Stubble aside, Blair had never felt so happy. After finally doing it with Nate nearly two weeks ago, she was a whole new woman. The only dark cloud in her rosy sky was the irritating fact that she was still only wait-listed at Yale. Just exactly how where her and Nate going to get together every afternoon if she wound up having to go to Georgetown in DC- the only school that had actually accepted her-and he was up at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, or Brown in Providence, Rhode Island, or one of the other great schools he'd so unfairly gotten into? Not that she was bitter, but Nate had shown up stoned for the SAT's, took no AP's and barely had a B average, while she was in ever AP Constance Billard offered, had gotten a 1490 on her SAT, and had almost an A+ average. Okay so maybe she was slightly bitter. "If I joined the peace Corps and spent a couple of years building sewers and making sandwiches for starving children in, like, Rio or somewhere, then Yale would have to take me, wouldn't they?" she said aloud. Nate grinned. Here was the thing about Blair that he loved. She was spoiled, but she wasn't lazy. She knew what she wanted, and because she believed absolutely that she could have everything she wanted if she tried hard enough to get it, she never stopped trying. " I heard everyone gets sick in the Peace Corps. And you have to speak the native language." "I'll so it in France than." Blaire blew smoke up at the ceiling. "Or one of those African countries where t hey speak French." She tried to imagine herself conversing with the natives in some arid African village while balancing a clay pot of fresh goat's milk on her head and wearing an elaborately dyed caftan that could be supremely sexy if tied in the right places. She'd have a killer tan and would be nothing but muscle and bone from all the hard work and horrible intestinal diseases. Children would clamor at her knees for the Godiva chocolates she'd order for them and she'd smile sincerely down at them like a beautiful, unwrinkled Mother Teresa. When she returned to the States she'd win some Peace Corps award for best volunteer, or even the Nobel peace Prize. She'd have dinner with the president, who would write her a recommendation to Yale, and then Yale would fall over themselves to accept her. Nate was pretty sure the Peace Corps only helped out in third-world countries, not economically thriving places like France, and no way would Blair last more than half and hour in some remote African Village where they didn't have Sephora or even flushing toilets. Poor Blair. It was completely unfair that he'd gotten into Yale without really trying, while she, who'd wanted to go to Yale since she was two years old, had been wait-listed. Then again, Nate was used to getting things without really trying. He propped his head up on his hand and tenderly smoothed Blair's dark hair away from her forehead. "Unless you hear soon that you got in, I promise I won't go to Yale," he vowed. "I'm fine with going to Brown or whatever." "Really?" Blair stamped out her cigarette in the sailboat- shaped marble ashtray beside Nate's bed and flung her arms around his neck. Nate was by far the best boyfriend a girl could ever ask for. She couldn't imagine why she'd ever broken up with him, not once, but again and again. Because he cheated on her again and again? All Blair knew now was that she was never ever wanted to leave Nate's side. She rested her cheek against his strong, bare chest. Now that she thought about it, moving into the Archibalds' town house wasn't such a bad idea, since her own house wasn't exactly an episode of "Seventh Heaven" right now. Her mother had just given birth to her baby sister just over two weeks ago and was now suffering from severe postpartum depression. Just this morning Blair had left her mother weeping over a DVD sent from Peruvian Alpaca farm. Apparently, if you adopted a herd of alpaca yearling, you could custom-order hand-woven blankets and sweaters made from the hair of the animals in your herd. Her baby sister would soon be the proud new owner of a hairy white alpaca blanket that would be completely useless all summer long, and probably the rest of her life, unless as a teenager she got into the hippie handmade-chic thing, cut a head hole into the blanket, and fashioned it into a poncho. Back when her mother was still pregnant, she had asked Blair to name the baby, and out of devotion to her favorite college Blair had chosen the name Yale. Now baby Yale served as a living, breathing, very noisy reminder that no matter how stunning Blair's record was, the school had all but rejected her. Worse still, the baby had taken over her bedroom, and she was forced to sleep in her stepbrother Aaron's room until after she left for school in the fall. Aaron was a vegan Rastafarian dog-lover, so the room had been decorated specifically for him in wall-to-wall organic, environmentally sound products in shades of egg plant and wild sage. To add insult to injury, Blair's cat, Kitty Minky, had taken to peeing on the barley husk cushions and throwing up on the woven sea grass floor mats in an effort to rid the room of the scent of Aaron's dog, a drooling boxer named Mookie. Hello, Nasty? Move in with Nate. Blaire didn't know why she hadn't thought of it before. A freaky mother, a cat-pee-soaked bedroom, and a newborn baby sister named after Yale were not exactly conductive to studying or s-e-x. it was only natural for her to seek other accommodation. Of course there was always Serena's house, but they'd tried that before and wound up fighting. Besides, Serena couldn't offer her much in the way of s-e-x. Unless those old rumors were actually true... Nate ran his hands lazily up and down her smooth bare back. "have you