Chapter Text
“No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Prologue - November 2016
Rory never goes to sleep.
She rides the high of her mother’s elopement straight through her mother’s wedding, and reception, and now it’s nearly 3 and she’s crashing.
Lorelai and Luke are slow dancing in the gazebo, but most of the town has gone home. It’s just the hardcores left: Lane and Zack spinning records from their make-shift booth, Michel and Fredrick and Sookie and Jackson at a table, all of them drunk, all of them laughing, and Rory, sitting sideways on the second step of the Gazebo, her legs stretched out across it, her bare feet resting against Jess’s thigh.
They’ve been sitting like this for a while, maybe half an hour or so, ever since TJ and Liz said their goodbyes and boogied off into the night. Jess has a book out, but she can tell he’s not really reading it. She knows what he looks like when he’s lost in what he’s reading. Besides, he hasn’t turned the page in ages.
She’s mostly watching Luke and Lorelai.
“They look so happy,” she says.
“They’d better be.”
She flexes her foot, digging it into the muscle of his thigh. “Excuse me?”
“They dragged this on long enough. I’d hope they’d be happy after, what, 11 years?”
She hmms in acquiescence. “They did take their time.”
“Had to make sure it was right, I guess.” He looks up from his book long enough to meet her eyes. “You look like shit, Gilmore.”
She takes offense. She shouldn’t—her make-up is smudged from dancing, she knows, and her skin feels clammy, and she’s been fighting nausea for a couple of days now—but she does. “I’ve been up for 24 hours.”
“Oh right, the last minute elopement no one invited me to.”
“It’s not my fault you slept through the call.”
He rolls his eyes a little, but lets it go. She hopes he’s not really mad, Luke had tried to reach him, but no one had wanted to risk waking Liz and TJ, turning the whole thing into a scene. “He’ll stand up with you at the big one,” Lorelai had said as they had piled into the truck, and Luke had nodded. And that was what had happened.
“You should go home,” he says, “get some sleep.”
“What kind of Maid of Honor bails before the reception is over?” she asks, even though the idea is tempting. Even though she knows Lorelai wouldn’t mind, probably wouldn’t even notice at this point.
“Well, what if the Best Man bails, too?”
“You’d do that for me?”
Jess yawns, suddenly, wildly. It’s so charmingly vulnerable that she feels a flutter pass over her heart, something hibernating inside her stirring in its sleep.
“It would be a purely selfish act at this point,” he says, when he’s recovered.
Rory glances up at Luke and Lorelai again. They’re so wrapped up in each other she wonders if they’d notice the gazebo burning down around them.
“Walk me home?” she asks. “You can crash on the couch if you want.”
He nods.
.
It’s a short walk back. The night is unusually warm for November, like some sort of magic trick Lorelai pulled off for the occasion. The thought brings a memory to the surface and she laughs.
“What?”
But now she’s nearly doubled over with laughter (it’s not even that funny, just giddy exhaustion and panic and hormones coursing through her), and it’s a minute before she can compose herself.
“Do you,” she finally says, another giggle catching in her throat, turning into a hiccup, “do you remember— *hick* —how you used to— *hick* —do close up magic?”
Jess sort of sighs and sort of groans and sort of laughs a bit, too, though not as hard as she did. “I was such a dork,” he says, his face in his hands.
“It was adorable,” she chokes out between giggles.
“And I thought I was such a badass .”
“You were the biggest badass Stars Hollow had ever seen. We grade on a curve here.”
“Ah yes, the only passing grade I ever received.”
She rolls her eyes at him, uninterested in revisiting his educational track record tonight.
“Where did you even learn close up magic?” she asks.
He snorts. “From a book.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. The public library was basically my babysitter when I was a kid—I spent the entire summer after fourth grade pouring over a guide to sleight of hand until I could make a quarter disappear.”
“That’s precious.”
“It’s a pretty valuable skill-set for a mini pick-pocket to have.”
“Less precious.”
He shrugs. “It is what it is.”
They’ve reached the house. It’s uncharacteristically dark. They had left in the middle of the day, after getting ready for the wedding, and no one had thought to flip the porch lights on. Standing in the shadow of her childhood home, Rory feels oddly sad. The nausea she’s been fighting back all day chooses that moment to re-express itself, and she stops for a moment to try and swallow it back down. He stops next to her.
“You okay?”
