Psycho Killer by Cecily von Ziegesar Page B

misery.
    “Whatever,” Blair said, tucking her dark hair behind her ears. “I guess I really don’t have time.”
    And she didn’t.
    Blair was chair of the Social Services Board and ran the French Club; she tutored third graders in reading; she worked in a soup kitchen one night a week, had SAT prep on Tuesdays, and on Thursday afternoons she took a fashion design course with Tim Gunn. On weekends she played tennis so she could keep up her national ranking. Besides all that, she was on the planning committee of every social function anyone could be bothered to go to, and the fall/winter calendar was
busy
,
busy
,
busy
.
    Never mind all the murders she’d have to commit to keep up with Serena.
    Vanessa flicked on the lights and walked back to her seat at the front of the room.
    “It’s okay, Blair, I wanted a taller girl for Mallory anyway.” Vanessa smoothed her uniform around her stocky thighs and sat down daintily, in an almost perfect imitation of Blair.
    Blair smirked at Vanessa’s prickly shaved head and glanced at Mr. Beckham. Would he notice if she pulled Vanessa’s ugly black turtleneck over her eyes and pushed her out the school doors in front of a moving Hummer?
    Vanessa smirked back at her, wondering if she could get the Mason Pearson boar-bristle hairbrush sticking out of Blair’s Miu Miu handbag all the way up Blair’s ass before the bell rang.
    Mr. Beckham cleared his throat and stood up. “Well, that’s it, girls. You can leave a little early today. Vanessa, why don’t you put a sign-up sheet out in the hall for your casting tomorrow?”
    The girls began to pack up their bags and file out of the room. Vanessa ripped a blank sheet of paper out of her notebook and wrote the necessary details at the top of it.
Natural Born Killers, a modern retelling of the violently romantic Oliver Stone classic. Try out for Mallory. Wednesday, sunset. Brooklyn Bridge
.
    She resisted writing a description of the girl she was looking for because she didn’t want to scare anyone away.
    In the original, Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis were an oddly complementary couple. He was big and strong, while she was willowy and baby-faced. He looked like he could take on ten men and was totally smitten with her. She was the more brutal killer and doubted his fidelity. In her remake, Vanessa wanted to reverse the roles. Mickey would be frail, mentally unbalanced, and deadly. Mallory would be a statuesque beauty, confident and strong, and madly in love with Mickey. Like in the original, her Mickey and Mallory Knox would become icons of their own fucked-up world, a serial-killing Bonnie and Clyde. But the more they killed, the more they were doomed. Death hung around their necks like a boa constrictor, choking them. Vanessawanted her film to be shocking and depressing and graphic and beautiful-—like the poetry Dan wrote, only grosser.
    The perfect Mallory would be the kind of girl to make Dan glow, even though he never ate and walked around all day chainsmoking and looking half-dead. Mallory would be full of movement and laughter—exactly the opposite of Dan, whose silent, caffeine- and nicotine-fueled energy caused his eyelids to twitch and made his hands shake sometimes.
    Vanessa hugged herself. Just thinking about Dan made her feel like she had to pee. Under that shaved head, that pale skin, and that impossible black turtleneck, she was just another neurotic, demonic, boy-crazy girl.
    Face it: We’re all the same.

a power lunch
    “The invitations, the gift bags, and the champagne. That’s all we have left.” Blair lifted a cucumber slice off her plate and nibbled at it thoughtfully. “Kate Spade is still doing the gift bags, but I don’t know—do you think Kate Spade is too boring?”
    “I think Kate Spade is perfect,” Isabel said, winding her dark hair into a knot on top of her head. “I mean, think how cool it is to have a plain black satin handbag now instead of all those faux animal skins with zippers and