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He was pale, his hair was shaggy, and he was rock-star thin. Existentialism has a way of killing your appetite. “Guess who's back?” Dan heard his little sister squeal excitedly into the phone. Like Dan, Jenny was a bit of a loner, and when she needed someone to talk to, she always called him. She was the one who had bought them both cell phones. “Jenny, can't this wait–” Dan started to say, sounding annoyed in the way that only older brothers can. “Serena van der Woodsen!” Jenny interrupted him. “Serena is back at Constance. I saw her in Prayers. Can you believe it?” Dan watched a plastic coffee-cup lid skitter down the sidewalk. A red Saab sped down West End Avenue through a yellow light. His socks felt damp inside his brown suede Hush Puppies. Serena van der Woodsen. He took a long drag on his Camel. His hands were shaking so much he almost missed his mouth. “Dan?” his sister squeaked into the phone. “Can you hear me? Did you hear what I said? Serena is back. Serena van der Woodsen.” Dan sucked in his breath sharply. “Yeah, I heard you,” he said, feigning disinterest. “So what?” “So what?” Jenny said incredulously. “Oh, right, like you didn't just have a mini heart attack. You're so full of it, Dan.” “No, I'm serious,” Dan said, pissily. “What are you calling me for? What do I care?” Jenny sighed loudly. Dan could be so irritating. Why couldn't he just act happy for once? She was so tired of his pale, miserable, introspective-poet act. “All right,” she said. “Forget it. I'll talk to you later.” She clicked off and Dan shoved his cell phone back into the pocket of his faded black corduroys. He snatched a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and lit another one with the burning stub of the one he was already smoking. His thumbnail got singed, but he didn't even feel it. Serena van der Woodsen. They had first met at a party. No, that wasn't exactly true. Dan had seen her at a party, his party, the only one he'd ever had at his family's apartment on Ninety-ninth and West End Avenue. It was April of eighth grade. The party was Jenny's idea, and their father, Rufus Humphrey, the infamous retired editor of lesser-known beat poets and a party animal himself, was happy to oblige. Their mother had already moved to Prague a few years before to “focus on her art.” Dan invited his entire class and told them to invite as many people as they wanted. More than a hundred kids showed up, and Rufus kept the beer flowing out of a keg in the bathtub, getting many of the kids drunk for the first time. It was the best party Dan had ever been to, even if he did say so himself. Not because of the booze, but because Serena van der Woodsen was there. Never mind that she had gotten wasted and wound up playing a stupid Latin drinking game and kissing some guy's stomach with pictures scrawled all over it in magic marker. Dan couldn't keep his eyes off her. Afterwards, Jenny told him that Serena went to her school, Constance, and from then on Jenny was his little emissary, reporting everything she'd seen Serena do, say, wear, etc., and informing Dan about any upcoming events where he might catch a glimpse of her again. Those events were rare. Not because there weren't a lot of them–there were–but because there weren't many Dan had even a chance of going to. Dan didn't inhabit the same world as Serena and Blair and Nate and Chuck. He wasn't anybody. He was just a regular kid. For two years Dan followed Serena, yearningly, from a distance. He never spoke to her. When she went away to boarding school, he tried to forget about her, sure that he would never see her again, unless by some act of magic they wound up at the same college. And now she was back. Dan walked halfway down the block, then turned around and walked back again. His mind was racing. He could have another party. He could make invitations and get Jenny to slip one into Serena's locker at school. When Serena came to his apartment, Dan would walk right up to her and take her coat, and welcome her back to New York. It rained every day you were gone, he'd say, poetically. Then they would sneak into his father's library and take each other's clothes off and kiss on the leather couch in front of the fire. And when everyone left the party, they would share a bowl of Breyers coffee ice cream, Dan's favorite. From then on they would spend every minute together. They would even transfer to a coed high school like Trinity for the rest of senior year because they couldn't stand to be apart. Then they would go to Columbia and live in a studio apartment nearby with nothing in it but a huge bed. Serena's friends would try to lure her back to her old life, but no charity ball, no exclusive black-tie dinner, no expensive party favor could tempt her. She wouldn't care if she had to give up her trust fund and her great-grandmother's diamonds. Serena would be willing to live in squalor if it meant she could be with Dan. “Fucking hell, we've only got five minutes until the bell rings,” Dan heard someone say in an obnoxious voice. Dan turned around, and sure enough, it was Chuck Bass, or “Scarf Boy,” as Dan liked to call him, since Chuck was always wearing that ridiculous monogrammed cashmere scarf. Chuck was standing only twenty feet away with two of his senior Riverside Prep pals, Roger Paine and Jeffrey Prescott. They didn't speak to Dan or even nod to acknowledge his presence. Why should they? These boys took the Seventy-ninth Street crosstown bus through Central Park each morning to school from the swanky Upper East Side, only venturing to the West Side for school or to attend the odd party. They were in Dan's class at Riverside Prep, but they were certainly not in his class. He was nothing to them. They didn't even notice him. “Dude,” Chuck said to his friends. He lit a cigarette. Chuck smoked his cigarettes like they were joints, holding them between his index finger and thumb and sucking hard on the inhale. Too pathetic for words. “Guess who I saw last night?” Chuck said, blowing out a stream of gray smoke. “Liv Tyler?” Jeffrey said. “Yeah, and she was all over you, right?” Roger laughed. “No, not her. Serena van der Woodsen,” Chuck said. Dan's ears perked up. He was about to head inside for class, but he lit another cigarette and stayed put so he could listen. “Blair Waldorf's mom had this little party, and Serena was there with her parents,” Chuck continued. “And she was all over me. She's, like, the sluttiest girl I've ever met.” Chuck took another toke on his smoke. “Really?” Jeffrey said. “Yes, really. First of all, I just found out that she's been fucking Nate Archibald since tenth grade. And she's definitely gotten an education at boarding school, if you know what I mean. They had to get rid of her, she's so slutty.” “No way,” Roger said. “Come on, dude, you don't get kicked out for being a slut.” “You do if you keep a record of every boy you slept with and get them hooked on the same drugs you're doing. Her parents had to go up there and get her. She was, like, taking over the school!” Chuck was getting really worked up. His face was turning red and he was spitting as he talked. “I heard she's got diseases, too,” he added. “Like, STDs. Someone saw her going into a clinic in the East Village. She was wearing a wig.” Chuck's friends shook their heads, grunting in amazement. Dan had never heard such crap. Serena was no slut; she was perfect, wasn't she? Wasn't she? That's yet to be determined. “So, you guys hear about that bird party?” Roger asked. “You going?” “What bird party?” Jeffrey said. “That thing for the Central Park peregrine falcons?” Chuck said. “Yeah, Blair was telling me about it. It's in the old Barneys store.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “Dude, everybody's going.” Everybody didn't include Dan, of course. But it very definitely included Serena van der Woodsen. “They're sending out the invitations this week,” Roger said. “It has a funny name, I can't remember what it is, something girly.” “Kiss on the Lips,” Chuck said, stubbing out his cigarette with his obnoxious Church's of England shoes. “It's the Kiss on the Lips party.” “Oh, yeah,” Jeffrey said. “And I bet there's going to be a lot more than kissing going on.” He sniggered. “Especially if Serena's there.” The boys laughed, congratulating each other on their incredible wit. Dan had had enough. He tossed his cigarette on the sidewalk only inches from Chuck's shoes and headed for the school doors. As he passed the three boys he turned his head and puckered his lips, making a smooching sound three times as if he were giving each boy a big fat kiss on the lips. Then he turned and went inside, banging the door shut behind him. Kiss that, assholes. 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.