AN: So sorry for the delay, I thought I posted Chapter 6 a week or two ago! Here it is at last! Thank you to ASadAir who is the best beta/editor!
Thanks to a few lessons in assertion from Raina and Epperly, Blair marches into her dorm on Thursday afternoon on a mission. Just as she predicted, Serena is lounging on Blair's bed scrolling through her phone and listening to music. Of course, it's some dreadful autotuned "artist" Blair refuses to learn the name of.
Drawing in a deep breath, Blair squares her shoulders. "Serena."
Blue eyes blink at her in surprise as though Blair is the one invading her space. "Oh. Hey."
"Listen," Blair hovers over Serena in what she hopes is an intimidating stance. "If you plan on sticking around, I suggest you visit Admissions. You'll need to see about finding a permanent housing solution because you can't sleep here anymore. If I find you on my bed again, I'll call the RA or will drag you out of here myself. This is my dorm room. You're welcome to stop by and visit Georgina when she's here and it's not some ungodly hour but stick to her side of the room. Now, up up!"
She drags Serena up by her golden, lithe arm. Her dumbstruck face suggests no one has ever kicked her out of anywhere before. Well, Blair thinks, there's a first time for everything.
"I'll tell Georgina you stopped by!" Blair leads Serena out of the dorm and locks the door behind her.
Smoothing out her wrinkled duvet, she feels a self-satisfied smile cross her face. She texts Raina and Epperly in the group chain they have going:
Mission accomplished. We're celebrating tonight.
Her friends reply with a flurry of emojis- a fist pump, confetti, champagne, and a million other little icons that represent Blair's mood. Next, she texts Nelly eager not to morph into Juliet and be the queen of exclusion:
Raina and Epperly are having a few of us over to their dorm tonight. Come by?
Nelly texts back in an instant with a response in the affirmative and Blair is glad she thought to invite her. She had been feeling a little guilty saving all her fun times for Raina and the girls, setting aside Nelly just for study sessions.
Blair honestly couldn't have ever imagined herself being the type of girl to go to a party on a Thursday night but it turns out, even an Ivy Leaguer can let loose. She throws on the latest of her mother's designs- a flirty dress in a dusty rose color that makes her skin look more luminous than it actually is. Normally, she would have put heels on with it and maybe a gold leafed headband but Raina has been trying to engrain "less is more" in Blair's brain. So instead, she simply slips a bangle on her wrist and wears her nicest pair of flat sandals.
Arriving to her friends' dorm, she finds it's hardly set-up for a get-together with "just a few friends." There's a Costco-sized pack of SOLO cups set out along with a table for beer pong. Blair didn't even know parties were allowed in the dorms, at least none ever happened in her dorm. But then again, she wouldn't know, never having been invited.
"B!" Raina surveys her. "See! Beautiful! You don't need headbands to sparkle. E, come look at how cute Blair looks."
Blair lets them praise her and even says yes to the shot of horribly cheap vodka they have on-hand, only because they are toasting to eternal friendship. She's glad she does it because sober-Blair would start questioning her presence at this sort of shindig on a school night and would start to think up excuses to leave, especially as the room fills quickly with at least thirty other students and still no Nelly Yuki in sight.
She can just picture Nelly walking up, getting one tiny glimpse into the raucous dorm, and then running in the opposite direction with one hand poised on her horn-rimmed glasses so they didn't fly off in her hurry.
"Okay another shot," Epperly proffers more vodka. "We need to drink to you!"
The other girls are with her – Raina, Fran, and Forest, all beaming huge grins and holding up their own shots. Blair's already fuzzy but she feels no choice but to say yes to her new, picturesque friends. Maybe her life is a movie, she thinks as she raises the shot.
"To you!" They all shout. "To the incredible, amazing Blair!"
Blair would blush but she's pretty sure the stuffy room has already caused her cheeks to permanently fill with color. So instead, she lets the cool alcohol burn her mouth out as she finishes the shot.