She breathes deep through her nose and nods. “Yup, fine,” she says. She’s not going to take this moment to tell her ex-boyfriend/new step-cousin that she has gone and gotten herself knocked up by her engaged other ex-boyfriend. There will be plenty of time for that confession in the weeks ahead. “Just... really tired.”
Something passes over his face that makes her think he doesn’t quite believe her, but he doesn’t say anything. They climb the porch steps and she unlocks the door for them. It’s eerily quiet inside and it’s a beat before she remembers that Paul Anka is staying with Kirk and Lulu and Petal for the night. He’s such a quiet dog, but his presence always seems to breathe through the house.
“I’ll get you some blankets,” she says, turning on the light in the front hall and stepping aside to let him in the door behind her. She feels awkward, suddenly, alone in the house with Jess. It’s been so long since they were last alone like this.
“I know where they are.”
“Oh,” she says. Of course he does. This is Luke’s house, too. A bar graph of how much time they’ve each spent here over the last 10 years would probably come out neck and neck. “Right.”
She puts her keys down on the hall table and kicks off her shoes. It almost hurts more to remove the heels.
“Then I’ll take care of…” she gestures toward the living room.
It looks like a bomb went off. A bomb made of tulle and Clinique and every pair of shoes Lorelai owns. They hadn’t bothered to clean up after themselves when they were getting ready, and then there had been a footwear crisis. (“How did I forget the shoes ,” Lorelai had yelled from upstairs. “They’re half the point!”) The living room had taken the brunt of it.
“Yikes.”
“It looks worse than it is,” she says, gathering an armful of pumps. “I think.”
It takes them twenty minutes to collect everything and carry it upstairs. They dump it all on Luke and Lorelai’s bed, which isn’t very nice of them, but it’s approaching 4 and the newlyweds are sleeping at the Inn tonight anyway, if they ever bother to go to bed. “I’ll put it all away in the morning,” Rory says, and Jess looks at her skeptically, but neither of them have the energy to fix it.
Back downstairs, Rory sits down on the couch, a definite mistake, while Jess goes to brush his teeth and grab a quilt out of the hall closet. Rory can feel herself losing consciousness to the sounds of him puttering around her bathroom. The soft padding of his bare feet on the hardwood floors, the water turning on and off again. She’s not sure if it’s a minute or twenty before he’s nudging her shoulder, saying Rory, hey, so soft near her ear. She tries to drag herself awake, but she can’t seem to manage it.
The next second she’s weightless. Dimly, she’s aware that she’s in Jess’s arms, the warm spicy smell of him still familiar, and the bulk of his shoulders, the strength in him still surprising. Then she’s landing, soft, in her own bed. He pulls a blanket over her, and something (his thumb?) whispers across her hairline. And then, she knows, he’s gone.
Chapter One
The morning after her mother’s wedding, Rory wakes up in her childhood bed, in her childhood bedroom, in her childhood home. The sun is streaming through the lace curtains that have been hanging in her windows since 1996, and it hits her directly across the eyes. She groans and pulls a pillow over her face.
There’s a moment, every morning since she came home six months ago (though she’s not, not , back), where she forgets that she’s in her thirties, that her career hasn’t taken off the way she thought it would, that she’s broke and single (and knocked up, now, too), and that she’s not living up to the potential she’s been hearing about all her life. There’s a moment where she thinks she’s eleven, or fifteen, or nineteen, or even twenty seven, and that her life is still where it was when she was eleven, fifteen, nineteen, twenty seven. She thinks she still has time to right the ship.
That’s usually when a wave of nausea hits her, and she remembers she’s 32, she’s broke, she’s single, she’s unemployed, and, right, she’s knocked up. She is not living up to her potential.
She has been putting off dealing with the biggest thing in that list, the baby thing, for 8 days now. “After the wedding,” she had promised herself. “When things settle down again, I’ll make some decisions.” She hadn’t even intended to tell Lorelai yesterday morning. She didn’t want to disrupt the day, make it all about her. But it had come spilling out in that moment, rising in her throat alongside the nausea. The options had been word vomit or actual vomit.
“Oh, Sweets,” Lorelai had said. “You are?”
And she had nodded, and managed a watery smile, and something unspoken had passed between them: shock and concern and fear and a question in Lorelai’s eyes that she hadn’t been able to answer.
She had shrugged, and Lorelai had nodded, and they had hugged. “Tomorrow,” she had finally said. “We can talk tomorrow. Today is your day.”
And that was the last they had spoken of it.
