Nothing Can Keep Us Together (6 page)

The final lacrosse team party of the year was in the St. Jude’s gym, which was kind of lame, since it was like eighty degrees outside, and a party in the park would have been much better. But the boys were all underage, and so a few six-packs in the gym and some pizza was all Coach Michaels would allow. Besides, the boys had all gotten high at Jeremy Scott Tompkinson’s house beforehand and would all go on to get trashed someplace else afterwards, so what did it matter?

Nate picked at his pizza and squeezed his eyelids shut. The last lax party of the year. The last lax party ever. Damn. The tears were already beginning to fall.

The gym was up on the roof of the six-story East End Avenue redbrick school building, with giant plate glass windows overlooking the shimmering East River and Queens. One afternoon near the end of tenth grade, Nate, Jeremy, Anthony Avuldsen, and Charlie Dern had volunteered to put away the gear after lax practice. They’d hung out for a while shooting hoops and then hidden from Rick, the janitor, behind the giant metal rack where the balls were stored. When Rick was done and the lights went out, they’d lined up in front of the windows—right where Nate was standing now—watched the sun set, smoked some weed, and eaten Starbursts until nine. An alarm had gone off when they finally left the building, but they’d sprinted to Carl Schurz Park a few blocks away and had never gotten caught. That had been a good time. Now the good times were about to be over. Maybe they already were.

Nate’s eyes scanned the horizon above the silvery water and low industrial buildings. Somewhere southwest of Queens was Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Blair lived now. He wondered what she was doing. Standing on her roof, maybe, smoking a Merit Ultra Light and sticking thumbtacks into the little voodoo dolls she’d probably made of him and Serena.

Don’t flatter yourself, honey.

Nate flicked the tears away from his gorgeous green eyes with his thumb and dropped his barely touched slice of pepperoni pizza into the garbage. Anthony came over, slung his thick-muscled arm around Nate’s shoulders, and kissed him on the cheek with mock tenderness. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

“Fuck off,” Nate replied, jabbing Anthony in the ribs.

His friend refused to be shaken off so easily. “Will you just drink a beer with us and stop moping already?” An overgrown hank of white-blond hair swung over Anthony’s freckled face and he brushed it away. “Dude, it’s party time!”

Nate laughed and allowed himself to be shepherded over to where the other guys were standing, drinking beer and listening to the coach talk. Jeremy hitched up his way-too-big dark blue Levi’s and tossed Nate a bottle of Heineken. “Hey, did you hear this? Every Wednesday after practice Coach has been popping Viagra and meeting his wife at the Pierre Hotel.” He cracked open another bottle for himself and took a long swig. “Who would have thunk.”

Coach Michaels stuck his hands into the pockets of his ever-present red Lands’ End windbreaker, looking pleased with himself. “Who says we can’t enjoy ourselves?”

Nate raised his bottle in silent answer to the coach’s question and chugged half its contents. Coach Michaels had all the gruff, fatherly qualities a guy could wish for in a coach, but Nate had never had much affection for him. The coach had made him captain halfway into the season only because the junior who was supposed to be captain went mysteriously AWOL from school. And the coach had yet to congratulate Nate on getting into Yale, Brown, and Harvard. It didn’t surprise Nate that the coach needed Viagra to get it on. He was sort of a cold fish.

Not that Nate was one to judge. After the trunk show at the St. Claire that morning Serena had been all over him, but instead of working up a sweat with her as the cab zoomed up Park Avenue, all he’d been able to do was look out at the grassy divider running down the center of the street, weeping because the heat had caused the red and yellow tulips to scatter their blossoms and wilt.

Guess the tulips weren’t the only things wilting.

Coach Michaels started on a tear about how minivans were actually the sexiest cars on the road because they had two sets of backseats. Nate sipped his beer as he reevaluated the coach. Even in his stupid red Lands’ End jacket he was healthy, sharp, and vital. No one ever caught him crying like a girl at the slightest thing. Maybe a little Viagra was exactly what Nate needed.

