Author's note: Sorry for such an intensely long time between updates! I was recently in a musical production, and that took up a lot of time and energy, then I had end of year exams, plus a plethora of events to plan and...well, clearly I am making too many excuses. =] However, I am really glad to be back writing in this world! I missed Elle and her crazy mental prose, and I'm excited to tell the rest of her story. So, without further ado...the chapter that hopefully makes up for my long hiatus.

DISCLAIMER: I use a lot of imagery from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. I don't own that book or that story or any of the quotes from it. I just love the book. xoxo

"Where're you gonna go with a heart that gone?"

CHAPTER ELEVEN
NYC – Gone, Gone

I cried when Nate's private plane took off and France became a strip of land in the barely perceptible distance, but not because I was sad to leave my home behind. There was a little part of me, past the heavy beating of my heart and the blind rage that dug half-moon shaped scars into my palms and the lead weight sitting in my gut that made it difficult to walk in a straight line and the overwhelming desire to raid the nearby minibar... there was a little part of me that was glad to see le pays de mère go. As far as I was concerned, it was le pays de merde, and I never wanted to think of it or see it or live in it again.

The light illuminating the fasten seatbelt sign blinked out, and I pressed my forehead against my window. The Atlantic Ocean swam below me like one endless swimming pool, and I wanted to dive into it...to break through the surface in a spectacular swan dive. No. A haphazard cannonball which would result in a catastrophic tidal wave, which would travel east to the English Channel, where it would infiltrate the Seine and crush its way to Paris, where it would explode and drown the city forever, probably killing all 2,167,994 of its inhabitants.

Tristan was a terrible swimmer, and Sophie would be too busy despairing over her ruined makeup, and mère would...probably make a deal with the devil to get out alive, but she would be very soaked and very unhappy about her ruined wardrobe when she did. I would be long gone, of course, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and completely untraceable. It would be the perfect crime and no one would persecute me for it! Stupid Paris...

I almost soothed myself to sleep with the mental images.

"How are you feeling?" asked Nate from the seat beside mine.

"Inventively homicidal," I opened my eyes and stopped imagining a happy life amidst the dolphins, who would bring me food and protect me from sharks and let me sleep on their backs.

"Well, you wouldn't be a Waldorf if you didn't."

I heard the smile in his voice, but I couldn't return it. Any leftover traces of joy or happiness that had stubbornly clung to my heart instantly shriveled up and died as soon as that name left his lips. Dramatic imagery? Yes. But those words only barely sum up the relentless stabbing pain that clenched my chest that day. To say that I wanted to curl up into a little ball of misery and slowly die would also be quite dramatic and just as inadequate a phrase to describe how much I really did want to. And not just because of that name...

Waldorf. You wouldn't be a Waldorf...

"I'm not," I whispered, running a hand through my hair. I let it rest on my slumped right shoulder so I could use it as a makeshift pillow, and my gaze shifted from the sea to the sky. Cotton candy clouds billowed across an infinite horizon, and I thought of my childhood when the clouds had seemed like a kingdom in the heavens... then, I was a princess, and the birds were my adoring subjects and...

I really needed to stop thinking I could communicate with animals. Life is not a movie, I reminded myself for the hundredth time. Life is not a movie.

Or maybe...

I could turn things around. I could go away and mature and become the better person, and return with a grace and dignity that none of them could ever envision or hope to aspire to. They would think I wanted revenge, and I would just smile at them and confuse them and earn everyone's adoration again and win, no matter how many years passed. Janson would settle for its leggy blonde queen and its sneaky liar king with his beautiful cheekbones and Marlboro cigarettes and...

Lying mouth full of liar lies!

I could not go back until the idea of Tristan didn't simultaneously make me want to lock myself in a bedroom with candlelight and soft music and hunt him down and eviscerate him with my eyes.

"But I still feel inventively homicidal."

Nate pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, just like in all the old movies, and held it out to me. I sniffled stubbornly and refused to so much as look at it. "I know you're angry," he said, pressing the embroidered piece of expensive cloth between my hands anyway. Then he gingerly touched a few of the stray tangled clumps of what vaguely resembled my usually glossy chocolate brown hair, and tucked them behind my right ear. "And hurt and abandoned and upset, and did I mention angry?"

