Gossip Girl: It Had To Be You

Hms stoner boy

Nate stood outside the pizzeria on Eightieth and Madison with a bunch of hot French L'École girls, impressing them with his newfound ability to buy pot, roll a joint, and get high in broad daylight. After the snowfall over the weekend, Monday was unseasonably warm, and the L'École girls flaunted their leftover St. Barts tans by tying up the tails of their white button-down school blouses to reveal their flat stomachs and folding over the waists of their gray pleated wool uniforms until they were more like loincloths than skirts.

Yesterday, Nate's St. Jude's School classmates Charlie Dern and Jeremy Scott Tompkinson had introduced Nate to Mitchell, the pale, alarmingly skinny pizza guy who sold slices and baggies full of premium Thai stick cannabis to whoever knew enough to order "two slices of Sicilian with extra oregano."

Aha, the magic password.

Nate felt like a spy, but then again, he was stoned. In fact, he'd decided yesterday that he liked the feeling of being stoned so much—the way it made everything so much more intense and at the same time so much easier to deal with—he planned on being stoned for the rest of his life.

There's aspiration for you.

Yesterday at Charlie's house he'd discovered that three of his classmates had been smoking pot for years. Anthony Avuldsen, the blond, über-preppy surfer-looking guy in his class, had been stealing pot from his dad's special Guatemalan coffee tin since he was ten. Jeremy, the scrawny kid with a late '60s Beatles haircut whose pants were always falling down, had made his own bong in pottery class, fired on the inside and everything, and glazed with a multicolored paisley design that looked extremely trippy after a few hits. And then there was Charlie, whose older brother, Tao, sent him pot all the time. All four boys had really bonded over hits on Jeremy's bong yesterday. It was pretty intense.

One of the L'École girls kissed Nate on both cheeks before leaving, smothering him with her curly black overly hair-sprayed hair.

Merci! Merci! Mwa! Mwa!

Nate sucked in a hit and squinted up at the bright yellow sun, basking in it. Oh yeah, it definitely felt great to be young, hot, stoned, and in demand. L'Wren wanted him, these French girls all wanted him, Blair had always sort of wanted him, and Serena definitely wanted him. In fact, he was on his way to pick her up at school right now to find out just how much.

Serena was in a hurry. Her meeting with the dean of admissions from Hanover and her father was starting in ten minutes at the Yale Club on Vanderbilt Avenue, more than fifty blocks away. Madame Rogers had kept her late, giving the entire class a lecture in French on why the conditional perfect was the most important tense, ranting about how no intelligent person could get along without it because it allowed language to have an imagination and inspired French filmmakers to delve into romantic realms that would otherwise have remained unexplored.

Like Last Tango in Paris?

When class was finally over, Serena flew out of the great blue doors of the Constance Billard School for Girls, buttoning her raspberry-colored corduroy Agnès B. mini trench coat as she went and waving her hand wildly for a cab headed downtown. She'd been dreading the meeting all day, but if she was late, her dad would probably send her to military school instead of boarding school.

"Hey—wait up!" All of a sudden Nate's adorable golden head and irresistible, glittering green eyes swam in front of her. He leaned in and kissed her right on the mouth.

Hello.

"I thought about you all weekend," he told her, suddenly realizing that he could have been kissing her all weekend if he hadn't been getting high with his buddies.

Duh?

"Me too," Serena whispered back, her heart banging wildly against her ribs. Had he come to apologize for leaving her house so abruptly yesterday morning? Had he come to tell her he loved her? She grasped his hand and swung it back and forth between them, her cheeks turning a bright, happy pink. Behind her she could hear the hum of Constance Billard schoolgirls buzzing with gossip.

"Wait, are they a couple, or do they just kiss on the lips when they like meet up or whatever?" Kati Farkas wanted to know as she glossed and reglossed her lips in complete fascination.

"I don't know. She looks pretty flustered to me," observed Isabel Coates with classic accuracy.

"God, he's hot. I'd grab him and rip his clothes off if I were her," Laura Salmon declared.

"Where's Blair?" demanded Rain Hoffstetter.

Thankfully, Blair was at a tennis tutorial at Asphalt Green. Nate pulled the tiny blue glazed sailboat he'd made in art class out of his book bag and handed it to Serena. "I made it for you," he told her shyly, sounding about seven years old.

Serena had spent most of yesterday with Blair, pretending to be excited about Blair and Nate. Now she could barely resist grabbing him and kissing him all over. She took a step toward him and leaned into his muscular chest. He smelled smoky, and Nate-y, and wonderful. "When are we going to tell Blair?" she asked.

Nate buried his nose in her pale, sweet-smelling hair. It hadn't really occurred to him that they'd have to tell anyone anything. After all, they were pretty much together all the time anyway. Now they'd just kiss when they were together, and sooner or later they'd do even more. Girls were like that, though—they had to know things. They had to plan. "You haven't told her?" he responded. "It's not like it has to be a big secret or anything."

Serena stepped back and examined the little clay boat in her hand. Her Constance classmates were huddled so close by, she lowered her voice to keep from being heard. "I didn't tell her because I thought we should do it together." She looked up at Nate hopefully. As a couple, she added silently.

Nate grinned boyishly. The most awesome thing about being stoned was that he could think something completely selfish and irresponsible and then say it out loud and not feel guilty about it. "I'd rather you just told her. I'm not good with stuff like that. And you know Blair."

Serena rolled her eyes as if she understood. Yeah, she sure did know Blair. Blair was going to decapitate her with her perfectly filed fingernails. But eventually all would be forgiven—maybe. "Okay. Well, I'll tell her soon," she promised vaguely. "Anyway, I have to go."

Nate took a step forward and kissed her lightly on the lips. "You look pretty today," he said, wishing now that he wasn't quite so stoned.

Serena giggled and pushed him away. "I'll call you, okay?" she told him quickly before dashing across the street and into a waiting cab. Sitting back in the sticky vinyl passenger seat, she fished the little blue boat out of her coat pocket again. HMS SERENA was etched in the stern, with a tiny red glazed heart next to her name. It was four o'clock, and Fifth Avenue was swarming with uniformed private school girls and their nannies on their way to ballet class or ice-skating at Sky Rink. The cab stopped at the light on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-third Street. Nate caught up to it and Serena rolled down her window and stuck her head out.

"Hey, Natie. You're not really taking that L'Wren girl to her debutante thing, are you?" she called out.

Nate stuck his hands into the pockets of his khakis. Blair had answered L'Wren's e-mail with that retardedly horny reply, so he was sort of committed now, wasn't he? Besides, when he'd told Charlie, Anthony, and Jeremy about it yesterday, they'd all agreed—L'Wren's a sure thing, man. Do it with the older girl and get it over with. If you wait around to do it with someone you're in love with, you'll be a thirty-year-old virgin. Those sounded like wise words to him.

"Yeah. I guess I have to!" he shouted back, like it was going to be a real chore.

Serena sat back down in her seat as the cab turned down Fifth, passing the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum in a gray blur. Her cell buzzed with another crazy text message from Blair.

WE CLD HIT N IN HS HEAD SO HE PASES OUT & FORGETS TO GO. BT WHAT IF HE GTS AMNESIA & DOESNT KNW WHO I AM? THN MAYB I CLD PRETND WE ALRDDY WER MRRYD!!

Up until now Serena had ignored Blair's crazy schemes, treating them as just that—crazy. Now that she knew Nate was still planning on taking L'Wren to the cotillion, things were different. He absolutely could not go.