Gossip Girl: It Had to Be You

like most juicy stories, it started with
one boy and two girls

"Truce!" Serena van der Woodsen screamed as Nate Archibald body-checked her into a three-foot-high drift of powdery white snow. Cold and wet, it tunneled into her ears and down her pants. Nate dove on top of her, all five foot eleven inches of his perfect, golden-brown-haired, glittering-green-eyed, fifteen-year-old boyness. He smelled like Downy and the L'Occitane sandalwood soap the maid stocked his bathroom with. Serena just lay there, trying to breathe with him on top of her. "My scalp is cold," she pleaded, getting a mouthful of Nate's snow-dampened, godlike curls as she spoke.

Nate sighed reluctantly, as if he could have spent the rest of the morning outside in the frigid February meat locker that was the back garden of his family's Eighty-second-Street-just-off-Park-Avenue Manhattan town house. He rolled onto his back and wriggled like Serena's long-dead golden retriever, Guppy, when she used to let him loose on the green grass of the Great Lawn in Central Park. Then he stood up, awkwardly dusting off the seat of his neatly pressed Brooks Brothers khakis. It was Saturday, but he still wore the same clothes he wore every weekday as a sophomore at the St. Jude's School for Boys over on East End Avenue. It was the unofficial Prince of the Upper East Side uniform, the same uniform he and his classmates had been wearing since they'd started nursery school together at Park Avenue Presbyterian.

Nate held out his hand to help Serena to her feet. Behind him rose the clean-looking limestone prewar luxury buildings of Park Avenue's Golden Mile, with their terraced penthouses and plate-glass windows. Still, nothing beat living in an actual house with an entire wing of one's own and a back garden with a fountain and cherry trees in it, within walking distance of one's best friends' houses, Serendipity 3, and Barneys. Serena frowned cautiously up at Nate, worried that he was only faking her out and was about to tackle her again. "I really am cold," she insisted.

He flapped his hand at her impatiently. "I know. Come on."

She pretended to pick her nose and then grabbed his hand with her faux-snotty one. "Thanks, pal." She staggered to her feet. "You're a real chum."

Nate led the way inside. The backs of his pant legs were damp and she could see the outline of his tighty-whiteys. Really, how gay of him! He held the glass-paned French doors open and stood aside to let her pass. Serena kicked off her baby blue Uggs and scuffed her bare, Urban Decay Piggy Bank Pink–toenailed feet down the long hall to the stately town house's enormous, barely used all-white Italian Modern kitchen. Nate's father, Captain Archibald, was a former sea captain–turned-banker, and his mother was a French society hostess. They were basically never home, and when they were home, they were at the opera.

"Are you hungry?" Nate asked, following her across the gleaming white marble floor. "I'm so sick of takeout. My parents have been in Venezuela or Santa Domingo or wherever for like two weeks, and I've been eating pizza or sushi every freaking night. I asked Regina to buy ham, Swiss, Pepperidge Farm white bread, Grammy Smith apples, and peanut butter. All I want is the food I ate in kindergarten." He tugged anxiously on a messy lock of wavy golden brown hair. "Maybe I'm going through some sort of midlife crisis or something."

Like his life is so stressful?

"It's Granny Smith, silly," Serena informed him fondly. She opened a glossy white cupboard and found an unopened box of cinnamon-and-brown-sugar Pop-Tarts. Ripping it open, she removed one of the packets from inside, tore it open with her neat, white teeth, and pulled out a thickly frosted pastry. She sucked on the Pop-Tart's sweet, crumbly corner and hopped up on the counter, kicking the cupboards below with her size eight-and-a-half feet. Pop-Tarts at Nate's. She'd been having them there since she was five years old. And now . . . and now . . .

"Mom and Dad want me to go to boarding school next year," she announced, her enormous, almost navy blue eyes growing huge and glassy as they welled up with unexpected tears. Go away to boarding school and leave Nate? It hurt too much even to even think about.

Nate flinched as if he'd been slapped in the face by an invisible hand. He grabbed the other Pop-Tart from the packet and hopped up on the counter next to her. "No way," he responded decisively. She couldn't leave. He wouldn't allow it.

