Cecily von Ziegesar - Gossip Girl

Novels by Cecily von Ziegesar:

Gossip Girl

You Know You Love Me

All I Want is Everything

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

Oscar Wilde

Disclaimer: All the real names of places, people, and events have been altered or abbreviated to protect the innocent. Namely, me.

Ever wondered what the lives of the chosen ones are really like? Well, Im going to tell you, because Im one of them. Im not talking about beautiful models or actors or musical prodigies or mathematical geniuses. Im talking about the people who are born to itthose of us who have everything anyone could possibly wish for and who take it all completely for granted.

Welcome to New York Citys Upper East Side, where my friends and I live and go to school and play and sleepsometimes with each other. We all live in huge apartments with our own bedrooms and bathrooms and phone lines. We have unlimited access to money and booze and whatever else we want, and our parents are rarely home, so we have tons of privacy. Were smart, weve inherited classic good looks, we wear fantastic clothes, and we know how to party. Our shit still stinks, but you cant smell it because the bathroom is sprayed hourly by the maid with a refreshing scent made exclusively for us by French perfumers.

Its a luxe life, but someones got to live it.

Our apartments are all within walking distance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, and the single-sex private schools, like Constance Billard, which most of us go to. Even with a hangover, Fifth Avenue always looks so beautiful in the morning with the sunlight glimmering on the heads of the sexy St. Judes School boys.

But something is rotten on museum mile....

B with her mother, arguing in a taxi in front of Takashimaya. N enjoying a joint on the steps of the Met. C buying new school shoes at Barneys. And a familiar, tall, eerily beautiful blond girl emerging from a New Haven line train in Grand Central Station. Approximate age, seventeen. Could it be? S is back?!

Yes, S is back from boarding school. Her hair is longer, paler. Her blue eyes have that deep mysteriousness of kept secrets. She is wearing the same old fabulous clothes, now in rags from fending off New England storms. This morning Ss laughter echoed off the steps of the Met, where we will no longer be able to enjoy a quick smoke and a cappuccino without seeing her waving to us from her parents apartment across the street. She has picked up the habit of biting her fingernails, which makes us wonder about her even more, and while we are all dying to ask her why she got kicked out of boarding school, we wont, because wed really rather she had stayed away. But S is definitely here.

Just to be safe, we should all synchronize our watches. If we arent careful, S is going to win over our teachers, wear that dress we couldnt fit into, eat the last olive, have sex in our parents beds, spill Campari on our rugs, steal our brothers and our boyfriends hearts, and basically ruin our lives and piss us all off in a major way.

Ill be watching closely. Ill be watching all of us. Its going to be a wild and wicked year. I can smell it.

Love,

I watched Nickelodeon all morning in my room so I wouldnt have to eat breakfast with them, Blair Waldorf told her two best friends and Constance Billard School classmates, Kati Farkas and Isabel Coates. My mother cooked him an omelet. I didnt even know she knew how to use the stove.

Blair tucked her long, dark brown hair behind her ears and swigged her mothers fine vintage scotch from the crystal tumbler in her hand. She was already on her second glass.

What shows did you watch? Isabel asked, removing a stray strand of hair from Blairs black cashmere cardigan.

Who cares? Blair said, stamping her foot. She was wearing her new black ballet flats. Very bow-tie proper preppy, which she could get away with because she could change her mind in an instant and put on her trashy, pointed, knee-high boots and that sexy metallic skirt her mother hated. Poofrock star sex kitten. Meow.

The point is, I was trapped in my room all morning because they were busy having a gross romantic breakfast in their matching red silk bathrobes. They didnt even take showers. Blair took another gulp of her drink. The only way to tolerate the thought of her mother sleeping with that man was to get drunkvery drunk.

Luckily Blair and her friends came from the kind of families for whom drinking was as commonplace as blowing your nose. Their parents believed in the quasi-European idea that the more access kids have to alcohol, the less likely they are to abuse it. So Blair and her friends could drink whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, as long as they maintained their grades and their looks and didnt embarrass themselves or the family by puking in public, pissing their pants, or ranting in the streets. The same thing went for everything else, like sex or drugsas long as you kept up appearances, you were all right.

But keep your panties on. Thats coming later.

The man Blair was so upset about was Cyrus Rose, her mothers new boyfriend. At that very moment Cyrus Rose was standing on the other side of the living room, greeting the dinner guests. He looked like someone who might help you pick out shoes at Saksbald, except for a small, bushy mustache, his fat stomach barely hidden in a shiny blue double-breasted suit. He jingled the change in his pocket incessantly, and when he took his jacket off, there were big, nasty sweat marks on his underarms. He had a loud laugh and was very sweet to Blairs mother. But he wasnt Blairs father. Last year Blairs father ran off to France with another man.

No kidding. They live in a chateau and run a vineyard together. Which is actually pretty cool if you think about it.

Of course none of that was Cyrus Roses fault, but that didnt matter to Blair. As far as Blair was concerned, Cyrus Rose was a completely annoying, fat, loser.

But tonight Blair was going to have to tolerate Cyrus Rose, because the dinner party her mother was giving was in his honor, and all the Waldorfs family friends were there to meet him: the Bass family and their sons Chuck and Donald; Mr. Farkas and his daughter, Kati; the well-known actor Arthur Coates, his wife Titi, and their daughters, Isabel, Regina, and Camilla; Captain and Mrs. Archibald and their son Nate. The only ones still missing were Mr. and Mrs. van der Woodsen whose teenage daughter, Serena, and son, Erik, were both away at school.

Blairs mother was famous for her dinner parties, and this was her first since her infamous divorce. The Waldorf penthouse had been expensively redecorated that summer in deep reds and chocolate browns, and it was full of antiques and artwork that would have impressed anyone who knew anything about art. In the center of the dining room table was an enormous silver bowl full of white orchids, pussy willows, and chestnut tree branchesa modern ensemble from Takashimaya, the Fifth Avenue luxury goods store. Gold-leafed place cards lay on every porcelain plate. In the kitchen, Myrtle the cook was singing Bob Marley songs to the souffl, and the sloppy Irish maid, Esther, hadnt poured scotch down anyones dress yet, thank God.