Psycho Killer (5 page)

“Which is sort of hard not to do,” Chuck said. “I mean, just look at her.”

And so they did. All four of them looked at Serena, who was still chatting happily with Nate. Chuck saw the girl whose scabs he’d offered to pick in first grade. Kati saw the girl she’d gullibly allowed to shave her arms with a disposable razor during a playdate in third grade. Isabel saw the girl who’d convinced her to pierce her own ears, with a nail. Third grade again. Both Kati and Isabel saw the girl who always stole Blair away from them, leaving them with only each other, which was too dull to even think about. And
Blair saw Serena, her best friend, the girl she would always love and hate. The girl she could never measure up to and had tried so hard to replace. The girl she’d wanted everyone to forget. The girl she wanted to kill so badly her hair hurt just thinking about it.

For about ten seconds Blair thought about telling her friends the truth: She didn’t
know
Serena was coming back. But how would that look? Blair was supposed to be tuned in, and how tuned in would she sound if she admitted she knew nothing about Serena’s return while her friends seemed to know so much? Blair couldn’t very well stand there and say nothing. That would be too obvious. She
always
had something to say. Besides, who wanted to hear the truth when the truth was so incredibly boring? Blair lived for drama. Here was her chance.

Blair cleared her throat. “It was an accident,” she said mysteriously. She looked down and fiddled with the little ruby ring on the middle finger of her right hand. The film was rolling. “She didn’t mean to. But she’s pretty messed up about it. And I promised her I wouldn’t say anything.”

Her friends nodded as if they understood completely. It sounded serious and juicy, and best of all it sounded like Serena had confided everything to Blair. If only Blair could script the rest of the movie, she’d wind up with the boy for sure. And Serena could play the girl who falls off the cliff and cracks her skull on a rock and is dismembered and eaten alive by bloodthirsty wolves, never to be seen or heard from again.

“Careful, Blair,” Chuck warned, nodding at Serena and Nate, who were still talking in low voices over by the wet bar, their eyes never straying from each other’s faces. “Looks like Serena’s already found her next victim.”

Serena held Nate’s hand loosely in hers, swinging it back and forth. At least she’d have this last moment to remember, after he died.

“Remember Buck Naked?” she asked, laughing softly.

Nate chuckled, still embarrassed, even after all these years. Buck Naked was Nate’s alter ego, invented at a party in eighth grade, when most of them had gotten drunk for the first time. After drinking six beers, Nate had taken his shirt off, and Serena and Blair had drawn a goofy, buck-toothed face on his torso in black marker. For some reason the face brought out the devil in Nate, and he started a drinking game. Everyone sat in a circle and Nate stood in the middle, holding a Latin textbook and shouting out verbs for them to conjugate. The first person to mess up had to drink and kiss Buck Naked. Of course they all messed up, boys and girls alike, so Buck got a lot of action that night. The next morning, Nate tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, but the proof was inked on his skin. It took weeks for Buck to wash off in the shower.

“And what about the Red Sea?” Serena asked. She studied Nate’s face. Neither of them was smiling now.

“The Red Sea,” Nate repeated, drowning in the deep blue lakes of her eyes. Of course he remembered. How could he forget?

One hot August weekend, the summer after tenth grade, Nate had been in the city with his dad, while the rest of the Archibald family was still in Maine. Serena was up in her country house in Ridgefield, Connecticut, so bored she’d painted each of her fingernails and toenails a different color, made her own chess set out of corks as she drank her way through the liquor cabinet, stuffed the empty bottles with gasoline-soaked rags, and hurled them at the geese flocked around the swimming pool. Blair was at the Waldorf castle in Gleneagles, Scotland, at her aunt’s wedding. But that hadn’t stopped her two best friends from having fun without her. When Nate called, Serena washed the feathers and goose blood out of her hair and hopped on a New Haven–line train into Grand Central Terminal.

Nate met Serena on the platform. She stepped off the train wearing a light blue silk slip dress and pink rubber flip-flops. Her still-wet yellow hair hung loose, covering her bare shoulders. She wasn’t carrying a bag, not even a wallet or keys. Nate needn’t know what she’d done to the ticket collector with his hole punch when he’d asked her to get off the train at Stamford if she couldn’t purchase a ticket. To Nate, Serena looked like an angel. How lucky he was. Life didn’t get any better than the moment when Serena flip-flopped down the platform, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the lips. That wonderful, surprising kiss.