But now it is tomorrow.
It is tomorrow and, Rory realizes with happy surprise, the usual wave of nausea has not hit her yet. Small blessings.
Rory stretches tall, twists at the waist, kicks her feet out to the bottom corners of the bed and her fists to the top. Someone is moving around in the kitchen, she hears the kitchen sink, and then the gurgle of the coffee maker. Jess must be up, making her coffee.
Coffee she’s not really supposed to have.
She sits up in bed.
There’s sleep in the corners of her eyes, and she knows her hair must be kinked and stiff with hairspray. She knows she didn’t take her make-up off last night, or even change out of her dress. It is a wonder, she thinks, that she’s not more uncomfortable. But when she looks down she’s in a pair of flannel pajamas. Old ones she doesn’t think she’s worn since high school, maybe. Did she change in the night? If she did she doesn’t remember it.
She throws her legs over the side of the bed and lands on her feet. It’s enough of a shock to her system to wake her up a bit, and she shuffles across the room toward her vanity.
Everything in her room feels slightly off, like it all moved a couple of inches in the night. Rory’s not much for “vibes,” but she’s not sure how else to explain what seems wrong, and then she catches sight of the wall behind her reflection in the vanity mirror and spins around.
All of the Yale paraphernalia in her room is gone. The blue pennant, the pictures of the campus, everything Lorelai put up back in 2003, the night after the Independence Inn burned down. In its place is the old Harvard merch that they had gathered throughout her childhood. Like it never left.
And then something in her brain catches up to her, and she turns back to the mirror.
She looks...different.
The hair she’d expected to find in a stiff tangle instead hangs loose, long and straight down her back. Her face is rounder, softer—not with pregnancy, but with youth. She looks...fresh-faced. Seventeen?
“Oh, good, you’re up,” Lorelai says, the bedroom door swinging open and her head popping into the room, “I made coffee, and I popped some tarts, but I think we should hit Luke’s anyway. First day of junior year deserves a real breakfast. And maybe donuts. I definitely want donuts. And you know when I want donuts there’s no stopping the craving. I’ll be thinking about them all day, they’ll be haunting me, calling out to me, and—why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something on my face?”
Rory shakes her head, tries to shake herself out of this, whatever this is.
“Rory? You okay?”
“Junior year?” she croaks out.
“I know,” Lorelai says, stepping into the room, taking Rory’s shoulders into her hands, “where did the time go? Just yesterday you were crying while I dropped you off at kindergarten.” She pauses for the tiniest millisecond to reconsider that statement. “Well, I was crying while I dropped you off at kindergarten. And now you’re all grown up.” She pulls Rory in for a tight hug, and then steps back. “It’s gonna be a good year, hun.”
Rory nods. She doesn’t know what else to do. She feels dazed.
“I pressed your uniform for you and everything,” Lorelai says, turning to leave the room. “By which I mean I hung in the bathroom while I showered and most of the wrinkles fell out. Leave for Luke’s in ten?”
She’s already gone, Rory can hear her moving through the rest of the house. She sits down on the end of her bed and takes a couple of deep slow breaths.
“What,” she finally says, out loud, “the fuck?”
.
It takes her a minute to get all the pieces of her Chilton uniform into place. Her button down doesn’t want to lay flat beneath her sweater vest, and the tie is a whole separate debacle. The hunt for her saddle shoes—their last known residence lost not just to 15 years of elapsed memories, but also to a summer of disuse—takes ages, and by the time she’s ready to go, her hair pulled back into a simple ponytail, and the giant yellow backpack she hasn’t missed once since she graduated sitting on her back, Lorelai is waiting for her, impatient, at the door.
“Since when are you the late one?” Lorelai pulls the door shut behind them.
She just shakes her head in reply.
“Are you okay, kid?” Lorelai asks in the car. “You’re awfully quiet this morning.”
“I just...slept funky,” Rory says. How do you tell your mother that you’re, what, a time traveler trapped in some weird dreamscape? Losing your mind? Surely it must be easier to just play along, she thinks. Until she wakes up.
Lorelai reaches out to feel her forehead. “Are you sick?” she asks. “I can call you out.”
“No.” Rory pushes her hand away.
Lorelai looks her up and down, like she’s not sure if she believes it. “I know you love school, Rory, but if you’re sick—”
“I’m not sick,” Rory says, a bit more forceful than she intended. “I’ll be fine. Let’s just go.”
