Gossip Girl: A Novel

At the heart of every fashion disaster is a hopeless romantic

"What I'm going for is tension," Vanessa Abrams explained to Constance's small Advanced Film Studies class. She was standing at the front of the room, presenting her idea for the film she was making. "I'm going to shoot the two of them talking on a park bench at night. Except you can't really hear what they're saying." Vanessa paused dramatically, waiting for one of her classmates to say something. Mr. Beckham, their teacher, was always telling them to keep their scenes alive with dialogue and action, and Vanessa was deliberately doing just the opposite.

"So there's no dialogue?" Mr. Beckham said from where he was standing in the back of the classroom. He was painfully aware that no one else in the class was listening to a word Vanessa was saying.

"You're going to hear the silence of the buildings and the bench and the sidewalk, and see the streetlights on their bodies. Then you'll see their hands move and their eyes talking. Then you'll hear them speak, but not much. It's a mood piece," Vanessa explained.

She reached for the slide projector's remote control and began clicking through slides of the black-and-white pictures she'd taken to demonstrate the look she was going for in her short film.

A wooden park bench. A slab of pavement. A manhole cover. A pigeon pecking at a used condom. A wad of gum perched on the edge of a garbage can.

"Ha!" someone exclaimed from the back of the room. It was Blair Waldorf, laughing out loud as she read the note Rain Hoffstetter had just passed her.

For a good time

call Serena v.d. Woodsen

Get it —VD??

Vanessa glared at Blair. Film was Vanessa's favorite class, the only reason she came to school at all. She took it very seriously, while most of the other girls, like Blair, were only taking Film as a break from Advanced Placement hell—AP Calculus, AP Bio, AP History, AP English Literature, AP French. They were on the straight and narrow path to Yale or Harvard or Brown, where their families had all gone for generations. Vanessa wasn't like them. Her parents hadn't even gone to college. They were artists, and Vanessa wanted only one thing in life: to go to NYU and major in film.

Actually, she wanted something else. Or someone else, to be precise, but we'll get to that in a minute.

Vanessa was an anomaly at Constance, the only girl in the school who had a nearly shaved head, wore black turtlenecks every day, read Tolstoy's War and Peace over and over like it was the Bible, listened to Belle and Sebastian, and drank unsweetened black tea. She had no friends at all at Constance, and lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her twenty-two-year-old sister, Ruby. So what was she doing at a tiny, exclusive private girls' school on the Upper East Side with princesses like Blair Waldorf? It was a question Vanessa asked herself every day.

Vanessa's parents were older, revolutionary artists who lived in a house made out of recycled car tires in Vermont. When she turned fifteen, they had allowed the perpetually unhappy Vanessa to move in with her bass guitarist older sister in Brooklyn. But they wanted to be sure she got a good, safe, high-school education, so they made her go to Constance.

Vanessa hated it, but she never said anything to her parents. There were only eight months left until graduation. Eight more months and she would finally escape downtown to NYU.

Eight more months of bitchy Blair Waldorf, and even worse, Serena van der Woodsen, who was back in all her splendor. Blair Waldorf looked like she was absolutely orgasmic over the return of her best friend. In fact, the whole back row of Film Studies was atwitter, passing notes tucked into the sleeves of their annoying cashmere sweaters.