xoxo
Theirs was the oldest story.
There was a boy and there was a girl, two girls, actually. But they had no fairytale castle.
They had the Upper East Side, where the endings are just a little different.
xoxo
February, 2010
Valentine's Day is just one of the many holidays Serena had once shone at.
It's all a bit tainted now.
The heart-shaped note Blair gave her in second grade doesn't smell like strawberry scented ink anymore and the dozens of roses she received at Constance just remind her of bathroom hook-ups and vomit in her hair.
Tripp's gone and she's over the thrill of forbidden love and longing looks. She spent last night with Nate and a small part of her wanted to ask him to spend the day with her. They'd go to a movie and end up in a lolly isle. (She'd pick out something sour and he'd pick out everything he knew she'd want to share.)
But she never asked and Nate pretended not to care.
It used to be easy for her to forget the people left in the dust of her destruction. But she can't forget him—the one person who never meant much, but became the centre of her world. Without even a breath, he brought down the reign of Manhattan's golden girl.
Her Valentine's Day doesn't belong to Nate and it never will.
xoxo
February, 2004
He wakes up, but doesn't open his eyes, wanting to avoid the pain of sunlight for as long as possible. He really hopes someone's poking his foot, otherwise he must have swallowed a lot more than he intended to.
"He isn't a toy, S." The indulgent voice doesn't care enough for it to be a scold.
"They're all toys, Georgie. Some are just more fun than others."
Reluctantly he snaps his eyes open. His headache is as bad as he expected.
Georgina's probably somewhere around, and he just knows it's a bad idea to take his eyes off that girl, but the pretty blonde thing on the end of the bed isn't something you just turn away from. She's just a kid, but at fifteen or sixteen she's still the best thing he's seen in a while.
"Hey." He sits up trying for a charming grin, the same one that got him the lead in every school play.
She meets his smile with one just as enthralling. "Mornin', sunshine," the blonde breathes in a happy gush.
She's stretched out along the edge of the bed, long tanned legs crossed at the ankles. "Are you one of Georgie's friends?" It's a loaded question, but it comes out simple and innocent.
He thinks of the Georgina with her shadowy blue eyes and honeyd words that sting in all the right places. She's just another UES princess gone bad, looking to score all the things he can find.
"Yeah, we're friends."
The blonde tilts her head to the side, considering his tone. "Good." She nods decisively. "Georgie needs more people to look out for her."
He doesn't know what to say to that, but the girl never waits for a response. "I'm Serena van der Woodsen." She sticks out an elegant hand in a pose slightly too formal to use on a hungover, half-naked guy.
For a second he's surprised, but without thought his mind switches on the charm he uses to get everything. He grasps her hand, turning it over to place a lingering brush of lips on the back of her palm. She snatches her hand away, heat staining her cheeks.
The wide-blue eyes and blush make him think fifteen was wishful thinking. "Peter Fairman."
Georgina moves out of the en suite doorway and he wonders how long she's been standing there. "Don't tease her, Pete. The only class S ever passed was Jailbait 101."
Serena throws back her head to let out a childish laugh. Georgina manoeuvres herself onto the edge of the bed and the blonde immediately moves her legs onto her friends lap.
"Still one more than you G," Serena points out, still smiling.
He's known Georgina for about six months and has already learnt that people don't say things like that to the brunette. It's just not done. A five-foot-one Georgina Sparks is already one scary bitch.
But Georgina just smirks, laying back on the bed. Only Serena can say things like that.
This moment should have felt poignant. The three of them together like this. He should have felt something. The beginning of the end, maybe. But there's no gift of foresight, no moment of revelation.
Instead Serena pulls out some colourful cellophane, digging through its contents.
She hands Pete a pastel green heart candy with a small grin. Technically they were a present from Gary, given to her by his sister Renee from English, but Serena thinks gifts are better the more they can be shared.
He takes it, raising his eyebrows at the message carved into the side. "Real Love?" he asks, slipping it between his lips.
The blonde gives a happy nod. "Better for you than the fake stuff."
Serena digs through the packet again, handing over a baby blue candy to Georgina.
Pete can't see what it says, but Georgina reads it thoughtfully before shoving it in her mouth. The girls share a look that he can't decipher and never will.
It's not as if they start hanging out or anything.