I bit my lip to keep from smiling. Nate always knew just how to make me crack, and always had...ever since I was a baby, according to him et ma mére. But just because he was my godfather, and just because he had only done what ma mère had asked him to do, and just because all I felt like doing was resting my head on his shoulder and asking him to tell me one of his ridiculously lame made-up bedtime stories (in which he substituted my favorite characters with him and Dorota and Aunt Jenny and ma mère or characters from his favorite action movies)...just because I didn't want to be angry with him didn't mean that I wasn't. I was. I was so angry with everyone that I could barely blink properly.

"At you, too," I bit out, thinking I was sharing a revelation.

But he just put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me into his familiar earthy scent. "I know."

Of course he knew. Everyone always knew everything I didn't...

I closed my eyes and let myself pretend, like I so desperately wanted to, that I was just a girl and that I was a princess, and the clouds were my kingdom and the plane was my riverboat. The hum of the engine and the soothing oldies playing on the Bose speakers (I abstractly heard the words "there's nowhere we can go with nothing underneath" before I drifted back to my fantasy) and the feeling of the initials N.A. beneath my fingertips stemmed the tears and I wasn't angry anymore.

"Tell me a story?" I remember murmuring, half-asleep as a dreamy voice sang about thin ice.

Nate squeezed my shoulder and chuckled. I felt it rumbling in his chest, beneath his steady heartbeat.

"Once upon a time, there were two little girls," Nate handed me my favorite teddy bear – who was named Teddy and wore a polka-dot bowtie – and tucked my covers up to my chin. In the bed beside me, my god sister Lux cradled her Strawberry Shortcake doll who was cute, but nowhere near as cuddly and adorable as my teddy bear, which had wide black button eyes and a pink smile on his fluffy brown face. I nuzzled his fur and giggled at Lux as Nate continued.

"Their names were Lux," he tapped his daughter on the nose, "and Elle." He tried to tap mine, but I dodged just in time.

"But that's us!" I complained, sitting up and trying to pout the way my mother did when she painted her lips red. Nate snorted at my effort and gently nudged me back onto my pillow. "Tell us a story about someone else." I was already back up with my Happy Face pajama-clad arms crossed over my chest in indignation. "And not Bruce Willis."

His lips snapped shut, as if he had indeed been about to venture into a tale about his favorite action star.

Lux rubbed her eyes and yawned. "Whoever it's about, tell it soon. I'ma fall asleep…"

"All right, Luxie, hold on a sec."

He fixed the covers and made sure that I was tucked in so tightly that I couldn't possibly escape before morning, then crouched back down beside us and scratched the top of his head. "I could tell you a story about me?"

"Boring," Lux instantly shook her blonde curls and made her Strawberry Shortcake shake her head too. "Tell us about someone fun."

"Like Serena!" I knew I practically had stars in my eyes, but my jet-setting godmother Serena had been the pinnacle of cool in my early childhood.

"Boring!" Lux protested yet again, rolling onto her stomach and burying her head in one of my feather down pillows. "We can hear about her any old time."

"You think of someone then," I snapped, struggling against my Egyptian cotton prison in an attempt to kick my best friend in the knees.

"I will!" Her head popped up and she wore the same extra thoughtful facial expression as her father. Feeling left out, I tried to force my eyebrows to furrow and my lips to pinch together just like theirs, but all I managed was a rather displeased looking scowl. By the time I had reverted to ma mére's pout, Lux was on her feet, bouncing around on my bed like her usual hyper self. "Tell us abooooooout Teddy's daddy."

Nate walked around to Lux's side of the bed and picked her up by her armpits. She kicked her feet in a vain attempt to stave him off, but soon she was in a cocoon much like mine, her arms stuck to her sides and hardly able to wriggle her toes. We looked at each other, looked at each other's mummified bodies, and sighed in defeat. It really was bedtime.

"How about Uncle Dan, instead?"

"No!" Lux thrust her bottom lip up. "Teddy's daddy."

"Not tonight, Luxie. Someone else, tonight." If I had been older than seven, maybe I would have noticed the way he looked at me, with a nervous quiver behind his eyes, and the way his voice was a little too firm for a matter so trivial. But I was only a few weeks shy of eight years old, and my keen skills of observation had not yet been honed. Instead, I stared at the canopy over my mattress and imagined that we were in an airplane that was flying over a vast, open sea.

Then the sea turned into sand, and the sand became rocks, and the rocks tumbled across grass, which spanned for fields and fields and across countries and on either side of crystal blue rivers. The rivers turned greener and greener and then sort of brown and the grass did too, until there was no more grass, just more sand. But the sand was not soft and white, but gold and coarse and it made mountains that turned into valleys that became mountains again with every gust of wind.

