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Her mother makes her dress.
It’s pale pink, all glittery tulle and taffeta—things that don’t exactly scream Rory Gilmore, and definitely don’t scream Jess Mariano, but, somehow, it works.
Actually, she loves it.
They talk about pooling their cash to rent a limo, but it feels silly when Luke’s is spitting distance from the high school gym, so they get ready there instead, Lane and Rory in the apartment, Jess and Dave in the store room.
And when they’re gussied up, Lorelai and Mrs. Kim and Luke take tons of photos, every possible combination of the four of them, lined up out in front of the diner—even Rory with Dave and Lane with Jess (after Mrs. Kim has left). And then they walk across the street to the high school.
There’s a No Doubt song blasting down the hallway, and just inside the front doors, Rory and Lane step aside to fix Lane’s make-up into something a little less mother-approved. Then Rory takes Jess’s hand and they make their way towards the music.
It’s early enough that people are still mostly standing around in clumps. The bobby pins are still in place, the curls still holding, and the lighting is a bit too high. It looks every bit a high school gym filled with overdressed teenagers. No one has so much as tried to spike the punch, yet.
They end up sitting on the old wood bleachers, Lane and Rory on one level and Dave and Jess right below them, twisting around to see their girlfriends. Rory feels weirdly nervous, something about the formal wear makes her feel formal. This is just Jess, she keeps reminding herself, your boyfriend of nearly two years, but she can’t quite talk herself into calming down.
“This DJ is uninspired, man,” Dave says when “Hot in Herre” starts playing.
“Is it a DJ or did they just put a bunch of different ‘Now That’s What I Call Music!’ discs into a CD changer?” Jess asks.
“We should have infiltrated the prom committee,” Lane says.
“Yeah, we could have played the long game,” Rory agrees.
Jess groans. “You would have killed all your brain cells talking about crepe paper with Janie Fertman all year.”
“But we could have hired a band,” Lane reminds him.
“You could have hired our band,” Dave says.
“That would have been cool.”
“You have to agree,” Rory says, “that we definitely could have come up with a better theme than ‘A Night to Remember.’”
“Why does prom even need a theme?” Jess asks.
“Yeah, the theme of prom is prom,” Dave agrees.
“The theme is uncomfortable penguin suits and bad music.”
“The theme is asphyxiation from inhaling too much glitter.”
“The theme is ‘you will forget all of these people by the time you’re thirty.’”
“Hey!” Rory smacks Jess’s chest with the back of her hand. “I am in favor of romanticizing all of this high school nonsense. In three weeks, this will all be over—”
“Thank god!”
“—and everyone will scatter in different directions, never to be heard from again. I want my Kodak moments.” She stomps her foot on the bleacher for emphasis.
Jess sighs. “You want romance?” He stands, grabs her hand. “I’ll give you romance.”
“Smooth, dude,” Dave says, while Lane whoops her approval.
Jess pulls her out onto the dance floor. Someone has lowered the lights, and it’s teeming now with other teenage bodies. “You’re going to give me romance to the ‘Thong Song’?” Rory asks, nearly shouting to be heard over Sisqo.
“Just give it a moment,” Jess yells back, and a second later the song changes, slows, and the lights dim a bit more.
Jess pulls her in, until she’s standing as close to him as the tulle of her skirt will allow.
“How’d you know that was going to happen?” she asks him, reaching up to wrap her arms around his neck.
“I’m psychic.”
“Wow,” she teases him. “Are you going to use that super power for good or evil?”
He doesn’t answer, just grins at her, wolf teeth in his crooked mouth. In her heels they’re just about the same height, and she leans forward to press her lips to the corner of his mouth.
“What was that for?” he asks.
“Romance.”
She leans her head on his shoulder, and they sway a bit. She’s not a particularly skilled dancer, but this she can do, shuffling side to side as Norah Jones croons “Come away with me, and I’ll never stop loving you.”
“Did I tell you,” she says into the crook of his neck, “how much I appreciate the tux?”
She’s close enough to feel the heat radiating off of his skin, to see goosebumps rise behind his ear. “You know I’d do anything for you, Gilmore.”
“I kind of expected you to show up in one of those tuxedo print t-shirts.”
“Ye of little faith.”
“I would have been okay with it if you had,” she says. She runs her hand down his chest, along his lapel, until it’s resting over his heart. She can feel it beating fast, out of sync with the song.
“Now she tells me.”
“But I’m still glad you went for the real thing.”
“Yeah well…” He twirls her, suddenly, like a yo-yo spinning away from him, her skirt fanning out around her, and then winding back in, tight into his arms. “I figured if my girlfriend was going to go all out, I probably should, too.”
She feels breathless, weightless, giddy.
