Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jess Mariano stood in the middle of a room that was caught halfway between being an hardware store and a diner, staring up at his uncle, and daring the man with his silence to give any compelling reason for him to move.

"Come on, Jess. It's just for one semester … or whatever it's called. Do they have semesters in elementary school? It's just until your mom gets things together and then you'll be going back to your old school in New York. Come on, think of it like a long visit, a vacation. Except … with school."

Jess shrugged, watching Luke standing there scratching his head through the back of his baseball cap, awkwardly holding out the small Power Rangers book bag.

"Okay, um." Luke bent down and slipped the shoulder strap of one side of the bag up over Jess' arm, as Jess let himself be jostled about, passively resisting the whole affair, until Luke realized he'd starting putting the bag on backwards. Jess sighed, taking it in his own hands and slipping it on correctly.

"I'll walk you over," Luke said.  

Jess stepped out into the bright afternoon among a hoard of other school-age children trampling down the steps, screaming and running after each other, excited to get the rest of the day started. Jess took a deep breath, hands clutching both straps of his bag and tromped down the stairs onto the grassy lawn outside the front of Stars Hollow Elementary School. There were kids running around, wrestling each other to the ground, skipping over to where their parents in pairs waited to pick them up, girls drawing out hopscotch patterns on the nearby playground, and small troops of boys shuffling into carpool minivans. The sun shown high above them and the sky was a bright shade of blue, uninterrupted by a single cloud. Even the weather in Stars Hollow was syrupy sweet and garish.

Jess fixed his eyes to the ground and marched one foot in front of the other, deliberately walking his way out of the crowd of carefree small town grade school kids, his untied shoelaces on one foot slapping against the pavement as he went. He walked home from school in New York City by himself all the time and figured his Uncle Luke didn't have the forethought to know what time to pick him up, much less that he couldn't make it back to the diner by himself in the small minutes it would take his uncle to figure it out. This town was too small and the colors making it up, green and blue and newly Tom Sawyer-tricked white picket fences, too bright. Jess missed the muted and senseless pollution of New York colors and sounds, the smells of anything other than freshly cut and sprinkler'd grass, and the home however quiet and unsettled that he’d known how to make himself disappear into. It stood in stark contrast to the tiny, suffocating apartment-converted-office he now had to go back to, where his broad-shouldered uncle would be awkwardly hovering around and Jess felt like he had to ask permission to pull books down off the shelves and leave the day behind by going into them.

Without taking conscious note of it Jess' footsteps begin to veer to the left, all the while his hands determinedly grasping his shoulder straps and his stare fixed to the ground. To the rhythm of his loose shoelaces first against the perfectly swept pavement and then the dusty dirt road, he walked away from Luke's and towards the edges of Stars Hollow proper.

After several minutes of walking Jess' footsteps gradually began to slow, the length of time between each stride expanding, until he took four small steps forward, three, and two, and one, his tennis shoe scuffing against the dirt path, finally deigning his view to be more than the peripheral hedges and grass around him. Stood in place he looked up and around himself, his eyes taking in the scenery from beneath the dark curls of hair falling across his forehead.  

He was near a building, or something like a building, with its dilapidated roof and encroaching shrubbery and tree branches. Jess walked over towards the stairs leading up to the porch, testing one foot on the warped wooden surface of the first step. Deciding it wasn't likely to fall out from underneath him, he finally shouldered off his book bag and sat down, placing it between his legs. He let out of huff of air, blowing a stray piece of hair from his cheek, and looked out in front of him. It was almost as if he was in the middle of the woods, if not for the clear dirt path he had come up leading towards this place. There was a field of grass in front of him, with a tree standing off to the side, and wild untamed shrubbery lining the perimeters. The building was clearly abandoned.

Jess looked down again and fiddled with the hook of his bag wondering how long it would be - if it would come to be - that his uncle Luke would start to worry about where he was. But it was quiet out here and nothing was lined up and squared off proper like it was in the center of town and the colors were more varied and the sunlight less offensive. And he could read.

Jess unzipped his bag and pulled out the one other thing he had in there aside from a red folder with a couple pieces of loose leaf notebook paper inside. He pried open the paperback chapter book, effortlessly landing right on the page where he had left off, and he placed his hand against the crisp, yellowed pages, pressing it open flat against his knees. He hunched over the words, starting to finally, thankfully, breathe a little easily.

Jess didn't know how long he had been there reading but he had turned the pages several times over now, the light and shadows hitting the small print shifting and edging further off the page. It was then that Jess heard the sound of someone walking up the path behind him. He curled in his lips and tucked his tongue inside his cheek, sure that he was going to get it now, for having run off and not come straight back after school. He stared down at his book, the words on the page no longer registering in his mind, waiting for the onslaught of curses or scoldings or waps to the back of the head that were surely about to come.

"Oh," a surprised female voice tickled in his ear and he looked up sharply, seeing a tall, young, dark-haired woman in casual business attire and a pair of heels dangling in her hand looking taken aback by the sight of him. He looked her up and down quickly, her wavy brown hair falling across her shoulders and bare feet in the tangle of grass around the building.

"Well," she said, shifting her shoes from one hand to the other, "What did I find? A nine-year-old squatter?" A thin but sure smile played on her lips as she looked back over at him.

Jess' eyes narrowed and he snapped shut his book. "I'm goin'," he said and started to pick up his bag.