A snake wound its way across a smattering of footprints, and a little boy sat on a stone wall and asked to be bitten. Our plane crashed near the boy, and the boy told us he was from the stars, and I imagined that I was from the stars and that I met a king who counted things, or was it a lamp-lighter who was a king? A rose yelled at me from across the galaxy and the boy said:

"One should never listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their scent."

So I ignored the flower and went to the moon and then Mercury, and watched the sunset from close up. The boy sat next to me, but he didn't look like the boy in the book. The scruffy hair was brown and even more unruly, and his cape was purple and covered with a shimmering sort of glittery material. I smiled at him and he smiled back at me and we joined hands before we walked back to our planet together. The two of us came to a crowded corner in a strange city. It was not Paris, the buildings were so shiny and the street beneath my shoes was paved differently. The crowd was dense and black, and I began to feel suffocated by the constant shuffling and movement. Just when I was about to scream for Tristan or Nate to come and get me, a strong hand clenched my shoulder protectively, and I felt a warm body encompass mine as the arm settled over my shoulders. The boy beside me received the same treatment, and looked up at our savior with adoration.

We were led away from the crowd and into a large green park, where children were running and flying kites as adults played music and pushed each other on swing sets.

I looked up, because I could still feel the warm, possessive arm around my shoulders, and I wanted to tell this stranger a hearty 'Merci beaucoup!' for helping me out of that horrible street.

The sharply defined face above me was the same face in the fading photograph, only it was looking down at me with affection. He opened his mouth to speak as I gasped, and I felt the sun shining down from the east. The boy laughed and hugged Chuck Bass's leg, before taking off and joining a crowd of children who were gathered around a particular kite. Except it wasn't a kite at all, but a float. Chuck ruffled my hair and nudged me toward the same group of children then turned and walked down a winding path that led to a waiting limo. It glinted in the moonlight.

I raised my eyes to the sky and it was night, the stars twinkled and sang above me and I was back in the desert. A yellow snake uncoiled in front of me.

"You will see where my track begins, in the sand. You have nothing to do but wait for me there. I shall be there tonight."

I frowned and tried to explain that I was a princess and could not be consorting with snakes, when the snake grew and there was a tree and Tristan blew a ring of smoke that turned into a heart and framed his face. His cheekbones were sharp in the light. "Let me take you home, ma petite." His fingers curled in my long hair, then his palm cupped my neck while his other hand tilted my chin toward his. "Your mother is still in the States, isn't she?"

"No..." I frowned deeper and touched my curls. Why were they so long? "She's in Paris and I'm going to the States."

Tristan smirked and lean close, so close that our lips touched and I breathed his air. "Running away from your problems?"

"No. I'm running to...I'm going to find something out." I looked around, and the street was wrong. A lamp-lighter was extinguishing a light, then reigniting its flame, then extinguishing it again. All the while, he glanced down at his pocket watch and mumbled to himself. Across the street, a gaggle of girls sashayed past and one of them was blonde with long legs and impeccably shaped pink lips, and she smiled at Tristan and he chucked me on the chin.

"Here's lookin' at you, kid."

And he went to her.

"This isn't right," I said to no one in particular. "This isn't Casablanca, this isn't...I'm not here."

The snake slithered down from the tree and circled my feet. "It's all deteriorated rather rapidly, hasn't it?"

I looked down and suddenly remembered that I had been terrified of snakes ever since my first trip to the zoo. It disappeared.

"What are you doing out of bed?"

Ma mère stood in front of a sputtering airplane, a hat shielding her eyes from the sun. She put a hand on her hip and eyed me up and down. "Nate has been looking everywhere for you."

I was scooped up and put back in bed beside Lux, who was fast asleep and drooling on her Strawberry Shortcake. "No more running away," he kissed my forehead and tucked the covers in around me again. I was small and clad in my Happy Face pajamas, and Teddy the bear was tucked securely under my arm. I felt ma mére's diary under the pillow beneath my head, and I knew the picture was safely in its hiding place. Nate and ma mère turned off the lights and shut the door, and I was left with the silence.

I woke up when the plane touched the ground, and the evidence I had cried in my sleep was dry on my cheeks.