He graduated from Riverside the year before last and got into MIT, just like his parents always planned. After six months he deferred, because civil engineering was boring and if he did it for another six his roommate would have come back to find him swinging from the ceiling by his red and grey tie.
But lucky for him the boys back in Boston still need all those pretty pills to keep them awake long enough to figure out the elements in tension for a suspension bridge or some shit.
So he has a lot of friends. He's suffocated by them at parties and clubs.
But the girls become a familiar piece of his life. The blonde and the brunette, in their own corner of the crowd, leading boys into a trap of barbs set with the bait of girls that don't exist. He gets used to Serena's too-loud laugh that always sounds a little like whistling in the dark. He only smiles when he sees Georgina whispering illegal things into guys' ears.
And before he realises it, Georgina and Serena dancing on a table becomes the marker of any party worth being at.
xoxo
February, 2005
They're at some abandoned factory on the outskirts of the city. Serena grips her friend's arm as they make their way through the crowd. Time was moving funny and she already got distracted once and ended up sitting in the parking lot for half an hour.
Georgina was already in a bad mood from all the try-hard teens. If you're having fun, you wouldn't have to advertise it with all those ridiculous glow sticks.
"This place is a hellhole," Georgina mumbles darkly, voice almost lost in the music.
A large body throws itself between the girls and enthusiastic arms drape around them both.
"Petey!" Serena squeals happily, wrapping her arms around the boy's waist.
Pete grins, dipping down to place a kiss on each of their heads. "How m'girls?"
"Pissed," Georgina cuts in, a dangerous scowl moving over her face. "This place is a total prep-fest."
"It's not that bad, G." Serena likes glow sticks.
"They're playing happy hardcore," Georgina hisses back, outraged by the lameness of it all.
Pete nods, taking in their opinions with his usual careless attitude. "Then why are we here?"
"Because you called us," Georgina reminds him accusingly.
"Did I?" He gives a lop-sided grin, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Then we'll take the party somewhere else and I'll make it up to you," he promises with a wink, having learnt how to manage Georgina's prickliness.
They end up back at Georgina's. Her parents were in the Alps, whereas Pete had got kicked out of home for the second time this month. And Serena's place had been overwhelmed by stepfather number three, a teetotaller, and the worst one yet, Georgina thought.
Georgina watches Peter and Serena mess around on her bed. It's not the sex that makes her uncomfortable; it's the weird way they seem to mirror each other that makes her fingers thrum along the arm of her chair in displeasure.
It had been her idea. Serena wanted to lose her virginity and where the blonde was concerned she was a control freak.
Georgina already knows that Pete is good, and there's something satisfying about knowing she'd been there first. But she hates the way they both sound—so loud and childlike. Neither of them have the right to sound that innocent.
They probably don't even know that it's Valentine's Day, or that she picked this day because it's when the two of them met.
She made them both do more lines than they usually do, because she still remembers her first time in sixth grade, and wishes like hell she'd had some good blow back then. Neither of them will thank her.
Pete gets to his knees and Serena actually giggles as she locks her legs around his waist.
Georgina looks away, her face a mask of indifference.
Sometimes she plays a game. When Serena is very drunk and she's feeling numb, she convinces boys to try their luck with the blonde. She watches Serena move in their clumsy hands, sweet and wild at the same time. She waits until her blood burns, until the rage simmers and she can barely see, then she snatches Serena's arm and drags her away. And the blonde always follows. And neither of them talk about it.
Every time she tells herself that the nothingness is better than the craziness. But how is she supposed to remember that when she goes numb again?
When they're done Pete tries to get her to come closer. She ignores the both of them.
Pete climbs from the bed and picks her out of the chair before she can protest. He doesn't let her go, just falls into the rumpled bed and holds her close. He knows her well enough not to say anything when he feels a few hot tears on his neck.
It's just a few silent tears before she pulls herself back together, immediately regretting showing weakness. But Pete already knows her every weakness for every substance, even the blonde one, so maybe it's okay.
Serena snuggles into the other side of her, chattering about something that Georgina tunes out. She falls asleep between the two of them and maybe that's okay too.
xoxo
February, 2006
They're on the floor of Serena's lounge, staring up at the cavernous ceiling. Georgina left for a family therapy session, so it's just the two of them.