"Blair," She hears her name again and turns, expecting to see... Well, she's not quite sure who she expects to see but certainly not Dan.
He belongs in Intro to Film and Journalism, not in her friends' overcrowded dorm room. In all her imagination of what it might be like when they finally held a real, intimate conversation, she never pictured it in such a disorderly environment. She feels far too dazed for this but she meets his eye as he approaches the high top table they're all gathered around.
"Hi." She says a little uncertainty, distracted by Raina and Epperly's eager, surreptitiously exchanged glances behind Dan. They keep nudging one another like they're watching something epic unfold.
Of course. They probably invited him.
Blair would certainly be glaring at them right now and rescinding her promise of eternal friendship if not for Dan being directly in her line of sight.
She asks, "What are you doing here?" as if she doesn't already know.
"I know Fran, she's in my Literature to Film class." Dan answers, making Blair wonder if this was Fran's doing, not Epperly's. But one look at them over his shoulder confirms it was definitely that duo. She rues the day she told them all about her and Dan.
Blair nods.
"I'm breaking our rule, aren't I?" Dan asks. "When I saw you, a minute ago, I actually checked my pockets for a sheet of paper I could pass you. I found one but I didn't have a pen. So communicating the old-fashioned way seemed de rigueur."
"You do realize I am well-versed in the art of conversation and don't require pen and paper to conduct a discussion, don't you?" Blair asks sardonically.
"I mean, I had to assume." Dan replies. "You don't exactly seem friendless."
His comment is sarcastic but it makes her realize he doesn't know the half of it. He continues on though. "So what's the occasion? Your friends seem to be celebrating you."
"Oh," Blair feels a bit sheepish. She can't remember if he said he was close to his stepsister or not. "Honestly, I kicked your stepsister out of my dorm. Sorry."
Dan doesn't look the slightest bit disappointed and instead blanches slightly. "Serena has been here, all this time?"
"Yes." Blair replies, wishing she had a drink to busy herself with. She glances down at one of the empty SOLO cups before continuing. "She sort of hijacked my bed there for a while."
"I'm glad you ousted her then." He shakes his head. "Do you happen to know where she went? I should track her down. If she's spending all her time at a college it should really be her own."
Blair can't help her reply. "Serena got in somewhere?"
"Brown." Dan hesitates. "Her mother contributed to the construction of a new music hall. Although, I'm sure it was unrelated."
Smiling at his dry tone, Blair asks, "I am going to get a drink. Something to wash away that shitty vodka shot you saw me doing. This way?"
After she plucks two fresh cups from the table, he follows her into the communal kitchenette where she knows the girls stash their better liquor and all the non-alcoholic beverages.
"You barely poured anything in there." Dan notes as she puts double the amount of vodka in his cup.
Blair nods. "I've already had two shots and am seizing the opportunity to sober up. We have class tomorrow, remember? I need to keep my wordbank sharp so I can properly communicate to you in our customary fashion. Any more than this and I might be too hungover to quip."
"Ah," Dan's tone turns sage.
Blair tops off their cups with an organic lemonade she finds in the fridge that undoubtedly belongs to Fran, whose Lilliputian frame runs on pesticide-free substances. Blair idly wonders if the lack of pesticides is what makes her skin so translucent; maybe it's everyone else that has the problem and not Fran.
Blair takes a sip and blinks in surprise as Nelly Yuki walks into the empty kitchenette. Her eyes are huge, magnified by her glasses, and she's wearing a cardigan as per usual.
"Nelly Yuki!" The alcohol makes Blair deaf to the loudness of her own voice. "You made it!"
"I thought maybe you sent me the wrong dorm number." Nelly glances back down the hall toward the party, face filled with terror and consternation.
Blair hears Dan laugh slightly from beside her and remembers her manners. "Dan this is Nelly Yuki, Nelly Yuki, this is Dan."
As she offers to make a skeptical Nelly a drink, Dan whispers to her, "Does she only go by Nelly Yuki or may I just call her Nelly?"