"Hey, whoa, whoa, kiddo," the woman said, holding out a hand. "Where'd you come from? What are you doing all the way out here?"

"What are you doing all the way out here?" he shot back, stuffing his book back into his bag. "It's none of your business!" He tried to sound confident as he lisped the last word, his face turning red with anticipation of having to make a quick dash out of here before he got in any trouble that would get back to his uncle.

"Oh my god," the woman said, a twinkling in her eyes. "You're a little punk, aren't you?" She steadied herself on her feet and looked straight at him, his wavy hair sticking up, face scrunched up in brave defiance as best he could make it, and Power Rangers bag dangling in his hand to mirror her heels. "That's adorable."

Jess' whole face turned red. "What'd you mean adorable!" he cried, his indignation making its way up to his reddening ears. "Stop talking to me, old lady! You're not s'pose to talk to little kids you don't know!"

"So cute!" the woman laughed, stumbling over to the stairs and plopping down on them. Jess turned around from where he was standing in the grass to face her, his face still red. She set her heels down on the ground and caught his eye as she sat back up. "I think it's that little kids aren't supposed to talk to strange old ladies they don't know. It's not safe for you to be all the way out here by yourself. Where's your mom, she must be worried?"

Jess took a shuddering mad breath as he stared back at her, hefting his bag up in his hand and letting it fall to the ground with a thud. "My mom's not here!" he said, "She wanted to stay in New York! I don't have to tell you anything!"

"Your dad?" she asked.

"He's not here either!" His hands balled into fists at his side. "I don't have to tell you anything an' he's never been here, so who cares!"

The woman paused, her manicured hand resting on the porch step beside her and curls falling against the side of her face. Jess screwed his eyes shut and took two deep breaths, then slowly opened them and saw her still staring back at him. She smiled gently. "That must be lonely."

She reached out to pick up his bag, holding it out to him. Jess stared back at her, his breath evening back out, and uncurled his hand, lifting it and taking the bag back, letting the weight drag his arm down once she let go. "Do you live near here? Do you know how to get home?"

Jess opened his mouth and then closed it again, trying to find his words. His voice was small when he answered. "My uncle's," he said. "I know."

She tucked her brown curls behind her left ear. "What's your name? Mine's Lorelai."

"Um," Jess looked to the side and shifted from one foot to the other, "I don' wanna say."

"Okay, kiddo," she laughed. "Finally being smart about that stranger danger."

Jess slipped his book bag back over his shoulders, looking at her with a furrowed brow. "What are you doing out here?" he asked, wondering if she could give him some sort of hint about this old building.

"I just like to come check this place out now and then. Kinda quiet." She looked up behind her at the ruined building. "I work near here."

Jess popped a silent "oh" with his mouth and darted his eyes out towards the dirt path. It wasn't that he necessarily wanted to leave, but he didn't know what to do next, and he was sure it was getting too late to be out anyway. Uncle Luke was probably furious and rearing up to give him a good wallop.

"Do you need me to help you get home?"

"No," he answered quickly. He looked down and kicked a foot at the ground, tearing up a small clump of weeds and dirt.

"Well, you better get back to your uncle's quick, it's gonna be dark soon."

Jess nodded and swayed on the heels of his feet, looking back up at her. Then he ducked his head down again and turned swiftly walking out towards the road.

"Hey, brat!" she called out. He stopped and looked over his shoulder at her, hands tightening around the straps of his bag and eyes straining to see her in the dimming light and shadows from the porch overhang and trees. "There's an inn up the road from here, Independence Inn. I work there during the day and…" she trailed off, and then plucked a smile onto her face again, "kinda live there during the rest of the time. If you ever don't feel like going straight home again, you can come by there."

Jess raised his eyebrows at her, although he was sure she couldn't see, and took in her appearance one last time. She was young, but looked about the same age as his uncle and mom, so old, too … but sitting there with her bare feet in the grass around a falling apart old house and a sloppy smile on her face, wavy dark curls framing her cheekbones, she seemed a part of another kind of world.

'That must be lonely'

Maybe if he saw her again it wouldn't be so bad. He turned his head back around and dropped his chin to his chest, contemplating the threshold between the grassy field and the dirt path in front of him. Then he lifted one hand, fingers spread out, and tossed it her way in a waving gesture, in the next split second dashing off down the road, shoelaces thwacking against the dirt.

"See ya, kiddo!" he heard her shout from the distance behind him.

Chapter Text

As he’d suspected, Luke wasn’t too happy when Jess slipped inside the to-be diner in the later afternoon, the bell jingling to signal his arrival. He was immediately met with four quick strides over to him, a rough hand grabbing him by his book bag and then dragging him up the stairs.

"Where were you Jess?! Where were you?!"

"Reading," he said, shrugging his shoulders.

"Re-" his uncle pinched his brow, "Where?!"

Jess lifted one shoulder and then tossed his head back over it, indicating a vague direction.

"Jess! You can’t just not come home after school, okay?! You have to come straight home! And if you’re not going to, then you have to tell me where you’re going! But you shouldn’t not come straight home! Unless, like, you have an after school thing or something! But I should know!"

Jess heaved a sigh and cast an unfixed gaze over towards other side of the small room.

"You got it, Jess? Jess!"

