Free Nobody Does It Better by Cecily von Ziegesar

front of her IMac and logged on. Most of the e-mails were from fashion houses like launch a signature fragrance or shoe, but a new message from someone at Brown topped the list, followed by a message from Harvard, and one from Princeton.
    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    Carina Serena,
    I used to paint faceless angels and hands without bodies. I used to be dead. Now my art has a face, and to have you here at Brown next year-oh living, breathing muse! -would be my resurrection.
    I kneel at your feet.
    Christian
    P.S There is a rumor you are engaged to that madman lead guitarist in the Raves. My love, I pray this is only a rumor.
    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    Dear Serena,
    I know you and I are cut from a different cloth, so to speak- I'm a jock from the boondocks and you're a goddess from New York City- but to quote a line from an old song, I just can't get you out of my head. When I think about you, the windows in my Jeep steam up and I can't breathe. I'm going to fail my finals because of you. I don't think they make you repeat grades if you fail a term in college the way they do in high school, but I wouldn't mind if they did, because then we'd be together for even longer. I know this is kind of crazy to say, but you're my girl, so you better come to Harvard next year. Here's to us for the next four years and forever.
    Love,
    Wade (your Harvard tour guide's roommate - remember me?)
    To: [email protected]
    From: [email protected]
    Dear Serena,
    Just wanted to know that we can NOT stop talking about how you and Damian from the Raves are like THE perfect couple!! We are TOO excited to meet him, but first we have to take down all the pictures of him plastered all over our house- SO embarrassing! Give Damian a kiss for us, and tell him we love him too (even though we'd NEVER try to steal away your guy).
    Love,
    Your sisters, the Princeton Tri Delts
    Serena winced and deleted all three stalkerish messages from her computer, hoping to delete the last one from her brain. There was nothing worse than a bunch of girls pretending to be your best friends when you didn't even know them, all gossiping about you and your new rock star boyfriend whom you'd never met. Way to make her not want to go to college at all!
    She logged off without reading the rest of her mail and pulled her luxurious fair hair back into a messy ponytail with a plain white rubber band. Then she smeared her lips with Vaseline and opened her bedroom door to look for her parents.
    The elder van der Woodsens had their own suite of rooms consisting of a large bedroom with a massive four-poster bed, two dressing rooms with huge walk-in closets, two full bathrooms, and a lounge with a wet bar they never used, a plasma TV they never watched, and a library full of rare books they never read, because they were always out at charity dinners or the opera or watching polo matches up in Connecticut. It could have been an apartment all by itself, but it took up only a quarter of the van der Woodsens' entire Fifth Avenue
     spread.
    “Didn't you see the clothes I laid out for you?” her mother demanded, sweeping her dark blue eyes despairingly over her daughter. Mrs. Van der Woodsen was tall and fair like Serena, with the same symmetrical features, which had grown haughtily handsome with age. “Jeans with holes in the behind really aren't acceptable for this sort of occasion, don't you agree, dear?”
    “They're not just nay old jeans,” Serena said, looking down at her faded pants. “They're my favorites.”
    Actually, she owned around twenty pairs of jeans, but this particular pair of Blue Cults were this week's can't-live-without-them.
    “The skirt and blouse I chose for you are just right,” her mother insisted. She buttoned the jacket of her gold Chanel suit and glanced at the antique platinum Cartier wristwatch fastened to her slim, Santo Domingo-
     tanned wrist. “We're leaving in five minutes. Your father