Nate sat back on the green wooden bench and gazed up at the sumptuous limestone apartment buildings lining Fifth Avenue. To his right, he could just see the corner of Blair’s Seventy-second Street apartment building. Up in the penthouse, Blair’s Russian Blue cat, Kitty Minky, was probably lying stretched out on Blair’s rose-colored bedspread, eagerly waiting for Blair to come home and scratch him under the chin with her coral-pink nails. Impulsively, Nate pushed the buttons on his phone to speed-dial Blair’s cell phone. It rang six times before she finally picked up.
“Hello?” Blair answered in a clipped voice. She was seated in Garren’s new East Fifty-seventh Street salon, which was decorated like a Turkish harem’s lair. Gauzy pink-and-yellow silk scarves hung from the ceiling, and huge pink-and-yellow-upholstered pillows were tossed at random around the salon for clients to lounge on and sip Turkish coffee while they waited for their appointments. In front of every stylist’s station was an enormous gilt-framed mirror. Gianni, Blair’s new hairdresser, had just finished combing out her freshly washed and conditioned locks. With her cell phone pressed against her damp ear, Blair stared at her reflection in the mirror. The critical moment was here: Did she dare go short?
“Hey. It’s me, Nate,” she heard an old familiar voice murmur in her ear.
Blair was too stunned to answer. They hadn’t spoken since New Year’s Eve, and even then the conversation had ended badly. What was Nate doing calling her
now
?
“Nate?” Blair replied, half-impatiently, half-curiously. “Is this really important, because I can’t really talk. It’s kind of a
very
bad time.”
“Nah, it’s not important,” Nate responded as he tried to come up with a reasonable explanation for why he’d called her in the first place. “I just thought you’d want to know I’ve decided to quit. You know—quit smoking weed.” He kicked at a clump of frozen dirt. He wasn’t even sure if that was true. Was he
really
quitting? For
good
?
Blair gripped the phone in confused silence on the other end. Nate had always been random—especially when he was stoned—but never
this
random. Gianni tapped his tortoise-shell comb against the back of her chair impatiently. “Well, good for you,” she responded finally. “Look, I have to go, okay?”
Blair sounded distracted, and Nate wasn’t even sure why he’d called her in the first place. “See you,” he mumbled, tucking his phone back into his coat pocket.
“Bye.” Blair tossed her silvery pink Nokia phone into her red bowling bag and sat up straight in the leather swivel chair. “I’m ready,” she told Gianni, trying to sound confident. “Just remember, I want it short but
feminine
.”
Amused creases appeared in Gianni’s tanned, intentionally stubbly cheeks. He winked a long-lashed, dark brown eye. “Jes lika Katerina Hepburn. Right?”
Uh-oh.
Blair tightened the belt on her beige salon robe and glared at Gianni’s overly pomaded black hair in the mirror, praying he wasn’t as stupid and incompetent as he sounded. Maybe it was a just a language thing. “No,
not
Katherine Hepburn.
Audrey
Hepburn. You know, like
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
?
My Fair Lady
?
Funny Face
?” Blair searched her brain for a more current celebrity reference, someone with a decent short haircut. “Or maybe like Selma Blair,” she added desperately, even though Selma’s haircut was more tomboyish than what she had in mind.
Gianni didn’t respond. Instead, he ran his fingers through Blair’s damp brown tresses. “Sucha bee-ootiful ’air,” he said wistfully as he picked up his scissors and gathered her hair in his fist. Then, without further ado, he lopped the entire pony-tail off with one brutal snip.
Blair closed her eyes as the rope of hair fell to the floor.
Please make me look pretty,
she prayed silently,
and sophisticated and poised and elegant
. She opened her eyes and stared in horror at her reflection. Her wet, blunt, ear-length mop was sticking out in all directions.
“Don’t worry,” Gianni reassured her as he exchanged his big scissors for a small pair of shears. “Now we shape.”
Blair took a deep breath, steeling herself. It was too late to back out of it anyway. Most of her hair was on the floor. “Okay,” she gasped. Then her cell phone rang again and she lunged at it. “Wait,” she told Gianni. “Hello?”
“Yes, is this Blair Waldorf? Harold’s daughter?”
