Excerpt from All I Want is Everything:

It had been by far the worst birthday Blair had ever had. But she wasn’t about to dwell on it. She wasn’t like that.

Yeah, right.

“I don’t believe in destiny anymore,” she told Serena, plonking her crystal champagne flute down on the table and nearly breaking its stem. She ran her fingers through her long, dark brown hair, which had been trimmed earlier that day by Antoine, her new favorite hairdresser at the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon.

Serena laughed and rolled her dark blue eyes. “Then how come you’re always saying Yale is your destiny?”

“That’s different,” Blair insisted.

Blair’s father had gone to Yale, and Blair had always dreamed of going there, too. She was at the top of her class at Constance Billard and had extracurriculars coming out of her ass, so applying early admission had seemed like an obvious choice. But during her interview, she’d cracked under pressure and become Blair, Drama Queen of the Silver Screen. She’d told her interviewer a heart-wrenching sob story about how her mother had divorced her gay father and was about to marry a man she barely knew, and how she couldn’t wait to go to college so she could start a whole new life. And then she’d kissed her interviewer—actually stood on her tippytoes and kissed him on his hollow, stubbly cheek!

Blair was always imagining herself as the heroine of some black-and-white fifties movie, in the style of Audrey Hepburn, her idol. This time it had been her downfall. Now she’d been forced to apply to Yale regular admission along with everyone else, and she’d even had to ask her father to donate a Yale study abroad program in France to help give her a leg up. But her chances of getting in were still slim at best.

Blair reached for the bottle of Cristal sitting in its silver cooler in the middle of the large, round table and filled her glass. “Destiny is for losers,” she said. “It’s just a lame excuse for letting things happen to you instead of making them happen.”

If only she knew exactly how to make the things she wanted to happen happen without fucking them up completely.

Thanks Michelle and Kat.

8 months ago · 8 notes