"They want to travel more," she explained, the pink, perfect curve of her lower lip trembling dangerously. "If I'm home, they feel like they need to be home more. Like I want them around? Anyway, they've arranged for me to meet some of the deans of admissions and stuff. It's like I have no choice."

Nate scooted over a few inches and wrapped his arm around her sharply defined shoulders. "The city is going to suck if you're not here," he told her earnestly. "You can't go."

Serena took a deep, shuddering breath and rested her pale blond head on his shoulder. "I love you," she murmured without thinking. Their bodies were so close the entire Nate-side of her hummed. If she turned her head and tilted her chin just so, she could have easily kissed his warm, lovely neck. And she wanted to. She was actually dying to, because she really did love him, with all her heart.

She did? Hello? Since when?!

Maybe since ballroom-dancing school way back in fourth grade. She was tall for her age, and Nate was always such a gentleman about her lack of rhythm and the way she stepped on his insteps and jutted her bony elbows into his sides. He'd finesse it by grabbing her hand and spinning her around so that the skirt of her puffy oyster-colored satin tea-length Bonpoint dress twirled out magnificently. Their teacher, Mrs. Jaffe, who had long blue hair that she kept in place with a pearl-adorned black hairnet, worshipped Nate. So did Serena's best friend, Blair Waldorf. And so did Serena—she just hadn't realized it until now. She shivered and her perfect, still-tan-from-Christmas-in-the-Caribbean skin broke out in a rash of goosebumps. Her whole body seemed to be having an adverse reaction to the idea of revealing something she'd kept so well hidden for so long, even from herself.

Nate slipped his lacrosse-toned arms around her long, narrow waist and pulled her close, tucking her pale gold head into the crook of his neck and massaging the ruts between the ribs on her back with his fingertips. The best thing about Serena was her total lack of embarrassing flab. Her entire body was as long and lean and taut as the strings on his Prince titanium tennis racket.

It was painful having such a ridiculously hot best friend. Why couldn't his best friend be some lard-assed dude with zits and dandruff? Instead he had Serena and Blair Waldorf, hands down the two hottest girls on the Upper East Side, and maybe all of Manhattan, or even the whole world.

Serena was an absolute goddess—every guy Nate knew talked about her—but she was perplexingly unpredictable. She'd laugh for hours if she spotted a cloud shaped like a toilet seat or something equally ridiculous, and the next moment she'd be wistful and sad. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking most of the time. Sometimes Nate wondered if she would've been more comfortable in a body that was slightly less perfect, because it would've given her more incentive, to use an SAT vocabulary word. Like she wasn't sure what she had to aspire to, since she basically had everything a girl could possibly want.

Blair was petite, with a pretty, foxlike face, cobalt blue eyes, and wavy chestnut-colored hair. Way back in fifth grade, Serena had told Nate she was convinced Blair had a crush on him. He started to notice that Blair did sort of stick her chest out when she knew he was looking, and she was always either bossing him around or fixing his hair. Of course Blair never admitted that she liked him, which made him like her even more.

Nate sighed deeply. No one understood how difficult it was to be best friends with two such beautiful, impossible girls.

Like he would have been friends with them if they were awkward and butt-ugly?

He closed his eyes and breathed in the sweet scent of Serena's Frédéric Fekkai Apple Cider clarifying shampoo. He'd kissed a few girls and had even gone to third base last June with L'Wren Knowes, a very experienced older Seaton Arms School senior who really did seem to know everything. But kissing Serena would be . . . different. He loved her. It was as simple as that. She was his best friend, and he loved her.

And if you can't kiss your best friend, who can you kiss?

upper east side schoolgirl uncovers shocking sex scandal!

"Ew," Blair Waldorf muttered at her reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door. She liked to keep her closet organized, but not too organized. Whites with whites, off-whites with off-whites, navy with navy, black with black. But that was it. Jeans were tossed in a heap on the closet floor. And there were dozens of them. It was almost a game to close her eyes and feel around and come up with a pair that used to be too tight in the ass but fit a little loosely now that she'd cut out her daily after-dinner milk-and-Chips-Ahoy routine.

