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

island of Rhodes, and while their parents were snorkeling and
Serena and Erik were supposed to be having windsurfing lessons,
Erik had swum ashore, stolen a Vespa, and bought her some maxi
pads. He came back with them in a little plastic bag, tied on top of
his head, her hero.
Serena had thrown her ruined underwear overboard. They were
probably still there, stuck on a reef somewhere.
Now Erik was a freshman at Brown, and Serena never got to see
him. He had been in France with her that summer, but they’d both
spent the whole time chasing or being chased by boys and girls, so
they’d never really had time to talk.
Serena picked up the phone again and pressed the speed-dial
button for her brother’s off-campus apartment. The phone rang and
rang until finally the voicemail system picked up.
“If you would like to leave a message for Dillon, press one. If you
would like to leave a message for Tim, press two. If you would like
to leave a message for Drew, press three. If you would like to leave
a message for Erik, press four.”
Serena pressed four and then hesitated. “ . . . Hey . . . it’s Serena.
Sorry I haven’t called in a while. But you could have called me too,
you big jerk. I was stuck up in Ridgefield, bored out of my mind,
until this weekend, and now I’m back in the city. I had my first day
of school today. It was kind of strange. Actually it sucked. Everyone
is . . . everything is . . . I don’t know . . . it’s weird. . . . Anyway, call
me. I miss your hairy ass. I’ll send you a care-package as soon as I
get a chance. Love you. Bye.”
“You’re so full of shit, Dan,” Jenny Humphrey told her brother. They
were sitting at the kitchen table in their large and crumbling tenthfloor,
four-bedroom West End Avenue apartment. It was a beautiful
old place with twelve-foot ceilings, lots of sunny windows, big walkin
closets, and huge bathtubs with feet, but it hadn’t been
renovated since the 1940s. The walls were waterstained and
cracked, and the wood floors were scratched and dull. Ancient,
mammoth dust bunnies had gathered in the corners and along the
baseboards like moss. Once in a while Jenny and Dan’s father, Rufus
Humphrey, hired a cleaning service to scrub the place down, and
their enormous cat, Marx, kept the cockroaches in order, but most
of the time their home felt like a cozy, neglected attic. It was the
kind of place where you’d expect to find lost treasures like ancient
photographs, vintage shoes, or a bone from last year’s Christmas
dinner.
Jenny was eating half a grapefruit and drinking a cup of peppermint
tea. Ever since she’d gotten her period last spring, she’d been