hey people! Ever wondered what the lives of the chosen ones are really like? Well, I’m going to tell you, because I’m one of them. I’m not talking about beautiful models or actors or musical prodigies or mathematical geniuses. I’m talking about the people who are born to it—those of us who have everything anyone could possibly wish for and who take it all completely for granted. Welcome to New York City’s Upper East Side, where my friends and I live and go to school and play and sleep—sometimes 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. We’re smart, we’ve inherited classic good looks, we wear fantastic clothes, and we know how to party. Our shit still stinks, but you can’t smell it because the bathroom is sprayed hourly by the maid with a refreshing scent made exclusively for us by French perfumers. It’s a luxe life, but someone’s 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. Jude’s School boys. But something is rotten on museum mile. . . .
SIGHTINGS 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?! THE GIRL WHO LEAVES FOR BOARDING SCHOOL, GETS KICKED OUT, AND COMES 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 S’s 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 won’t, because we’d really rather she had stayed away. But S is definitely here. Just to be safe, we should all synchronize our watches. If we aren’t careful, S is going to win over our teachers, wear that dress we couldn’t 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. I’ll be watching closely. I’ll be watching all of us. It’s going to be a wild and wicked year. I can smell it. Love, “I watched Nickelodeon all morning in my room so I wouldn’t 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 didn’t even know she knew how to use the stove.” Blair tucked her long, dark brown hair behind her ears and swigged her mother’s 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 Blair’s 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. Poof—rock 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 didn’t 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 drunk—very 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 didn’t 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 drugs—as long as you kept up appearances, you were all right. But keep your panties on. That’s coming later. The man Blair was so upset about was Cyrus Rose, her mother’s 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 Saks— bald, 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 Blair’s mother. But he wasn’t Blair’s father. Last year Blair’s 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 Rose’s fault, but that didn’t 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. Blair’s mother was famous for her dinner parties, and this was her first since her infamous divorce.