Gossip Girl: It Had To Be You

That's one f-ed up little prince said the caterpillar to the butterfly

"Hey Jenny, listen to this." Dan took a drag from his fourth unfiltered Camel that day and cleared his throat."You have hair like the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat. . . ." He stopped reading and looked up at his sister, who was lying on her stomach in the middle of their dusty living room, drawing on a sketch pad with fat sticks of charcoal. "It's like the kind of thing I want to say. I'm just too embarrassed, but in a poem it's different. It's like everything's a metaphor, and even if you're really saying what you mean, there's nothing to be embarrassed about, because it's the poem talking. Get it?"

Jenny stared at her brother for a second and then went back to smudging the lashes on her charcoal angel's eyes. She had no clue what Dan was talking about, but she knew it made him feel better to rattle on in this way, so she didn't say anything. She and Dan were alike in that way. In public they appeared shy. At home you could not shut them up.

"That's from The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He's French. This is a translation." Dan took another puff of his cigarette and paged through the slim secondhand hardcover book with its delicate black-and-white illustrations. He'd been smoking on a regular basis, cultivating his image as an angst-ridden poet. So far their dad hadn't said anything about it, but it took him a long time to notice things. "It looks like a children's book, but it's really this profound existential work. And it's really romantic too—he falls in love with this rose, who he knows he can't really have a love affair with. But he loves her—he can't help how much he loves her."

Jenny was barely listening. Obviously everything Dan said was in some way related to his obsession with Serena. Yesterday she'd noticed that some of her angel drawings were missing from her portfolio. She stormed into his room and found them Blu-Tacked to the wall. His shamelessness was pathetic.

"I'm proud of your work," he'd told her defensively when she pointed out that he'd taken them without asking.

Right.

Jenny let him keep the drawings, although she was a little concerned that her big brother was turning into a psychopath who talked to himself and had delusions that one day Serena would just appear in their kitchen and ask him out.

If only.

Dan continued to read. Mr. Sohn, his history teacher at Riverside Prep, had assigned The Little Prince to illustrate what creative people were doing and thinking during the Nazi regime. Mr. Sohn was cool. He liked to demonstrate whenever he could that you didn't have to be a boring lawyer or bond trader when you got older. He tried to introduce role models like this Antoine de Saint-Exupéry guy, who was a naval pilot and also this incredible philosopher-writer-illustrator. He sounded so dashing—even his name was dashing.

"Antoine de Saint-Exupéry." Dan recited the name aloud, rolling it off his tongue with a dramatic French accent.

Jenny looked up from her drawing again. "You need friends."

"That's where I come in," a girl's hoarse voice rang out from the hallway. Rufus appeared in the doorway of the living room wearing electric orange Adidas track pants and a faded red-and-green-plaid flannel button-down shirt. It hurt Dan's eyes to look at him.

"I just came back from buying saffron for my squid-ink paella and I found this rather sweet bald girl in the lobby," he told Dan with a goofy wink. "She's not a blonde, but I asked her to stay for dinner anyway."

Dan closed his book and stood up. "Vanessa?"

Rufus stood to one side to allow Vanessa to enter the room. "Hi," she greeted Dan, and then glanced at Jenny. "Hi." She didn't know why she'd come without calling or anything. She'd just been thinking about him so much, and she suspected that Rufus had forgotten to give Dan her message since he hadn't called her back. Maybe he was just super shy.