Gossip Girl: It Had To Be You

Psychotic stalkers come in small packages

"You remember Mom's, though, right? They're not small," twelve-and-a-half-year-old Jennifer Humphrey reminded her older brother, Daniel, as they sat at their cracked, banana- colored Formica kitchen table, eating Saturday brunch. Her tiny, four-foot-eleven-inch body tucked into the same pink fleece footie pajamas she'd been wearing since she was ten, Jenny was working her way through a giant container of peach-flavored soy yogurt in hopes that the naturally occurring estrogen in soy would increase her breast size. Everyone in her seventh-grade class at Constance Billard was blossoming—Luna Skye had gone up two cup sizes since September!—everyone except Jenny.

"Yeah, but maybe they're fake. I mean we don't know any- thing about Mom really," a scruffy, stained-brown-corduroys- wearing Dan pointed out. This winter he had worn only two outfits: brown corduroys and a black polo shirt with a frayed white turtleneck underneath it—all from Old Navy—or faded black Levi's paired with a mustard yellow hoodie he'd bought at a thrift store in the East Village. He'd rotate the two outfits until they turned gray and Jenny would finally break down and wash them for him in the basement laundry room of their building. That's what happened when you didn't have Mom around to do the wash, Jenny thought dolefully. Little Sister wound up doing it.

Dan spooned another heap of Folgers crystals into the green plastic Winnie-the-Pooh mug he'd been drinking coffee out of since he was six. The topic of their mother always made him squirm, and since their father, Rufus, had been away since last night, attending an all-night howl-in with his anarchist, Beat poet comrades, Jenny had been talking about Mom even more than usual.

"They're not fake. We were both breastfed, so—"

"Can we please stop discussing Mom's... parts?" Dan interrupted grumpily, feeling guilty almost instantaneously. Jenny was the only girl living with her scruffy weird father and her scruffy weird brother. She had every right to talk about her ever-absent mother. The lack of femaleness or even normal- ness in their decaying Upper West Side rent-controlled apartment was excruciating. Jeanette Humphrey had left Rums and her two children when Dan was eight and Jenny was not yet six to "discover herself" with a handsome count in the Czech Republic. Dan preferred to think of their mother as a babysitter who took care of them for a few years and then got another job. He certainly never thought about how he resembled her. Clearly Jenny thought about it a lot. Or at least she'd continueto think about it until she finally got breasts and started think- ing about something else. It wasn't like she missed their mother. Who could miss someone who'd abandoned her young children, never wrote or called, and sent them each a pair of lederhosen in a child's size four two Christmases in a row?

The only person Dan ruminated over obsessively was Serena van der Woodsen. Serena van der Woodsen. Just the thought of her name made him clutch his coffee mug with sweat-slicked fingers. Serena was so beautiful he felt like puking every time he allowed his thoughts to wander back to her; so perfect it was difficult to believe she existed; so entirely unattainable she might as well have been a ghost or the tooth fairy or something equally ethereal. Serena van der Woodsen was and always would be Dan's dream girl, his muse—not that he ever did anything creative that required a muse.

Never say never.

Two years ago, in a fit of insane compassion for his mother- less son, Rufus had thrown the mother of all birthday parties for thirteen-year-old Dan. There was a disco ball, Jell-O shots, a bathtub full of St. Pauli Girl, and enough Haagen Dazs coffee ice cream and Newman's Own microwave popcorn to feed the entire roster of eighth-grade boys at his school, Riverside Prep. Since Rufus was notoriously liberal and would definitely have no problem getting a bunch of eighth graders drunk, Dan's entire class came, including woman-hips-sporting Zeke Freedman, Dan's only real friend. But Riverside eighth graders weren't the only ones who'd heard about the alcohol-friendly party. Thesophomores came and so did the juniors. So did twenty-odd kids from across the park who'd heard about the party from Dan's highly obnoxious Park Avenue-dwelling classmate, Chuck Bass. A few of the crashers were girls—thank God—and Serena was one of them.