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

the invitations, but she was going to the party; that was all that
mattered.
Just wait until she told Dan. He was going to freak. And she was
going to make him come with her to the party, whether he liked it
or not.
Two martinis and three rolls of Remi brothers’ film later, Serena
jumped out of a cab in front of Constance and ran up the stairs to
the auditorium, where the interschool play rehearsal had already
begun. As always, she was half an hour late.
The sound of a Talking Heads song being played jauntily on the
piano drifted down the hallway. Serena pushed open the auditorium
door to find her old friend, Ralph Bottoms III, singing Burning Down
the South, to the tune of Burning Down the House, with a
completely straight face. He was dressed as Rhett Butler, complete
with fake mustache and brass buttons. Ralph had gained weight in
the last two years, and his face was ruddy, as if he’d been eating
too much rare steak. He was holding hands with a stocky girl with
curly brown hair and a heart-shaped face—Scarlett O’Hara. She was
singing too, belting out the words in a thick Brooklyn accent.
Serena leaned against the wall to watch, with a mixture of horror
and fascination. The scene at the art gallery hadn’t fazed her, but
this—this was scary.
When the song ended, the rest of the Interschool Drama Club
clapped and cheered, and then the drama teacher, an aged English
woman, began to direct the next scene.
“Put your hands on your hips, Scarlett,” she instructed. “Show me,
show me. That’s it. Imagine you’re the teen sensation of the Civil
War South. You’re breaking all the rules!”
Serena turned to gaze out the window and saw three girls get out of
a cab together on the corner of Ninety-third and Madison. She
squinted, recognizing Blair, Kati, and Isabel. Serena hugged herself,
warding off the strange feeling that had been stalking her since
she’d come back to the city. For the first time in her entire life, she
felt left out.
Without a word to anyone in the drama club—Hello? Goodbye!—
Serena slipped out of the auditorium and into the hallway outside.
The wall was littered with flyers and notices and she stopped to
read them. One of the flyers was for Vanessa Abrams’s film tryout.
Knowing Vanessa, the film was going to be very serious and
obscure, but it was better than shouting goofy songs and doing the
Hokey-Pokey with fat, red-faced Ralph Bottoms III. Vanessa’s tryout
had started an hour ago, on a bench in Madison Square Park, but
maybe it was still going on. Once again, Serena found herself