Psycho Killer (28 page)

“The Barneys guy just taught me how to do this.” Dan gestured toward Chuck’s lamely tied bow tie, which was dark purple silk and had a black tag dangling from it that said Yves Saint Laurent. “It’s actually pretty easy,” he added, trying and failing to keep the condescension out of his voice. Chuck’s family probably employed nannies or slaves to tie his bow ties for him, which was why he didn’t know how to do it himself.

Chuck shrugged his shoulders and stuffed his hands into his sleek YSL tuxedo pockets. “Go ahead. It’s not like it could look any worse.”

Dan reached out and yanked on the purple silk bow tie until it untied and dangled loose from Chuck’s white tuxedo shirt neck. He moved behind Chuck and put his arms around him to retie it.

The boys faced the mirror. Dan glared at their reflection. Chuck’s hair was slicked back in a particularly annoying fashion and with Dan’s arms around Chuck’s neck it looked like they were hugging.

“First you make a loop,” he instructed. “Then you make another loop, wind it around, and push it through—”

“Like this isn’t totally gay,” Chuck commented with a smirk.

Dan ignored him. “Then you pull it tight.” He tightened the bow tie and kept on tightening and tightening it. He stood on tiptoe and tightened it some more.

Taut silk round your neck
.

Let’s hope that was your last breath
.

No one knows I’m here
.

“Hey,” Chuck gasped. “Hey!”

The salesman parted the curtain and poked his head into the dressing room.

“You boys okay?”

He frowned when he saw Chuck’s red face and Dan’s look of guilty consternation. The bow loops of the tie were Minnie Mouse huge.

“Oh dear, let me.” The salesman swept in and untied the purple bow.

Chuck doubled over and sucked in his breath. “Fucking idiot asshole!”

But Dan, foiled again, had already vanished.

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

Blair threw her laptop across her room, smashing it against her closet door. Shoes toppled willy-nilly from the shoe rack. Kitty Minky jumped off his pillow and hid under the bed. Blair ripped off her red velvet Natori dressing gown and threw that across the room too. If she had to read one more word about how famous the Remi brothers were now that they were dead, and how valuable their portraits were going to be, she was going to throw herself out her penthouse window, and the corpse would be anything but pretty after those foul, totally unendangered birds were done pecking at it.

But that would be giving Serena exactly what she wanted.

Blair’s old Barbies dangled from their nooses, blond and dead and sad. She’d tied them to the chandelier over her bed so she could lie beneath them, plotting and scheming with morbid dedication. But killing her Barbies had given her no more satisfaction than killing the Remi brothers. She couldn’t rest until Serena was dead and gone and out of her life. In fact, Blair was so completely obsessed with murdering Serena that she thought
she might have to kill Serena not once, but twice, just for the thrill of it.

Coming soon, a new society lifestyle cookbook:
The Joy of Killing
.

Blair pulled on a pair of stretchy black Topshop leggings and a murderously soft black Tse cashmere tunic. Then she began to search for just the right weapon to execute the execution of her former best friend.

The penthouse was deliciously deserted. Eleanor and Cyrus were away until Sunday, and her little brother, Tyler, was at a friend’s house. Tyler had taken fencing a few years back. She padded into his room and began to dig in his stinky little brother closet for his old fencing foil. The foil was tucked behind a hockey stick and a golf club. It was disappointingly bendy and not sharp enough at all. That would never do.

She moved on to her mother’s medicine cabinet. The shelves were laden with a shocking number of prescription bottles with names that she vaguely recognized as potentially harmful—Valium, Percocet, Ambien, Xanax—but she didn’t want to kill Serena with pills. She wanted to kill her in cold blood.

And so it went. Blair spent the entire day wandering from room to room, plotting Serena’s dire end with any number of fire pokers, letter openers, nail scissors, the cook’s meat carving and bread slicing collection, the maid’s ironing equipment, and the nail gun and electric drill that were stashed in the hall closet for uses unknown.

She was in the living room, standing in the window and passing from hand to hand a Japanese sushi knife she’d found in the pantry, when she spotted a blond girl down below on the street, turning off Fifth Avenue and entering the park.

