N'S PERSONAL LITTLE CLUSTER *%@#
"A Pyrrhic victory," Mr. Knoeder mumbled in his typical impossible-to-follow manner. "Archibald.
Are you with me?"
Nate hadn't done his homework. He wasn't even sure what day it was. He'd woken up, taken a
shower, and wandered into school, hoping for some guidance. Now this asswipe of a teacher
wanted him to answer some idiotic question about the Vietnam War, which everyone knew had
been a total clusterfuck.
"Pyrrhus was a Greek king or whatever who kicked the shit out of the Romans in some battle, but
there were a ton of causalities," Nate heard himself saying. No wonder I got into Yale and Brown,
he congratulated himself. I'm a frigging genius!
"Actually, it was the Battle of Pyrrhus," Mr. Knoeder corrected, sticking his pinky in his ear as he
wrote something on the board. The St. Jude's boys all called him Mr. No Dick because he wore his
pants so high and so tight, he couldn't possible have a dick. "But your answer was mostly
accurate."
Nate got out his cell phone and started texting Jeremy, who was seated in the same row as he was,
four desks down.
HEY THKS DICKLESS, he wrote.
WNT 2 HANG L8R? Jeremy wrote back.
CAN'T. GROUNDED, Nate replied.
SORRY TO HEAR ABT B & THT KID, Jeremy wrote back.
Nate leaned over his desk and shot his friend an annoyed look that said, "Please explain."
KID FRM YALE PRTY THT HKEDUP W/ B, Jeremy clarified.
So that was who was in Blair's bed last night. Nate was too bummed to even reply. He'd left Blair
alone for a little more than a day, and she'd had to go and hook up with some asshole at a stupid
Yale party that she probably wasn't even invited to? He ought to have been furious. Instead, he just
felt depressed. He was supposed to have been at that party. He could even have brought Blair with
him. They could have talked bout the future and then had sex afterwards. It might have been
romantic. But as usual he'd messed everything up.
Well, now he knows- it may not suck to be the cheater, but it definitely sucks to be cheated on.
Fuck it, Nate decided. He held up his hand. "Mr. Knoeder, may I be excused? I think I have food
poisoning or something."
Oh, come now. You can do better than that.
Mr. Knoeder didn't even notice. His back was turned as he busily drew a detailed map of Saigon in
purple chalk. Nate texted a despondent SEE YA to Jeremy, gathered up his things, and slipped out
of the classroom, leaving the rest of the St. Jude's senior history class to stare after him and
wonder why they didn't have the balls to do the same.
Nate stuffed his books in his basement locker and slammed the door. Fuck homework, and fuck
school. He was already into college, and now that he was grounded, he might as well just stay
home, eating brownies and getting high. He'd cut the rest of the day's classes, light up a big fatty,
fill out the appropriate forms, and send in his deposit to Yale. So what that he promised Blair that
he wouldn't go to Yale unless she got in? Every promise they'd ever made to each other had been
broken, and the truth was, Yale had the best lacrosse team and had promised to make him captain
his sophomore year. He wanted to go there whether Blair got in or not.
With grim determination, he headed home, trying to rid himself of the image of that skinny,
snoring, girlfriend stealing asswipe sleeping in Blair's hotel bed. Mailing in his Yale deposit wasn't
exactly going to be a victory without losses though. Blair was going to spit fire when she heard
about it.
Unless she didn't care anymore, which was almost even scarier.
D, THE FUTIRE OF HIP-HOP
Riverside prep was housed in a redbrick church built in the late 1900's, the quaintest little
schoolhouse on the Upper West Side. The school's main entrance was on West End Avenue- a cute
bright red door over which hung a sing that said RIVERSIDE PREPARATORY SCHOOL FOR
BOYS, which sounded embarrassingly like some sort of rich boys' finishing school. Thankfully,
the upper-school boys entered from the side entrance, a normal-looking black door on
Seventy-Seventh Street, the perfect place to slip into school nearly two hours late.