Lorelai looks a little wounded, but she doesn’t push back. She starts the car and backs them out of the driveway. Rory watches through the window as they drive to Luke’s. If this is a dream, the details are impeccable: every gnome in its place in Babette’s garden, Monty the rooster standing proud at the end of the block. Things she sees every day, but shifted almost imperceptibly backward in time, to the way they were when she was starting her junior year.
She does some quick math as they walk into Luke’s. Junior year started in late August, 2001, just before she turned 17. It was her second year at Chilton, her mother had just called off her engagement to Max.
She tries to remember what happened the first day of her junior year. Surely there must have been some sort of power struggle with Paris? And there was the awkwardness with Max. Mr. Medina. Whoever he was meant to be to her now. The puzzle pieces start to snap into place: the Franklin, the article on repaving the parking lot, the interview with the Chilton students’ favorite teacher... She looks up to find her mother gaping at her.
“What?”
“Are you sure you’re okay, Rory?”
“Why?”
“Because last night you went on for 20 minutes about the importance of being early on the first day of school because of something that sounded more like cartography than eleventh grade and today you’re sitting there like a lump while I eat my eggs. Shouldn’t you be more stressed?”
“You want me to be more stressed?”
“Of course not, but I kind of expect it at this point.”
She’s not really sure how to respond to that. She dimly recalls that version of herself: type A, overprepared, delighted by the very idea of learning, but it feels like remembering someone else. That’s when the bell over the door dings and Lane collapses into the chair next to her.
“Thank god you haven’t left,” she says, pulling out the giant copy of Mojo Rory remembers her carrying around the way Mrs. Kim carried her bible. “I found the greatest record store in the world. It's ten minutes from your school, and I'm wondering how much you love me.”
Something clicks in Rory, like this is a play and she actually knows her lines. “Address,” she requests, pulling a notepad and pen from her backpack. She’s already writing down “Record Breaker Incorporated” as Lane reads off the address to her.
She’s dimly aware of Lorelai slipping away from the table while she takes down Lane’s order, but her attention isn’t drawn away from her friend until Luke starts yelling into the phone. “This is unbelievable! You won't ever change, will you?”
The rest of the diner goes still.
“Okay, fine!” Luke yells. “Do what you want, make the arrangements. Now I'm working, we'll finish this later.”
And suddenly Rory remembers the other thing that happened at the beginning of her junior year of high school.
.
Lorelai drops her off at Chilton with a donut and plenty of time before the first bell.
She moves through the school on muscle memory, even her locker combination seems to be saved somewhere on her harddrive, the locker swinging open on her first try. She thinks about what she told the current crop (future crop?) of Chilton students when she visited a few months ago, about the value of her Chilton education. At the time she’d felt caught up in the nostalgia of this time in her life, but now that she’s trapped in that nostalgia it feels suffocating. Who wants to go back to high school?
There’s a confrontation with Paris—flanked by Madeline and Louise—outside her first class of the day. (Two years ago the four of them met up for drinks in New York, Madeline in town for a conference, and Louise driving in from her starter marriage in Hartford. The night had gone long and loud and ended with private room karaoke in K-town and Doyle collecting them in a taxi at 3 AM.) Sparring with Paris is like breathing, they’ve been matching wits for 16 years now, and she remembers this conversation, her childlike refusal to give in to the bullying. She lets it roll off her back when Paris tells her the wrong time for the Franklin meeting.
The day progresses in a blur of blue plaid. Chilton wasn’t the sort of school to ease you in on the first day back, and she finds her note-taking skills rusty, her hand cramping every few minutes. Still, there’s a thrill in rediscovering this part of herself.
She has seventh period Lit, her last class of the day, and she slips in just before the start of class, hiding in the back row, in the seat behind Bowman. At the front of the room, Mr. Medina talks about the Victorians and lays out their syllabus for the semester. Rory slides her finger down the page, remembering the experience of reading Villette for the first time, and Bleak House , and Middlemarch . How she had loved this class, until Max’s departure for California in late November. How thrilled she’d been when he came back at the end of her senior year.
She darts from the room as soon as class is over and bangs the side of her shoulder into the door frame on the way out. Pain shoots up and down her right arm, but she keeps moving until she finds herself in the quiet respite of the Chilton library.
She’s played out the day as close as possible to what she remembers: bickering with Paris, avoiding Max...she still doesn’t know what has happened, what she’s doing back in her teenage body, in her teenage life, but the signs, including the throbbing ache in her right arm, seem to indicate that this is not some dream. Everything around her seems solid, saturated. It feels real . And if this is real, then what is she supposed to do?