First they drank martinis at the little bar upstairs by the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance to Grand Central. Serena made Nate laugh by engineering little voodoo dolls out of olives and maraschino cherries and stabbing them with toothpicks and plastic
swords. Then they got a cab straight up Park Avenue to Nate’s Eighty-second Street townhouse. His father was going to be out until very late, Lourdes and Angel had the day off, and Serena and Nate had the place to themselves. Oddly enough, it was the first time they’d ever been alone together, without Blair or any of their other friends, and without Serena compensating for her forbidden attraction by sneaking into Nate’s bathroom when he wasn’t looking and stealing the hairs out of his shower drain.

It didn’t take long.

They sat out in the garden, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Nate was wearing a long-sleeved polo shirt and the weather was extremely hot, so he took it off. His shoulders were scattered with tiny freckles, and his back was muscled and tan from hours at the shore in Maine, hurling boulders into the ocean as he tried to exorcise all horny thoughts of Serena from his mind.

Serena was hot too, so she climbed into the fountain. In the center of the fountain was a marble statue of Morta—a Roman goddess of death, holding the severed head and tail of an unfortunate snake—which the Archibalds had imported from Tuscany to ward off burglars. Serena sat on Morta’s feet, giggling and splashing herself with water until her dress was soaked through.

At least it was water this time, not blood.

It wasn’t difficult to see who the real goddess was. Nate staggered over to the fountain and got in with her, and soon they were tearing the rest of each other’s clothes off. It was August, after all. The only way to tolerate the city in August is to get naked.

And push a few tourists off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Nate was worried the neighbors might see them, so he led Serena inside and up to his parents’ bedroom.

The rest is history.

They both had sex for the first time. It was awkward and painful and exciting and fun, and so sweet they forgot to be embarrassed. It was exactly the way you’d want your first time to be, and they had no regrets. Afterward, they turned on the television and watched the coverage of the ongoing serial shark attacks on swimmers in the Red Sea. A single shark had maimed or killed five people standing in shallow water over the course of six days. Holding each other and looking up at the clouds through the skylight overhead, they listened to the narrator until Serena burst out laughing.

“Your shark attacked my Red Sea!” she howled, wrestling Nate against the pillows.

Nate laughed and rolled her up in the sheet like a mummy. Serena marveled at how relaxed she was. For the first time ever, she hadn’t had the urge to hurt anyone or set anything on fire. She hadn’t even pulled out any of Nate’s wavy golden brown hairs for safe-keeping.

Nate ordered a raw eel roll, sea urchin roe, and warm sake from the local sushi place, and they lay in bed and ate and drank. Then Nate bared his teeth and pretended to be a shark, attacking her Red Sea a few more times before they both passed out from exhaustion.

A week later, Serena went away to boarding school at Hanover Academy, while Nate and Blair stayed behind in New York. Ever since, Serena had spent every vacation away—reindeer hunting with her Swedish relatives at Christmas, bone fishing in the Bahamas for Easter, bar-hopping and dismembering and bagging boys throughout Europe over the summer. This was the first time she’d been back, the first time she and Nate had seen each other since the shark attacks on the Red Sea.

“Blair doesn’t know, does she?” Serena asked Nate now.

Blair who?
Nate thought, with a momentary case of amnesia. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “If you haven’t told her, she doesn’t know.”

But Chuck Bass knew, which was almost worse. Nate had blurted out the information at a party only two nights ago in a drunken fit of complete stupidity. They’d been doing shots, and Chuck had asked, “So, Nate. What was your all-time best lay? That is, if you’ve done it at all yet.”

“Well, I did it with Serena van der Woodsen,” Nate had bragged, like an idiot.

And Chuck wasn’t going to keep it a secret for long. It was way too juicy and way too useful. Chuck didn’t need to read
How to Win Friends and Influence People
. He practically wrote it. Although the only friends he had were the people who gave him a standing ovation every time he looked in the mirror, and they didn’t actually exist.

Serena didn’t seem to notice Nate’s uncomfortable silence. She sighed, bowing her head to rest it on his shoulder. She no longer smelled like Chanel’s
Cristalle
, like she always used to. She smelled like honey and sandalwood and lilies and something he couldn’t identify.

Squirrel poison?

The scent was very Serena, utterly irresistible, but if anyone else tried to wear it, it would probably smell like rotting flesh.

