Nobody Does It Better (6 page)

“Sure you're all right, man?” Damian asked for the second time through the locked bathroom stall door.

“Yep,” Dan called back from the other side of the door, praying that Damian and the rest of the band would think this was just his usual pre-gig behavior and go back to playing poker and knocking back Stoli shots or whatever they were doing backstage.

“All right, then. See you in a few,” Damian replied. “Nice shoelaces,” he added before leaving the bathroom.

Perched on top of the toilet seat lid, Dan stared woefully down at his new sneakers and the absurdly wide pant legs that nearly covered them. Yesterday he'd wandered into 555 Soul on Broadway in SoHo and let a sales guy talk him into a completely new performance wardrobe. Big yellow-and-black two-tone T-shirt, insanely huge and baggy gray rip-stop pants with drawstrings and toggles and pockets all over them, black canvas Converse sneakers with yellow laces, and a khaki-colored truckers' hat with a picture of yellow YEILD sign on it. That hat kept his wild, shaggy hair under control and revealed his shaved neck, making him look more menacing than he'd ever thought possible. In fact, with his new outfit, he kinda looked like a shorter, skinnier Eminem. Which was not really the look he wanted at all.

None of the guys in his band had commented on his outfit when he showed up, but then again he hadn't really given them time. One look at the huge line forming outside the club and the instruments and microphones set up on the stage inside had sent him rushing to the bathroom to puke his guts out. He'd been locked in a stall ever since.

If only he had a lucky talisman like a handmade silver belt buckle or a shark tooth necklace the way most legendary rock singers probably did. He could don his lucky whatever-it-was, his nervousness would disappear, and he'd perform with complete abandon, driving the crowd insane. Instead, he just sat on the toilet in the club's garish pea-green-painted men's room and smoked his lucky Camels- about forty of them- feeling progressively sicker and sicker.

All of a sudden the men's room door creaked open and the scuffed toes of Damian's black work boots appeared under the stall door once more. “have a taste and you'll be all right,” he advised, shoving an upopened bottle of Stoli under the door.

Dan took the bottle. If he was going top perform tonight he'd need to feel as fly as his outfit. He opened it and took a swig. His stomach felt so bottomless and endless, it was like pouring a teaspoon of vodka into an empty well. He took another swig and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“See you in a few then, yeah?” Damian said again. “You might want to lose the hat, though,” he added gently before leaving the men's room.

The Raves were all about not having a look and not trying too hard. Most of them still wore clothes their moms had bought them in prep school- Lacoste polo shirts, Brooks Brothers khakis- paired with something cool and absurdly expensive, like a custom-made kidskin trench coat from Dolce & Gabbana. But Dan's mom had fled to the Czech Republic
with some balding, horny count before he'd even started high school, so he didn't even own any polo shirts or khakis, only the clothes he picked out for himself and paid for with the barely adequate clothing allowance Rufus gave him. He could feel his panic mounting. Who was going to want to listen to a sick, skinny high-school kid with a shaved neck wearing fashion-disaster yellow-and-black shoes?

You'd be surprised.

Skirt, shirt, bra, underwear, shoes, watch, pearl choker, pearl earrings- Serena stared at the clothes her mom had laid out neatly on the end of her canopy bed. Everything her mom had chosen was gray or navy blue, which just happened to be Yale
University's colors.

Hello, dorkdom! Did she really need her mom to pick out her clothes? How old was she, anyway- five?

Her parents were in their suite of rooms, getting ready for Yale's University Yale Loves New York party for incoming freshmen from New York City
at Stanford Parris III's apartment on Park Avenue and Eighty-Fourth Street
. For them it was just another cocktail party- a chance to mingle with the parents of the children their own children had gone to school and tennis lessons and SAT prep with for most of their lives. No one would know each other intimately, but everyone would know everyone. People like the van der Woodsens thought of everyone in their circle as their dearest friends, but how intimate did you really want to be with someone like Stanford Parris III?

“Are you almost ready, dear?” Serena heard her mother call out to her.

“Yeah,” she called back, feeling stubborn and grumpy and annoyed. After all, she could have been on her way to the Raves gig right now instead of to another totally boring and useless party with her parents. Ignoring the outfit her mother had selected for her, she sat down in front of her IMac and logged on. Most of the e-mails were from fashion houses like launch a signature fragrance or shoe, but a new message from someone at Brown topped the list, followed by a message from Harvard, and one from Princeton.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Carina Serena,

I used to paint faceless angels and hands without bodies. I used to be dead. Now my art has a face, and to have you here at Brown next year-oh living, breathing muse! -would be my resurrection.

I kneel at your feet.