She drops her backpack next to one of the library’s long wood tables and pulls out a notepad and a pen, but she’s not sure what to write. She doesn’t have any theories about what’s going on, why she’s time traveling, or why said time travel has brought her to this moment in particular.
Is there something she’s supposed to see here? Something she doesn’t remember? Something she needs to change?
And if so, what?
She thinks about writing down a list of her regrets, all the big moments in her life where she made the wrong choice. There are certainly decisions she’d like to change, some of them massive (stealing a boat) some of them tiny (an impulsive haircut), some of them small, but momentous (a missed phone call). There are relationships she should have ended sooner, fights she let go on too long, and then there’s the pregnancy she wishes she didn’t have to address at all.
A quick glance at her watch tells her that she has the opportunity to change something right now, to show up on time to the Franklin meeting, maybe get a better assignment than the repaving of the school parking lot. But the thought of defeating Paris doesn’t carry the same pleasure as it did when they were still rivals, and the praise she got for the parking lot piece still fills her with a certain pleasure. If she leaves now she can pick up Lane’s CDs and make it back to campus before the time Paris gave her.
She sticks the pen and the blank legal pad back into her backpack and leaves the library.
Record Breaker, too, is just as she remembers it: high concrete walls covered in band posters, aisles and aisles of CDs and vinyl. She gathers the CDs from Lane’s list and stops to browse for herself. It seems pointless to shop when she can’t remember what she already owns at this exact moment of history. Her fingers slide over a vinyl copy of the Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat and she checks for Belinda’s autograph, the way she has every time she’s encountered it since 2002.
No dice.
She deviates from her route on the way back to Chilton, walking an extra couple of blocks so she can pass her grandparents’ house. She peers through the fence and finds it exactly as she left it in 2016 (sans the FOR SALE sign): the carefully maintained paint on the facade, the fountain gurgling in the center of the driveway, the seasonal flowers lining everything.
“Rory?”
She hasn’t heard his voice in a year and a half. The last time had been over the phone, her rushing off to an interview, trying to pull on a pair of heels and fix her lipstick and carry on the conversation at the same time. She’d been distracted, and a little frustrated that he’d picked up the phone to call her at that exact moment, and she’d rushed him off the call. She hadn’t known, couldn’t have known, it would be her last chance to talk to him. Her last chance until now.
She spins around to find Richard’s car half-turned into the drive behind her, and Richard himself leaning across the seats to speak to her through the open passenger window. “Shouldn’t you be at school?”
The words catch in her throat at first, but she recovers. “I was just on my way back. I had some free time before my Franklin meeting.”
“Well hop in, my dear,” he says, unlocking the door. “I’ll drive you back.”
She lets her heavy backpack slide off her shoulders before climbing into her grandfather’s Rolls. It smells like money, leather, shoe polish, and the spearmint gum she knows he always keeps in his briefcase. She takes a deep breath in, trying to hold it in her lungs, and presses a kiss to his soft cheek. “Thank you, Grandpa,” she says.
They drive in silence for a minute. Silence with Richard was always comfortable; she appreciated that, unlike the rest of the Gilmores, herself included, he didn’t feel the need to fill every silent moment with words. Perhaps he’d never had the opportunity, between Emily and Lorelai.
At last, he says, “today was your first day of school?”
She nods. “Eleventh grade.”
“A very important time, Junior Year,” he says. “Although I’m sure you’ve heard all about that from your counselors.”
“Oh yes, they like to drive it home every chance they get.”
“I have no doubt you’ll prove equal to the challenge.”
“Thank you, Grandpa,” she says. This moment, this conversation, isn’t a memory, it’s brand new. She never sat here with him. She revels in it, this tiny window of extra time with him.
“And Harvard is still your plan?”
She’s silent for a moment. She remembers how contentious this was: his desire for her to attend Yale, to follow in his footsteps, and hers to live up to her mother’s dreams. She knows the way it ultimately played out, of course, and how much it meant to him when she decided on Yale. Part of her wants to give him that gift now, in this moment. But she doesn’t think she can do it.
“Yes,” she says. “Still Harvard.”
“Well,” and she’s not sure if she’s imagining a note of pain in his voice, “I have no doubt you’ll prove equal to that challenge as well.” He parks in an empty spot near the front entrance to the school and peers over his glasses at her. “Harvard will be very lucky to have a Gilmore in its ranks.”