“Dude!” Dave and Lane sidle up next to them, “you are setting the bar way too high over there.”
“I’m sorry, didn’t you read the entire bible for the pleasure of Lane’s company tonight?”
“You raise a great point.” Dave turns his attention back to Lane. “See, I’m romantic, too.”
“You’re very romantic,” Lane agrees.
“Bets on the next song?” Dave asks the group.
“Something by Enrique Iglesias?” Lane suggests.
“Someone who has, at some point, been cheated out of money by Lou Pearlman,” is Rory’s guess.
Jess sighs. “‘Lady Marmalade.’”
“Well, it’s gotta be one of those three,” Dave agrees, just as Norah Jones gives way to “Cry Me a River.”
“Ooh, what do I win?” Rory asks.
“An excuse to leave the dance floor.”
They line up at the heavily-chaperoned punch bowl, and then take their little plastic cups out into the hallway, where the music is deadened by the cinder block walls. Dave takes Lane’s hand and pulls her away down the hall a bit, in search of a rare opportunity for privacy. Rory and Jess hang back, sipping their punch against a row of lockers.
“I wasn’t kidding, you know,” she says. She leans back and lets herself sink, slowly, to the floor, her skirt puffing up around her.
“Kidding about what?”
“It is all ending in a couple of weeks. I didn’t think I’d be sad about it, but I am.”
Jess drops down next to her. On the wall across from them are hundreds of “M” cut-outs in Minutemen red, each decorated with a student’s name and a school they’ve been accepted to. Four of them are hers: Rory Gilmore, Vassar; Rory Gilmore, Columbia; Rory Gilmore, Dartmouth; Rory Gilmore, Harvard.
Lane only has one M up on the wall, for the Seventh-Day Adventist college she agreed to attend, and Jess has one, too. She can see it from where she’s sitting: Jess Mariano, NYU. (It’s in her handwriting. Jess didn’t want to put it up.)
“What if it all falls apart after this?” she asks him.
“I don’t think it’s going to,” he says.
“How do you know?”
“Psychic, remember?”
She huffs, a sharp exhalation from deep in her diaphragm. “I’m serious, Jess.”
He scoots closer to her on the floor, till her skirt is crumpled up between them. “I don’t know, Rory,” he says. “Maybe it will fall apart, but I hope it won’t.”
“It’s a four and a half hour train ride.”
“We can meet in the middle,” he says. “What’s halfway between New York and Boston?”
“Here.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Suddenly they’re both laughing, so hard that she can’t keep her balance. She falls into him, buries her face in his shoulder. Tears leak out the corner of her eyes, and she says a silent thank you to her mother, who convinced her that waterproof mascara was a necessity tonight.
When the laughter subsides he reaches for her, presses his lips to hers. Her face is wet, but she can’t tell if it’s from her tears or his. Maybe both. He cups her face in his hands, brushes the tears away with the pads of his thumbs.
They kiss for a long time, side by side against the lockers, both of them a little tangled in her skirt, until someone standing over them clears a throat, and they look up to find Lane and Dave.
“We thought maybe we’d bail before my curfew and get something to eat,” Lane says. “You want to come?”
So they scramble up, and Rory tries to smooth down her dress, to fix what she’s sure is smudged lipstick, as they make their way towards the double doors at the end of the hall.
“Can we not go to Luke’s, please?” Jess asks.
“God no,” Lane agrees. “Way too easy for my mom to find me there.”
They pile into Dave’s car, instead, with the boys in the front and Rory and Lane in the back, and they drive to a pizza place in Woodbridge. In the parking lot, Jess strips out of his jacket and button-down to reveal a tuxedo print t-shirt underneath, and Rory gasps.
“Oh, see that’s cool,” Dave says. “Why aren’t I that cool?”
“You don’t need to be cool, man,” Jess says. “You’re in a band. It does the work for you.”
“Fair point, fair point. But I am a little worried about getting tomato sauce on the rental,” he says, gesturing to his own tux.
Inside they get a corner booth and order two large pizzas to share. The boys pool their quarters and head over to the jukebox by the register.
“What do you think they’re going to put on?” Rory asks.
“Five bucks says it’ll be a Temptations song,” Lane says around a bite of pizza. “Dave is very into motown right now.”
“Interesting.”
“He’s a man of varied tastes.”
Rory smiles. It’s nice to see Lane so happy. She’s stressing about a four and a half hour train ride, but Dave is heading for California in the fall, and she doesn’t envy Lane that sort of long distance.
“So,” Lane asks, “was it a night to remember?”
Rory looks over to the jukebox, where Jess and Dave are deep in conversation. “Yeah,” she says. “I think it was.” She turns back to Lane. “But we promise here and now that we are never admitting that to Janie Fertman.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Lane agrees.