Christian

P.S There is a rumor you are engaged to that madman lead guitarist in the Raves. My love, I pray this is only a rumor.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Dear Serena,

I know you and I are cut from a different cloth, so to speak- I'm a jock from the boondocks and you're a goddess from New York City- but to quote a line from an old song, I just can't get you out of my head. When I think about you, the windows in my Jeep steam up and I can't breathe. I'm going to fail my finals because of you. I don't think they make you repeat grades if you fail a term in college the way they do in high school, but I wouldn't mind if they did, because then we'd be together for even longer. I know this is kind of crazy to say, but you're my girl, so you better come to Harvard next year. Here's to us for the next four years and forever.

Love,

Wade (your Harvard tour guide's roommate - remember me?)

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Dear Serena,

Just wanted to know that we can NOT stop talking about how you and Damian from the Raves are like THE perfect couple!! We are TOO excited to meet him, but first we have to take down all the pictures of him plastered all over our house- SO embarrassing! Give Damian a kiss for us, and tell him we love him too (even though we'd NEVER try to steal away your guy).

Love,

Your sisters, the Princeton Tri Delts

Serena winced and deleted all three stalkerish messages from her computer, hoping to delete the last one from her brain. There was nothing worse than a bunch of girls pretending to be your best friends when you didn't even know them, all gossiping about you and your new rock star boyfriend whom you'd never met. Way to make her not want to go to college at all!

She logged off without reading the rest of her mail and pulled her luxurious fair hair back into a messy ponytail with a plain white rubber band. Then she smeared her lips with Vaseline and opened her bedroom door to look for her parents.

The elder van der Woodsens had their own suite of rooms consisting of a large bedroom with a massive four-poster bed, two dressing rooms with huge walk-in closets, two full bathrooms, and a lounge with a wet bar they never used, a plasma TV they never watched, and a library full of rare books they never read, because they were always out at charity dinners or the opera or watching polo matches up in Connecticut. It could have been an apartment all by itself, but it took up only a quarter of the van der Woodsens' entire Fifth Avenue
spread.

“Didn't you see the clothes I laid out for you?” her mother demanded, sweeping her dark blue eyes despairingly over her daughter. Mrs. Van der Woodsen was tall and fair like Serena, with the same symmetrical features, which had grown haughtily handsome with age. “Jeans with holes in the behind really aren't acceptable for this sort of occasion, don't you agree, dear?”

“They're not just nay old jeans,” Serena said, looking down at her faded pants. “They're my favorites.”

Actually, she owned around twenty pairs of jeans, but this particular pair of Blue Cults were this week's can't-live-without-them.

“The skirt and blouse I chose for you are just right,” her mother insisted. She buttoned the jacket of her gold Chanel suit and glanced at the antique platinum Cartier wristwatch fastened to her slim, Santo Domingo-
tanned wrist. “We're leaving in five minutes. Your father and I will be reading the newspapers in his study. Don't be difficult, darling. It's just a party. You like parties.”

“Not this kind of party,” Serena grumbled. Her mother raised her thin gray-blond eyebrows so fiercely she decided not to mention that she'd much rather see the Raves play than schmooze with a bunch of kids and their parents all gloating about the fact that they'd gotten into one of the toughest colleges to get into in the world.

Serena went back to her room and grudgingly changed out of her jeans and into the gray pleated Marc Jacobs skirt laid out on her bed, pairing it with a beaded aqua-colored t-shirt and her orange Miu Miu clogs instead of the boring navy blue blouse and baby blue suede Tod's loafers her mother had chosen.

And the pearls? Sorry, mom.

Her last effort was to pull out the messy ponytail and run her fingers through her pale blond hair. Then, without even a glance in the mirror, she strode out of her room and into the front hall.

If only we could all be so sure of our exquisite beauty.

“Mom! Dad! I'm ready!” she trilled, trying to sound excited about it. She'd give the party five or ten minutes- just enough time for her parents to get involved in some supremely boring and involved conversation with Stanford Parris III or one of the other ancient dull Yale alumni who'd been attending these parties for centuries, than she'd slip out and head downtown to the Raves gig.

After all, if she was going to spend the next four years being intellectual, she needed to enjoy herself while she had the chance.

As if she didn't always enjoy herself.

Jeremy, Charlie, and Anthony would not shut up about Bermuda, so when they got onboard the Charlotte, named after Nate's paternal grandmother, Nate did a search for ports in Bermuda on the boat's computer and then programmed Horseshoe Bay into the navigational system. He set the motor for .5 miles per hour. That meant they were headed to Bermuda very slowly. In fact, even though they'd left the dock in lower Manhattan nearly twenty hours ago, they were only drifting past Coney Island, in Brooklyn.