Oh, how she misses him.
“Thanks, Grandpa,” she says. She unlatches the door, kicks it open with her saddle shoe, then turns back to him. “Nothing is set in stone, though,” she says. The tiniest concession.
She smiles at him.
He smiles back.
.
The Franklin meeting goes as she remembers. Even the little speech she gave Paris, about how she won’t back down, how, at the end of the year, her transcript will say she worked on the Franklin, comes back to her. Spills out of her mouth like it’s scripted. She leaves the journalism classroom with a spring in her step, and nearly collides with Max.
She sees, in his eyes, his desire to talk to her, but she turns and bolts in the other direction.
She uses the bus ride back to Stars Hollow to outline her pavement piece, drawing on her memories of the original as much as she can, making notes of who she’ll have to interview, what research she needs to pull. The realization that reliving high school also means re-doing the mountains of homework Chilton assigned, taking all the tests and pop quizzes again, writing all those essays, strikes her. She loved school, but not so much that she wants to do it all over again.
The bus spits her out in town just after 5, and she turns toward Luke’s.
She’s halfway across the square when she spots him, reading on one of the benches in the Gazebo. He’s wearing that old camouflage henley, and reading what looks like a play, a Samuel French edition of something or other.
They didn’t meet in this moment—won’t be introduced until tomorrow night’s ill-fated dinner party. She doesn’t remember seeing him here before, but of course she would have looked right past him. Still, it’s hard to imagine, now, not being drawn to Jess immediately.
He looks so young , she thinks, though of course that’s been true of everyone she’s seen today, starting with her own face staring back in the mirror. 33 year old Lorelai, and Paris in her long hair days. But Jess, even back then, had seemed so worldly to her, grown. Now she can see he’s just a child, thrown into an unfamiliar world.
He looks up and catches her staring at him, his eyes meeting hers over the top of his paperback. It starts as a glare and almost immediately softens into something quizzical.
She bolts for Luke’s.
She feels flushed and flustered when she lands on the stool next to her mother. She grabs Lorelai’s coffee mug off the counter and takes a deep sip of it to calm down. Lorelai looks at her expectantly.
She gulps the last of the coffee down. “What?” she asks.
“You don’t have a monologue prepared about your first day of school? I thought you’d be bursting with stories about the joys of learning.”
“No monologue,” she says. “It was good.”
“Just good?”
“It was great. I like all my teachers, I didn’t have any trouble finding my classes, my music theory class sounds really cool, and Paris was the worst, but that’s business as usual.”
“That Paris sure knows how to nurture a grudge.”
“You have no idea.”
Lorelai settles back a little, like she’s not sure how exactly to ask her next question. “And Max?” she finally asks, “did you see him?”
Rory shakes her head, “no.”
“Isn’t he your Lit teacher?”
“Yeah, but I do have really tall people sitting in front of me.”
“Rory.”
“I saw him in the hallway and I walked the other way and…”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I thought that’s what you’d want me to do.”
It’s funny, she remembers this day only in the abstract, more a concept of her first day of Junior Year, but she finds herself spouting out dialogue in every conversation like it’s been written for her. She thinks these are the words she actually said, the first time she lived this day. She has to admit, it makes things a little easier.
“Just because Max isn’t a part of my life anymore doesn’t mean he can’t be a part of yours,” Lorelai says, gently. The pain of what she lost when Lorelai bailed on the wedding throbs, suddenly, fresh in her chest. “He has to be a part of yours. You have to see him and talk to him.” She swallows down thick, hot tears. “That’s okay. That’s good. I know everything seems screwed up right now, but I don’t want you to avoid him. Especially not on my account. Okay?”
Rory nods. “Alright.”
“I am sorry I put you in this position.”
Rory looks at her mother, really looks, and realizes, quite suddenly, that they are pretty much the same age. She hadn’t been completely blind to her mother’s flaws as a teenager, but Lorelai at 32, 33, had seemed to be an adult to her, she’d always had the answers. Her decision to call off the wedding to Max had felt so confusing at the time—she had never let a man into Rory’s life before, and Rory didn’t understand how Lorelai could have let things go so far, let her get so close, if she wasn’t going to go through with things.
Now, so deep into her own uncertainty, struggling to stand on her own wobbly foundation, she thinks maybe she understands.
Rory feels her throat clearing, the throb in her chest dulling to a flutter.
