Novels by Cecily von Ziegesar: Gossip Girl You Know You ... - Weebly

She looked down and fiddled with the little ruby ring on the middle
finger of her right hand. The film was rolling, and Blair was getting
warmed up.
“I think Serena is pretty messed up about it. But I promised her I
wouldn’t say anything,” she added.
Her friends nodded as if they understood completely. It sounded
serious and juicy, and best of all it sounded like Serena had
confided everything to Blair. If only Blair could script the rest of the
movie, she’d wind up with the boy for sure. And Serena could play
the girl who falls off the cliff and cracks her skull on a rock and is
eaten alive by hungry vultures, never to be seen again.
“Careful, Blair,” Chuck warned, nodding at Serena and Nate, who
were still talking in low voices over by the wet bar, their eyes never
straying from each other’s faces. “Looks like Serena’s already found
her next victim.”
Serena was holding Nate’s hand loosely in hers, swinging it back
and forth.
“Remember Buck Naked?” she asked him, laughing softly.
Nate chuckled, still embarrassed, even after all these years. Buck
Naked was Nate’s alter ego, invented at a party in eighth grade,
when most of them had gotten drunk for the first time. After
drinking six beers, Nate had taken his shirt off, and Serena and Blair
had drawn a goofy, buck-toothed face on his torso in black marker.
For some reason the face brought out the devil in Nate, and he
started a drinking game. Everyone sat in a circle and Nate stood in
the middle, holding a Latin textbook and shouting out verbs for
them to conjugate. The first person to mess up had to drink and kiss
Buck Naked. Of course they all messed up, boys and girls alike, so
Buck got a lot of action that night. The next morning, Nate tried to
pretend it hadn’t happened, but the proof was inked on his skin. It
took weeks for Buck to wash off in the shower.
“And what about the Red Sea?” Serena said. She studied Nate’s
face. Neither of them was smiling now.
“The Red Sea,” Nate repeated, drowning in the deep blue lakes of
her eyes. Of course he remembered. How could he forget?
One hot August weekend, the summer after tenth grade, Nate had
been in the city with his dad, while the rest of the Archibald family
was still in Maine. Serena was up in her country house in Ridgefield,
Connecticut, so bored she’d painted each of her fingernails and
toenails a different color. Blair was at the Waldorf castle in
Gleneagles, Scotland, at her aunt’s wedding. But that hadn’t
stopped her two best friends from having fun without her. When
Nate called, Serena hopped right on the New Haven line into Grand