Blair looked at the mirror, scrutinizing her outfit. Her Marc by Marc Jacobs shell pink sheer cotton blouse was fine, as were her peg-legged Seven jeans. It was the fuchsia La Perla bra that was the problem. It showed right through the blouse so that she looked like a lap dancer from Scores. But she was only going to Nate's house to hang out with him and Serena. And Nate liked to talk about bras. He was genuinely curious about, for instance, what the purpose of an underwire was, or why some bras fastened in front and some fastened in back. Obviously it was a big turn-on for him, but it was also sort of sweet. He was a lonely only child, craving sisterhood.

Right.

She decided to leave the bra on for Nate's sake, hiding the whole ensemble under her favorite belted black cashmere Loro Piana cardigan, which would come off the minute she stepped into his well-heated town house. Maybe the sight of her hot pink bra would be the thing to make Nate realize that he'd been in love with her just as long as she'd been in love with him.

Maybe.

She opened her bedroom door and yelled down the long hall and across the East Seventy-second Street penthouse's vast expanse of period furniture, parquet floors, crown moldings, and French Impressionist paintings. "Mom! Dad? I'm going over to Nate's house! Serena and I are spending the night!"

When there was no reply, she clomped her way to her parents' huge master suite in her noisy Kors wooden-heeled sheepskin clogs that she'd bought on impulse at Scoop, opened their bedroom door, and made a beeline for her mom's dressing room. Eleanor Waldorf kept a tall stack of crisp emergency twenties in her lingerie drawer for Blair and her ten-year-old brother, Tyler, to parse from—for taxis, cappuccinos, and, in Blair's case, the occasional much-needed pair of Manolo Blahnik heels. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, two hundred. Blair counted out the crisp bills, folding them neatly before stuffing them into her back pocket.

"If I were a cabernet," her father's playfully confidential lawyer's voice echoed out of the adjoining dressing room, "how would you describe my bouquet?"

Excusez-moi?

Blair clomped over to the chocolate brown velvet curtain that separated her mother's dressing room from her father's. "If you guys are in there together, like, doing it while I'm home, then that's really gross," she declared flatly. "Anyway, I'm going over to Nate's, so—"

Her father, Harold J. Waldorf III, Esquire, poked his head out from behind the velvet curtain, holding it firmly in his grasp so that Blair couldn't pull it aside. The one shoulder she could see appeared to be dressed in his favorite charcoal tweed Paul Smith cashmere bathrobe. But if he wasn't naked, then why wouldn't he let her open the curtain?

"Your mom's with Misty Bass looking at dishes for the Guggenheim benefit," he said, his nicely tanned, handsome face looking slightly flushed. "I thought you were out. Where are you going exactly?"

Blair glared at him and then yanked the curtain aside, catching him as he tucked his rather bulky BlackBerry into his bathrobe pocket. She shoved him aside and stood amongst his custom-tailored Valentino and Dior suits with her hands on her hips. Who had he just been talking to? His intern? His secretary? A salesgirl from Hermès, his favorite store?

"What's up, Bear?" Her father smiled tensely back at her, his crystalline blue eyes looking a little too innocent. What was he hiding?

Does she really want to know?

Her stomach roiling with bilious outrage and her blue eyes shining with angry tears, Blair stumbled out of the master suite and clomped her way across the penthouse to the foyer. She grabbed her blood-orange-colored Jimmy Choo Treasure Chest hobo and ran for the elevator.

February had been unusually cruel. Outside it was breathtakingly cold, and fat snowflakes fell at random. Usually Blair walked the twelve blocks to Nate's house, but today she had no patience for walking. She couldn't wait to see her friends and tell them what a scumbag her father was. A cab was waiting for her downstairs. Or rather, a cab was waiting for Mrs. Solomon in 4A, but when Alfie, the hunter-green-uniform-clad doorman saw the terrifying look on Blair's normally pretty face, he let her take it.

Besides, hailing cabs in the snow was probably the highlight of his day.