Jess turned his head back and looked up at his uncle, who lifted a hand and rubbed the back of his head again, staring down the boy in front of him with some bewilderment. Jess took this as his sign to be let go and walked over to the kitchen table, climbing into the chair and slinging his bag onto the table top. He folded his hands in front of him and rested his chin on them, letting out a puff of breath.

Luke made his way over there slowly, eyeing his nephew as he opened the refrigerator. “You hungry?”

Jess shrugged.

Jess stepped up to the edge of the path, acorns crunching under his shoes into the dirt, and the sharp sound knocking him out of his reverie to fully take in where he was. School had gotten out for his second day there, as painful and uneventful as the first, ten minutes prior. As soon as the bell rang, he'd found himself being pulled by something - curiosity ... boredom ... routine ... or something else tight inside his chest that he had not read a word to define yet - to take the same aimless walk he had the day before, only this time knowing where he would end up.

Jess took a deep breath, breathing in the early Spring air tinged with leftover cold. He surveyed the grounds in front of him and found it exactly the same as it had been the day before. She had said that she worked, or something about living, just up the road a little ways from here. Jess bit the inside of his cheek and stepped off the road into the grassy field. He made his way over to the tree standing in front of old house and with his feet firmly rooted in place he leaned over and looked up and down the empty porch.

Dropping his head and looking down at his feet Jess let the options rattle around in his brain. He had wandered this way and stayed sitting by this old, abandoned house yesterday because he had wanted to be alone. It’s large but squat shape and crumbling outline amidst an overgrown field and secluding collection of brambles had struck him like a slightly familiar face in a strange town. The last thing he had expected, or wanted, was for someone to find him. So, the last thing he was interested in doing was going to visit wherever it was she came from. He could care less, no matter how curious her appearance and words had been.  

Jess shuffled his feet against the tangles of weeds and dirt and then turned around, shouldering off his bag, and sitting down cross-legged against the trunk of the old tree, back facing the abandoned house. He wedged himself into a comfortable position against the roots and lightly touched the overgrown grass around him, patting down and familiarizing the spot. Jess kicked out his legs and dragged his bag over into his lap, unzipping it and pulling out his book. He looked up blinking and squinting at the sunlight filtering through the tree branches and then folded the book open to the right page, starting to read just as the day before.

Time passed but Jess made sure to look up periodically, blinking back into the world and checking that it wasn’t too late by how close the sun had sunk to the cypresses lining the other side of the road. It was during one of these relapses back into the real world, that couldn’t have been more than fifteen or so minutes since he started, that he heard the sound of shoes kicking up dirt along the road behind him. He stiffened in place and then folded in his knees and the covers of his book. The footsteps stopped and Jess heard a feminine sigh, the steps then resuming and stopping at the sound of wooden boards creaking beneath the weight of someone sitting down. Jess held his breath and let his one hand brace against the tree trunk behind him.

Quickly he darted his head around and saw her sitting there, in blue jeans and a pink tie-dye t-shirt, her arm propped on her knee and chin rested in her hand, long fingernails softly pressed into her cheek as she looked off into the distance away from him. Her dark, wavy hair now had offsetting streaks of green in it. She had a coffee cup in her other hand and casually took a sip. Jess let his head fall back against the tree trunk and sighed. He wasn’t ... hiding exactly. But every instinct from the crown of his head down into the pit of his gut had told him all his life it was better to observe first than to be observed. If he hadn’t come to see her at the inn like she asked then why was she here? He relaxed his legs, still trying to contain his limbs behind the thick old tree.

"Hey, punk!" Jess jumped in place. "Quit hiding." Her voice floated over to him easily on the light spring air, cheerful and teasing, "Didn’t want to come by the inn?"

Jess edged up, untangled his legs and scraped his hand along the rough bark of the tree. He turned around, letting his book fall open hanging from his hand, several pages falling loose from under his thumb. He pulled up his bag with the other hand but let it drag in the grass. Jess gave her a deep shrug of his shoulders and twitched his mouth into a half-frown.

"Don’t worry, kiddo," she said with an expression settling somewhere on amused exasperation. "I told you I come by some of the time after work. I usually have about an hour to kill a couple days a week." She smiled at him. "But if you want it all to yourself, you’ll have to arm wrestle me for it. I was here first and," she said, dipping her index finger to make the point, "I’m older."

"What’s with your hair?" he asked moving over to the porch steps and pulling his book back up into both hands, sitting down next to her and flipping it open, as if planning to ignore her presence.

"Rude," she said, tugging at a green curl. "What’s with yours? It looks like no one ever brushes it."

Jess cut her a glare and went back to flipping the pages of his book, trying to find where he had left off. They sat in silence for a minute, her fingernails intermittently tapping against the cardboard coffee cup, elbows pressed into her knees. “A friend of mine did it this morning,” she piped up, “Awful, right? But it’ll wash right out first time I take a shower.”

Jess put his book down on the step beside him and pressed his palm against the wood, leaning over in front of Lorelai and peering into her face. She blinked and sat back. “What, do I have something in my teeth?”

Jess sat back again and picked the book up, fwipping the pages against the pad of his thumb. “You’re weird,” he stated.

"Again, with the rudeness," Lorelai chimed, taking a sip from her coffee.

Jess sat, staring at a sentence in the middle of the page, reading it over in his head several times, as his eyebrows knitted together. Then he looked up, staring out into the grass in front of the building. “Do you have a husband?” he asked.

"What?" Lorelai asked, pulling the coffee cup away from her lips.

