B's like whoa and puts on her game face, and then heads over to Rachel out. Rachel is still looking like she's going to barf because of all the true stuff Dan just laid on her, and Blair's like, "Fight back!" Rachel won't, because she can't deny it. She is a gross, gross lady who managed to take the thing she loved most in Dan and in herself -- that innocence and belief -- and twist them all up in ugliness and weakness. She's done too. Blair's taken aback by all this, and she's like, "Okay, gotcha. But I'm never going to Yale, so you have to bleed exactly that much even though it won't be that fun." Rachel starts to cry: "I don't know what's happened to me, I don't know what I've become. I'm... So sorry." It's so for real that it punches Blair in the face, and becomes a mirror. She actually, physically swallows it.

It's that last Jenga piece: vengeance, gone. No fun. Won't help. Just feels worse. You can't break a woman that's been broken like Rachel, and you can't destroy anything as thoroughly as Blair wants to destroy Rachel without coming to understand it enough that it's indivisible from something akin to love. "Well, your punishment is... Just... Live with it. I should know," Blair says. "It's not easy." For a second they see the other in each other and for a second their nasty, impure closeness becomes something sweet, and bitter, and then B takes off, because fuck that.

Serena texts the truth to Vanessa, smiling ruefully about Julian's gayness, and then Dan gingerly approaches to explain that it wasn't B that was Anonymous, but in fact Rachel, and it was his fault. Serena's like, "But why would you do that?" And Dan heads, brilliantly, into a Newland-esque explanation about how he was trying to explain what's special and unique and free about Serena, and she cuts him off. "I gotta go find Blair. Thank you for telling me?" She's kind of grossed out, but glad about the info and as usual pleasantly surprised by his honesty. Then she enacts the great Serena thing of two steps, turn, and walk away that she always does, because she remembers that they are still broken up, and goes off to save B again. Edith would have loved Serena too:

There are two ways of spreading light: to be
The candle or the mirror that reflects it.