The stone walls bordering Central Park were blanketed in snow. A tall, elderly woman and her Yorkshire terrier, dressed in matching red Chanel quilted coats with matching black velvet bows in their white hair, crossed Seventy-second Street and entered the Ralph Lauren flagship store on the corner. Blair's cab hurtled recklessly up Madison Avenue, past Zitomer, Agnès B., and the Three Guys coffee shop where all the Constance Billard girls gathered after school, turned east on Eighty-second Street, and finally pulled up in front of Nate's town house.

"Let me in!" she yelled into the intercom outside the Archi-balds' elegant wrought-iron-and-glass front door as she swatted the buzzer over and over with an impatient hand.

Nate and Serena were still cuddling in the kitchen when the buzzer rang. Serena raised her head from his shoulder and opened her eyes, as if from a dream. The kiss they'd both been fantasizing about had never actually happened, which was probably for the best.

"I think I'm warm now," Serena announced, and hopped off the white marble countertop, composing her face so that she looked totally calm and cool, like they hadn't just had a moment. And maybe they hadn't—she couldn't be sure. She grinned at the monitor's distorted image of Blair giving her the finger. "Come on in, sweetness!" she shouted back, buzzing her other best friend in.

Nate tried to erase the disturbing thought that Blair had caught him and Serena together. They weren't together. They were just friends, hanging out, which is what friends do when they're together. There was nothing to catch. It was all in his mind.

Or was it?

"Hey hornyheads." Blair clomped into the kitchen with melting snowflakes in her shiny, shoulder-length chestnut brown hair. Her cheeks were pink with cold, her blue eyes were slightly bloodshot, and her carefully plucked dark brown eyebrows looked messy, as if she'd been crying or rubbing her eyes like crazy. "I have a fucked-up story to tell you guys." She flung her orange bag down on the floor and took a deep breath, her eyes rolling around dramatically, milking the moment for all it was worth. "As it turns out, my totally boring Mr. Lawyer father, Harold Waldorf, Esquire, is like totally having an affair. Only moments ago, I caught him talking on the phone in his closet with some random babe, saying, 'If I were a wine, how would you describe my bouquet?'"

"Whoa," Serena and Nate responded in unison.

Blair turned on the kitchen faucet and then turned it off again. Her face twisted up into a horrible grimace. "He just sounded so . . . slimy!" she wailed with dismay as she admired her own reflection in the polished white porcelain. She looked up and tucked her hair behind her tidily small, slightly pointed ears, waiting for her friends to say something soothing to make her feel better.

As if that were possible.

"Well, maybe he was just talking dirty to your mom," Serena suggested.

"Sure," Nate agreed. "My parents talk like that all the time," he added, feeling a little sick as he said it. His former navy admiral dad was so uptight he probably couldn't even think sexy thoughts for fear of being court-martialed.

Blair grimaced. The idea of her tennis-toned-but-still-plump, St. Barts–tanned, gold-jewelry-loving mom having any kind of sex, let alone cabernet phone sex, with her skinny, preppy, argyle-socks-wearing dad was so unlikely and so completely icky she refused to even think about it.

"No," she insisted, snatching the uneaten half of Serena's Pop-Tart off the counter and wolfing it down. "It was definitely another woman. I mean, face it," she observed, still chewing. "Dad is totally hot and dresses really well, and he's an important lawyer and everything. And my mom is totally insane and doesn't really do anything and she has varicose veins and a flabby ass. Of course he's having an affair."

Serena and Nate nodded their glossy blond heads like that made complete sense. Then Serena grabbed Blair and hugged her hard. Blair was the sister she'd never had. In fourth grade they'd pretended they were fraternal twins for an entire month. Their Constance Billard gym teacher, Ms. Etro, who'd gotten fired midyear for inappropriate touching—which she called "spotting"—during tumbling classes, had even believed them. They'd worn matching pink Izod shirts and cut their hair exactly the same length. They even wore matching gold Cartier hoop earrings, until they decided they were tacky and switched to Tiffany diamond studs.

Blair pressed her face into Serena's perfectly defined collarbone and heaved an exhausted, trembling sigh. "It's just so fucked up it makes me want to vomit."

Serena patted her back and met Nate's gaze over Blair's Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon–glossed brown head. No way was she going to bring up the whole being-sent-away-to-boarding-school problem—not when her best friend was so upset. And she didn't want Nate to mention it either. "Come on, let's go mix martinis and watch a stupid movie or something."

