Psycho Killer (25 page)

Blair picked up the tube of black body paint, ran a caressing
hand over Nate’s shoulder blades, and wrote the first thing that came to mind across his strong bare back:
My girlfriend got in early to Yale and all I got was this lousy T-shirt
.

“What’re you writing?” Nate asked. He shivered. “It tickles.”

Blair finished writing and turned Nate around to face her. “Take off the rest of your clothes,” she whispered.

Nate did as he was told, trying not to look as she drew arrows, exclamation points, and asterisks all over him. Finally he couldn’t help himself. She was naked and she was beautiful. She was a girl and he was a boy. And he was naked too. And they were both covered in body paint.

There have been plenty of songs written about this.

There have?

Maybe after we do it, I’ll tell her
, Nate thought.
I’ll tell her everything
.

That didn’t seem completely fair, but still, he kissed her. He kissed a red heart on one cheek, and then another red heart on another. And another. And another. Their body paint began to mingle and smudge. Outside, the vultures beat their jealous wings against the rain-streaked windows. But now that he’d started, he just couldn’t stop.

When Serena woke up a little while later, Chuck was wearing her Pucci dress and her blue suede knee-high boots and was singing Madonna’s “Express Yourself” along with Gwyneth Paltrow, who was guest-starring on
Glee
. The brightly patterned silk jersey stretched taut across his hindquarters as he strutted and vogued.

Serena propped herself up on her elbows and wiped the lip gloss scum out of the corners of her mouth. “What time is it?” she yawned.

Chuck glanced at her. “Time for us to get naked,” he said impatiently. He’d been waiting long enough.

Serena’s head felt thick. She was dying for a glass of water. “I feel awful.” She sat up and rubbed her forehead. “Give me back my dress. I want to go home.”

“Come on,” Chuck said, flicking off the TV. “We could take a hot tub first. That’ll make you feel better.”

“No,” Serena insisted.

“Fine,” Chuck said angrily. He pulled off the dress and flung it at her. His chest hair had been shaved into bat wings and his silk boxer shorts were black and tiny. Still wearing her tall blue boots, he looked like a superhero gone completely wrong.

Jumpin’ juju beads, Robin, it’s Bat-Chuck!

He unzipped the boots and threw them at her too.

“It’s raining,” Serena observed as they both got dressed.

Chuck tossed her a scarf, his trademark cream-colored cashmere, monogrammed in gold with the letters
C.B
. “Wrap it around your head,” he said. “It’s okay. I wear a new one every single day.” He shoved on his loafers. “Come on, let’s go.”

They rode down the elevator in silence. Serena knew Chuck was disappointed, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t wait to get out into the fresh air and into her own bed.

A cab pulled up, the Remi brothers’ poster in the box on the cab’s roof. Serena thought it looked like a close-up photograph of lips puckered into a kiss.

“What’s that? Mars?” Chuck joked, pointing at it. He glanced at Serena without a trace of humor in his eyes. “No, it’s your anus!”

Serena blinked at him. She couldn’t tell if Chuck was trying to be funny or if that was what he actually thought the picture was. He held the cab door open for her, and she slid into the backseat.

“Thanks, Chuck,” she said gratefully. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”

“Whatever.” Chuck leaned into the cab and pressed Serena against the seat. “What’s your problem anyway?” he hissed. “You’ve been fucking Nate Archibald since tenth grade, and I’m sure you did just about every guy at boarding school, and in France, too. What, are you like, too good to give me some?”

Serena stared directly into Chuck’s eyes, seeing him as he really was for the first time. He’d always been hard to like, but she’d never actually hated him before. Again the murderous montage of killings played before her eyes. She fumbled in her purse for something, anything that could be used as a weapon. BlackBerry, keys, iPod microphone cord. Grasping the BlackBerry in one hand, she unzipped her little Louis Vuitton cosmetics pouch and pulled out her eyelash curler with the other. They would have to do.

“That’s okay, I wouldn’t want to do it with you anyway,” Chuck spat into her face. “I hear you have diseases.”

“Get away from me,” Serena hissed and whacked his left temple as hard as she could with her BlackBerry. With her left hand she clipped the eyelash curler over Chuck’s right eyelid and pulled back
hard
.

“Fuck me!” Chuck cried out. He stumbled backward. The cab door slammed shut and the driver pulled away.