A look out the window revealed that it was nighttime, and I briefly thought I was still trapped in my dream. But the Nate who was helping unload our luggage was not the same Nate who had tucked me into bed with my bear, and Lux was nowhere to be seen. I rubbed my eyes and tried to remember why there had been a snake and why Tristan had been there – oh, that made sense, he and the evil snake were clearly in cahoots.

How dare that cretin intrude on my dreams, I thought. How dare he infiltrate my most private thoughts and ruin them with his stupid cigarettes and his stupid voice and his stupid cheekbones. I felt like strangling something. Probably a snake, but I would be hard pressed to find one at an airport.

Then I looked at myself in the reflection of the airplane window, saw the sharp jaw and the angled eyebrows, and the dark fathomless eyes on top of the round nose, and...Chuck Bass had been in my dream. I had had that particular dream before, with the crowds and I vaguely remembered kites and swing sets, and I certainly remembered the feeling of his leather glove on my shoulder, and the way the light hit the angles of his face, and the way he looked as he was about to speak. What had he been about to say?

But there had been someone else, too. A boy...

Nate poked his head back into the plane to make sure I had roused myself, and smiled slightly when he saw the state of my hair. "Helicopter's ready."

I nodded, vaguely feeling the handkerchief he had given me in the palm of my left fist. It was strange, but I could tell that I wasn't in France anymore, just from the air or the smell or the way my body felt in the seat. My clothes were ill-fitting all of the sudden, and my shoes far too loose. I knew I looked like a streetwalker who had been on the clock for a few days too long, who was desperately in need of a shower and a tan, and maybe even a glass of wine. God, I would have killed for a glass of wine.

Instead, I cleaned myself up as best I could, thanked God that it was night, therefore dark, therefore less people would see me in my haggard state, and walked down the stairs to the even concrete ground that waited. I was right about the air being different, and even though the sun wasn't out, I could see that light was distributed in ways I hadn't seen before. The stars were invisible, which I was used to, but their absence was accentuated by a milky film over the black sky, and I suddenly wished I had stayed home with mère and Dorota and Dorota's cookies.

"Coming, Elle?" Nate had already loaded what he could into the helicopter, and the rest had already shipped out in a glossy black Lincoln town car.

It was all happening so fast. Couldn't we take a moment to breathe? Maybe...sit down and have a coffee and talk about stuff?

If only I hadn't slept the entire flight...I would be up all night, between that and the 6 hour time difference. It was 6 AM in my home city and it was Saturday, which meant mère was allowed to sleep in until 11. Dorota was already up and bustling around, cleaning the already immaculate kitchen, preparing brunch for mére, going back and forth between the stove and her garden, where she was doing the best she could to repair her belladonna lilies. The lights were dimming around the city and things were coming into gray perspective. The light was hitting my room from the east in a straight line of pale gold light, but the bed was empty.

Before I could think about the wide open closet doors or the blank walls or the locked windows, I nodded and ran to the open seat next to my godfather.

Seeing Manhattan for the first time was not the movie moment it should have been. It was, in fact, wasted entirely on me because I had never laid awake at night thinking about it, fantasizing about it, wishing I was there, imagining what it would be like to walk its busy streets, or look at it from above as the helicopter allowed me to. It was different than seeing Paris from the air...there, the lines were not quite so straight, but they were more manicured somehow. Manhattan was odd clumps, and it fanned out then in then out again, like it couldn't make up its mind. The lights were brilliant, not indistinct like the ones I would have seen at home, and I instantly loved it somehow.

And suddenly, it was a movie, but all too late. We landed at the East 34th Street Heliport, and I was in the thick of things. The lights were taller than any I'd ever stood under, and I felt invigorated by the crisp night air. Somewhere, conceivably, within 22.96 square miles of where I was standing (I had done my research), was Chuck Bass. The knowledge thrummed inside my chest and spread to my arms like an adrenaline rush, and I hugged my small carry-on bag close to my body. Inside it was ma mére's diary and all the clues I would need to piece together in order to learn the whole truth.

I looked over at Nate, who was making sure my smaller suitcases were stacked into the trunk properly, and smiled as wide as I ever had.

I still wanted to see all of my former friends drown in a pool of their own salty tears of bitter and pleading remorse, but I had other things to take care of first.

The town car took us west on East 34th Street and turned right onto Park Avenue. I could see the Empire State Building illuminated in the rearview mirror when we were far enough uptown – I could tell we were going uptown because the numbers at the intersections kept increasing.

68th...

69th...

70th...