Dan swaggered into the last ten minutes of the first-period AP English wearing his hip-hop pants
and black-and-yellow sneakers from the Raves gig the night before, and a dark gray APC T-shirt
given to him by Monique with MR.WONDERFUL stenciled in bold letters across the chest. Last
night he'd drunk his ass off, sung like a sickass motherfucker, and then had crazy, totally
undeserved sex with a beautiful French girl on a giant bed in a Plaza Hotel suite. Being a rock star
was actually kind of excellent.
You don't say.
"Well, if it isn't my most famous student," Ms. Solomon observed tersely as Dan wandered to the
back of the room and slouched behind a desk. Ms. Solomon was right out of graduate school and
was incredibly ashamed of the major crush she had on Dan. Instead of showering him with praise-
there was no question he was the most accomplished and intellectual student in the class- she was
either snide and critical, or she ignored him completely. Once, just to test her, he'd even copied an
essay on Virginia Woolf's writing habits, written by the famous literary critic Harold Bloom, her
advisor at Princeton, and handed it in, pretending he'd written it. Ms. Solomon had given him a B+,
just like she did on every one of his English assignments, no matter how bad or good it was.
"The class and I were just discussing whether or not we should have a final essay on our unit on
Shakespeare's tragedies instead of a final exam. Any opinion, Dan?" she clamped a hand over her
mouth and added sarcastically. "I do apologize- perhaps you have a stage name now?"
Dan frowned down at his desktop, where someone had etched the words Bitch Face with a green
ballpoint pen. Normally he would have welcomed the chance to write a paper over taking an exam,
but papers required research and outlining and hours of writing, whereas an exam required a single
two-hour appearance.
That is, if you have no intention of studying for it, which he didn't.
Now that he was a rock star he'd be touring, shooting videos, signing albums, and fending off
women and the paparazzi. Two hours out of one day for a stupid English exam was definitely
preferable.
Ms. Solomon was the type of dried-apple skinny that made her look forty years older than she
probably was, and her hair, which she kept pulled back in a low ponytail, was an ashy dark blond
color that looked gray under the school's harsh fluorescent lights. She loved lace, and preferred
cream-colored blouses with lace collars and ruffles at the sleeves paired with black wool
knee-length skirts, black stockings, and bizarrely high, skinny-heeled black pumps. Her skirts
were always seriously tight, too, leading the boys to suspect that she probably thought she was the
sexiest female alive.
Ew.
"Half the class wants a paper and half the class wants an exam. Yours is the swing vote," she
explained.
Meaning that no matter what Dan said, half the class would hate him for it.
He cleared his throat. "I think an exam would be a better indicator of how much we've learned
over the course of the year," he declared, sounding like a total schmo.
"Oh, would it now?" Chuck Bass sneered from two desks away. Riverside Prep's dress code was
plain-colored khaki pants or cords, brown or black belt, white or pastel-colored button-down shirt ,
and brown or black loafers with dark-colored socks. Chuck Bass was wearing a black Prada
jumpsuit, unzipped so his tanned, recently waxed chest was clearly visible, and creamy white
leather Camper sandals that showed off his smooth, manicured feet. On the floor beneath his desk,
Chuck's pet snow monkey, Sweetie, poked his fuzzy white head out of Chuck's orange-and-red
leather Dooney & Bourke tote bag and bared his teeth.
Chuck hardly deserved to be in AP English. He could barely spell, had never read a book in its
entirety, and thought Beowulf was a type of fur used for lining coats. But in an effort to get him
into college, his parents had insisted he be placed in all APs, which turned out to be a big fat
mistake. Due to the fact that Chuck preferred to shop and attend fashion shows instead of going to
school and doing his homework, he had gotten D's in all his classes last semester, failed to get into
any of the colleges he'd applied to, and was now bound for military school.
And was he bitter? Definitely.
"Hey Mr.Wonderful." Chuck hissed at Dan. "Don't look now, but your days as a Rave are over."
Huh?
Dan slouched in his chair and dug at the desk with his ball point pen. He was a rock star; he didn't
have to take this shit. Someone's foot nudged the base of his spine. "You're out," whispered Bryce
James, one of Chuck's bullish friends. "Unless your slut of a sister can get you back in."