"Do you," he said the words carefully, as if asking a little kid, "have a husband?"

"Why?" she laughed.

Jess stopped, looking at her with a guarded frown. "Cause you’re old."

She let out a short, sharp laugh at that. “Well, okay then. I’m old,” she whispered to herself. “Um, no. I don’t have a husband.”

Jess looked out in front of him for a moment longer and then pressed his hand back down on the pages of book, turning his face back to the words. “Okay.”

Lorelai twisted the plastic lid of her coffee cup between her fingertips. “I almost had a husband,” she said, almost as if admitting a fact to herself that she didn’t quite believe.

Jess looked up at her. The light hit the side of her face between patterns of shadows cast by the leaves above them. Her eyes looked distant, a smile whispered across her face that wasn’t like the others she’d teased his way. He thought, just for a moment, in just that light with just those words, that she looked just like his mom.

“My mom’s almost had a husband a lot of times,” he offered.

"Oh?" she said, turning his head to look at him, her left hand bunched up in her brown and green curls. He nodded, simply, mouth rested into barely a frown on his tiny face, reassuring the fact to her in his best attempt at solidarity.

That same different sad smile crossed her face briefly, but this time Jess felt it directed at him. His frown deepened.

Jess stood up, the movement abrupt and spurred before he’d even thought about it. He picked up his bag and turned around to face her, pressing the bag against his shins. “I have to get back now or my uncle will get upset again.”

"Okay," she said, picking up her coffee cup and standing. She started to walk out towards the road and Jess tromped along behind her, his bag hitting against his knees with every step. They stopped at the edge of the dirt path. "That’s good," she said. "That your uncle would be worried."

"Yeah," Jess frowned up at her.

"I’m going that way." She pointed the opposite direction up the road, where the path disappeared behind a bend.

Jess looked down and bit his lip softly, thinking. He looked back up and decided it wouldn't bruise his ego too much to let a few more words pass between them. "What’s that way?"

"I told you, where I work. You didn’t want to come, remember?" She started to walk out towards that way. "Invitation still stands. Maybe next time, kiddo?" She nodded towards the book still in his hand, "We have a little library even."

Jess looked down at the book, slipping slightly from between his fingers and where it was held against his book bag. “And…,” he bit his lip again, “You said you stay there too, right?”

Lorelai stopped. “Yeah,” she answered, “In the back potting shed.”

Jess gave her an incredulous look. “Are you a squatter?”

She laughed, airy but bright. “No, it’s an arrangement I have with the owner. Fixed it up to be cozy. My daughter and I live there.”

“Your daughter," he tested the words to himself.

"She’s about your age, I think. So another reason to come by.” She winked at him and then started to walk away. Jess looked after her and just as she was about to round the bend she shouted out without looking back, "Get on home, punk! Before your uncle worries!"

As she was out of view, Jess turned around and started back into town.

Chapter Text

Jess slipped into the store, the bell jingling above him in tune with the brass lock clacking against the creaking wooden frame of the door. His uncle was standing behind the counter, the phone to his ear.

“Yeah, I need fifteen orders of that,” Luke said into the receiver. He glanced up at Jess and nodded, lifting his open hand. “And yeah, ten of the - yeah of the buns …” Jess started to move towards the stairs, through the disarray of half set up tables and chairs and packing tape littering the floor. Luke switched the phone over into his other hand and glanced up at the wall clock just above the storage room doorway. Jess caught him looking and glanced up, too.

4:15 – over half an hour since he’d gotten out of school. Shimmying around the protruding legs of an overturned bar stool Jess hopped over towards the staircase.

He heard several loud whaps in quick succession as his uncle banged his open hand against the countertop to get his attention. Jess stopped mid-stride and forlornly cast his gaze down at the top of the first step, only a few inches away from running up to safety and feigning obliviousness. He turned and faced his uncle, now looking straight at him down the length of the backside of the counter. Luke fixed him with a hard stare, gluing him in place, as he finished up his phone conversation.

“Alright, that’ll be great, Charlie. Thanks.” Luke pulled the phone away from his ear and pressed the receiver firmly into the set on the wall. “Where have you been?”

Jess frowned and lifted his shoulders. “Don’t,” Luke said, pointing his finger at Jess, “Don’t shrug. Answer.”

Jess dropped his shoulders mid-shrug and placed his hands in his pockets, turning his frown into a straight line.

Luke folded his arms across his chest and looked back at Jess. The clock on the wall ticked to 4:16.

Luke sighed and ducked his head, pinching his brow. “Alright, Jess. I know you’re not exactly thrilled about being here but you have to stop with this attitude. You’re a kid, I’m in charge of you, I need to know where you are when you’re not here and not in school.”

Jess bit the inside of his cheek, watching his uncle. He slowly turned over the options in his head, of continuing his silence or giving a response. He decided on a middle ground.

“I came back, didn’t I? What’s the big deal?”

“That’s not the point, Jess. What if something happens to you while you’re out? You could get hurt or – or lost -”

Jess quirked an eyebrow at that. Lost in Stars Hollow, sure.

“- or kidnapped.”

“Oh, jeez,” Jess said, scuffing his shoe against the floor.

“I’m serious, Jess.”

Jess took a deep breath and rolled his head, looking out towards the door.

“Jess …”

Jess frowned and continued to stare away from his uncle.