71st...

72nd...

73rd...

When we got to 74th Street, the driver nearly got us killed, or so it seemed to me, by swinging a sharp left and narrowly avoiding a bicyclist who was pedaling through a red light. The bicyclist made a few colorful hand gestures and shouted a lot, but the words were lost on me, because twenty seconds later we were in front of it.

The house.

The beautiful white townhouse with the pretty white columns at the front door, and the wrought iron gates, and the stone stairs, and the pretty green ivy growing up the sides in a perfectly controlled way. The windows reflected the lights of other windows, and the tall green tree in front of it had a pretty red ribbon tied around its trunk. I wondered why Nate would want a red ribbon tied to his tree, when I noticed there was something dangling from it...an envelope with a name written on the front.

My name, I guessed.

I giggled because I recognized the game. Whenever the Archibalds had visited ma mère at papére's chateau, Lux and I had amused ourselves with various games of hide-and-seek, either played the traditional way or with rules we made ourselves when the game grew stale. Our favorite variation was more like a scavenger hunt, which involved us writing little riddles to each other and putting them in envelopes for the other to find. Whoever found all their envelopes by solving the riddles first, won, and got to wear a red ribbon in her hair until the other won, and so on for infinity.

As the chauffeur took great pains to unload my luggage and carry it up the stairs, I bypassed Nate and ran straight for the red ribbon.

Elle the envelope read. I had guessed right.

Inside was cream-colored stationary with an elaborate L in the left hand corner. In her perfectly stilted cursive, Lux had written:

This clue is just the first
In a series of other hints
And unless you're cursed
You'll find this game a cinch

I rolled my eyes fondly at Lux's bad poetry – it hadn't improved with age.

Take two steps to the left, and two steps to the right
And you will find yourself within a pool of light

In fact, it took three steps to the left and five steps to the right, but I got what she meant. I was underneath the streetlamp that stood on their street. Nate came over with his hands in his pockets and scanned the paper with a disinterested eye. "She's telling you where to find your key. It's under the – "

"Nate!" I protested, clutching the poem to my chest as if shielding the words from him would make him forget what he had read. "Don't take all the fun out of it!"

Now walk six paces forward
And kneel upon your knees
And you will find the items
Most people call spare keys!

Reminding myself not to make fun of her too harshly for completely abandoning her rhyme-scheme halfway through the terribly childlike poem, I did as she requested exactly as she requested, walking precisely six steps forward, sinking down to my knees, and reaching underneath the potted plant for the set of spare keys that would allow me access to the Archibald home. I smiled as the little silver things shone in the light – Aunt Jenny or Lux had polished them to make sure they looked brand new. I glanced up quickly to make sure that Nate hadn't already let himself in, but he was standing against the back door of the black town car, looking up at the house with an odd look on his face.

"Nate?" I ventured, pushing myself back to my feet and frowning at him. I had never seen him look so sad, not even when his mère died and the Archibalds came to France to get away.

He didn't look at me for several seconds, and when he did it was like I wasn't even there. "Go ahead, they're waiting for you."

I clutched the keys and started to walk up the polished stone steps, but he didn't move a muscle. "Aren't you coming?"

Nate shook his head and opened the car door for himself. "Patrick will take your things in."

On cue, the chauffeur stepped forward with five of my bags in hand and tipped his head as if to say 'Yes, I will take care of your things for you, ma'am'. And it was such a movie moment that I couldn't help staring as my godfather's shoulders sunk, and he ducked into the back of his town car looking like a broken Ken doll. I didn't know what was happening – he was leaving, clearly, but how could he? How could he say he would take care of me in this big new city I had never been to and promise that he wouldn't ever let anything happen to me and then just leave? Didn't he want to be there for me anymore?

"I'll be in later, I promise," he reassured me after rolling down his tinted window. Perhaps he had seen the expression on my face. "I will, and we'll go to breakfast tomorrow."

"Promise?" I wanted to hear it again, because if I didn't then he might not mean it.

"I promise, Elle. Go in."

He rolled the window back up and then I couldn't see him anymore.

There was nothing else to do, unless I wanted to stand on the bottom step all night staring at the tinted glass and forcing Patrick to hold onto my very heavy luggage. So, I turned on my heel, jogged up the remaining four steps, and used my personal keys to unlock the doors to the Archibald town house.


TRANSLATIONS:
Le pays de mère –
the mother country
Le pays de merde –
the shit country