Friday night had oozed into Saturday night, and the sun hung low over Staten Island as the sailboat motored slowly southward. The air was cooler than on land and smelled like wet dog. Nate and everyone else on the boat remained stoned, sprawled on deck wit their eyes half closed and their mouths hanging lazily open, or drifting languidly below decks in bare feet to replenish their stashes of beer and snacks.

It had dawned only recently that Blair wasn't onboard. He recalled that she'd called him last night from the Plaza, and that he'd sort of blown off meeting her. Of course he would have called her, but his cell phone was missing, and when he tried to use Jeremy's phone, he discovered that he'd only ever speed-dialed Blair from his stored address book, and he didn't even know her number. And when you've been stoned for almost twenty-four hours, doing something like calling information to find your girlfriends number seems impossibly complicated.

Hello, lameness?

Nate and his father had built the Charlotte themselves, up on the Archibald compound on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. It was one-hundred-and-ten-foot ketch, huge enough to comfortably ferry one hundred-plus passengers from Battery Park City to the Hamptons, or seventten high-school kids to Bermuda. In preparation for the upcoming cruise to the Hamptons
, the kitchen had been fully stocked with artisanal cheeses, Carrs table water crackers, smoked oysters, Belgian beer, Veuve Clicquot champagne, and vintage scotch. The four bathrooms were equipped with hot showers, navy blue Frette towels, and handmade shell-shaped mini soaps with CHARLOTTE
printed on them in gold. The cabin was equipped with the latest computer mapping and communication systems, and there were state-of-the-art sound systems both on deck and below decks.

After a dinner of beer, Brie, and potato chips, Nate passed up another session of bong hits with his buddies and climbed up into the crow's nest at the top of taller of the boat's two masts. He sat down and hugged his knees, contemplating the situation from up high. Since they were only drifting, he was pretty sure they weren't going to get farther than the New Jersey
Shore
before Monday, which was fine with him. He was also pretty sure he was just about to miss that Yale party he was supposed to go to with his parents. And he'd probably missed a whole slew of Blair's pissed-off, upset, and maybe even worried calls.

Probably.

Nate had the nagging feeling that his little foray onboard the Charlotte
had been kind of a mistake. The crew would be frantic to find the boat missing, and his dad would be pissed as hell. But as long as they were back by the time the Hamptons
cruise was supposed to start, there was no harm done, right? He lifted up his worn black T-shirt and checked to see if the hickey Blair had left on his belly the day before was still there. A shade lighter, but yes, still there. Just thinking about Blair eased his mind. Even if she was pissed off at him eighty percent of the time, they would stay together for always, and hopefully even go to Yale together. How good it was, he thought, as only a par-baked boy can, knowing you had someone's hand to hold when you were about to step into the big bad unknown.

“Peace, dude!” a girl's voice called up to him from the deck. “Alors, I found some Oreos for our desert!”

Nate peered down at Lexie. From where he was sat she looked very small and bright-eyed, like a little girl. All over the deck, groups of guys and a few girls were smoking and drinking blond Belgian beer out of crystal beer steins. In the aft of the boat the lazy music of one of Nate's mom's French jazz CDs wafted out of Bose waterproof speakers.

“Want one?” Lexie added. “I can climb up.”

For a moment, Nate didn't respond. He shifted his gaze to the brightly lit Coney Island Ferris wheel, turning slowly round and round across the twinkling, greenish-brown water.

He was pretty sure he didn't want Lexie to join him in the crow's nest. First of all, there was hardly room up there for one person; second of all, if she did, the obvious thing would be for him to kiss her, because she was pretty and had that sexy tattoo, and because she so obviously had a crush on him.

But these days he really didn't feel like kissing anyone but Blair. After all, he and Blair were supposed to going to college together and getting married. They were going to spend their whole lives together.

Wait. Is he, like having some sort of epiphany?

Nate stood up and began to climb down out of the crow's nest. He couldn't sit up there all night, waiting for the boat to turn itself around. Not when Blair was waiting for him, not when he had his whole future ahead of him

He jumped down the ladder and Lexie handed him an Oreo. “The water makes me feel so free,” she declared swaying slightly as the Charlotte
drifted over a patch of rough water. Her tie-dyed dress had somehow loosened or gotten torn, and the cap sleeves drooped down over the tops of her arms, revealing her tanned shoulders and making the most of her tiny sun, moon, and stars tattoo.

Nate took an Oreo, pulled the two halves apart, and licked the white icing inside. Yes, he had his whole future ahead of him, but sometimes it's important to enjoy the simple things in life.