Psycho Killer (6 page)

“It must really stink without your dad around,” Serena told Blair sympathetically. “But your mom looks so good, and Cyrus is kind of sweet, once you get used to him.” She giggled.

But Blair still wasn’t smiling. “Maybe,” she said, staring out the window at the hot dog stand. She imagined stuffing about fifty of them, complete with buns and sauerkraut and ketchup and relish, down Serena’s lovely throat. “But I don’t think I want to get used to him.”

All six of them were silent for a long, tense moment. What they needed was one more good stiff drink. And a pair of oars or a couple of baseball bats to bash each other’s heads in.

Nate rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Who wants another?” he offered. “I’ll make them.”

Serena held out her glass. “Thanks, Nate,” she said. “I’m so fucking thirsty. They locked the damned booze cabinet up in Ridgefield. And took away all the knives and belts and scarves and shoelaces. Can you believe it?”

Blair remained silent but shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “When you’re around, Serena, everyone has to prepare for the worst.”

“If I have another drink, I’ll be hungover at school tomorrow,” Kati said.

Isabel laughed. “You’re always hungover at school.” She handed Nate her glass. “Here, I’ll split mine with Kati.”

“Let me give you a hand,” Chuck offered.

Before the boys could get started on refills, Jeremy Scott Tompkinson staggered into the penthouse clutching his shaggy head. His face was blotchy and covered with a film of perspiration. In fact, he was a lot worse off than when Serena had bumped into him in front of Nate’s townhouse less than an hour ago. He sank to his knees in the middle of the living room.

“Jeremy, what’s up?” Nate called. The party had started out so boring, he’d sent Jeremy home to pick up some pot. “You okay?”

Jeremy gazed up at his friends with mournful, red-rimmed eyes. His long hair was matted with sweat and there was a bluish tinge to his lips.

“Serrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…” he slurred nonsensically. He yanked a pair of neon yellow Adidas socks from out of his pocket and tossed them on the carpet.

Serena blanched. Oopsie.

“Dude!” Nate protested. Jeremy had never been one for subtlety.

“Sreeeennnnnnn…!” Jeremy wheezed, still clutching his head. His bloodshot eyes were painfully huge.

Blair glanced at Serena. Jeremy was trying to say her name and Serena was just standing there, staring at him like a dumb statue.

“Dude!” Nate said again. This was bad. The pot in the socks was good Thai stick, the best. Should he pick up the socks and implicate himself in Jeremy’s mess, or just let it go?

Serena reached for Nate’s hand, suddenly grateful that it was Jeremy this was happening to and not him. Nate’s eyes were too beautiful and he was too precious to simply poison like some ferret or mole or whatever. Jeremy didn’t look very good, but it was too late now. What could she do?

Jeremy’s eyes bulged impossibly. Finally, they exploded.

Pop! Pop!

Blood spattered the walls and the furniture. Jeremy collapsed in a blood-soaked heap on the floor.

“Son?” Mr. Scott Tompkinson demanded. “Are we going to have to send you up to Little Silver again?” Little Silver Ranch was a rehab center in Connecticut where Jeremy had spent many a long weekend.

“He can’t hear you, dear,” Jeremy’s mother said. “He’s out.”

That’s one way of putting it.

Kitty Minky slinked out from behind a sofa and began to bat at one of the bloody eyeballs with a soft gray paw. Esther rushed in to usher the guests to the dinner table and close the pocket doors behind Jeremy and his family. It was a good thing Mrs. Waldorf had chosen red and brown for her new color scheme. The blood wouldn’t even leave a stain.

Mrs. van der Woodsen touched her daughter’s arm. “Eleanor made an extra place for you next to Blair, so you girls can catch up.”

Serena cast an anxious glance at Blair, but Blair had already turned away and was headed for the table, sitting down next to her eleven-year-old brother, Tyler, who had been at his place for over an hour, reading
Rolling Stone
magazine. Tyler’s idol was Cameron Crowe, the movie director who had toured with Led Zeppelin when he was only fifteen. Tyler refused to use an iPod or even CDs, insisting that real vinyl records were the only way to listen to music. Blair worried her brother was turning into the type of loser who would wind up living in a trailer in the woods, preying on chipmunks and robins for meat.

Serena steeled herself and pulled up a chair next to Blair.