Blair thinks about this. "I think her full name is more apt. Don't you? It's a catchy name. Nelly Yuki." She says it again, for fun.
Dan shakes his head and stills Blair's hand on the vodka bottle. The contact freeze frames the moment, Blair registering the first time they've ever made proper contact. It's a silly thing to note, Blair realizes, dismissing the tingles his skin on hers sends up her arm and down her spine. "She looks like a lightweight. Go easy on her."
"Right," Blair pulls back the bottle, surveys the cup which is now two-parts vodka and one-part air and dumps a little of the excess liquor into Dan's.
Dan frowns down at his cup. "I didn't say to pour the extra into mine. I won't even make it to class at this rate. This was already half vodka when you first poured it."
"You will." Blair says confidently, adding lemonade to Nelly's cup. Meanwhile, Nelly is standing at the threshold of the party and the kitchen, glancing back and forth nervously as though perhaps she's stumbled into a nightmare. "Your wit will just be compromised but that's okay. I like to be the cleverer one."
"So I've noticed," Dan says with a flicker of amusement.
"Here you are," Blair passes Nelly her drink. "Your first college party."
"Possibly my last." Nelly says despondently as they walk back into the packed dorm room.
It's been two hours and while the room has stopped swaying quite so much for Blair, Nelly now seems to be the unsteady one. Blair surveys her with a grimace. "I really shouldn't have put so much vodka in her drink."
She's surrounded by her friends and Dan who doesn't seem to know anyone else at this party and thus has stuck by her side. They all nod, especially Dan. "I warned you."
"I think I'm going to walk her back to her dorm." Raina and Epperly both make pouty faces but know better than to protest at this point. Blair has stuck it out longer than she normally would have on a weeknight.
"I'll head out too." Dan says, throwing his cup in the trash. While he's not looking, her friends shoot her suggestive glances which she carefully ignores.
"Come on, Nelly," Blair links her arm through Nelly's, but not before she's swapped numbers with some guy wearing a pair of Beats headphones around his neck. "It's time for you to go home."
When they're outside in the cold, a now-sober Blair has to cautiously guide a very off-balance Nelly down the steps.
"Do you know which dorm she's in?" Dan asks, a look of concern on his face.
"I do," Blair says and points toward the right. "We're both that way, you?"
"Durfee," He replies, frowning a little. "I can go with you guys, though, to make sure you get there safely."
Blair shakes her head. "We'll be fine. Nelly Yuki is a very cooperative drunk."
Nelly nods to this emphatically. "Nelly Yuki is very, very cooperative. I could probably retake my- my S… SAT's right now and still get a 2360." She stumbles over the words.
"I'm sure you could." Blair agrees. To Dan she says, "See? She can still remember her SAT score. We're fine. Besides, you'll know we didn't make it if I don't show up tomorrow in class."
"That's not very reassuring." He says.
"Really, Dan. I went to public school in what was perhaps one of the seedier Upstate neighborhoods. You on the other hand," She glances meaningfully at his expertly tailored clothing. "I don't think your private school good manners will prove necessary to us. Thank you, though."
She gives him her most bolstering smile as he reluctantly agrees and says goodnight.
The whole way back to Nelly's dorm her friend raves about some guy named Todd Jansen. By the time they've made it to Nelly's room, Blair feels like she could probably write a biography on the guy.
"Thanksss," The 's' is elongated in Nelly's slurring, the sibilance strong. "Blair, for inviting me."
"Sure, anytime." Blair takes Nelly's phone and switches it off for her, so she can't get any drunken ideas about texting Todd. "I'll see you tomorrow at lunchtime for our study session. You might want to pop an aspirin or two in the morning though."
Nelly nods dutifully and then sinks back into her bed, peacefully asleep before Blair has even closed the dorm door on her.
As she walks back to her own dorm room, she imagines what this walk would have been like with the company of Dan. She forgets the thought just in time to turn the lock in the key.
TBC...
Chapter 7 is edited and ready for posting this weekend! Thanks for reading!