“That’s okay,” she says, letting go of something she didn’t know she was holding onto. “It’s going on the list.”
“My God, that list is getting long.”
Lorelai tells her about the dinner party on their way out of Luke’s a little while later. Rory cranes her neck to try and see into the Gazebo. All she can see is the back of Jess’s head, hunched over his book.
.
She wakes up the next morning and wonders if she’ll find herself back in 2016, but when she opens her eyes she’s still a teenager.
The school day flies by. She interviews Charleston, and the Chilton groundskeeper, and the school historian, over her lunch, and writes the first draft of her article during Study Hall. It flows out, not unlike the way her words have been coming back to her, but she thinks it’s even better this time. (Of course, as a professional journalist ten years into her career, she certainly hopes it’s better.) The sour look on Paris’s face during the Franklin meeting that afternoon is the sweetest victory.
Sookie is already in the kitchen when she gets home from school, and the whole house smells amazing. She closes herself in her room to change out of her uniform and start on her homework. She knows there’s no need to re-read Middlemarch along with the rest of the class, she’s read it a couple of times now, but still she finds herself falling into the pages, and into the routine of high school.
She’s in the middle of prepping her notes for her interview with Max when Lorelai comes in to check on her. The open door lets the chaos of the kitchen into her room, and the warm glow that Sookie always brought into the house when she was a kid, when it was so often just Sookie and Lorelai and Rory, spills in. Rory’s reveling in it when suddenly Jess is standing in the door of her bedroom.
Up close he looks kind of jumpy and out of place. His eyes pop a little bit, probably recognizing her from yesterday, but he doesn’t say anything about catching her staring at him. He just rounds on her bookcase and says, “Wow, aren’t we hooked on phonics.”
She suppresses a grin. He was such an ass.
“Oh. I read a lot.” Her next words bite at her lips. “Do you read?”
“Not much.”
He’s already slipping her copy of Howl off the shelf. She tries to look for the moment he steals it, as she offers him the loan, but whenever it happens, she doesn’t catch it.
That sleight of hand book must have been thorough.
Lorelai summons them to dinner, and then Jess is at her window, asking if it opens.
“Oh, yeah, you just have to unlatch and then push.”
“Great,” he says. “Shall we?”
And she thinks, “why the fuck not?”
.
They’re passing Monty the rooster when he nearly doubles over with laughter.
“What?” she asks. So far they’ve just been walking in awkward silence. He seems kind of...shy? Can that be right? And she’s finding herself very aware that he’s a teenager.
“What is it with this hick town ?” he asks in disbelief, gesturing to the rooster. “How do you live here?”
“I love it here.”
It’s true, she does love Stars Hollow. Even now. She loves it at this time of year most of all, the leaves starting to turn, the twinkle lights glowing from every tree as soon as the sun goes down. She loves the safety of knowing she always has this place to come home to.
“It doesn’t make you want to scream?”
She looks around. They’re walking up Peach now, and every house is glowing, yellow light pouring out of the living rooms of her neighbors.
“I always thought that part of growing up in a small town was longing to escape it,” she says, “and I do want to see what else is out there. I want to travel, and to see all the places I’ve read about, and I want to experience the things in this world that never really touch Stars Hollow. But sometimes I wonder if it would be such a bad thing… staying.”
“Staying here? Forever?”
She shrugs. “If it’s good enough for my mom, and for Sookie and Luke and Jackson and everyone else that lives here, why can’t it be good enough for me?”
“I counted eleven stores that seem to exclusively sell porcelain unicorns,” he says.
“Then you must have missed one.”
He’s shaking his head, like he’s concerned, like he’s pretty sure she’s crazy, but also like maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
.
They pass Kim’s Antiques, and Hughes Brothers, and the bookstore. She loops him around the town square twice before he asks, “so where are we going?”
“Oh,” she says, “nowhere. There’s nowhere to go on a Tuesday night in Stars Hollow, even the 24 hour mini-mart closed half an hour ago.”
He rolls his eyes and drops down onto the front steps of the high school. She perches next to him.
“This school is cracked,” he says. “My English class is reading Nicholas Sparks.”
She laughs. “Mrs. O’Donnell claims that assigning pop lit increases student engagement, but I’m pretty sure she’s just looking for an excuse to read A Walk to Remember during work hours.”
“You go here?” Jess asks.
She shakes her head. “Not anymore. I go to school in Hartford.”