“Oh Nate,” Serena sighed, wishing this bittersweet moment would never end. “If you only knew how evil I was, you wouldn’t even be talking to me.”

“What do you mean? What did you do that was so bad?” Nate asked, with a mixture of dread and anticipation. For a brief second
he imagined her hosting orgies in her dorm room at Hanover Academy and having affairs with older guys in French hotel rooms.

Leaving none of them intact. Thank goodness for House-keeping!

“And I’ve been such a horrible friend, too,” Serena went on. “I’ve barely even talked to Blair since I left. And so much has happened. I can already tell she’s mad. She hasn’t even said hello.”

“She’s not mad,” Nate said. “Maybe she’s just feeling shy.”

Serena flashed him a look. “Right,” she said mockingly. “Blair’s feeling shy. Since when has Blair ever been shy?”

“Well, she’s not mad,” Nate insisted.

Serena shrugged. Everything would go back to normal once he was dead.

“Anyway, I’m so psyched to be back. We’ll do all the things we used to do. Blair and I will cut class and run down to that old movie theater by the Plaza Hotel and see some weirdo film until cocktail hour starts. And then we’ll get drunk and pass out and eat a huge breakfast in the morning. And we’ll live happily ever after, just like in the movies.”

Nate frowned. Where exactly was he in this picture?

“Don’t make that face, Nate,” Serena said, laughing. “That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?”

“No, I guess it sounds okay,” he said hesitantly.

“What sounds okay?” a surly voice demanded.

Startled, Nate and Serena tore their eyes away from each other. It was Chuck, and with him were Kati, Isabel, and, last but not least, Blair, looking very shy indeed.

Chuck clapped Nate on the back. “Sorry, Nate,” he said. “But you can’t bogey the van der Woodsen all night, you know.”

Nate snorted and tipped back his glass. Only ice was left.

Serena looked at Blair. Or at least, she tried to. Blair was making a big deal of pulling up her black stockings, working them inch by inch from her bony ankles up to her bony knees, and up around her tennis-muscled thighs. So Serena gave up and kissed Kati, then Isabel, before she made her way to Blair.

There was only a limited amount of time Blair could spend pulling up her tights before it got ridiculous. When Serena was only inches away from her, she looked up and pretended to be surprised.

“Hey Blair,” Serena said excitedly. She put her hands on the shorter girl’s shoulders and bent down to kiss both of her cheeks. “I’m so sorry I didn’t call you before I came back. I wanted to. But things have been
so
crazy. I have so much to tell you!”

Chuck, Kati, and Isabel all nudged each other and stared at Blair. It was pretty obvious she had lied. She didn’t know anything about Serena coming back.

Blair’s face heated up.

Busted
.

Esther had just put a sizzling pot of cod cheek fondue on the side table. Sharp, long-handled fondue forks ringed the pot. Blair could grab one, stab Serena through her annoyingly swanlike neck until the fork came out the other side, grab Nate, and whisk him away to the Pierre Hotel, where they could finally have sex without interruption.

Nate noticed the tension, but he thought it was for an entirely different reason. Had Chuck told Blair already? Was
he
busted? Nate couldn’t tell. Blair wasn’t even looking at him.

It was a chilly moment. Not the kind of moment you’d expect to have with your oldest, closest friends. It was more like the grisly face-off before a women’s wrestling match, minus the tiny bathing suits, fake tans, and inflated boobs.

Serena’s eyes darted from one face to another. Clearly she had said something wrong, and she quickly guessed what it was.
I’m so clueless
, she scolded herself.

“I mean, I’m sorry I didn’t call you
last night
. I literally just got back from Ridgefield. My parents have been hiding me there until they figured out what to do with me. And I have been
so bored
.”

Nice save.

She waited for Blair to smile gratefully for covering for her, but all Blair did was glance at Kati and Isabel to see if they’d noticed the slip. Blair was acting strange, and Serena fought down a rising panic. Maybe Nate was wrong, maybe Blair really was mad at her. She’d missed out on so much. The divorce, for instance. Poor Blair. But the sooner Nate died, the sooner she could make it up to her. Serena would have to start dropping hints to Nate about how much better this party would be if they were both very stoned. Then, hopefully, Nate would run home to get his pot and wouldn’t be able to resist doing a quick bong hit on his own. And then… bye-bye Natie.