Blair studied herself in the mirror. She wasn’t exactly sure
who
she was anymore. She looked more like a new inmate getting her preprison crop than the daughter of notorious corporate lawyer Harold Waldorf, who’d divorced Blair’s mother two years ago and now lived in a château in France, where he ran a vineyard with his “life partner,” who just happened to be a man.
Considering the turbulent state of her present existence, Blair really wouldn’t have minded being someone completely different, which was part of the reason she’d decided to submit herself to Gianni in the first place. She’d even settle for Katherine instead of Audrey as long as the look was totally new.
“Yes,” Blair answered feebly.
“Good,” the guy on the phone replied. His voice was deep and cajoling, making it hard to guess how old he was. Nineteen or thirty-five? “This is Owen Wells. Your father mentored me at the firm when I was first starting out. We’re both Yalies, and I understand you’re interested in going there yourself.”
Interested?
Blair wasn’t just
interested
in going to Yale—it was her sole purpose in life. Why the hell else would she be taking
five
APs?
“Yes, I am,” she squeaked. She glanced up at Gianni, who was mouthing the words to a cheesy Celine Dion song wafting out of the salon’s sound system. “I kind of messed up my interview, though.”
Actually, she’d kind of told the interviewer her whole life’s sob story and then kind of
kissed
him, which was more than kind of a major “whoops.”
“Well, that’s exactly why I’m calling,” Owen Wells replied, his sexy voice resonating like the bass notes of a cello. “Your father’s support means a lot to the school, and they want to give you a second chance. I’m volunteering my services as your alumnus interviewer, and the admissions office has already agreed to use my write-up when they review your application, instead of the interview you did back in November.”
Blair was dumbstruck. A second chance—it was almost too good to be true. Tired of waiting, Gianni dropped his scissors on the wheeled cart next to Blair’s chair, snatched the latest issue of
Vogue
out of Blair’s lap, and minced away to complain about her to his colleagues.
“So when are you available?” Owen Wells persisted.
Now
, Blair wanted to say. But she couldn’t very well ask Owen to sit and watch Gianni cut her hair while he asked her all those boring stereotypical interview questions like, Who are the most influential people in your life?
“Anytime,” she chirped. Then she realized she shouldn’t sound
too
desperate, not when she was supposed to be a total whiz kid with an insane schedule. “Actually, today is kind of busy for me and tomorrow might be a little crazy, too. Wednesday or Thursday after school would be better.”
“I tend to work pretty late, and I’ve got meetings up the wazoo this week, but how about Thursday night? Around eight-thirty?”
“Fine,” Blair responded eagerly. “Do you want me to come to your office?”
Owen paused. Blair could hear his office chair creak and she imagined him surveying his Philippe Starck–designed Tribeca office with its view of New York Harbor, wondering if it was an appropriate place to meet. She imagined him tall and blond, with a tennis tan, like her father. But Owen Wells would be at least ten years younger than her dad, and so much better looking. She wondered if he knew how cool it was that there was a
w
in each of his names. “Why don’t we meet at the Compton Hotel? They’ve got a nice little bar that should be pretty quiet.” He laughed. “I can buy you a Coke, although your father tells me you prefer Dom Perignon.”
Blair’s face burned. Her stupid-ass father—what else had he said? “Oh, no, Coke is fine,” she stammered.
“Good. I’ll see you Thursday night. I’ll be wearing my Yale tie.”
“I’m looking forward to it.” Blair tried to maintain a businesslike tone despite her vivid Owen-at-the-office fantasy. “Thank you so much for calling.” She clicked off the phone and looked directly into the gilt mirror in front of her. Her blue eyes already seemed larger and more intense now that she had less hair.
If she were really an actress starring in the movie of her life—which was what she always liked to imagine—
this
would be the turning point: the day she transformed her look and began rehearsing for the biggest role of her career. She glanced at her watch. There was only half an hour left before she was due back at Constance for gym. There was no reason to rush back, though, especially not when Bendel’s was only three blocks away and a new dress for meeting Owen Wells on Thursday night was calling her name. It was absolutely worth getting in trouble for cutting gym if her new haircut and new dress were going to help get her into Yale.
Gianni was drinking coffee and flirting with the shampoo boys. Blair shot him a menacing look, daring him to fuck up her hair.
“Whenever you’re ready, miss,” he called over in a bored tone, as if he couldn’t have cared less if he cut her hair or not.