A day’s worth of adrenaline pumped through Blair’s veins. Not bothering with a coat or her bag, she headed for the elevator, sushi knife in hand.

No one seemed to mind the sight of a half-crazed almost-seventeen-year-old girl brandishing a large, sharp knife, brunette mane flying, as she ran after her prey.

“Serena!” Blair shouted, chasing the blonde up a tree-lined path headed north.

The girl glanced behind her and started to run.

Blair ran faster. She’d been pent up in the house all day. It felt good to run. They ran down the path and through a field and over a bridge and up another steeper path through the woods. As the gap between them closed, Blair raised the knife up, bracing for the kill.

But the girl kept running and running, all the way to the obelisk behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the path ended abruptly. She had nowhere to go.

The blonde turned back toward Blair just as Blair swung the knife, holding it in both hands for extra head-chopping power. Serena was born on Bastille Day. It seemed especially fitting for her to lose her head; although a guillotine would have been best.

The girl’s head separated from her neck with a satisfying slicing sound. Her body fell, while her head soared through the air, landing with a splash in a puddle at the base of the stone obelisk. Blair stared at it as she caught her breath. The hair was long and blond, but the staring, terrified eyes were a muddy brown, not navy blue. The head wasn’t Serena’s, but at least she’d had a good workout.

Beheading works all the muscle groups.

Blair knew this spot well. Each May, when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, the Constance Billard girls marched down Fifth Avenue to picnic at Cleopatra’s Needle, as the obelisk was called. Their art teachers made them sketch it, their history teachers made them write reports about it, and their gym teachers used it as the halfway mark for relay races.

The obelisk was the oldest man-made object in Central Park, one of a pair of obelisks commissioned by an Egyptian pharaoh back in 1500 BC. It had taken workers one hundred and twelve days to move it from the banks of the Hudson River, where it was delivered by ship from Egypt, to its spot on Greywacke Knoll in Central Park. People came from all over town to watch the raising of the obelisk by the light of two huge bonfires on a snowy night in January 1881. The other obelisk was in London. Blair had gotten extra credit in fifth-grade History for taking a picture of it and e-mailing it to her teacher.

Twilight was setting in and the park was pungent and peaceful. Blair looked up at the looming, pearly expanse of the Met. A host of vultures peered down at her from their perch on the roof ledge. With so much to feed on lately, the birds were content to wait until Blair had gone before claiming their bloody prize.

Blair headed back down the path toward home. She’d be back here soon enough. Tomorrow her family and her friends and their families would all gather for the annual fall brunch beside the reflecting pool in the Sackler Wing of the museum, where the Temple of Dendur was housed. Her family had been benefactors of the museum for over a century. In fact, the Arms and Armor collection had been donated in the Waldorf name. The Arms and
Armor collection happened to be right next door to the Temple of Dendur.

As she walked a slow, wicked smile spread across Blair’s face.

Enjoy your eggs Benedict, S. It may be your last meal.

That evening Vanessa Abrams patrolled Madison Square Park, filming more background shots for her remake of
Natural Born Killers
. She sighed, weary of the same old Manhattan sights—a bum with his penis out, a three-legged dog, a little boy selling yellow boxes of stolen peanut M&M’s. She needed more stuff like the body outside the pizzeria and the drowned girl in the darkroom. If she got enough footage she could turn the whole movie into a documentary and forget about casting it altogether. She’d call it
Naturally Born Killers: A Sickeningly Addictive High School Movie Without Music, a Prom, Cars, or Blue Jeans
.

The sun had just set. Vanessa decided to sit down on a bench and wait for something interesting to happen.

She didn’t have to wait long.

Three young vultures swooped down from the sky and dropped three small objects on the pavement. The objects rolled until they came to a stop in front of Vanessa’s bench. Two human eyes and a human nose stared up at her, all in a row, like an ellipsis.

Vanessa zoomed in on them excitedly.

Talk about found art.

Late Sunday morning the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art were crawling with people. Tourists mostly, and locals who had come for a brief visit so they could brag about it to their friends and sound cultured.