Serena couldn’t exactly tell the driver to stop and wait while she finished Chuck off, so she decided to let it go. Chuck’s bloody eyelid drooped from the eyelash curler. She opened the window and tossed it into the gutter. Within seconds two well-fed baby vultures were fighting over it, squawking.

Some endangered species.

Staring straight ahead through the taxi’s rain-spattered
windshield, Serena wiped her bloody fingers on the ends of Chuck’s cream-colored scarf. When the taxi stopped at a light on the corner of Broadway and Spring, she opened her door, leaned out, and threw up into the gutter.

That will teach her not to drink on an empty stomach.

Chuck’s creamy cashmere scarf swung from her neck and dangled in the puddle of pink vomit on the pavement.

“Yuck.” Serena pulled off the scarf, wiped her mouth on it, and stuffed it into her bag. She slammed the cab door closed again.

“Tissue, miss?” the cab driver offered, passing a box of Kleenex back to her.

Serena pulled one from the box and wiped her mouth with it.

“Thanks,” she said, grateful—as always—for the kindness of strangers.

“What about a condom or something?” Blair murmured, gaping at Nate’s body paint–smeared hard-on. It looked like it was going to take over the world.

They’d been fooling around for almost an hour, their bodies tacky with black paint. Blair picked up a candle. She was running out of foreplay ideas. It was about time they did it.

Nate rolled onto his back while Blair poured hot red candle wax all over his empty stomach. Man, was he hungry. Maybe when he went home he’d pick up a burrito from the Mexican place on Lexington Avenue. That’s what he wanted, a chicken and black bean burrito with extra guacamole.

Blair grabbed his hand and stuck his pinky into the flame.

“Ow,” Nate said, his hard-on deflating as if pricked with a pin. He sat up and blew on his hurt hand. “I can’t do this,” he muttered under his breath.

“What?” Blair said, tossing aside the candle. “What’s wrong?” Her heart fell. This wasn’t in the script. Nate was ruining a perfect moment.

Clumsily, Nate took Blair’s hand and looked into her eyes for the first time all night. Her face was black and red and creepy-looking, like some tribesgirl from the movie
Avatar
except not blue. “I have to tell you something,” he said.

Blair could tell by the look in Nate’s eyes that the moment wasn’t just ruined—it was killed. “What?” she said softly.

Nate reached down and gathered up the edges of the quilt. He draped one end around Blair’s shoulders and wrapped the other end around his waist. It didn’t seem right to talk about this when they were both so naked and covered with black gunk. He took Blair’s hand again.

“Remember the summer before last when you were away in Scotland, at your aunt’s wedding?” Nate began.

Blair nodded.

“It was so damned hot that summer. I was in the city with my dad, just hanging out while he went to some meetings and stuff. I got bored, so I called Serena in Ridgefield, and she came down.” Nate noticed Blair’s back stiffen when he mentioned Serena’s name. She removed her hand from his and crossed her arms over her chest, her eyes suddenly distrustful.

“We had some drinks and sat out in the garden. It was so hot, Serena started splashing around in the fountain, and then she started splashing me. And I guess I got kind of carried away. I mean—” Nate fumbled. He remembered what Cyrus had told him about girls liking surprises. Well, Blair was about to be very surprised, and he didn’t think she was going to like it.

“And what?” Blair demanded. “What happened?”

“We kissed.” Nate took a deep breath and held it. He couldn’t just leave it at that. He blew the breath out. “And then we had sex.”

Blair threw the quilt off her shoulders and stood up. “I knew it!” she shouted. “Who
hasn’t
had sex with Serena? That nasty slut. Sure she wants to be friends again. I’ll fucking kill her. I’ll rip her heart out and eat it and then throw it up and make you eat it and then make you throw it up and make
her
eat it!”

“I’m sorry, Blair. It wasn’t like, planned or anything,” Nate said. “It just happened. And then it sort of happened again, earlier this week, right after she got back.” He swallowed, realizing how totally lame he sounded. “I just wanted you to know this wasn’t my first time.”

Blair stomped into her bathroom and snatched her pink satin bathrobe off its hook. She put it on, cinching the belt tight. Her graffitied skin shone in the candlelight. Angry tears sluiced her painted cheeks in greasy gray rivulets.

“Get the fuck out of here, Nate,” she sobbed. “Before I kill you.”

