Psycho Killer by Cecily von Ziegesar

be pretty graphic,” Vanessa insisted. “I want the images to scream. I don’t need much talk.”
    She reached for the slide projector’s remote control and began clicking through slides of the black and white pictures she’d taken to demonstrate the mayhem and destruction she’d already captured. A pigeon pecking at a bloody paper towel. A headless black wig draped on a park bench. A homeless person’s pale, dead-looking, dirty-fingernailed hand. A bloody, openmouthed rat smushed flat by a car on the street.
    “Ha!” someone exclaimed from the back of the room. It was Blair Waldorf, laughing out loud as she read the note Rain Hoffstetter had just passed to her.
For a good time
    call Serena v.d. Woodsen
    Get it—VD??
    Vanessa glared at Blair. Film was Vanessa’s favorite class, the only reason she came to school at all. She took it very seriously, while most of the other girls, like Blair, were only taking Film as a break from Advanced Placement hell—AP Calculus, AP Bio, AP History, AP English Literature, AP French. They were on the straight and narrow path to Yale or Harvard or Brown, where their families had all gone for generations. Vanessa wasn’t like them. Her parents hadn’t even gone to college. They were artists, and Vanessa wanted only one thing in life: to go to NYU and major in film and make the artiest slasher films ever made.
    Actually, there was something else she coveted. Or some
one
else, to be precise, but we’ll get to that soon.
    Vanessa was an anomaly at Constance, the only girl in the school who had a nearly shaved head, wore black turtlenecks every day, read
The Silence of the Lambs
over and over like it was the Bible, listened to the Smiths, and drank unsweetened black tea. She had no friends at all at Constance and lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her twenty-two-year-old sister, Ruby. So what was she doing at a tiny, exclusive private girls’ school on the Upper East Side with Gucci-Pucci-tutu-wearing competitive princess freaks like Blair Waldorf? It was a question Vanessa asked herself every day.
    She also asked herself every day why she didn’t kill them all and torch the school.
    Vanessa’s parents were older, revolutionary artists who lived in Vermont in a rubber house made out of recycled car tires. When she turned fifteen, Vanessa had shaved her head and stopped smiling. She threatened to transform the woodstove into a live bomb and melt the house unless her parents let her move in with her bass guitarist older sister in Brooklyn. Her parents finally gave in, but they wanted to be sure the perpetuallyunhappy Vanessa got a good, safe high school education. So they made her go to Constance, which she soon found out was the worst form of torture imaginable.
    Vanessa loathed Constance and every other girl who went there, but she never said anything to her parents. At least she was in New York, and there were only eight months left until graduation. Eight more months and she could blow this fuckhole sky-high and escape downtown to NYU.
    Eight more months of bitchy Blair Waldorf—that is, if Vanessa didn’t kill her sooner—and even worse, Serena van der Woodsen, who was back in all her splendor. Blair Waldorf looked like she was absolutely orgasmic over the return of her best friend. In fact, the whole back row of Film Studies was atwitter, passing notes. Fuck them. Vanessa wanted to stuff their notes down their throats and strangle each one of them with the arms of their annoying cashmere sweaters.
    But she had a film to make. She lifted her chin and went on with her presentation. She was above their petty bullshit anyway.
Only eight more months
.
    Perhaps if Vanessa had seen the note Kati Farkas had just passed to Blair, she might have had a tad more sympathy for Serena.
    Dear Blair
,
    Can I borrow five million dollars? I have to bail myself out of jail because I’ve already killed my parents and my grandparents and that nice bail bondsman and now I have no one