Inside, brunch was being served in the Sackler Wing for all the museum’s board members and their families. The wing was a superb setting for nighttime parties—glittering gold and exotic, with the moonlight shining dramatically through its modern glass walls. But it was all wrong for brunch. Smoked salmon and eggs and mummified Egyptian pharaohs really don’t mix. Plus, the morning sun shining so brightly through the slanting glass walls made even the slightest hangover feel ten times worse.

Who invented brunch anyway? The only decent place to be on a Sunday morning is in bed.

The room was filled with large round tables and freshly scrubbed Upper East Siders. Eleanor Waldorf, Cyrus Rose, the van der Woodsens, the Basses, the Archibalds, and their children were there, all seated around one table. Blair sat between Cyrus Rose and her mother, looking grumpy.

Nate had been intermittently baked, drunk, or passed out since Friday night, and looked woozy and rumpled, as if he’d just woken up. Serena wore a pretty yellow dress she’d bought shopping with her mother the day before, and she’d had her hair cut, with soft layers framing her face. She looked even more beautiful than ever, but felt nervous and jumpy about being seated with Blair and Chuck. Only Chuck seemed at ease, happily gulping his Bloody Mary and looking rather dapper in his Hermès eye patch.

Cyrus Rose sliced his salmon and leek omelet in half and plunked it on a pumpernickel bagel. “I’ve been craving eggs,” he said, biting into it hungrily. “You know when your body tells you you need something?” he said to no one in particular. “Mine’s shouting, ‘Eggs, eggs, eggs!’ ”

And mine’s shouting,“Shut the fuck up before I ram that omelet down your windpipe,”
Blair thought.

She winced and pushed her plate away from her. “I hate eggs.”

Cyrus pushed her plate back. “No, you eat. All you girls are dying because you’re way too thin.”

“That’s right, Blair,” her mother agreed. “Eat your eggs. They’ll keep you strong for tennis.”

And other strenuous activities.

“I hear eggs make your hair shiny,” Misty Bass added.

Blair shook her head. “Eggs make me gag.”

Chuck reached across the table. “I’ll eat them, if you don’t want them.”

Blair handed her plate over, careful not to look at Serena or Nate, sitting on either side of Chuck. Instead she watched the table’s centerpiece, a fishbowl terrarium full of electric blue poison dart frogs, frantically hopping around their round glass prison.

Jacked up on strong coffee, Serena was busy cutting her omelet into little squares, like Scrabble pieces. She began building tall towers of them.

Out of the corner of his eye, Nate was watching her. He was also watching Chuck’s hands. Each time they slid underneath the tablecloth and out of view, Nate imagined them all over Serena’s legs.

“Anyone see the Styles section of the
Times
today?” Cyrus asked, looking around the table.

Serena’s head shot up. Her picture with the Remi brothers. She’d forgotten all about it.

She pursed her lips and slunk down in her chair, waiting for an inquisition from her parents and everyone else at the table. But it never came. It was part of their social code not to dwell on things that embarrassed them.

“Pass me the cream, Nate darling?” Serena’s mother said with a smile.

And that was that.

Nate’s mother cleared her throat. “How are the preparations for the
Kiss Me or Die
party going, Blair? Are you girls all ready?” she asked, swigging her Seven and Seven.

“Yes, we’re all set,” Blair answered politely. “We finally got the invitations cleared up. And Kate Spade is sending over the gift bags after school on Thursday.”

“I remember all the cotillions I used to organize,” Mrs. van der Woodsen said, with a dreamy expression. “But the thing we always used to worry about most was would the boys show up.” She smiled at Nate and Chuck. “We don’t have to worry about that with you two, do we?”

“I’m all over it,” Chuck said, scarfing Blair’s omelet.

“I’ll be there,” Nate said. He glanced at Blair, who was staring at him now.

Nate was wearing that same green cashmere sweater she had given him in Sun Valley. The one with the gold heart.

“Excuse me,” Blair said. Then she stood up abruptly and left the table.

Nate followed her.

“Blair!” he called, weaving his way around the other tables, ignoring his friend Anthony, who was waving to him from across the room. “Wait up!”

Without turning around, Blair began walking even faster, her heels clacking on the white marble floor.

They reached the hallway to the restrooms. “Come on, Blair. I’m sorry, okay? Can we please talk?” Nate called.