Free Nothing Can Keep Us Together by Cecily von Ziegesar Page A

and her father arrived at the Croton School, in Croton Falls, New York. Rufus’s weekly wine and beat poetry night with his weirdo anarchist poet cronies was starting in an hour at a speakeasy in Greenwich Village, and he was getting antsy. Croton was only an hour and a half from the city by train, and Jenny was anxious to ditch him, anyway, so she offered to take the train home.
    “Don’t get off at 125th Street,” Rufus advised, even though the stop was closest to their apartment. He handed Jenny three twenty-dollar bills. “Go all the way to Grand Central and then get a cab. And call me when you’re leaving so I can tell your brother when to expect you.”
    Like Dan really cared if she ever came home. Lately Dan had been so preoccupied, he barely seemed to remember that they used to kind of be friends.
    Jenny kissed her father on the cheek. It was cute how he babied her, but she was almost fifteen—she could take care of herself. “Have a nice night, Daddy,” she told him sweetly. She waved good-bye as the battered navy blue Volvo station wagon disappeared down the road. Then she unbuttoned her blouse another notch and stepped inside a cute red clapboard house with a gold plaque on its hunter-green-painted door that read ADMISSIONS, eager to meet her Croton tour guide.
    “You!” a male voice crowed enthusiastically as soon as she opened the door. “It’s you!”
    Jenny’s pretty red mouth dropped open in shock. Leering at her from across the quaintly decorated admissions office reception area was a more masculine, less flamboyantly dressed clone of Chuck Bass. Same European-aftershave-commercial-handsome face, same slicked-back dark hair, same cocky smile, same perverted twinkle in the eye. He walked over and held out his hand, a gold monogrammed pinky ring flashing on his right hand. “I’m your tour guide. Name’s Harold Bass. Call me Harry. You may know my cousin Charles Bass—goes by Chuck. He told me all about you. And of course I’ve seen your pictures on the ’Net.”
    Oh, God.
    Jenny mustered a smile. Chuck Bass had nearly deflowered her in a stall in a ladies’ room in the old Barneys building during her first dressy benefit party that fall, and Jenny was still a little scared of him. But the Basses were a powerful Upper East Side family notorious for their philanthropy and decadence and the wild ways of their fucked-up children. If Chuck’s cousin liked it at Croton, then it was probably just the sort of school Jenny was looking for.
    “Don’t be put off by how straitlaced everything seems here, Jennifer,” Harry advised, his white teeth flashing. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his cool light blue linen Zegna trousers, which he was wearing with straw flip-flops—very prep-school-boy-goes-to-the-beach. “We basically party, like, eighty percent of the time, sleep fifteen percent of the time, eat five percent of the time, and study whenever we have time left over, which is, like, never.”
    Jenny grinned. That sounded fine—just fine.
    Harry Bass pressed his lips together and cocked his head as if he were sizing her up. “Come on. There are some people I’d like you to meet.”
    Her heart racing with eager anticipation, Jenny followed him out of the building and down a long sloping pebbled walkway that curved behind a row of pretty brick buildings with black wooden shutters in the windows. The walkway ended in a narrow dirt path that led along the banks of a quaint little duck pond and into the heavily forested woods. “It’s just a little bit farther,” Harry explained, his flip-flops flapping against his heels.
    Jenny hesitated, wondering what on earth the people he wanted her to meet were doing in the middle of the woods. Was she about to be a part of one of those peculiar boarding school traditions she’d read so much about, like bonfires and midnight skinny-dipping? In the middle of the pond a mallard with a dark green head was quacking loudly at a demure brown duck,