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a complete idiot,” she said, removing her linen napkin from its silver ring and spreading it out on her lap. She felt more at ease now, knowing Nate was still alive, but also a little confused. Plan A had failed and there was no Plan B. “Your parents splitting up must have totally sucked.”

Blair shrugged and grabbed a fresh sourdough roll from a basket on the table. She tore the roll in half and stuffed one half into her mouth. The other guests were still milling around and figuring out where to sit. Blair knew it was rude to eat before everyone was seated, but if her mouth was full, she couldn’t talk, and she really didn’t feel like talking.

“I wish I’d been here,” Serena said, watching Blair smear the other half of her roll with a thick slab of French butter. “I went a little crazy last year,” she confessed. “I have the most insane stories to tell you.”

Blair nodded and chewed her roll slowly, like a cow chewing its cud. Serena waited for Blair to ask her what kind of stories,
but Blair didn’t say anything, she just kept on chewing. She didn’t want to hear about all the fabulous things Serena had done while she was away and Blair had been stuck at home, watching her parents rip each other’s hair out and spar themselves bloody with silver candle snuffers.

Serena had wanted to tell Blair all about her exploits at Hanover. About Soren and Jude and how she couldn’t stand another winter in New Hampshire. How she just had to come back before she murdered everyone on campus. She wanted to tell Blair how scared she was to go back to Constance tomorrow because she hadn’t exactly been studying very hard in the last year and she felt so completely out of touch.

But Blair wasn’t interested. She grabbed another roll and took a big bite. Jeremy Scott Tompkinson’s eyeballs had just exploded in her living room and she was pretty sure Serena had something to do with it.

“Wine, miss?” Esther said, standing at Serena’s left with the bottle. Esther’s apron was spattered with Jeremy’s blood, but no one seemed to mind.

“Yes, thank you.” Serena watched the Côtes du Rhone spill into her glass and thought of the Red Sea once more.
Maybe Blair does know
, she thought. Was that what this was all about? Was that why she was acting so weird? She glanced at Nate, four chairs down on the right, but he was deep in conversation with her father. Talking about sailboats, no doubt.

“So you and Nate are still totally together?” Serena said, gnawing on her bloody thumbnail. “Bet you guys wind up married.”

Blair gulped her wine, her little ruby ring rattling against the glass. She reached for the butter, slapping a great big wad on her roll.

“Blair?” Serena said, nudging her friend’s arm in desperation. “Aren’t you going to talk to me?”

“Um,” Blair slurred. It was less an answer to Serena’s question than a vague, general statement made to fill a blank space while she was tending to her roll. “I’m not sure I should.”

Esther brought out the duck and the acorn squash soufflé and the wilted chard and the lingonberry sauce, and the table filled with the sound of clanking plates and silver and murmurs of “delicious.” Blair heaped her plate high with food and attacked it as if she hadn’t eaten in weeks. She didn’t care if she made herself sick, as long as she didn’t have to talk to Serena.

“Whoa,” Serena said, watching Blair stuff her face. “You must be hungry.” She felt a bit nauseated herself, after the whole Jeremy fiasco.

Blair nodded and shoveled a forkful of chard into her mouth. She washed it down with a gulp of wine. “I’m starving,” she said.

“So, Serena,” Cyrus called down from the head of the table. “Tell me about France. Your mother says you were in the South of France this summer. Is it true the French girls don’t wear tops on the beach?”

“Yes, it’s true,” Serena said. She raised one eyebrow playfully. “But it’s not just the French girls. I never wore a top down there, either. How else could I get a decent tan?”

Blair gagged on an enormous bite of soufflé and spat it into her wine. Was Serena flirting with Cyrus? She imagined them both drowned and bloated, floating on the crimson liquid in her wine glass beside the chunk of soufflé. Then Esther whisked it away and brought her a clean glass.

Serena kept her audience captive right through dessert with
heavily edited stories of her travels in Europe, omitting the parts where people lost limbs or died. Blair finished her second plate of duck, followed by a huge bowl full of chocolate-laced tapioca pudding, tuning out Serena’s voice as she spooned it into her mouth. Finally her stomach rebelled and she shot to her feet, scraping her chair back and running down the hall to her bedroom and into its adjoining bathroom.

“Blair?” Serena called after her. She stood up and hurried off to follow.

Several seats away, Chuck nudged Isabel with his elbow. “Beware the shit storm. Heads are about to fly.”