Nate jumped off the counter, feeling completely confused. Suddenly all he really wanted to do was hug Blair and kiss away her tears. Was he hot for her now, too?

That's the trouble with friends who happen to be boys. You can't take the boy out of the friend.

"All we have is vodka and champagne. My parents keep all the good wine and whiskey locked up in the cabinet for when they have company," he apologized, pulling his heathered gray J.Crew sweatshirt off over his head and giving both girls a small heart attack at the sight of his bare, tanned navel.

Yum.

Serena broke away from Blair and scooted down the countertop on her bum until she reached the bread pantry, where most families would actually keep bread, but where Nate's mom stored the cartons of Gitanes cigarettes her sister sent from France via FedEx twice a month because the ones sold in the States simply did not taste fresh. She slid open the door and pulled out a royal blue carton. "I'm sure we can make do."

She ripped open the carton and stuck two cigarettes in her mouth like tusks. Then she beckoned Nate and Blair to follow her out of the kitchen and upstairs to the master suite. If anyone was an expert at changing the mood, it was Serena. That was one of the things they loved about her. "I'll show you a good time," she added goofily.

She always did.

The Archibalds' vast bedroom had been decorated by Nate's mother in the style of Louis XVI, with a giant gilt mirror over the headboard of the enormous red-and-gold-toile-upholstered four-poster bed, and heavy gold curtains in the windows. The walls were adorned with red-and-gold fleur-de-lys wallpaper and renderings of Mrs. Archibald's family's summer château near Nice. On the floor was a red, blue, and gold Persian rug rescued from the Titanic and bought at auction by Mrs. Archibald at Sotheby's as a gift to Mr. Archibald for their tenth wedding anniversary. The only modern exception to the room's historical décor was the circular glass skylight in the ceiling over the bed, a porthole to the stars.

"Bus Stop? Some Like It Hot? Or the digitally remastered version of Some Like It Hot?" Serena asked, flipping through Nate's parents' limited DVD collection. Obviously Captain Archibald liked Marilyn Monroe movies—a lot. Of course, Nate had his own collection of DVDs in his room, including a play-by-play of the last twenty years of America's Cup sailing races. Thanks, but no thanks. His parents' taste was far more girl-friendly. "Or we could just watch Nate play Xbox, which is always hot," she joked, although she kind of meant it.

"Only if he does it naked," Blair quipped hopefully. She sat down and bounced up and down on the end of the luxuriously huge bed.

Nate blushed. Blair loved to make him blush and he knew it. "Okay," he responded boldly, sitting down next to her.

Blair snatched a Kleenex out of the silver tissue box on Nate's mom's bedside table and blew her nose noisily. Not that she really needed to blow her nose. She just needed a distraction from the overwhelming urge to tackle Nate and rip his clothes off. He was so goddamned adorable it made her feel like she was going to explode. God, she loved him.

There had never been a time when she didn't love him. She'd loved the stupid lobster shorts he wore to the club in Newport when their dads played tennis together in the summer, back when they were, what—five? She loved the way he always had a Spider-Man Band-Aid on some part of his body until he was at least twelve, not because he'd hurt himself but because he thought it looked cool. She loved the way his whole head reflected the sunlight, glowing gold. She loved his glittering green eyes—eyes that were almost too pretty for a boy. She loved the way he so obviously knew he was hot but didn't quite know what to do about it. She loved him. Oh, how she loved him.

Oh, oh, oh!

Blair blew her nose with one last trumpeting snort and then grabbed a hot pink, tacky-looking DVD case from off the floor. She turned the case over, studying it. "Breakfast at Tiffany's. I've never seen it, but she's so beautiful." She held the DVD up so Serena could see Audrey Hepburn in her long black dress and stunning pearls. "Isn't she?"

"She is pretty," Serena agreed, still sorting through the movies.

"She looks like you," Nate observed, cocking his head and studying Blair in such an adorable way that she had to close her eyes to keep from falling off the bed.