Oh, no.

Nate finished off his beer and set the bottle down on the long white collapsible table the school kitchen staff had set up for the party. Then he turned and headed toward the physical education staff office on the other side of the gym, next to the guys’ locker room. Everyone would think he was just taking a piss.

When in fact …

On Coach’s desk was an eight-by-ten photo-portrait of his wife, Patricia. She looked a little like Jennifer Aniston with wrinkles and a dyed-auburn pageboy haircut. Small and leathery, in a magenta-colored Lands’ End for Ladies version of Coach’s jacket, her brown eyes were shining and her pink, lipstick-free lips were parted in a broad, happy smile. Her teeth were so white they had to be fake, and Nate wondered if she took them out during those Viagra-induced escapades at the Pierre Hotel.

The P.E. department office smelled like stale potato chips and feet. A huge stack of old magazines was on the floor, topped with the swimsuit issue, which sported a picture of some impossibly hot Brazilian chick wearing nothing but what looked like a chain-mail thong. Her freckled arms hugged her bare chest casually, and she was laughing at the camera, as if to say, “Dare me to drop my arms!”

Nate was tempted to pick the magazine up and check it out but he resisted, pulling open the wide drawer beneath Coach’s green metal desktop instead. The drawer was a mess, full of those small foil bags of honey-roasted peanuts they pass out on airplanes, bottles of whiteout, bulldog clips, Advil, ice packs, and various vials of prescription medicine. Nate sorted through them until he found the one he was looking for. Casually, he dropped it in his Brooks Brothers khakis pocket and slipped out of the office.

The other boys were still listening to the coach brag about how many times he’d gotten his wife pregnant.

“I was already married by the time I was your age,” the coach was saying.

“Whoa,” Nate’s teammates murmured in horror.

Actually, being already married to Blair might have saved him a lot of trouble, Nate thought a little nonsensically.

Right. Like being married would have kept him from cheating on her?

“Yo, Babes!” Jeremy shouted over to Nate. He hitched up his jeans and grabbed another Heineken out of the cooler. “You got a girl hiding in the bathroom or what?”

The other boys looked up expectantly. Despite being a dumb, handsome jock just like the rest of them, Nate always managed to deliver the most surprises. The mere fact that he’d managed to bag both Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen had raised his status to near-godlike.

Nate smiled weakly and held out his hands, motioning for Jeremy to toss him another beer. If they could have seen what was in his pocket, they would have been very surprised indeed.

Nothing Can Keep us Together

“So good to have you with us, Miss Waldorf,” the Yale Club’s uptight concierge greeted her. “If you’ll just follow me, Dominick will tend to your luggage.”

“Thank you,” Blair replied graciously, pleased with herself for having made Chuck call and pretend to be her father, booking her a suite only minutes before she arrived. Of course, she could have asked her dad to call himself, but he was in Germany buying a plane or a car—she wasn’t sure which—for his new French boyfriend, Giles, and she didn’t want to bother him.

The Yale Club lobby was businesslike and unfussy, with a black-and-white marble floor, white walls, and a few Yale-blue wing-back chairs scattered about. Blair kept her chin up as the staff scurried about with her bags and keys, imagining she was Elizabeth Taylor, back in the days when she was beautiful, thin, and glamorous, arriving at some simple bed-and-breakfast in a small town in Scotland where her new film was being shot. She could tolerate the old-fashioned, crusty surroundings so long as she spent most of her time in the bar.

She followed the black-vested, bow-tie-wearing concierge into one of the old wood-paneled elevators and stood silently waiting for the door to close, praying that her suite would have lots of closet space and decent sheets. It was precisely one of those awkward, mundane little moments that made her feel like most of life was just waiting for something to happen.

But then, something did happen.

