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1
It doesn’t hit Serena at first. She knows he’s gone, but it doesn’t feel like it. A part of her wants to pretend he’s in Hudson with his mother; that he ran away just like she did, all those years ago.
She calls his phone, again and again, just to hear his voicemail.
Hey! You’ve reached Dan Humphrey’s number, please leave a message, his voice says. It sounds cheerful, sunny, like he’s smiling as he’s saying it.
It doesn’t sound like the voice of someone who’d take their own life, she thinks, aware even as she thinks it that it’s a stupid thing to think.
She calls until one day she gets a message that says that his phone is out of service. By this time she’s memorised his phone number, morbidly, like it’s the last thing she has of him left.
Maybe even the only thing.
2
They’d joked about death in high school. How could it not have come up? Dan was a writer, and his bookshelf was full of the gloomiest shit. She’d pulled books out at random, moving his cabbage patch kid out of the way, and they’d sat there, reading The Great Gatsby together. Her hair had gotten in his face as she’d leaned over his shoulder while he read aloud. Dan had a great voice for reading aloud, she’d told him, he should totally narrate sexy audiobooks. He’d laughed, said thank you in that sincere but bemused way he’d had when he was humouring her, when he thought she was a little silly and a little cute but wasn’t going to say it outright.
Serena didn’t have the best time in high school, but she’d had Dan.
“Listen, promise me, if I go before you do, you’ll dress slutty at my funeral,” he’d told her once. It was the most un-Dan-like thing she’d ever heard him say; she was more used to strange jokes like that coming from Nate.
She’d promised him, thinking that there was no way she was ever going to outlive straight-laced, well-behaved, never-even-tried-cocaine Dan Humphrey.
So much for that.
She doesn’t dress slutty at his funeral; she can’t bring herself to. But she does wear her sexiest lingerie under the black. Just in case there really is an afterlife, she wants him to know that she’s keeping her word.
But who is she kidding? Who is she even dressing up for? A man she hasn’t spoken to in months, a man she once loved more than anything, a man who she didn’t even know had been suffering the way he must have, to put himself in his own grave like this?
3
There were so many times in her youth that she’d thought she wasn’t going to stay alive much longer. So many nights, some of them with Georgie, that she didn’t know who’d put what in her drink, that she wasn’t sure if what she was snorting was even coke, that she didn’t know the name or age of the men next to her in bed, built so much stronger than she was that they could just kill her while she lay there and make a run for it if they wanted.
People thought she was reckless, but she was making calculated risks. There were windows of time when she didn’t really care whether she lived or not, after all. She’d been aware, vaguely, the way you are of someone who sits three rows behind you in class, that she was breaking Blair and Nate’s hearts with her behaviour, that they were worried about her, that they didn’t know how to help. How much they’d worried, how afraid they’d been – it hadn’t really sunk in, back then.
It’s not the same, because she’d survived, but she thinks maybe she can empathise with them now. It’s strange, being on the other side of it.
She wishes he’d called. She doesn’t know why he did it, but she understands why people in general do. She’s been through the lowest lows, and she’s had Blair cleaning her up and putting her back in bed. She wishes she had called Dan more frequently. Just to hear his voice. Just to ask him how his day had been. Small talk, awkward talk.
End of the day, it happened the way it did and she couldn’t do a thing about it. Growing up means growing apart, and they hadn’t been Dan-and-Serena for a long time. They’ll never be Dan and Serena again.
4
She talks to her therapist about Dan. It’s easier than talking to everyone else who’s grieving him too. Serena thinks she should be sadder, should be more upset, should feel abandoned or betrayed, but she just gets it, and she just feels sad. And yet, some part of her is waiting for him to come back. For the body pronounced dead to have been someone else, someone who looked freakishly like Dan Humphrey but wasn’t Dan Humphrey. Some part of her is waiting, even now, for him to call her back, to say, “Serena, hi! It’s been so long, what’ve you been blowing up my phone for?”
But she isn’t really in denial, not when she thinks about it. She cries almost every day, and then does her make-up perfectly and pours herself a glass of something alcoholic and sweet, something different each day. She feels like her mother, like her grandmother, like a real Rhodes woman.
One day, in an attempt at closure, she compiles all her pictures of Dan, Dan from her Cotillion, the blurry photos on her phone of silly pictures they’d taken when they were dating in high school, photos from old Gossip Girl blasts, newspaper articles about up-and-coming writer Dan Humphrey, photos from the Constance/St Jude’s yearbook; everything she can find without asking somebody else to give her a photo.
She prints copies, cuts out things from magazines. Travel maps, book recommendations, the music section of Nylon, sports scores from the teams she knew he liked in high school (and god, it hurts, realising she barely knew the sort of person Dan had been, when he’d grown up, whether he liked the same music, or the same sports teams, it hurts, knowing that now she’ll never know all these details of his life.) She writes, too, about the way he made her feel, the way he looked at her, their first Christmas together with the fake snow, the way he touched her so reverently when they were younger, the way he treated her with such respect and awe.
And she scrapbooks. She pastes pictures of them against sunsets and road trip maps. She cuts house plans from architecture magazines, tries to remember the future she’d believed in so strongly when she was seventeen, a life with Dan, tries to embody it through the collages.
Ultimately, it just boils down to one thing: Serena had loved Dan with everything she had, once, and he’d loved her back. But they’d just been kids, and they’d grown up, grown out of it, grown apart. But maybe there was a part of her that had never stopped loving Dan. A part of her that never would, even if there was no Dan left to love.