“Alright, fine,” Luke sputtered, slapping his hand on the counter. He adjusted his baseball cap and pointed his index finger at Jess. “If you’re not gonna answer, then you can go upstairs until supper.”

Jess flicked his eyes towards Luke and spun on his heel. “That’s where I was trying to go in the first place,” he mumbled. He moved to the stairs, running up them two at a time.

Luke watched the empty space where Jess had been for a moment before turning to lean heavy against the counter, clasping his hands together and resting them on the dusty countertop. Dropping his forehead with a groan, he heard the receding echo of his nephew's footsteps up the stairs and the slamming door.

Jess quickly walked down the empty hallways of Stars Hollow Elementary School, the bright lights in the ceiling reflecting on the bright clean floor under his feet. His hurried reflection caught in the glass cases along the walls, housing trophies for spelling bees and soccer tournaments and pumpkin carving contests. He kept a steady pace, while the school halls were still settling into silence after the dispersing of the 3rd through 5th grade classes into the schoolyard and lunch room. He wanted to get where he was going before some unconvincing teacher with a smile daubed on her face found him and inquired as to how he was adjusting and why he wasn’t with the other kids. It had already happened about a dozen times and he’d only been here for a week. 

The lengthy stretch of the fluorescent lit, newly waxed, plaque and ornament filled hallway felt like a long walk through a mirage, and Jess couldn't be sure what he was walking towards was any different. He at last reached the pair of doors he was looking for, their clean wooden surface a welcome sight against the iridescent backdrop he'd slogged through to get here, and wrapped his hand around the solid metal handle, pulling one side open.

This whole town was sitting on top of an illusion; the kind that said everything was fine - just like his mom did when she told him that he was coming to stay here, just like his uncle said when he showed him the gutted hardware store he was going to be sleeping above - when in the pit of his stomach he knew it wasn't. The only person who hadn't told him it was fine yet was that same woman ... Lorelai. She'd told him it was lonely .

Jess let the heavy door slam behind him, and he stood inside of it, taking in the sights and scents of the shelves of books in front of him. It was quiet ... just like libraries prided themselves on being, and the air was cooler in here than out in the hallway. There was a faint under scent of that same pristine cleanliness as the rest of the school, but it was masked by the smell of old, well-read, stacks upon stacks of books. Jess breathed in deeply. Maybe it was. Lonely. He had a thousand words to his mind already, many far beyond his age, but he didn't have one for this yet.

He wasn't set on finding it either. Walking through the stacks Jess ran the tips of his fingers along the spines, his hand skipping one by one over slick hardbacks and creased paperbacks and raised drips of text and smooth printed titles. He navigated himself by touch all the way down the rows and rows of books, into the back corner of the room, near a beanbag chair and a poster sign that read in multi-colored bubble letters: "Stars Hollow Elementary Book Club - meets twice a week, Tuesday and Friday!"

Jess turned so he was facing the shelves to one side. He didn't need a word for a feeling that wasn't permanent, settling in his stomach over a place that wasn't real. Even if it knotted in his gut and twisted all throughout the day, he knew it was going to be let loose soon, and this whole experience was going to be a memory. So, he didn't need a word. He just needed to not be here.  

Jess inhaled through the flare of his nostrils, the scent of dozens of colorful paperbacks lined up in front of him. They had a tantalizing acetic fragrance, that could offer up to him a million scents - in addition to sights and sounds and tastes and all his senses brought to life by the shapes of ink on leafs of paper. So when they all came together, he was somewhere, and it brought a momentary settling to his stomach and easement to his mind.

Jess turned his head to the left and then right, peaking at the librarian facing away from him at her desk, and the otherwise emptiness of the room. He slipped a book off the shelf with his index finger caught on the edge of the spine, and in a careful swift movement he dropped it into his bag.

Jess looked around himself again. The clock on the opposite wall ticking away another minute was the only sound in the dense quiet. He zipped up his bag, slipping it back over his shoulders. Just as he did the recess bell rang, filtering through the rows of shelves. The muted sounds of kids filling the mirage hallways as they headed back to class echoed against the thick glass of the library’s windows. Jess took one last look around the room, committing the layout to mind. Although it was small, and the stacks of books didn't tower over his head like he was used to, and everything was a bit too pastel colored, it was a welcomed enough change in atmosphere. It was where he could get books and that was the most important thing about being here. He uprooted himself and found the backdoor of the library, slipping out, and melting into the crowd of other kids swarming back towards the classrooms.

The day went on, the midday sun outside the classroom window sinking towards the treeline. Jess was the first to his feet when the final bell rang, before the teacher had finished explaining the homework, and had somehow jostled his way out the door before anyone else, even though he'd sat at the very back corner of the room. But when he finally stood on the steps at the front of the school, everyone else's days starting to unfold in front of him as they ran off to their parents' cars, their friends' houses, and their favorite games, Jess found himself momentarily frozen. His feet did not carry him like they had the days before.

Although he felt an equal pull to move towards that same abandoned old house, he wasn't sure he saw the point. It seemed just as well that he go back to his uncle's and get the day over and done with. He could read anywhere. So, with a dedicated movement of one foot in front of the next, he started that way, pulling himself in the opposite direction.