“Hold it!” a tall, broad-shouldered boy shouted as he dashed into the elevator. His light brown hair was short and wavy, and his skin was tanned a nice golden brown color. His glittering green eyes were framed by long, golden brown lashes, and his girlish red mouth was set off by a masculine square chin.

“Cheers,” he thanked the concierge in a British accent. Then he turned and stood facing Blair, unabashedly checking her out as the elevator doors rolled shut behind him.

Looks like Elizabeth has found her Richard Burton.

Blair teetered on her gold Manolo Egyptian Goddess sandals as they glided upwards. What a charming British accent. What a beautiful crisp white shirt and perfectly ironed Helmut Lang jeans. What adorable Church’s of London tan lace-up shoes. What golden brown hair, what green eyes, what great height! He was like a taller, handsomer version of Nate—but even better than Nate, because of that delicious accent!

Isn’t she supposed to be through with men? But a super-British version of Nate? Come on, who could resist?

The elevator stopped on the fourth floor. The boy stood aside, and the concierge stepped out. “If you’ll just follow me, miss,” he said, motioning to Blair to follow him. Blair hesitated. How could she leave such a delicious-looking boy behind?

“After you, miss,” the boy murmured quietly, pressing the door-open button so Blair wouldn’t get squashed.

“Right this way,” the concierge prompted, leading the way down the Yale blue–carpeted hallway.

Blair stepped out into the hall and began to follow the concierge, walking as slowly as possible. Then suddenly the boy was walking beside her, exuding pleasant odors and looking delighted with his own hotness.

The concierge stopped at the end of the hallway. “Yours is the junior suite, miss. Right next to His Lordship’s.”

His Lordship?!

The English boy smiled at Blair as he fumbled with his key. “Lord Marcus Beaton-Rhodes,” he introduced himself, thrusting his hand out. Blair noticed right away he was wearing a Yale ring. “Embarrassingly enough, my friends at Yale all call me Lord.”

Lord. I’d like you to meet my boyfriend, Lord. This is my husband, Lord. We met at Yale. The lord and his gorgeous wife will be vacationing on their yacht in the South of France this spring with their perfect family before a long sojourn at their summer castle in Cornwall. …

“And you are?”

Blair fluttered her thick, mascaraed eyelashes, awakening from her delicious daydream. “Blair Cornelia Waldorf,” she trilled, sounding exactly like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s when she first introduces herself to her new neighbor, Paul Varjak. “Actually, I’m starting at Yale this fall.”

“And I’ve just finished there. Wa-hey!” Lord Marcus tossed his keys into his room and kicked off his shoes in the doorway. “Blimey, I’m late for squash, but let’s …” He smiled shyly. “Shall we get together for a drink tonight?”

Blair nodded in dumb agreement. She could hardly believe her luck.

“See you in the lounge at seven, then.”

The lord closed his door and the concierge deposited the adjacent suite’s keys into Blair’s hand. “Your bags will be here in a moment. Is everything all right, Miss Waldorf?”

“Bloody hell!” she heard the lord exclaim in his adorable accent as he crashed around in his suite. Blair imagined him throwing his beautiful, tailor-made English clothes all over the place as he hunted for something to wear for squash. If she were his girlfriend, she’d color-code his shirts for him and alphabetize his shoes according to designer so he wouldn’t have to thrash around so much looking for things.

Of course she would.

She stepped inside her room and flopped down on the king-size bed to listen, her eyes darting around the room as she did so, taking it all in. It was small and shabby-chic, erring on the shabby side, the gold accents on the curtains and bedspread and the Regency blue–patterned wallpaper the only attempts at grandeur. It wasn’t exactly the Plaza, but there was a hot English lord living next door.

Yes, yes—everything was more than all right.