Her blue eyes widened as the notion hit her with extreme clarity, like a dim bulb that has finally been properly screwed in.

It wasn’t Nate she wanted to kill. It was Serena.

“Blair—” Nate pleaded. Then he noticed the same crazed look on Blair’s face that he’d hallucinated when she killed the L’Ecole girl outside the pizzeria.

Blair slammed the bathroom door in his face.

Nate stood up and pulled on his boxers. Kitty Minky poked his gray, furry head out from under the bed and stared at him accusingly, his golden cat eyes glowing eerily in the dark. Nate left the rest of his clothes on the floor and headed for
the front door. Fuck Blair’s creepy cat. Fuck the vultures. Fuck the rain. He was going to run, barefoot, in his underwear, all the way home.

The front door closed with a hollow bang. Blair remained locked in the bathroom, glaring at her tearstained, paint-smeared reflection in the mirror. The tube of Serena’s lip gloss was still lying on the sink where she’d left it. Blair picked it up with trembling fingers.
Gash
, it was called. What an ugly name. Of course Serena could wear lip gloss with ugly names, and tights with holes in them, and dirty old boots, and never cut her hair, and kill anyone she felt like killing, and still get the boy. Blair grunted at the irony of it all and opened her bathroom window, tossing the lip gloss out into the night without waiting to hear the pained squeals of the rat it killed on the pavement below.

Her head was too full of the new movie she was working on. The movie in which she pushed the fabulous Serena van der Woodsen in front of a speeding bus with Serena’s stupid picture plastered on the side of it. Serena would flail and flop on the pavement like a dehydrated mermaid while Blair watched. Then Blair would shave off all of Serena’s annoying blond hair for the pigeons and vultures to use in their nests, gouge out her bluer-than-blue eyes with quarters, and leave her ugly, maimed, and smushed carcass there to rot as she died.

Jenny had gone to bed hours ago, still recovering from her invitation-making all-nighter. Rufus had fallen asleep in front of the Food Network. He liked to laugh at the so-called gourmet chefs struggling to make simple dishes like risotto with asparagus and poached salmon. His own specialties included curried crab apple soup made with apples picked fresh from Riverside Park and onion bagel peanut butter pie using bagels from the Dumpster behind Zabar’s. Hence Jenny’s taste for uncooked ground beef.

It was Friday night. The apartment was quiet.

Friday the thirteenth
,

full moon—how appropriate
.

Boy, man. Scarf Boy, dead man
.

When Dan really took a good look around, he saw that his apartment was an arsenal of weaponry. Fire pokers. Handsaws. Corkscrews. Meat cleavers. Carving knives. Razor blades. Ice skates. A baseball bat. A hatchet. A bottle of paint thinner. His
dad even owned a blowtorch, which he used for cooking his inventive, if inedible, dishes.

If only Serena hadn’t taken the knife he and Vanessa had bought at Paragon. It would have been perfect. Dan decided on a meat cleaver. He could imagine throwing it at Chuck, ninja style, and watching Chuck’s shocked expression as it cleaved his rotten heart in two. He’d bleed to death slowly, from the inside out. A little coughing up of blood would be nice too.

Dan had heard about Chuck’s suite at the Tribeca Star, and because it was Friday night, he was pretty sure that’s where Chuck would be. He took a cab downtown, the meat cleaver wrapped in a kitchen towel and stuffed into the front pocket of his gray Gap hoodie with just the wooden handle sticking out.

Made up almost entirely of prewar residential doorman buildings, the stately inclines of West End Avenue after dark were always elegantly somnolent. Tribeca, on the other hand, was a mash-up of blocks of shuttered boutiques, spanking new glass-fronted condos, and hot new restaurants, hotels, and bars with bouncer-manned velvet ropes and red carpets outside their doors.

The Tribeca Star was such a place. The entrance to the bar was to the right of the hotel’s main entrance, nondescript, unmarked, and totally unnoticeable, save for the line of people outside it, which went around the corner and halfway down the block. Of course this was what every establishment in town craved. The more people came, the more people would come. An ambulance with its lights flashing was parked outside the hotel’s main entrance, boosting the sexiness of the place a millionfold. Was there a celebrity inside? What had happened? An overdose? A bar fight? A suicide attempt?

An eyelash curler accident?

Overhead in the hotel eves the vultures roosted, their red-rimmed eyes only half-closed, dreaming of the next delicious carcass.