It was a much shorter walk back to his uncle's place, so the building was soon in sight. Jess trudged along with the singular weight of the filched library book on his back, not even a pencil otherwise in his bag. As Jess approached the building he heard the whirring of a drill and rattling of wood and metal and heavy objects being moved around. He opened the door and stepped just inside. Sawdust was in the air and packing tape still tangled on the floor at his feet. He saw a couple of men he didn't know in old, paint-stained t-shirts putting together legs onto the overturned tabletops from the day before. His uncle was squeezed between the counter and back doorway, holding up one side of a stove, while a burly guy in matching flannel with a tool belt around his waist bolstered the other, trying to get it through. Luke caught Jess' eye and loosened his grip on the stove, while the other man grimaced.

"Oh, hey, Jess," Luke said. "School get out already?"

Jess gave a half-nod and looked over at the younger men who were wobbling the newly fastened table legs, making sure they were sturdy.

"You should probably go upstairs til we're done, Jess." Luke's voice cut in over the fading noise of the drill bit.

"Hey, Luke. You wanna get this through the door or not?"

"Oh, sorry, Tom," Luke hefted the stove back up and they resumed shuffling it through the small doorway. Jess watched the other two men turn over a few of the newly assembled tables, which varied in size and shape and color, as if they'd been bought in stages from various locations. The accompanying assortment of chairs were lined up against the far window.

"Alright, well, I guess I can have the guy hook it up tomorrow with the other stuff," Luke said, emerging from the back room, dusting off his hands.

"Yep," the other man, Tom, responded, picking up a clipboard from the top of the counter and ticking something off. "Well, I'd say you're all done here, Luke. Just the frill and ornament to do now." They walked around to the other side of the counter and the two younger men joined them. "You sure you don't want some of my guys to take down the old shelving? Or paint the place?"

"Ah, nah," Luke said, making a dismissive gesture with his hand. "I think it's all good. Thanks for all your help."

"Sure. Anything for Will's kid," Tom said, looking up and around the inside of the store. Jess followed his gaze, noting the shelves still lined with tins of polish, work gloves and garden hoses, and old cookie bins filled with nails and bolts.

"Maybe, take the sign down out fro-," one of the younger men started to suggest, tucking a rag into his belt loop.

Luke clapped his hand on Tom's shoulder. "Really grateful for all your help guys. I gotta take care of my nephew now, so -" Jess wrinkled his nose at that from the sidelines and Luke moved the three men over to the door. "I'll write your last check tomorrow and get it sent to you right away. Make sure to stop by when we open." He closed the door behind them, the bell jiggling with their sudden exit.

Luke turned to Jess and let out a huff of breath. Jess stared back at him, the disarray of the half assembled diner settling around them with the dust in the air. Luke clasped his hands together. "You want a snack?" he asked.

"Has my mom called?"

Luke's clasped hands fell down by his side. "Wh-?" he started, his face giving it away too easily. Jess took his eyes off his uncle and resumed looking around the room. "I mean, um," Luke tried, attempting to catch his nephew's eyes again. "She hasn't. Not since she dropped you off. But I'm ... I'm sure she will soon." Jess' eyes traced the outline of the whole room - the shelves lined with hardware supplies, and the slightly faded paint, and old heavy cash register on the end of the counter. "Probably ... uh, probably just letting you get adjusted, you know?" Jess' eyes skimmed over the boxes of coffee mugs that were already littered along the back of the counter, that would need to be rewashed, and the new-old tables scattered around the floor, and the shiny edge of the stove peeking out from the back room. "Jess?" He whipped his eyes back up to Luke, standing there with that same dumbfounded look on his face. This place wasn't a hardware store or a diner. It wasn't anything. It wasn't anywhere. 

Luke relaxed his shoulders as he watched his nephew. "I'm glad you came straight home.”

"I'm not," Jess answered, turning and walking towards the stairs up to the office-apartment. It wasn't his home.

"Jess," Luke said, his name stressed on his lips like it always seemed to be, following right behind him.

Jess stopped when he got to the top of his stairs, the knot in his stomach tightening, and turned around. Luke paused on the stairs below him. "I'm goin' to join the book club," Jess said. "It's twice a week. Tuesday and Friday. I'll be back late."

"Oh, well ... that's ... good." Luke moved the rest of the way up the stairs as Jess entered the apartment. "How late is it?"

"An hour," Jess said, walking past his uncle's bed and his own makeshift mattress over to the vintage desk on the far side of the room.  

"Okay," Luke said, sitting down at the table. "Make sure you're home after an hour."

Jess rolled his eyes, facing away from his uncle, and upturned the tin can onto its side, shaking out the array of different colored pens and pencils of varying lengths and dullness. He ran his eyes over the collection and picked the sharpest yellow pencil he found. He made his way back over to the kitchen table, facing Luke and tapping the pencil in his hand against his leg. "Can I go downstairs?" he asked, a tinge of sarcasm in his voice at asking permission.

Luke turned in his chair to face him. "It's kinda dusty down there. Tools are ... lying around."

Jess didn't say anything for a beat, standing there flicking the pencil between his two fingers, his backpack still on.

"Alright, just ... don't touch anything."

Jess was already halfway out the door as Luke finished his sentence. Once he tramped down the stairwell he turned to the storage room off to the side. Jess made his way towards the back of the rows of empty shelves, winding his path the way he had through the stacks of books earlier in the day, until he found a shadowy corner with a little bit of light to sit down in. The floor and the wall were hard, and there was a draft coming in from somewhere, as Jess dropped his book bag onto the ground by his feet, its empty form sagging around the single library book tucked inside.

