Psycho Killer (21 page)

“Blair!” Serena shouted when she saw Blair by the milk
table. She rushed over excitedly. “I need your help,” she gushed, squeezing Blair’s arm.

Blair kept her body stiff until Serena let go.

“Sorry.” Serena let her hand drop. “But I have the best, best, best idea! I want to make a movie, but I have no idea how to work the cameras and stuff and you do, because you take Film. Remember how we always wanted to make movies together? Well, here’s our chance! I’ll be the director, and you can be the star!”

Blair glanced at Rain and Laura, quietly sipping their milk. She smiled grimly and shook her head. “Sorry, I can’t. I’ve got activities every single day after school. I don’t have time.”

“Oh please, Blair,” Serena begged, grabbing her old friend’s hand. “Remember, you can be Janet Leigh. And I’ll be… Oliver Stone!”

Blair dragged her hand away and folded her arms across her chest so Serena couldn’t touch her anymore.

“I’ll do all the work,” Serena added desperately. “All you have to do is show me how to use the camera and the lighting and stuff. And we can go shopping and pick out the coolest costumes. We can go to Chanel—”

“I can’t,” Blair interrupted her. “Sorry.”

Serena couldn’t have been more hurt if Blair had drawn a serrated knife across her cheek and then stabbed her in the liver. She mashed her lips together to keep them from trembling. Her eyes seemed to be growing larger and larger, and her face was turning splotchy.

Blair had seen this transformation in Serena many times as they grew up together. Serena was about to have a tantrum. Once, when they were both eight, they had walked the three miles from Serena’s country house into the town of Ridgefield to
buy ice cream cones. Serena stepped out of the ice cream shop with her triple strawberry cone with chocolate sprinkles and bent down to pet a puppy tied up outside. All three scoops fell splat into the dirt. Serena’s eyes had grown huge and her face looked like she had the measles. Serena was collecting rocks to throw at the puppy and at the shop window when the nice ice cream man came out with a fresh cone and made it all better.

Seeing Serena on the verge of a tantrum once more touched something deep inside of Blair, like an involuntary reflex. Perhaps she wanted to protect herself. Perhaps she wanted to protect her friends—the few who were still living. Perhaps she wanted to protect the school, where she had gone every day since she was five.

“Want to meet up on Friday?” she asked Serena in a neutral tone. “Drinks around eight at the Tribeca Star?”

Serena took a deep breath and swallowed her rage. “Just like old times?” she asked, her voice quavering.

“Right,” Blair assured her. “Exactly.”

She made a note in her mental Google calendar to tell Nate not to meet her until later now that Serena was coming out. The new plan was to knock back a few calming, highly alcoholic drinks with Serena at the Tribeca Star, leave early, go home, fill her room with candles, take a bath, and wait for Nate to arrive. Then they’d have sex all night long while listening to the weird Hawaiian music she’d loaded on to her iPod late last night. She wanted Friday night to feel special and different. Like she and Nate were on the beach in Kauai with nothing but the waves and their warm naked bodies, thousands of miles away from any slutty French girls or boyfriend-stealing freakshows.

“Cool,” Serena agreed. She sniffed and wiped her nose on the
sleeve of the camel-colored Max Mara cardigan she’d stolen from her mom. “Can’t wait ’til Friday.”

The bell rang and the girls went their separate ways to class; Blair and Rain to their AP Academic Achievers afternoon, and Serena to her plain old Kraft American slices classes.

On her way, Serena popped her head into the photography lab to see if there was any equipment she could steal to make the film she had absolutely no idea how to make, especially not without Blair’s help. God, Blair was mean. Serena still didn’t feel one hundred percent calmed down. In fact, she was still sort of shaking.

It was dark in the lab. Anna Quintana swished some undeveloped film around in a washtub full of clear, potent fixer, using a pair of black plastic tongs. Her short blond bob was tucked into a navy blue Constance Billard softball cap and her muscular legs rippled in a pair of silver Lycra jogging pants. She whipped her head around and glared at Serena.

“Just so you know,” Anna growled, “Isabel texted me. Right before she and Kati disappeared?” She waved the tongs around in the air. “We’d been talking because she needed to add a sport and she wanted to try out for soccer. She said she’d just seen you, and you and Nate had hooked up. He was like, in the shower, which is so gross.”

She swished the picture around in the fixer.

“I mean my first thought was, I wonder what Blair would think. And I bet you threatened Kati and Is. I bet you like, murdered them, like, seconds after she texted me.”

Anna lifted the picture out of the fixer and clothespinned it to a line overhead to dry. She leveled her green eyes at Serena and added accusingly, “You’re like… not a good person.”

Serena gave Anna her famously luminous smile. She’d wanted to kill someone at recess. Now was her chance.

“I’m in kind of a bad mood,” she warned. “Maybe you should be a little nicer to me.”

Anna’s blond eyebrows shot up in alarm. “Is that a threat?”

Serena shrugged her shoulders. “Not really.” She strode calmly across the darkroom, knocked off Anna’s softball cap, and seized the blunt blond strands of the girl’s hair. “This is more of a threat.”

Anna tried to stomp on Serena’s foot with her soccer cleats. “Ow. Ow. Ow. Help! Stop it. Ow! Help! Ow!!”

Serena dunked Anna’s head in the tub of fixer. “If you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

Anna thrashed her feet. Chocolate chip cookie vomit spewed out of her mouth as she drowned. The air was filled with the fixer’s formaldehyde scent mixed with the stench of burnt sugar and rotting chocolate.

Anna’s cleated feet kept thrashing until, at last, she was dead.

