N'S PERSONAL LITTLE CLUSTER *%@# "A Pyrrhic victory," Mr. Knoeder mumbled in his typical impossible-to-follow manner. "Archibald. Are you with me?" Nate hadn't done his homework. He wasn't even sure what day it was. He'd woken up, taken a shower, and wandered into school, hoping for some guidance. Now this asswipe of a teacher wanted him to answer some idiotic question about the Vietnam War, which everyone knew had been a total clusterfuck. "Pyrrhus was a Greek king or whatever who kicked the shit out of the Romans in some battle, but there were a ton of causalities," Nate heard himself saying. No wonder I got into Yale and Brown, he congratulated himself. I'm a frigging genius! "Actually, it was the Battle of Pyrrhus," Mr. Knoeder corrected, sticking his pinky in his ear as he wrote something on the board. The St. Jude's boys all called him Mr. No Dick because he wore his pants so high and so tight, he couldn't possible have a dick. "But your answer was mostly accurate." Nate got out his cell phone and started texting Jeremy, who was seated in the same row as he was, four desks down. HEY THKS DICKLESS, he wrote. WNT 2 HANG L8R? Jeremy wrote back. CAN'T. GROUNDED, Nate replied. SORRY TO HEAR ABT B & THT KID, Jeremy wrote back. Nate leaned over his desk and shot his friend an annoyed look that said, "Please explain." KID FRM YALE PRTY THT HKEDUP W/ B, Jeremy clarified. So that was who was in Blair's bed last night. Nate was too bummed to even reply. He'd left Blair alone for a little more than a day, and she'd had to go and hook up with some asshole at a stupid Yale party that she probably wasn't even invited to? He ought to have been furious. Instead, he just felt depressed. He was supposed to have been at that party. He could even have brought Blair with him. They could have talked bout the future and then had sex afterwards. It might have been romantic. But as usual he'd messed everything up. Well, now he knows- it may not suck to be the cheater, but it definitely sucks to be cheated on. Fuck it, Nate decided. He held up his hand. "Mr. Knoeder, may I be excused? I think I have food poisoning or something." Oh, come now. You can do better than that. Mr. Knoeder didn't even notice. His back was turned as he busily drew a detailed map of Saigon in purple chalk. Nate texted a despondent SEE YA to Jeremy, gathered up his things, and slipped out of the classroom, leaving the rest of the St. Jude's senior history class to stare after him and wonder why they didn't have the balls to do the same. Nate stuffed his books in his basement locker and slammed the door. Fuck homework, and fuck school. He was already into college, and now that he was grounded, he might as well just stay home, eating brownies and getting high. He'd cut the rest of the day's classes, light up a big fatty, fill out the appropriate forms, and send in his deposit to Yale. So what that he promised Blair that he wouldn't go to Yale unless she got in? Every promise they'd ever made to each other had been broken, and the truth was, Yale had the best lacrosse team and had promised to make him captain his sophomore year. He wanted to go there whether Blair got in or not. With grim determination, he headed home, trying to rid himself of the image of that skinny, snoring, girlfriend stealing asswipe sleeping in Blair's hotel bed. Mailing in his Yale deposit wasn't exactly going to be a victory without losses though. Blair was going to spit fire when she heard about it. Unless she didn't care anymore, which was almost even scarier. D, THE FUTIRE OF HIP-HOP Riverside prep was housed in a redbrick church built in the late 1900's, the quaintest little schoolhouse on the Upper West Side. The school's main entrance was on West End Avenue- a cute bright red door over which hung a sing that said RIVERSIDE PREPARATORY SCHOOL FOR BOYS, which sounded embarrassingly like some sort of rich boys' finishing school. Thankfully, the upper-school boys entered from the side entrance, a normal-looking black door on Seventy-Seventh Street, the perfect place to slip into school nearly two hours late. Dan swaggered into the last ten minutes of the first-period AP English wearing his hip-hop pants and black-and-yellow sneakers from the Raves gig the night before, and a dark gray APC T-shirt given to him by Monique with MR.WONDERFUL stenciled in bold letters across the chest. Last night he'd drunk his ass off, sung like a sickass motherfucker, and then had crazy, totally undeserved sex with a beautiful French girl on a giant bed in a Plaza Hotel suite. Being a rock star was actually kind of excellent. You don't say. "Well, if it isn't my most famous student," Ms. Solomon observed tersely as Dan wandered to the back of the room and slouched behind a desk. Ms. Solomon was right out of graduate school and was incredibly ashamed of the major crush she had on Dan. Instead of showering him with praise-there was no question he was the most accomplished and intellectual student in the class- she was either snide and critical, or she ignored him completely. Once, just to test her, he'd even copied an essay on Virginia Woolf's writing habits, written by the famous literary critic Harold Bloom, her advisor at Princeton, and handed it in, pretending he'd written it. Ms. Solomon had given him a B+, just like she did on every one of his English assignments, no matter how bad or good it was. "The class and I were just discussing whether or not we should have a final essay on our unit on Shakespeare's tragedies instead of a final exam. Any opinion, Dan?" she clamped a hand over her mouth and added sarcastically. "I do apologize- perhaps you have a stage name now?" Dan frowned down at his desktop, where someone had etched the words Bitch Face with a green ballpoint pen. Normally he would have welcomed the chance to write a paper over taking an exam, but papers required research and outlining and hours of