Gossip Girl: It Had To Be You

Something is amiss in the state of denmark

HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

OPHELIA: No, my lord.

HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap?

OPHELIA: Ay, my lord.

HAMLET: Did you think I meant country matters?

Dan stared at the same faded page of his Shakespeare anthology, the words crossing his frame of reference and then skittering away without any hope of comprehension. He'd read Hamlet before and marveled at it, but today he could not concentrate. Laundry, he decided, apropos of nothing. He'd do his laundry and then go back to homework. He pushed away his desk chair and gathered up the dirty clothes strewn across the lint-speckled dirt-brown wall-to-wall carpeting on his bedroom floor. Maybe he'd do everyone's laundry. His dad would love that. Anything to keep from staring stupidly at those pictures of Serena van der Woodsen on his computer, or from thinking about the fact that he was pretty sure Vanessa had tried to kiss him last night. Before he fainted, and before she tucked him into bed and went home.

It was pretty obvious that she liked him. You don't drop in unannounced at someone's house and start kissing them if you don't like them—right? He just didn't know what to do about it. He removed the faded Spider-Man pillowcase from his pillow and stuffed a wad of dirty clothes into it, mostly shirts he didn't even remember wearing and underwear that he'd discreetly kicked under the bed.

Nice.

Dan headed down the narrow dusty hallway to his dad's bedroom. As usual, Rufus was still in bed. He spent Saturday mornings—and every other morning, for that matter—tucked under a scratchy red wool blanket reading newspapers and literary journals, smoking and cursing all the while. Hunger would force him to get up around one, and then he'd venture out to the supermarket to shop for the day's culinary adventure. It was after one now, but Rufus had been out late last night in the East Village with his anarchist writer friends, so he was sleeping in.

"Dad?" Dan called from outside the bedroom. "Got any laundry you want me to do?"

A muffled grunting and muttering sounded from within and then Rufus opened the door. Last night's purple ponytail elastic was dangling from a few strands of wiry gray hair near his left ear. His gray-and-black beard looked like it had been in a fight. His stomach bulged above the waistband of his light blue Hanes boxer shorts, exposing a bare slab of furry flesh beneath a too-tight black Mets hoodie that Dan suspected was his.

"You're doing laundry?"

"I guess I'm procrastinating." Dan shrugged. "I have a paper to write. Hamlet."

Rufus nodded. If there was one thing father and son had in common, it was their interest in literature. "That shouldn't be too hard. But you've decided to do laundry instead." He sniffed the air suspiciously. "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," he quoted Shakespeare's famous lines, his muddy brown eyes bulging out of his head with toad-like imperiousness.

"Dan has a girlfriend . . . !" Jenny's annoying-little-sister voice singsonged from down the hall. She danced out of her room wearing a denim Diesel zip-up shirtdress strategically unzipped to show off her budding cleavage. She was wearing makeup, and had obviously been dressing up and staring at herself in the mirror since dawn.

"Do not!" Dan swung around and hurled the Spider-Man pillowcase full of laundry at her. His dirty underwear scattered at his sister's feet.

She wrinkled her freckled, turned-up nose. "Hello, uncalled for?"

"Is it the same girl? The hairless one I met from before?" Rufus inquired as he got down on his hands and knees and began patrolling his bedroom for soiled clothing, stashing it under one arm as he went. A lot of the clothes he wore were dry-clean only, but that didn't stop him from washing and wearing them. It was his opinion that the more shrunken and wrinkled clothes became, the more interesting they were to wear. He stood up and handed the unsavory armload to Dan. "Where does she live? We should invite her parents over for dinner."

"No!" both of his children exclaimed at the same time.

"She lives with her sister," Dan added, feeling a little mean for insulting his dad's cooking all the time. "She's macrobiotic. Or something, I forget."

"Are you doing laundry?" Jenny asked eagerly as Dan continued down the hall past her room. She always got stuck with laundry duty, so it was crucial that she take advantage of her older brother's generosity. "Wait!" She dashed into her closet and gathered up a tidy pile of jeans and T-shirts. No way would she let him handle her underwear.

Dan waited in the doorway. A picture of some girl's perky chest was floating on Jenny's computer screen. The chest was clothed in a sheer nude bra. "Nice," he observed.

Jenny shrugged and handed him her dirty clothes, stuffed into a pink-and-white-striped pillowcase. "I wrote a thank-you letter to the breast supplement company last night and got a bunch of really nice e-mails from other girls." Actually, the e-mails were mostly from guys, but she didn't mention those.

"This girl sent me her picture," she continued, sitting down at her Pottery Barn Kids white "Madeleine" desk. "And here's what she wrote: 'Dear Jennifer, you are so inspiring. I've been complaining my whole life about my flat chest and I'm way older than you. I was taking the supplements for only like a week and I was gonna quit, but ever since you wrote your testimonial I've decided I have to give it some time. Good luck—you deserve it.'" Jenny turned around. "Isn't that so nice?"

Dan shrugged. He couldn't believe how much time some people spent online. He preferred to scribble things on paper, cross them out, and then smoke himself sick while staring furiously at a new blank page.

Hence his fainting problem?

Jenny scrolled quickly over the next e-mail, which was from some crazy guy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who'd sent her a picture of his bare ass with the words New and Improved! scrawled across it in neon blue marker. Some people were so stupid. "Anyway, I'm going out soon to this bra store I read about online where they fit you better than anywhere else and they have bras from all over the world. I really need bigger ones now, and this place sounds cool. It's in the Village. Want to come?"

Shop for bras with his sister, or stay home, smoking and drinking coffee and contemplating his status in "the universe? It was a tough one.

"Maybe some other time," he told her kindly.

Dan headed down to the basement with a fistful of quarters and two pillowcases full of dirty clothes. He used to think he was the only kid in the world who had to do his own laundry. Certainly he was the only boy in his class who did. So it was actually pretty comforting to have met someone who did her own laundry too. And Vanessa was a diva of coolness. He'd just always thought that if he were to have a girlfriend, she'd be someone else. A certain platinum blond, blue-eyed leggy angel someone else.

"Oh, yes? And who might that be?

The thing was, despite the fact that he had been writing poems for her, Serena van der Woodsen honestly didn't know he existed. Vanessa had already been over to his house. She'd seen him vomit. She'd stuck her face in his and kissed him. She was real—so real he could still taste the pepperoni grease on her red lips. She liked him, and he'd never really been liked by a girl before. Still, did they have to kiss? Even if it never actually happened in real life, it was happening all the time in his mind, in his poems: kissing was reserved for Serena.

Good luck explaining that.