"You think?" She tossed her dirty tissue in the general direction of the Archibalds' dainty white porcelain wastepaper basket and studied the picture on the DVD case again. A movie began to play in her head, and in it she was Audrey Hepburn—a fabulously dressed, wafer-thin, perfectly coiffed, beautiful, mysterious megastar. "Maybe a little," she agreed, removing her black cashmere cardigan so that her fuchsia bra was clearly visible beneath her blouse.

She turned the DVD case over and examined the pictures on the back of it. Audrey Hepburn looked like the most stylish, sophisticated woman in the world, but she also looked sort of prim and proper, like she wore sexy underwear but wouldn't let a guy see it unless he was going to marry her. Blair yanked her cardigan back on and buttoned the top button. From now on, her life's work would be to emulate Audrey Hepburn in every possible way. Nate could see her underwear, but only once she was sure that one day they'd walk down the aisle at St. Patrick's Cathedral with wedding bands on their fingers and confetti flying through the air.

That makes sense—to her.

"I watched that movie with my mom," Nate confessed, causing both girls' hearts to drip into sticky puddles on the floor. "It's kind of bizarre, actually. I think it's supposed to be romantic, but I'm not sure I even understood it."

That was all the girls needed. Blair stuck the DVD into the player while Serena mixed martinis on top of the vintage hammered steel wet bar in the adjoining library. This involved pouring Bombay Sapphire into chilled martini glasses and stirring it with a silver letter opener. It was only noon—not exactly cocktail hour—but Blair was in crisis, and Nate tended to take off his shirt when he got drunk. Besides, it was Saturday.

"There," Serena announced, as if she'd just put the finishing touches on a very complicated recipe. She handed out the glasses. "To us. Because we're worth it."

"To us," Blair and Nate chorused, glasses raised.

Bottoms up!

even cowgirls from vermont get the blues

"Whose idea was it to send me to Constance anyway?" fifteen-year-old Vanessa Abrams demanded of her nineteen-year-old sister, Ruby.

"Fuck if I know." Ruby was in the bathtub, soaking off the sweat and stench from her gig at Pete's Candy Store the night before. She was the bassist for the band SugarDaddy, the latest sensation on the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bar scene, and she'd been up all night, rocking out. "Do you mind?"

Vanessa stood in the doorway of the bathroom while her sister floated naked in the sparsely bubbled lukewarm water, her thick black Williamsburg hipster bangs plastered to her clammy white forehead. "Is there some reason why I couldn't go to a more convenient, less materialistic, less-full-of-bitches school in, say, Brooklyn, which happens to be where I live?" Vanessa railed on.

"You know the story." Ruby hugged her pale wet knees. "Dad read an article about that woman recycling personal objects to make art in Atlantic Monthly and the artist's bio said she went to Constance Billard. He was so impressed that when you told him you wanted to come live here with me, he just signed you up. He doesn't care what a hassle it is to get there. And it makes him feel good that you're at this ritzy school all day. It's like he thinks the school can be your substitute parent because it's used to dealing with families where the parents are always in Gstaad or Cannes or wherever." Ruby lay on her stomach so that her flat, pink ass was in plain view. Outside the tiny, city-grime-smeared bathroom window a cargo truck rumbled by on its way to the sugar factory three blocks away. That was one of the things Vanessa loved about living in gritty Williamsburg: the air always smelled like cotton candy.

"Nice," she muttered grimly. Vanessa turned to the mirror over the sink, grabbed Ruby's green rubber hairbrush, and started to brush out her waist-length, naturally jet-black mane. Six months ago, on her first day of school at Constance Billard, the tenth-grade girls had all gone crazy over her hair, stroking it and braiding it, like Vanessa was one of those Barbie hairdressing heads or a new pony or something. It was clearly the only thing they liked about her. "Okay, so he read that article like twenty years ago. The girls in my class don't give two shits about recycling or art. All they do is get their highlights done and trade lip glosses they get in gift bags at all those fancy parties they go to. Plus, you graduated from White River High and you're making decent money without even going to college."

"I'm exceptional," Ruby replied dryly, sitting up to squirt Johnson's baby shampoo into her palm. "If I'd gone to Constance instead of some shitty high school in Vermont, I'd probably be the first woman president by now."