He lay stomach down on the floor, his shirt pulling up so his skin pressed against the cool concrete. His legs lazily kicked in the air as he pulled out the book and laid it flat. Jess read the first few sentences over and over again, trying to will away the liminal world expanding outwards beyond him. It wasn't as easy to drift into the words as it had been the last two days under the canopy of trees and broken sunlight, but Jess had another trick for getting away slipped into the palm of his hand.He bit his lip and re-read a sentence one more time, letting his fingers twitch as he turned it over in his mind, putting the tip of his pencil to the milky tanned page.

The seconds built and melted away, as his hand started to move effortlessly across the margins of the book. Jess let his light pencil marks etch into the soft paper, reading one sentence of the book, sharing his thoughts, and reading the next, over and over again in a circular churning of his mind and the pages. As he did so, only one regard to Stars Hollow remained present in his mind; tomorrow was Friday ... and he knew exactly where he was going after school.

Chapter Text

The short heels of her shoes kicked up the dirt under her feet as Lorelai made her way along the path she knew well. She'd been coming by this abandoned building on and off since she'd first found it when trying to forge a footpath shortcut from her work/home to her daughter's elementary school, seeing as she'd had no car when her daughter had started kindergarten. The good thing about living in a small town, and living where you work, was that she could get most anywhere on foot, but the way from the inn to the school had turned out to be a longer walk than she would have liked.

She'd found some back dirt roads that pretty much cut a beeline from the Independence Inn to Stars Hollow Elementary School and in her early twenties she'd had no qualms about traversing it. Of course, now with the beat up jeep she'd worked her butt off to save for, she didn't need this shortcut. But on that rare occasion she needed to get away ... the old building she'd found tucked away here in the trees enchanted in her mind latent teenage fantasies of perfect, secret hideaways, that had been traded out for actual teenage running away, the reality of which hadn't been such a fairy tale. 

She sighed as she slowed her speed along the path. Today she was coming by for a different reason.

Coming up from the back and rounding the side of the building, she stopped just in the field of grass before the porch. There he was, not on the steps reading like she'd found him the first time, or resting back against the tree as she had the second, but pacing up and down the porch instead. He didn't seem to take notice of her, but she could tell by the slightest shift of his jaw muscles that he knew she was there. She watched silently, her heels sticking in the soft dirt of the field. Her purse was hanging from the crook of her arm, coffee cup from the inn in hand. He kept moving up and down the length of the old porch, head faced down as he went. His hand would reach out and dust along the edge of the dirt-stained porch railing, swaying as he changed direction, shoulder bumping against the rusted shut door loose on its hinges. He skipped over the hole in the floor at the other end of the path, sweeping around the broken glass from the porch light above, and stopping short of the half broken down swing, hanging only by one end on its chain. He continued pacing up and down the porch this way, his movement aimless but purposeful.

He hadn't been here yesterday when she'd gotten off work. She’d gone by foot to pick her daughter up from school and decided to cut by this way just to check. The last two times she'd come by had been a matter of convenience. The first day, when she'd found him here, she had an hour to kill before her daughter got out of her after school club. The second day her daughter had been going home with her friend Lane, and Lorelai's curiosity and concern was peaked enough to see if he had come back to this particular place.

So, when she checked again yesterday in the little time she had, she was worried when she hadn't found him here. Although she tried to tell herself he'd simply gone back to his uncle's, and she shouldn't be worried that a kid wasn't where he wasn't supposed to be, something in her gut remained unsettled for the rest of the evening and throughout the work day. If there was a reason he was coming here in the first place, his suddenly not showing up anymore may not exactly be a good sign. So Lorelai thought he might have still come by yesterday, but she'd just missed him. That possibility unsettled her even more, thinking of him on his own out here, and not only for the obvious safety concerns.

Jess had arrived several moments earlier, not sure whether or not that woman would be waiting on the steps already, or suddenly appear again. He told himself he wanted the place alone - that was the whole reason he'd found it. Somewhere away from school, the town, his uncle. Not intruded on by anything or anyone from this place or this situation. Somewhere all on its own.

When he got there and saw the area was empty he’d shouldered off his bag and left it on the ground, moving up over to the porch and climbing the steps. He’d looked around from that small vantage point and started examining the front of the building, taking in the details that he hadn't paid much attention to before. Then he'd started walking. He didn't feel like reading at the moment, just walking - thinking. Maybe biding his time to see if she would show.

She did.
 
After a long couple moments of him silently pacing and her silently watching, Lorelai's voice came from behind.

"Do you come by here everyday, kiddo?"

Jess didn't stop walking or look up at her question. "I didn't come yesterday," he said.

Lorelai felt the knot in her stomach finally loosen, although only slightly. She watched his small hand run over the porch rail again, floorboards and accompanying crooked nails squealing under the small weight of his sneakers. "Oh," she said, "Why not?"

Jess stopped briefly, back facing her, and then resumed pacing. "My uncle," he answered.

"He's worried when you're late?" Lorelai asked.

Jess shrugged, as he toed a stray piece of wood with his scuffed shoe. "I guess," he said. "He's mad ."

Lorelai smiled. Jess continued walking and she dropped her head, clearing her throat, before looking back up at him. "He's probably right though. I mean, Stars Hollow isn't exactly the badlands, but it's not the safest idea to be wandering around abandoned buildings. And I'm sure your uncle's just concerned cause he cares about you."