Nothing Can Keep us Together

It was already five in the afternoon by the time Jenny and her father arrived at the Croton School, in Croton Falls, New York. Rufus’s weekly wine and beat poetry night with his weirdo anarchist poet cronies was starting in an hour at a speakeasy in Greenwich Village, and he was getting antsy. Croton was only an hour and a half from the city by train, and Jenny was anxious to ditch him, anyway, so she offered to take the train home.

“Don’t get off at 125th Street,” Rufus advised, even though the stop was closest to their apartment. He handed Jenny three twenty-dollar bills. “Go all the way to Grand Central and then get a cab. And call me when you’re leaving so I can tell your brother when to expect you.”

Like Dan really cared if she ever came home. Lately Dan had been so preoccupied, he barely seemed to remember that they used to kind of be friends.

Jenny kissed her father on the cheek. It was cute how he babied her, but she was almost fifteen—she could take care of herself. “Have a nice night, Daddy,” she told him sweetly. She waved good-bye as the battered navy blue Volvo station wagon disappeared down the road. Then she unbuttoned her blouse another notch and stepped inside a cute red clapboard house with a gold plaque on its hunter-green-painted door that read ADMISSIONS, eager to meet her Croton tour guide.

“You!” a male voice crowed enthusiastically as soon as she opened the door. “It’s you!”

Jenny’s pretty red mouth dropped open in shock. Leering at her from across the quaintly decorated admissions office reception area was a more masculine, less flamboyantly dressed clone of Chuck Bass. Same European-aftershave-commercial-handsome face, same slicked-back dark hair, same cocky smile, same perverted twinkle in the eye. He walked over and held out his hand, a gold monogrammed pinky ring flashing on his right hand. “I’m your tour guide. Name’s Harold Bass. Call me Harry. You may know my cousin Charles Bass—goes by Chuck. He told me all about you. And of course I’ve seen your pictures on the ’Net.”

Oh, God.

Jenny mustered a smile. Chuck Bass had nearly deflowered her in a stall in a ladies’ room in the old Barneys building during her first dressy benefit party that fall, and Jenny was still a little scared of him. But the Basses were a powerful Upper East Side family notorious for their philanthropy and decadence and the wild ways of their fucked-up children. If Chuck’s cousin liked it at Croton, then it was probably just the sort of school Jenny was looking for.

“Don’t be put off by how straitlaced everything seems here, Jennifer,” Harry advised, his white teeth flashing. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his cool light blue linen Zegna trousers, which he was wearing with straw flip-flops—very prep-school-boy-goes-to-the-beach. “We basically party, like, eighty percent of the time, sleep fifteen percent of the time, eat five percent of the time, and study whenever we have time left over, which is, like, never.”

Jenny grinned. That sounded fine—just fine.

Harry Bass pressed his lips together and cocked his head as if he were sizing her up. “Come on. There are some people I’d like you to meet.”

Her heart racing with eager anticipation, Jenny followed him out of the building and down a long sloping pebbled walkway that curved behind a row of pretty brick buildings with black wooden shutters in the windows. The walkway ended in a narrow dirt path that led along the banks of a quaint little duck pond and into the heavily forested woods. “It’s just a little bit farther,” Harry explained, his flip-flops flapping against his heels.

Jenny hesitated, wondering what on earth the people he wanted her to meet were doing in the middle of the woods. Was she about to be a part of one of those peculiar boarding school traditions she’d read so much about, like bonfires and midnight skinny-dipping? In the middle of the pond a mallard with a dark green head was quacking loudly at a demure brown duck, trying to get her attention. Jenny couldn’t help but marvel at how strange it was to have spent a whole day in the country after spending her entire life until now on the island of Manhattan.

“Where are we going?” she called to Harry as she hurried to keep up.

Before he could answer, a girl in a fire-engine red bikini stepped onto the path about fifty feet ahead of them. “Hey, Bass!” She shouted so loudly, the leaves seemed to shake in the trees overhead. “You and your new girlfriend better get your asses over here before we finish all the you-know-what!”

“Coming!” Harry shouted back. He chuckled at Jenny. “Come on. You know you want to.”