Dan's hackles rose. What did Jenny have to do with it? As far as he knew, Jenny was only going
along for the ride, just like she's always done. After all, if your big brother was in a major band,
wouldn't you want to hang out with him and his bandmates, too?
"I heard she wants to be singer," Bryce elaborated. "So she slept with every one of them."
Dan whipped around and gave Bryce the finger simply because he was too hung over to think of
anything intelligent to say. Jenny had left the suite by the time he and Monique had gotten up that
morning, but what exactly had she been up to while he was getting busy last night? And how come
everyone already seemed to know about it?
"An exam it is, then," Ms. Solomon announced. She scribbled something in a notepad and then
stood up and approached Dan's desk. "I'm bit of a Raves fan myself," she murmured, her cheeks
slightly flushed. "And it's sort of killing me." She stopped in front of Dan, put her palms on his
desk, and leaned toward him so that he could smell the everything bagel with scallion cream
cheese she'd eaten for breakfast. "is it true that Damian is married to his high school sweetheart?
Some French girl?" she asked loudly, obviously thinking it was totally hip for a teacher to know
anything about a cool band like the Raves.
Dan's hands were sweating, and he fingered the pack of unfiltered Camels in the back pocket of
his baggy pants. Didn't Riverside Prep have rules about teachers harassing the students?
There were only two more minutes left before the end of class. Still hoping to hear the answer to
Ms. Solomon's question, the other boys gathered their books and zipped up their backpacks.
The minute hand on the clock was over the blackboard crept forward and the hallway outside the
class room buzzed to life. Dan stood up, brushed past his nosy teacher, and headed for the door.
Saved by the bell.
AN E-MAIL WORTH RESPONDING TO
That afternoon during computer lab, Serena was tempted to e-mail that melodramatic artist at
Brown, those perky sorority weirdos at Princeton, and that lovelorn jock at Harvard, telling them
to have nice lives, because from now on she was all about Yale. Instead, she permanently
expunged then from her trash folder. At lunchtime she'd actually mailed in her deposit to Yale, and
what a relief it was to finally come to a decision- even if she couldn't tell her best friend in the
whole world about it. She skimmed the rest of her e-mail until she came to one from an unknown
source.
From: dpolk@raver.et
To: Svdwoodsen@constancebillard.edu
Subject: don't believe everything you read
So, we're an item. It's all very flattering. Problem is, we've never met. Want to? A bunch of people
will be at my place in the Village Friday night. Hope you can make it.
Damian
Serena giggled and stood up partway out of her chair, searching the Constance Billard computer
lab for Blair's dark shiny head. But Blair was working intently at her computer and didn't even
notice Serena waving at her. Mr. Schneider, the uptight computer proctor with the deformed
nostrils, glared at her, and Serena went back to her e0mail. She knew from their videos that the
Raves' lead guitarist was extremely handsome and talented, and wouldn't it be crazy if they
actually hit it off, turning myth into reality? So what if she'd kind of decided to take the serious
route and be a full-time student next year? That was next year, and the rest of this year was all
about having fun, fun, fun. Who knew- she might even change her mind, defer her admission,
become a Raves groupie, and tour with the band for the next five years!
And only just a moment ago she was all pleased with herself for being so decisive.
Serena bit her nails for a few second, then hit reply and typed three letters using only her partially
chewed-on, partially pink-polished index finger.
Y-E-S
AN UNLIKELY MATCH
Blair strolled the Internet for the exquisite Jimmy Choo shoes she'd seen in W but had yet to find
in her size. They were made of green silk, hand-sewn with tiny mother-of pearl hearts all over the
heels. They'd only distributed three hundred pairs of the shoes worldwide, but surely there had to
be one size seven-and-a-half that hadn't been claimed- in Mexico City, maybe, or Hong Kong,
where feet tended to be small.
Next to her, Vanessa Abrams was furiously typing, building some sort of feminist Web page or
something. Blair glanced at her neighbors screen. Roommate wanted, she read in big bold letters.
Female Only.
Blair had never been too fond of her shaven-headed, black-wearing, film auteur classmate. Every
word Vanessa uttered in class was said with an air of
I'm-only-talking-to-you-because-you-asked-me-a-question, like she was so much smarter and