He's naked except for a pair of unzipped, ripped jeans. His eyes stray every now and then to Serena's unbuttoned Constance blouse. Her baby blue bra is spilling into the early evening light.
They're coming down from two-day bender, limbs too weary to move and too useless to want to. There's an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach that keeps reminding him how fucking hopeless he is.
He plays his fingers gently over the hem of her skirt, just because it's Serena and she'd never think to stop him. It feels rough and bordering on unpleasant against his fingers. Not the unreal, overwhelming sensation it was last night.
"You ever want to change?" he asks, not because he does, he just wants to know if she does.
"Change what?" She edges her head closer to him, meeting his searching eyes with an even gaze.
(He could never tell naivety from Upper East Side denial.)
"I'm gonna' end up all fucked-up," he announces calmly, like maybe he isn't already.
Under the dilated pupils and skin too many men have touched, she's pretty close to being sweet. Maybe she deserves this—the first and only warning he'll ever give.
He can feel her lips curve against his bare shoulder, a smile just for him. Her long, thin arms wrap around his neck loosely.
"Uh uh. I won't let you." She seals the promise with a lazy kiss.
He knows her and he's not surprised when she turns it into something deeper. He'd be disappointed if she didn't straddle his waist and undo his jeans with a single hand.
She drags him into her parent's bedroom.
xoxo
He doesn't know what to label the experience. It's soft and slow and more real than anything else he's done recently. Fucking doesn't quite cover the feeling of his hands wrapped in silky golden tendrils and the curiously tender kisses she burned into his chest.
He shouldn't be this much of a screw-up. He shouldn't be waking up in bed with coked-up minors wrapped around his body. He should feel worse about it too, but most of him is just glad he's found friends who can match him move for move.
There's something wrong with him. Something magnetic that pulls people to him and repels them at the same time. He makes friends faster than most, loses them quicker too. The women he dates have a habit of going crazy. The people he touch burn up under his fingertips.
But he already knows that Serena and Georgina aren't going to call him thirty times a day, they're not going maul his car with a butcher's knife when they're calls go unanswered. They both have that destructive edge in their eyes—the need to run fast, see everything, and never look both ways. It's a little like loving life, but hating air.
There's nothing he can point to, no moment in his life that makes him go ah-hah. There's flashes, memories where he can feel the almost beginnings of this paradox he's playing.
(Live hard, laugh loud, because all you really want is to disappear.)
There was glass over the dining room floor, but his father wasn't much of an aimer and his mother was faster than she looked. There was a broken arm and a night in the hospital spent alone, because his mother was raising money for a charity he couldn't name and she couldn't care less about.
But there was an older brother who taught him how to drive and summers at the Hamptons when his mother would swipe fuchsia zinc over his nose and his father would play poker with jellybeans.
The whole upper-middle-class sob story was old and worn and none of it holds up too well against dime bags and burnt spoons.
xoxo
He laughs when Georgina tells him her idea. She has a camera in one hand and rolled-up notes in her coat pocket.
When Georgina smiles—a dark flinty thing that never touches her eyes—his laughter dries up.
"Sounds like something I could go to prison for," he states dryly.
"I know, it'll be wild," she promises.
There's that edge of something her voice. A desperation for more—for things that could hurt, for things that bite back. He's always recognised it because it's a part of him too. A part of Serena as well. It's what binds them together.
It'll be what tears them apart.
"Well, looks like we're moving into the film industry, babe." He chuckles, an almost innocent sound, because Serena's going to be so pissed. She'll probably chase him around with a cushion again.
Georgina rewards him with a nudge of her shoulder and a small but honest smirk. "Our parents are going to be so happy."
xoxo
He is just a boy and they are just two girls.
But this is no fairytale castle. This is the Upper East Side.
And there are no happy endings.
xoxo
February, 2010.
Serena thinks about Georgina, goes as far as to write a text before she remembers angrily deleting the number from her phone at a loft in Brooklyn.
So she spends the day alone, flipping through photos on her computer and watching Georgie's present over and over again till years of trying obliterate and she's just a boyfriend-stealing mess, handing over a few lines to a boy who trusted her when he should have known better.
Valentine's Day just isn't the holiday it once was. Too much has happened—too many regrets to weep over, too much in the future to fear.
There's no more heart-shaped candy with be mine scrawled into the side, just a single rose on a trendy and impersonal grave marker.