He even sounded like his cousin.

Now that she was sure she and Harry weren’t going to be alone in the woods, Jenny felt more confident about following him. It was cooler in the shade of the trees and smelled of wet moss. All of a sudden they came upon a group of five guys and four girls, sitting in a circle, wearing bathing suits or shorts and T-shirts, the rest of their clothes scattered at the base of a nearby tree. Some of them were drinking cans of Coors, some of them were smoking cigarettes, and all of them looked extremely happy to be there.

The girl in the red bikini—skinny and pale, with long, shiny light brown hair and beautiful hazel eyes—held out her palms to them. “One more minute and you-know-who was gonna come along and nab these,” she told them with a bright smile. Jenny stared at the girl’s palms, which were dotted with little white pills.

“April, you rock.” Harry scooped a tab of Ecstasy out of the girl’s hands and popped it in his mouth. “Go on, Jennifer,” he urged Jenny, pointing at April’s outstretched palms. “The quicker you eat one, the quicker you’ll fall in love with me.” He grinned devilishly. “I mean, our school.”

Oh, really?

Jenny had been offered drugs before. She’d even been stoned once, with Nate Archibald, the first day they’d met, in Sheep Meadow in Central Park. She’d fallen in love with him that day and had stayed in love with him until he broke her heart on New Year’s Eve. Probably if she hadn’t been stoned, she’d have understood that she and Nate had only just met and that she needed to get to know him a lot better before she kissed him.

She reached out to pinch one of the tabs of Ecstasy out of April’s hand with no intention of actually ingesting it. It was so tiny, no one would even notice.

“Yum,” she cooed, pretending to be delighted as she cupped her hand over her mouth and let the teeny pill fall past her chin and cascade down into her ample double-D-sized cleavage.

We always knew it would come in handy!

“We were about to play Duck, Duck, Goose,” one of the Coors-drinking guys announced with a completely straight face, as if he were trying to organize a friendly touch-football scrimmage. He was wearing nothing but a pair of electric blue bike shorts, and he looked like a Tour de France bicycle racer, with ropy muscles, a shaved head, and intense blue eyes. “Wanna play?”

“Sure!” Harry Bass responded enthusiastically. He wrapped his arm around Jenny’s waist and kissed the top of her head. “My little cucumber,” he murmured affectionately.

Jenny had the feeling the tab of E Harry had just taken was not his first of the afternoon. She was about to shrug him away when she realized that she was going to have to at least pretend she was on Ecstasy; otherwise, it would be obvious she hadn’t taken it. Problem was, she didn’t even know how long it was supposed to take to start working. “Yay!” she squeaked. “Let’s play!”

They joined the circle and sat down between a chubby Japanese boy sporting Madras plaid Bermuda shorts and a cute rocker haircut and the muscular boy in the blue bike shorts. Everyone was grinning so hard, it looked like their teeth hurt. “I’ll go first,” April volunteered. “But first I think we’re going to need some of this.” She passed around a few packets of cinnamon Dentyne gum.

“You’re a goddess,” blue bike shorts boy told her appreciatively. He shoved three pieces of gum into his mouth and began to chew them voraciously. “Mwa, mwa, mwa!”

April cracked tiny pink bubbles with her gum and then clapped her hands together. “Okay, people, let’s go!” She wound her way around to the outside of the circle and began to walk counterclockwise, tapping each person on the head as she passed. “Duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, goose!” she shouted as she tapped the Japanese guy with the cool haircut on the head and then sprinted away. He jumped to his feet and gave chase, catching her in his arms and wrestling her to the ground. They lay like that for a while, panting and sort of petting each other.

Jenny noticed that none of the other kids were even watching them. They were too focused on their gum-chewing, or they were rubbing their hands up and down each other’s backs and giggling. Then she felt a hand on her back, too, underneath her shirt.