“Ahh,” Jess says, “right. The private school uniform.”
She raises an eyebrow at him.
“ You were the one staring at me ,” he says, “I’m an innocent bystander with an eye for detail.”
“Sure.”
“You like it? Private school?”
“I mean, I don’t have to read Nicholas Sparks,” she says. She shrugs. “It’s a means to an end.”
“The end being?”
“Harvard,” she says, catching herself just before saying Yale. “I want to go to Harvard, and study journalism, and become the next Christiane Amanpour.” It’s funny to hear those words come out of her mouth. When was the last time she thought about becoming Christiane Amanpour?
“Big goals.”
“Yeah, well.”
“Specific, too.”
“The Harvard thing… I don’t remember a time before that was the plan. My mom and I started talking about it when I was practically a toddler.”
“So is it your dream,” he asks, “or is it hers?”
“Both,” she says. “Maybe it was her idea, but if I told her I didn’t want that life anymore, she’d be fine.” She thinks this is true, but it probably deserves a caveat. “She’d be fine eventually ,” maybe. Or “she’d get over it.” But she doesn’t say that out loud.
“Sounds like a lot of pressure.”
“No. I mean, yes , but most of it is self-inflicted. And what isn’t...they don’t mean to pressure me.”
“They?”
“My mom. My grandparents.” She gestures around. “This town.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“My mom had me young. My family’s worst fear is that I’ll turn out like her, get,” she stops, swallows, “pregnant like she did. Derail my life. And I don’t ever want them to worry about it, so maybe sometimes I push a little too far in the other direction.” She looks down at her fingers, laced together around her knees. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
She looks at him. It’s too dark to see his face clearly. “What about you?” she asks, “got any deep dark secrets you want to unburden? You can trust me.”
“I don’t even know you.”
“Well, don’t I look trustworthy?”
She thinks he might be smiling, just the tiniest bit. “Maybe,” he says.
.
Sookie and Jackson and Luke have all gone home when she gets back to the house. Lorelai is waiting for her on the steps of the porch. “What the hell, Rory,” she says, standing. Her anger and panic roll out across the yard.
“Sorry.”
“Where were you? You don’t just disappear like that.”
“Jess and I went for a walk. I left you a note.”
“Jess? The kid you just met? Why would you think it’s okay to take off with some guy you don’t know?”
Rory reaches the foot of the porch steps. Her mother towers over her.
“He’s not—I mean, he is, but. He just seemed kind of overwhelmed by the whole house full of strangers thing. He looked like he was about to jump out of his skin and I just...wanted him to feel welcome. That was the point of tonight, right?”
Lorelai gapes at her in disbelief. It’s a look she remembers seeing a lot in this era: the Jess years. Rory hated it then and she doesn’t like it much now, either.
“All we did was walk around and talk. I swear nothing nefarious happened.”
“That kid is troubled, Rory,” Lorelai says. “His mom sent him here for a reason. I just want you to be careful.”
“When have you ever known me to be anything but?”
“It’s my job, babe,” Lorelai says. She leans down to put a hand on each of Rory’s shoulders, stares deeply into her eyes. “It’s my most important job, knowing where you are, who you’re with. That you’re okay.”
She steps down off the bottom stair and pulls Rory into a tight hug, pinning Rory’s arms to her sides. “I know that,” Rory says into a faceful of her mother’s hair.
Lorelai lets go, steps back. “I know you’re responsible,” she says, “and I know you feel like you’re so grown up, and you can take care of yourself—”
“I can—”
“But you’re not as old as you think you are,” Lorelai says.
Internally, Rory scoffs.
“I grew up too fast. I don’t want that for you.”
“We just went for a walk.”
“So you said.”
“And nothing happened.”
Lorelai nods her head up and down a few too many times. “Right.” Her anger has receded but her panic is still there. “Just…just tell me next time you sneak out, okay?”
“That kind of defeats the purpose of sneaking out.”
“I don’t care.”
Finally, Rory nods. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, I promise to tell you next time I sneak out.”
Lorelai hugs her again, and for a moment Rory does feel bad. She didn’t mean to worry her mother, she just…hadn’t really thought about it.
They go back inside, and Lorelai tries to feed her. “Sookie made way too much,” she says. “Even for us.”
But for once in her life she’s not hungry. She washes her face, brushes her teeth, changes into flannel pjs and climbs into her bed.
She falls asleep thinking she’d do anything to be a grown-up again.