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gotten caught in some sort of mind-melt-time-warp-space-time-continuum-body-swapping ordeal straight out of the type of bad comic book he used to read when he was nine, and he really was Aaron. Nevertheless, it was sheer ecstasy kissing Vanessa again, and sheer agony to even think of pulling away. But after a few minutes, he forced himself to do it. “Um, can I just ask you—what are we doing?”
    Vanessa grabbed the hem of his faded red Stussy T-shirt and lifted it up, peeking at his pale, flat stomach. “Don’t you sometimes wonder what the big deal is?” she asked, as if that were answer enough.
    Dan didn’t say anything. Vanessa seemed to be going through some sort of experimental period, and he wasn’t about to get in the way, especially since it seemed to involve wanting to take his shirt off. And his pants. Even his socks seemed to be getting in the way of her need to express herself. And just so she wouldn’t feel left out, he helped her off with her clothes, too. Before long they were kneeling on the futon beneath the water tower, naked.
    Talk about déjà vu!
    Nothing Can Keep us Together

Gossip Girl 08 - Nothing Can Keep Us Together
    You can take the girl out of 212, but you can’t take the...
    “Do you have anything that isn’t … shiny?” Blair Waldorf demanded as she fingered the dresses on the circular rack in the back of Isn’t She Lovely, a tiny Williamsburg bridal and special-occasion-dresses boutique a block away from the apartment she shared with Vanessa. She walked by the boutique every day on her way to and from the coffee shop where a car service town car picked her up in the morning after she bought her large latte with an extra shot of espresso and dropped her off after school. Today she’d wandered inside, thinking it might be cool to buy a graduation dress in a place so completely off the map that no other girl in the senior class at Constance Billard could possibly have the same one she did. The problem was, with no designer label to show their merit, she wasn’t sure if the dresses were ugly in a cool way or just plain ugly.
    “This one is very popular for confirmations,” the overly perfumed saleslady told her in heavily accented English. She held up a dazzling white, rhinestone-encrusted, polyester-lace-bodiced sundress with a pleated skirt that was so stiff and shiny, it looked like it had been laminated.
    Blair glanced in one of the many mirrors all over the store and glared at the haughty brunette in a short light-blue-and-white seersucker Constance Billard uniform skirt and neat white-collared, baby pink polo shirt staring back at her, furious with herself all of a sudden. Who was she kidding, pretending not to need a graduation dress that was made to order by Oscar de la Renta or Chanel? She hitched her nude pink Fendi purse up on her shoulder and slid her tortoiseshell Parsol sunglasses up on her nose, tempted to buy the hideous dress the saleslady had just shown her and bring it home to Vanessa as a joke, pretending she was going to wear it to graduation. But the thought of spending money on anything so hideous, even in jest, made her even more furious. When had her life become so base?
    Maybe when she decided to ditch Manhattan and become a Brooklyn hipster?
    Usually Blair couldn’t leave a store without buying at least one thing, but usually the stores she went into were stocked with irresistibles. As far as Blair was concerned, Isn’t She Lovely should have been named Isn’t She Ugly.
    Across the litter-strewn expanse of Broadway from Vanessa’s crumbling gray, five-story walk-up apartment building, a cluster of people stood looking up, their mouths agape.
    Hmm, wonder why?
    Oblivious and not at all curious about anything the locals might find interesting, Blair hurried across the street, mounted the crumbling cement stoop, and unlocked the building’s graffitied front door. She held her breath as she climbed the steps up to Vanessa’s second-story apartment.