Blair took a deep breath. She was erasing the past—her failed relationship with Nate, her mother’s revolting new husband and embarrassing pregnancy, her botched Yale interview—and recreating herself in a new image. Yale was giving her a second chance, and from now on she would be the master of her own destiny, writing, directing, and starring in the movie that was her life. She could already see the headline in the Styles section of the
New York Times
, featuring her haircut.
A
head
of the
Times
: Gorgeous Brunette Goes Short for Yale Debut!
Her face broke into the winning smile she was already practicing for her interview with Owen Wells on Thursday night. “I’m ready.”
“So . . . ,” Vanessa said, bouncing her knee against Dan’s thigh as they lay naked on their backs, contemplating his cracked bedroom ceiling in a postcoital daze. “What did you think?”
Vanessa had already tried sex a couple of times before with her ex-boyfriend Clark, an older bartender she’d gotten together with briefly in the fall, when Dan (along with the rest of the predictable male population) had been too busy mooning over Serena van der Woodsen to notice that Vanessa had fallen in love with him. Even if Vanessa had just done it for the first time, she would have been matter-of-fact about it, because that was the way she was about everything. Dan, on the other hand, wasn’t matter-of-fact about anything, and
he
was the one who’d just been deflowered. She couldn’t wait to hear his reaction.
“It was . . .” Dan stared unblinkingly up at the gray, turned-off lightbulb dangling from the center of the ceiling, feeling immobilized and overstimulated at the same time. Their hips were touching under the thin, burgundy-colored sheet, and it felt like an electric current was running between them, pinging out of Dan’s toes, his knees, his belly button, his elbows, and the ends of his hair.
“Indescribable,” he finally answered, because there really were no words to describe how it had felt. Writing a poem about sex would be impossible, unless he resorted to boring, clichéd metaphors like exploding fireworks or musical crescendos. Even those were totally inaccurate. They gave no sense of the actual
feeling
, or how sex was this whole discovery process during which everything commonplace became absolutely amazing. For instance, Vanessa’s left arm: it wasn’t a particularly spectacular arm—fleshy and pale, covered in brownish fuzz, and sprinkled with moles. While they’d been having sex it had no longer been the same old arm he’d known and loved since he and Vanessa had accidentally gotten locked out of a party in tenth grade—it had been an exquisite, precious thing that he couldn’t stop kissing; something new and exciting and delicious. Oh,
God
. See? Everything he could think of to describe what sex was like sounded like a lame ad for a new cereal or something. Even the word
sex
was wrong, and
making love
sounded like a bad soap opera.
Electric
would have been a good word to describe what sex was like, but then again, it had too many negative connotations, like the electric chair or an electric cattle fence.
Teeming
was another good word, but what did it mean exactly? And
quivering
sounded too dainty and puny, like a scared little mouse. If he were ever going to write a poem about sex, he wanted to provoke thoughts of sexy, muscular beasts like lions and stags, not mice.
“Earth to Dan?” Vanessa reached over and flicked her finger against his earlobe.
“Pinnacle,” Dan muttered senselessly. “Epiphany.”
Vanessa ducked under the sheet and blew a giant raspberry on Dan’s pale, hollow stomach. “Hello? Are you in shock or something?”
Dan grinned and scooted her up his chest so he could kiss her Cheshire cat mouth and dimpled chin. “Let’s do it again.”
Whoo!
Vanessa giggled and rubbed her nose against his unruly brown eyebrows. “So I guess you enjoyed it, huh?”
Dan kissed her right eye and then her left. “Mmm,” he sighed, his whole body humming with pleasure and desire. “I love you.”
Vanessa collapsed on his chest and squeezed her eyes shut. She wasn’t a very girly girl, but no girl can help but melt the first time she hears a boy say those three words.
“I love you, too,” she whispered back.
Dan felt like his whole body was smiling. Who’d known this mundane Monday in February would wind up so damned . . .
great
?
So much for flowery descriptions and poetic turns of phrase.
All of a sudden his cell phone sounded its startling, vibrating ring from where it sat on the bedside table, only inches away. Dan was pretty sure it was only his little sister, Jenny, calling to complain about school again. He turned his head to read the number on the little screen. P
RIVATE
, the message flashed, which only happened when Vanessa called him from home.