Only in Your Dreams (Gossip Girl #9)(66)
Turn the page for a sneak peek of
it had to be you
the gossip girl prequel
and find out how it all began.
by the #1 New York Times bestselling author
Cecily von Ziegesar
Disclaimer: All the real names of places, people, and events have been altered or abbreviated to protect the innocent. Namely, me.
hey people!
Ever have that totally freakish feeling that someone is listening in on your conversations, spying on you and your friends, following you to parties, and generally stalking you? Well, they are. Or actually, I am. The truth is, I’ve been here all along, because I’m one of you.
Feeling totally lost? Don’t get out much? Don’t know who “we” are? Allow me to explain. We’re an exclusive group of indescribably beautiful people who happen to live in those majestic, green-awninged, white-glove-doorman buildings near Central Park. We attend Manhattan’s most elite single-sex private schools. Our families own yachts and estates in various exotic locations throughout the world. We frequent all the best beaches and the most exclusive ski resorts. We’re seated immediately at the nicest restaurants in the chicest neighborhoods without a reservation. We turn heads. But don’t confuse us with Hollywood actors or models or rock stars—those people you feel like you know because you hear so much about them, but who are actually completely boring compared to the parts they play or the songs they sing. There’s nothing boring about me or my friends, and the more I tell you about us, the more you’re going to want to know. I’ve kept quiet until now, but something has happened and I just can’t stay quiet about it. . . .
We learned in our first eleventh-grade creative writing class this week that most great stories begin in one of the following fashions: someone mysteriously disappears or a stranger comes to town. The story I’m about to tell is of the “someone mysteriously disappears” variety.
To be specific, S is gone.
In order to unravel the mystery of why she’s left and where she’s gone, I’m going to have to backtrack to last winter—the winter of our sopho-more year—when the La Mer skin cream hit the fan and our pretty pink rose-scented bubble burst. It all started with three inseparable, perfectly innocent, übergorgeous fifteen-year-olds. Well, they’re sixteen now, and let’s just say that two of them are not that innocent.
If anyone is going to tell this tale it has to be me, because I was at the scene of every crime. So sit back while I unravel the past and reveal everyone’s secrets, because I know everything, and what I don’t know I’ll invent, elaborately.
Admit it: you’re already falling for me.
Love you too . . .
gossip girl
Gossip Girl 09 - Only in Your Dreams
the best stories begin with one boy and two girls
“Truce!” Serena van der Woodsen screamed as Nate Archibald body-checked her into a three-foot-high drift of powdery white snow. Cold and wet, it tunneled into her ears and down her pants. Nate dove on top of her, all five-foot eleven inches of his perfect, golden-brown-haired, glittering-green-eyed, fifteen-year-old boyness. Nate smelled like Downy and the Kiehl’s sandalwood soap the maid stocked his bathroom with. Serena just lay there, trying to breathe with him on top of her. “My scalp is cold,” she pleaded, getting a mouthful of Nate’s snow-dampened, godlike curls as she spoke.
Nate sighed reluctantly, as if he could have spent all day outside in the frigid February meat locker that was the back garden of his family’s Eighty-second-Street-just-off-Park-Avenue Manhattan town house. He rolled onto his back and wriggled like Serena’s long-dead golden retriever, Guppy, when she used to let him loose on the green grass of the Great Lawn in Central Park. Then he stood up, awkwardly dusting off the seat of his neatly pressed Brooks Brothers khakis. It was Saturday, but he still wore the same clothes he wore every weekday as a sophomore at the St. Jude’s School for Boys over on East End Avenue. It was the unofficial Prince of the Upper East Side uniform, the same uniform he and his classmates had been wearing since they’d started nursery school together at Park Avenue Presbyterian.
Nate held out his hand to help Serena to her feet. She frowned cautiously up at him, worried that he was only faking her out and was about to tackle her again. “I really am cold.”
He flapped his hand at her impatiently. “I know. Come on.”
She snorted, pretended to pick her nose and wipe it on the seat of her snow-soaked dark denim Earl jeans, then grabbed his hand with her faux-snotty one. “Thanks, pal.” She staggered to her feet. “You’re a real chum.”
Nate led the way inside. The backs of his pant legs were damp and she could see the outline of his tighty-whiteys. Really, how gay of him! He held the glass-paned French doors open and stood aside to let her pass. Serena kicked off her baby blue Uggs and scuffed her bare, Urban Decay Piggy Bank pink–toenailed feet down the long hall to the stately town house’s enormous, barely used all-white Italian Modern kitchen. Nate’s father was a former sea captain-turned-banker, and his mother was a French society hostess. They were basically never home, and when they werehome, they were at the opera.
“Are you hungry?” Nate asked, following her. “I’m so sick of takeout. My parents have been in Venezuela or Santa Domingo or wherever they go in February for like two weeks, and I’ve been eating burritos, pizza, or sushi every freaking night. I asked Regina to buy ham, Swiss, Pepperidge Farm white bread, Grammy Smith apples, and peanut butter. All I want is the food I ate in kindergarten.” He tugged anxiously on his wavy, golden brown hair. “Maybe I’m going through some sort of midlife crisis or something.”