ever thought about getting a tattoo?" he asked out of nowhere as he traced the lines of her shoulder blades. Except for a brief stint in rehab earlier that year, Nate had been pretty stoned pretty much all day every day since he was eleven, and Blair was used to his random questions. She wrinkled her pointy, slightly upturned nose at the thought of having a big scar filed with black ink. "Gross," she responded. Leave that to skanky-looking actresses like Angelina Jolie. Nate shrugged. He'd always thought carefully chosen, tiny tattoos in just the right places were insanely sexy. A little black cat between Blair's shoulder blades, for instance would totally suit her. But before he had a chance to take the notion any further, Blair briskly changed the subject. "Nate?" she nuzzled her face into his manly, perfect collarbone. "Do you think your parents would mind if I stayed--?" Before she could finish her sentence, the downstairs buzzer rang. Nate's personal wing of the town house took up the entire top floor, necessitating his very own front door buzzer. He rolled away from Blair and swung his feet to the floor. "Yeah?" he called, pressing the button on the intercom. "Delivery!" Jeremy Scott Tompkinson shouted in his hoarse stoner voice. "Hurry while it's still hot!" Nate heard laughter and other voices in the background. Blaire waited for him to tell them to get lost. Instead, he pressed the button to unlock the door and let them in. "I should get dressed," Blair observed tersely. She slid out of bed and stomped into Nate's adjoining bathroom. How could he be smart enough to get into Yale, yet too dumb to understand that inviting his stoner friends up to their steamy love den would totally ruin the mood? Not that Yale had accepted Nate because of his smarts: the school needed a few good lacrosse players. End of story. At least Blair had an excuse to use the delicious L'Occitane sandalwood body shampoo the housekeeper stocked in Nate's shower. She toweled herself off with a thick navy blue Ralph Lauren towel, slipped on her flimsy pink silk Cosabella underwear, zipped up her blue-and-white-seer-sucker Constance Billard School spring uniform skirt, and buttoned two of the six buttons on her white linen Calvin Klein three-quarter-sleeve blouse. Braless and barefoot, it was the perfect my-girlfriend-just-got-out-of-the-shower-and-would-you-please-leave? look. Hopefully Nate's friends would get the hint, make like the bees and fuck off. She tousled her damp hair with her fingers and pushed open the bathroom door. "Bonjour!" a buxom, raven-haired, long-legged L'école girl greeted Blair from Nate's bed. Blair had met the girl before at parties. Her name was Lexus or Lexique or something equally annoying, a sixteen-year-old junior who'd done some modeling as a child in Paris was now working on perfecting the French hippie-slut look. Lexique, whose name was really Lexie, was wearing a lavender-and-mustard-yellow hand-dyed cotton wraparound dress that looked homemade but had actually been purchased at Kirna Zabete for four hundred and fifty dollars, and those ugly flat Pakistani sheep herder sandals from Barneys that everyone but Blair seemed to think were so cool this year. Lexie's face was makeup-free; and she cradled an acoustic guitar in her skinny arms. On the bed beside her was a Ziploc bag full of pot. What a rebel. Most L'école girls never go anywhere without a pack a Gitanes, red lipstick, and heels. "The boys are making bong hits on the roof," Lexie explained. She strummed her thumb across the guitar strings. "Alors, want to jam with me till they get back?" Jam? Blair wrinkled her nose with even more emphasis that she had at the thought of getting a tattoo. She was so not into the whole getting-high, playing-guitars-and-laughing-at-your-friends'-totally-stupid-stoned-observations scene, and she really didn't want to hangout with this Lexique girl. Who obviously thought she was the coolest French girl in New York. She'd rather watch Operah reruns on Oxygen in her cat-pee-soaked room while her delusional mom wept over baby alpacas. Someone had stuck a stick of burning amber incense into the cork heel of one of Blair's new mint green Christian Dior espadrilles. She grabbed the stick of incense and jammed it into a porthole in one of Nate's beloved model sailboats on his desk. Then she laced up her shoes, buttoned a few more buttons on her blouse, and grabbed her vintage Gucci bamboo-handled tote bag. "Please tell Nathaniel that I've gone home," she instructed briskly. "Peace!" Lexie saluted Blair with stoned gaiety. "Au revoir!" A tattoo of the sun, moon and stars was printed on her shoulder blade. Hence Nate's sudden interest in tattoos? Blair stomped down the stairs and let herself out onto Eighty-Second Street. It felt like summer already. The sun was still two hours from setting, and the air smelled of fresh-cut grass from Central Park, and suntan lotion from all the half-naked girls hurrying home to their apartments on Park Avenue. A gaggle of eleventh-grade St. Jude's Nate-and-Jeremy-wannabe's were hovering around the downstairs buzzer outside Nate's town house. One of them had a guitar slung over his shoulder. "Bien sur. Come on up!" Blair heard Lexie call out to them over the intercom, as if she lived there. Nate's house seemed to draw all the stoner kids on the Upper East Side with some sort of magnetic pull. And Blair swore she didn't mind- really, she didn't- as long as she didn't have to sit around watching them all jam. After all she and Nate had been through, Blair knew it was going to be different this time. She and Nate were together spiritually, and now physically, too, which meant she could leave him alone, feeling perfectly confident that he wouldn't dream of cheating on her.