and corrected herself. “I mean, more than usual?”

To call Blair and Vanessa the Odd Couple was an under-statement. Blair had been raised by a team of nannies and had attended preschool at Park Avenue Presbyterian, just like all the other children from the best Upper East Side families. Vanessa had been raised by her hippie artist parents in Vermont and been homeschooled until the age of ten. She’d moved to Williamsburg to live with her older sister, Ruby, at the age of fifteen and had spent her first two summers working double shifts at the local Kinko’s copy shop to earn enough money to buy her first digital video camera. Blair had spent her summers playing tennis on her father’s estate in Newport, Rhode Island, or helping Serena filch bottles of Stoli out of the liquor cabinet in Serena’s Ridgefield, Connecticut, country house. Blair modeled herself after Audrey Hepburn, and her favorite color was bright pink. Vanessa modeled herself after no one, except maybe the great Swedish avant-garde filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, and wore only black. They couldn’t have been more different.

“No.” Blair shrugged, allowing a small smile to play on her foxlike face. “Why would I be mad?”

Vanessa padded into the kitchen and retrieved one of the waterlogged tofu pups Aaron had left in the pot on the stove, eating half of it in one bite. She’d developed a taste for them since hooking up with Aaron. “Want one?” she offered both Blair and Dan, waggling it at them like a chewed-on finger.

Gee, thanks.

“I’m good,” Dan mumbled, fumbling with his rumpled pants.

Blair flapped her hands at the tofu pup, the half-naked Dan and his icky hickey, the dingy-despite-its-new-coat-of-paint apartment, and all of Williamsburg outside. “It’s just not me,” she tried to explain.

Vanessa nodded slowly. Ever since Blair had found Serena and Nate colluding in the pool house bathtub at Isabel Coates’s Hamptons beach house, she’d been acting a little manic. “Are you sure the Yale Club will even take you? It’s not like you’re an alumna yet.”

Blair shoved an armload of jewel-toned Juicy Couture tracksuits into her already-heaving duffel bag. She used to be so sensitive about the subject of Yale, but that was before she got in. “My dad’s a member. They’ll take me or he’ll kick their asses.”

Vanessa was still watching her. Blair could hear the ticking of the electric clock on the old stove. “Oh. I almost forgot.” She picked up the Browns of London shopping bag she’d lugged all the way home from school.