“Let’s take our shirts off,” Harry suggested eagerly.

“Okay,” Jenny agreed, not wanting to be a prude. She only had three buttons left buttoned, anyway. The guidebooks were definitely right about Croton. It was wild, and maybe—once she got used to it—exactly what she needed.

“Wow,” he murmured as she folded her shirt neatly and placed it on the grass beside her. The look on his face was the absolute definition of the phrase to gawk.

“Now you,” Jenny said, feeling confident in the knowledge that she was the only sober one in the forest. Well, almost.

“What the hell are you kids doing back here?!” a deep voice boomed. An athletic-looking man with curly brown hair and a brown mustache strode down the path, barefoot, wearing faded Levi’s and a threadbare light blue oxford shirt, unbuttoned to midchest.

April sat up and wiped her mouth, her brown eyes shining. “Hi, Mr. Tortia.”

Mr. Tortia didn’t look as angry as he’d sounded. He almost looked like he wanted to hang out. “So, what did I miss?” he demanded eagerly. Then he noticed Jenny. “And who, may I ask, are you?”

Harry rubbed the spot between Jenny’s bare shoulder blades. “She’s a prospective. And I think maybe she took your share.”

Jenny crossed her hands over her chest. Actually, his share of the E was somewhere inside her nude-colored Bali extra-support bra with double-duty underwire and chafe-free superwide straps, but she wasn’t about to volunteer that information.

Mr. Tortia picked something out of his tobacco-stained teeth and flicked it angrily into the grass, looking genuinely pissed off. “This is a school, not a strip club. Put your clothes back on,” he snapped at Jenny.

Gladly.

Jenny snatched up her pretty Japanese-style shirt, rising to her feet as she slipped her arms inside the sleeves and buttoned it up to her chin. Who the hell is this guy, anyway? she wondered with frightened indignation.

“You can’t be serious about attending this institution,” Mr. Tortia observed, his thick brown mustache slick with sweat and spittle. “Croton prides itself on its discretion. Our students are the crème de la crème!”

Jenny gazed down at the circle of Croton students, their bare navels and nipples blinking up at her in the warm summer sun, their mouths working the Dentyne, blissed out from the Ecstasy, and exhausted by a single round of Duck, Duck, Goose. Discretion? Crème de la crème? The crème de la crème of fuckups, maybe. And what right did this dude with the mustache have to tell her whether she could go there or not?

“Are you a teacher here or …?” she asked politely.

Mr. Tortia squatted down and held his palm out to April, who handed him a piece of Dentyne. He stood up again. “As a matter of fact, I’m the headmaster,” he replied flatly. He pulled on his mustache and offered her his first smile. “Discretion lesson number one: Let’s not mention this little incident to anyone. Got it?”

Jenny nodded mutely.

Mr. Tortia held up both hands and waved with his palms facing backwards, like the Queen of England. “Arrivederci, little prospective girl!” he chimed, dismissing her.

Harry reached up and patted Jenny on the bottom. “Drive safely,” he told her affectionately, even though she was obviously not old enough to drive.

Arrivederci, fuckups!

Her whole body trembling with outrage, Jenny hurried down the path through the woods, wishing with all her heart there was a subway stop right there by the duck pond. She could swipe her MetroCard and catch the 3 train down to Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway, and be home in time for American Idol. The green-headed mallard quacked at her mockingly as she hurried by. “Crème de la crème! Crème de la crème! Crème de la crème!” he seemed to be saying.

Jenny whipped out her cell phone and dialed information. “Taxi. In Croton Falls, New York,” she instructed.

“We have no listings for Taxi,” the operator responded blandly. “I’ll check Limousines.”

“Fine.” Jenny typed the number for the Village of Croton’s only limousine service into her cell phone. With the money her father had given her combined with the money already in her wallet, she could probably get the driver to take her all the way home.

Who said she wasn’t the crème de la crème?

Nothing Can Keep us Together