writing, whereas an exam required a single two-hour appearance. That is, if you have no intention of studying for it, which he didn't. Now that he was a rock star he'd be touring, shooting videos, signing albums, and fending off women and the paparazzi. Two hours out of one day for a stupid English exam was definitely preferable. Ms. Solomon was the type of dried-apple skinny that made her look forty years older than she probably was, and her hair, which she kept pulled back in a low ponytail, was an ashy dark blond color that looked gray under the school's harsh fluorescent lights. She loved lace, and preferred cream-colored blouses with lace collars and ruffles at the sleeves paired with black wool knee-length skirts, black stockings, and bizarrely high, skinny-heeled black pumps. Her skirts were always seriously tight, too, leading the boys to suspect that she probably thought she was the sexiest female alive. Ew. "Half the class wants a paper and half the class wants an exam. Yours is the swing vote," she explained. Meaning that no matter what Dan said, half the class would hate him for it. He cleared his throat. "I think an exam would be a better indicator of how much we've learned over the course of the year," he declared, sounding like a total schmo. "Oh, would it now?" Chuck Bass sneered from two desks away. Riverside Prep's dress code was plain-colored khaki pants or cords, brown or black belt, white or pastel-colored button-down shirt , and brown or black loafers with dark-colored socks. Chuck Bass was wearing a black Prada jumpsuit, unzipped so his tanned, recently waxed chest was clearly visible, and creamy white leather Camper sandals that showed off his smooth, manicured feet. On the floor beneath his desk, Chuck's pet snow monkey, Sweetie, poked his fuzzy white head out of Chuck's orange-and-red leather Dooney & Bourke tote bag and bared his teeth. Chuck hardly deserved to be in AP English. He could barely spell, had never read a book in its entirety, and thought Beowulf was a type of fur used for lining coats. But in an effort to get him into college, his parents had insisted he be placed in all APs, which turned out to be a big fat mistake. Due to the fact that Chuck preferred to shop and attend fashion shows instead of going to school and doing his homework, he had gotten D's in all his classes last semester, failed to get into any of the colleges he'd applied to, and was now bound for military school. And was he bitter? Definitely. "Hey Mr.Wonderful." Chuck hissed at Dan. "Don't look now, but your days as a Rave are over." Huh? Dan slouched in his chair and dug at the desk with his ball point pen. He was a rock star; he didn't have to take this shit. Someone's foot nudged the base of his spine. "You're out," whispered Bryce James, one of Chuck's bullish friends. "Unless your slut of a sister can get you back in." Dan's hackles rose. What did Jenny have to do with it? As far as he knew, Jenny was only going along for the ride, just like she's always done. After all, if your big brother was in a major band, wouldn't you want to hang out with him and his bandmates, too? "I heard she wants to be singer," Bryce elaborated. "So she slept with every one of them." Dan whipped around and gave Bryce the finger simply because he was too hung over to think of anything intelligent to say. Jenny had left the suite by the time he and Monique had gotten up that morning, but what exactly had she been up to while he was getting busy last night? And how come everyone already seemed to know about it? "An exam it is, then," Ms. Solomon announced. She scribbled something in a notepad and then stood up and approached Dan's desk. "I'm bit of a Raves fan myself," she murmured, her cheeks slightly flushed. "And it's sort of killing me." She stopped in front of Dan, put her palms on his desk, and leaned toward him so that he could smell the everything bagel with scallion cream cheese she'd eaten for breakfast. "is it true that Damian is married to his high school sweetheart? Some French girl?" she asked loudly, obviously thinking it was totally hip for a teacher to know anything about a cool band like the Raves. Dan's hands were sweating, and he fingered the pack of unfiltered Camels in the back pocket of his baggy pants. Didn't Riverside Prep have rules about teachers harassing the students? There were only two more minutes left before the end of class. Still hoping to hear the answer to Ms. Solomon's question, the other boys gathered their books and zipped up their backpacks. The minute hand on the clock was over the blackboard crept forward and the hallway outside the class room buzzed to life. Dan stood up, brushed past his nosy teacher, and headed for the door. Saved by the bell. AN E-MAIL WORTH RESPONDING TO That afternoon during computer lab, Serena was tempted to e-mail that melodramatic artist at Brown, those perky sorority weirdos at Princeton, and that lovelorn jock at Harvard, telling them to have nice lives, because from now on she was all about Yale. Instead, she permanently expunged then from her trash folder. At lunchtime she'd actually mailed in her deposit to Yale, and what a relief it was to finally come to a decision- even if she couldn't tell her best friend in the whole world about it. She skimmed the rest of her e-mail until she came to one from an unknown source. From: dpolk@raver.et To: Svdwoodsen@constancebillard.edu Subject: don't believe everything you read So, we're an item. It's all very flattering. Problem is, we've never met. Want to? A bunch of people will be at my place in the Village Friday night. Hope you can make it. Damian Serena giggled and stood up partway out of her chair, searching the Constance Billard computer lab for Blair's dark shiny head. But Blair was working intently at her computer and didn't even notice Serena waving at her. Mr. Schneider, the uptight computer proctor with the ............