Outside Admissions, Serena's cracking up about "Great Hoaxes In Archaeology" with some lovely friends she's only just met, drawing her in to show her the course catalog through sheer force of delightfulness. Her hair sparkles blindingly as Blair rushes her, scattering the underclassmen back to their garrets and hidey-holes. "What are you doing, Serena?" S plays it off, of course, so Blair has to say it out loud. "No, here. Yale. Yale is mine!" Serena admits she was only visiting to punish B for her outright bitchitude that morning, and B's like, "Consider me fucking punished," but Serena stops her in her tracks: "...I actually like it here." It bounces thuddingly against the back of Blair's head like a thrown handbag, and she whirls back around, stricken.

"The campus is beautiful, the people are so nice... And do you know how great the drama school is?" B screeches crazily, "-- Of course I do! It's world-renowned!" S presses, a little meanly: "The Dean made me realize that by being so set on Brown, I closed myself off to all other options." The Dean, she's saying, made her realize that being so set on keeping Blair safe from the world that she closed herself off from possibilities. Again. "Well, that's a lovely epiphany. I'm afraid it's irrelevant. It's not as if you'd actually get in here..." Serena's phone rings, and she answers brightly, framing her responses as a tommy gun pointed right at Blair's little head. "An intimate gathering at the Dean's house tonight? I'd be honored. Thank you." Blair gets pissy about another thing stolen, and Serena looks down at her from a height of ten feet at least: "You might want to make other plans. She said I was her last call." Until you stop calling me stupid, I am going to make the point that I am not stupid; until you stop telling me I don't deserve what I have, Daniel Humphrey, I am going to drink deep. Define yourself against me all you want, but don't insult me in the process: Cansei de Ser Stupid. Serena turns and plays with her phone so that B can process, but Blair pulls her best trick out, finally: absolute raw-assed vulnerability at weird times, which always works.

"Of all the things -- Nate, my mom, the girls at school -- you wouldn't take this from me." Serena doesn't turn, but the tears spring up in her eyes, the mirror to Blair's own. She rises a step toward her and makes her usual mistake: "Because if you do, I swear I will take you down." Brute force is all she has, but until she understands that's the one thing that won't work on Serena, all she's going to do is force Serena to fight back. Any other sentence, literally, in the English language would have done it: Serena would have turned around crying and apologizing for shit from two years ago, but B picked the one thing nobody in their right mind would back down from, least of all Serena who has still done absolutely nothing wrong in this scenario except waffle on the "hide your light" issue.