Nate watched the two girls flee the table with a mounting sense of unease. He was pretty sure the only thing girls talked about in the bathroom was sex.

And mostly he’d be right.

Blair kneeled over the toilet and stuck her middle finger as far down her throat as it would go. Her eyes began to tear and then her stomach convulsed. She’d done this before, many times. It was disgusting and horrible, and she knew she shouldn’t do it, but at least she was only hurting herself, which was more than she could say for some people.

The door to her bathroom was only half closed, and Serena could hear her friend retching inside.

“Blair, it’s me,” she said quietly. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be out in a minute,” Blair snapped, wiping her mouth. She stood up and flushed the toilet.

Serena pushed the door open and Blair turned and glared at her. “I’m fine,” she said. “Really.”

Serena put the lid down on the toilet seat and sat down. “Oh, don’t be such a bitch, Blair,” she said, exasperated. “What’s
the deal? It’s me, remember? We know everything about each other.”

Blair reached for her toothbrush and toothpaste. “We used to,” she said and began brushing her teeth furiously. She spat out a wad of green foam laced with blood from her bleeding gums. “When was the last time we talked, anyway? Like, the summer before last?”

Serena looked down at her scuffed brown leather boots. “I know. I’m sorry. I suck.”

Blair rinsed her toothbrush off and stuck it back in the holder. She stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Well, you missed a lot,” she said, wiping a smudge of mascara from beneath her eye with the tip of her pinky. “I mean, last year was really… different.” She’d been about to say “hard,” but “hard” made her sound like a victim. Like she’d barely survived without Serena around. “Different” was better.

With a sudden sense of power, Blair glanced down at Serena, seated on the toilet. “Nate and I have become really close, you know. We tell each other everything.”

Yeah, right.

The two girls eyed each other warily for a moment.

Then Serena inhaled and let it all out in one giant confused breath. Blair needed to know the truth. “Well, you don’t have to worry about me and Nate,” she began. “I sort of wanted to kill him, but Jeremy got to the pot first and smoked the poison and now he’s dead instead of Nate, which I’m glad about, because you love Nate, and I just want everyone to be happy, especially you.”

She gazed up at her friend hopefully. Maybe that was all she needed to do to make things right—just spill her guts so they could both move on.

The corners of Blair’s mouth curled up in a sneer. So Serena had poisoned Jeremy. She’d even tried to murder Nate—
her
Nate. Blair tugged her sweater down and glanced at her reflection in the mirror. A coldhearted, steely eyed warrior stared back at her.

No way was Serena going to get away with this. Blair was the one who wanted to kill people—all the time. And if Serena could actually go through with it, then so could she. Murder was probably a lot easier than she thought. Jeremy’s exploding eyeballs weren’t even that bad. The maid had already cleaned up most of it. Serena thought she was such a trendsetter, such a revolutionary. But Blair was the better student, and she wasn’t taking AP Physics for nothing. She could come up with something way more impressive than exploding eyeballs. Guillotines, garrotes, rapiers, machetes! She would excel at killing, just as she excelled at everything else.

“We’re missing the espresso,” she announced, and abruptly left the bathroom.

Damn
, Serena thought, staying put. Wasn’t Blair even remotely surprised that she, Serena van der Woodsen, was the one responsible for Jeremy’s gruesome death? That she had tried to kill Nate? Well, it was no use going after Blair now, while she was obviously in such a crappy mood. Things would be better tomorrow at school. She and Blair would have one of their famous heart-to-hearts in the lunchroom over lemon yogurts and romaine lettuce. It wasn’t like they could just stop being friends.

She stood up and examined her eyebrows in the bathroom mirror, using Blair’s tweezers to pluck out a few stray hairs. She pulled a tube of Urban Decay
Gash
lip gloss from her pocket and smeared another layer on her lips. When she returned to the table, Blair was eating her second helping of pudding and Nate
was drawing a small-scale picture of his kickass sailboat for Cyrus on the back of a matchbook. Across the table, Chuck raised his wine glass and Serena raised hers in return. She had no idea what she was toasting, but she was always up for anything.

Even murder.

Blair reached for her wine glass, gripping the stem in a viselike fist. The glass’s delicate base broke and the remaining red wine sloshed onto the table. It seeped through the tablecloth and bled between her fingers.