Serena washed her hands carefully in the darkroom sink and examined the video cameras clustered on a shelf. The cameras were complicated and intimidating. Even if she stole one she wouldn’t know how to use it. Besides, she and Blair were going out for drinks tomorrow night with Nate and the rest of the gang. Maybe after a few drinks she’d be able to talk Blair into making the movie with her. And if Blair
still
didn’t want to, she might let loose with that tantrum after all. She wouldn’t give up so easily.

Her picture wasn’t on the side of a bus for nothing.

Vanessa spent the first five minutes of Calculus in the darkroom, filming Anna Quintana’s drowned, fixer- and vomit-soaked body before someone cleaned it up. She’d gone in there for a new lens cap and was pleasantly surprised to discover even more great background footage for her film.

Satisfied, she stepped outside school and tried to call Dan. She knew he had Study Hall fourth period on Thursdays. He was probably hanging out outside, writing suicidal haikus while he asphyxiated himself with nicotine. She paced up and down Ninety-third Street, waiting for him to venture out of his manic-depressive vow of silence and answer his fucking phone.

The lower school boys were using the Riverside Prep courtyard for a game of dodgeball, so Dan had exiled himself to a park bench in the traffic island in the middle of Broadway. He’d just cracked open a new collection of haikus by Bash
, Buson, and Issa, which he was reading in the original Japanese, just to torture himself. Dan didn’t even take Japanese. He had to use a pocket Japanese dictionary to decipher every line. It was impossible, but he felt pretty hardcore. People hurried past in a busy blur, while
he, Dan, just sat there on the bench in the median, poisoning his body with caffeine and nicotine, slowly dying, with a book of indecipherable symbols. There was a certain calm about him today. A certain beauty.

People visiting all day—

in between

the quiet of the peony
.

No one paid him any mind. They didn’t even realize that he was different today. They didn’t notice that the circles under his eyes were more pronounced than usual. That his pale cheeks were more hollow. They didn’t know that Dan was
in love
.

He’d lain awake all night, thinking of Serena. They were starring in a movie together. They were even going to kiss. It was too good to be true.

Poor dude, he has that right.

Dan noticed his cell phone ringing.

“Konnichiwa,” he answered in Japanese, with uncharacteristic cheer.

“About fucking time,” Vanessa snapped. “I thought maybe you were dead.”

“Not yet,” Dan joked. It was fun to make a joke.

“Listen, I’m supposed to be in Math, so I have to make this quick. I just wanted you to know that I told Marjorie she has the part.”

“You mean Serena,” Dan said, flicking his ash and taking another drag on his cigarette.

“No, I mean Marjorie.”

Dan exhaled and pressed the phone tight against his ear.
“Wait. What are you talking about? Marjorie, with the red hair and the gum?”

“Yes, that’s right. I haven’t got their names mixed up,” Vanessa said patiently.

“But Marjorie stank, you can’t use her!”

“Yeah, well, I kind of like that she stank. She’s sort of rough around the edges. I think it will make it feel edgier, you know? Like, not what you’d expect.”

“Yeah, definitely not,” Dan sneered. “Look, you’re making a huge mistake. Serena… I don’t know why you wouldn’t want her. She’s awesome. This isn’t about the knife, is it? I’m sure she’ll bring it back.”

“She didn’t bring it to school today,” Vanessa snapped. “Anyway, it’s my movie, so it’s my choice, and I choose Marjorie.” Vanessa really didn’t want to hear about how awesome Serena was. “Besides, I keep hearing all these stories about Serena. I don’t think she’s all that reliable.”

Vanessa was pretty sure that everything she’d heard was completely bogus, but it couldn’t hurt to mention it to Dan.

“What do you mean?” Dan said. “What stories?”

“Like she manufactures her own drug called S, and she has some pretty bad STDs,” Vanessa said. “And she possibly might have murdered some kid up at boarding school. I really don’t want to deal with that.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Dan demanded.

“I have my sources,” Vanessa insisted vaguely.

A bus roared up Madison on its way to the Cloisters. On the side of it was a massive photograph of a belly button. Or was it a gunshot wound? Scrawled in blue girly writing on the side of the poster was the name “Serena.”

Vanessa stared after the bus. Was she losing her mind? Or was Serena really and truly everywhere? Every last bit of her?

“I just don’t think she’s right for us,” Vanessa insisted, hoping Dan would come around if she used the word
us
. It was
their
movie, not just hers. “Besides,” Vanessa said, remembering her footage of that L’Ecole girl, splayed on the pizza boxes, and of the body she’d just discovered in the darkroom. “I’ve been getting all this amazing background stuff for the movie. I’m beginning to think I don’t need actors. It’ll be like, a documentary almost.”

“Fine,” Dan responded coldly. The words from the angry, life-is-shit Bash
haiku he’d just translated came into his head:

Fleas, lice
,

a horse peeing

near my pillow
.

“So, want to come out with me and Ruby in Brooklyn tomorrow night?” Vanessa asked, eager to change the subject.

“Nah.” Dan clicked off and tossed the phone angrily into his black courier bag.

That morning Jenny had stumbled into his room, eyes all bloodshot, hands covered in red ink, and dropped an invitation to that stupid birds of prey party on the floor beside his bed. He’d actually dared to think that since he was going to be Serena’s costar, he might take her to the goddamned party as his date. Now, that little dream was all shot to hell.

Dan couldn’t believe it. His one chance to get to know Serena was gone because Vanessa wanted to exercise her artistic license to make the worst film ever made. It was unbelievable. More
unbelievable still was that Vanessa, queen of the alterna-rebel scene, had stooped to spreading rumors about a girl she barely knew. Maybe Constance was finally rubbing off on her.