Jess stopped, the muscles around his stomach tightening, and his lips pressing together tightly. There it was. She was gonna take this place away from him, cause she, like every adult, knew where they wanted him to go. Knew - and told him - and put him - wherever they felt he should be. For the first time since he'd stepped onto the rundown porch of this old building, he felt like it was about to give out from under him.

Jess reached up a hand and clenched it around the support beam by the front steps, turning around and hanging out from it on the lip of the porch. He fixed his eyes on her's.

"I don't have to listen to you," he bit out, his stomach growing tighter.

As his words left his mouth, he felt his throat grow cold, and saw a twinge of what, for the first time, looked like irritation pass over the woman's face. It was gone almost as soon as it showed, however.

"Well, maybe not," she said, fixing her gaze back at him just as sharply. "But you are gonna have to put up with me." She broke the firmness of her gaze and took a sip of her coffee, keeping her eyes on him over the rim. Jess dropped his arm. "Cause if you want to insist on hanging around here, instead of coming by the structurally sound inn I keep inviting you to, then you can expect some company other than the termites."

Jess looked down at his feet and was silent for a moment. He slid down one step below him and twitched his glare back up at her. "Well, I'm only gonna be here twice a week," he said.

"Very specific."

He let his gaze falter and with more hesitation moved down one more step. "I'm not gonna come by ... the inn," he said, watching her carefully.

"Your choice."

Jess paused and let out a huff of breath, his hair falling in his eyes. "Why don't you just tell on me and make me go home?"

Lorelai's mouth twitched upwards and her eyes softened as she looked at the boy in front of her. "Cause," she said, "for whatever reason, you don't want to." She shifted and scanned her eyes up and down the old building, tangles of overgrown trees trailing its rooftop and afternoon sunlight pin-pricking through the holes in the window screens, quiet and peaceful. "And I know what that feels like. So I'm not gonna force you." She looked back over at him, staring at her, his eyes unguarded. "But I am gonna make sure you stay safe."

She stuffed her empty coffee cup into her purse and walked over towards the porch steps. Jess sat down, his sneakers skidding into the worn area of mud and grass below the steps. "Wanna see something?" she asked, raising her eyebrows playfully. Jess looked up at her for a moment, his cheeks flushed on his small face, and then dipped his head with a single nod. "It's a piece of treasure." Lorelai smiled, reaching into her purse and pulling out a modest, green wallet.

Jess watched as she flipped it open, her brown hair with a faded emerald streak falling across her face as she looked downward. She folded it back and bent down, placing one hand on her knee, and holding it out open towards him, a lopsided grin on her face. "There you go," she said. "My treasure."

Jess stared at the open wallet in her hand, from his place sat on the porch, elbows resting on his knees, and saw a little girl staring back out at him. A photograph was pressed beneath a cheap sheet of plastic inside the wallet, the edges around it worn and faded. It was of a little girl, with straight brown hair, lighter than the woman's in front of him, wearing a sundress with her arms folded behind her back. Her knees were showing from underneath the shadow of her dress, and one was scraped lightly, against her otherwise smooth skin. Her face was rosy and her eyes a piercing blue, wide open and dancing, a lopsided grin on her face to match ... her mother's. She was looking right out into the camera, out of the picture frame and into his eyes.

Jess tentatively reached up one hand and took the wallet between his thumb and forefinger. Lorelai let it go and smiled as he brought the photo closer to his face, his lips parting as he breathed steadily.

She looked like she was laughing in the photograph. He wanted to hear it.

"So," Lorelai voice broke over him and he snapped his eyes back up towards her. "What do you think?" She smiled at him, still bent down, hands pressed into her knees. "Her name's Rory."

Jess looked back at the picture - the little girl his age who lived in a potting shed with just her mother - and then quickly held it back out to Lorelai, a faint blush etched onto his cheeks. Lorelai took the wallet and knelt down in the grass, folding it carefully and opening her purse. "Do-," he started, "Do you always carry that around?"

"Yep," Lorelai responded, tucking it away. "Everywhere I go, my little girl goes with me."

Jess felt his stomach tightening again. He looked up and saw that the sun had sunk far down behind the back of the building, and the trees around them were more shadowed than they had ever gotten to the point of before. "I should go," he said, looking back over at Lorelai, still knelt down in the grass. He didn't get up from the porch.

"You should," Lorelai agreed, also looking around and noting how late it had become. She stumbled upward first, but instead of standing all the way, she sat down two steps up from Jess on the porch. He looked over his shoulder at her and then stood.

"Bye," he said lamely, arms hanging at his side. He could hear crickets chirping at the back of him. Turning around he started to walk out towards the road.

"Hey, so wait, kiddo," Lorelai called softly from behind him. "What two days are you planning to come here?" She smiled brightly in the dimming light. "I'll make sure to put 'visitation with disillusioned small punk' in my weekly planner."

Jess turned back around and watched her eyes sparkling at him underneath the dark porch, piercing blue just like the ones in the photograph. He smirked, standing up straighter. "Not sayin'"

"Alright then." Lorelai answered back, unfazed. "I'll just come everyday."

Jess dropped his half-smile at that, and watched her steadily. She had a job. She didn't have a husband. She did have a kid. And she lived in a shed in the back of an inn. But she was going to come by here everyday. To see him. Jess took a deep breath, his chest heaving above his clenched gut, as she shifted her thin pink lips into a smirk of her own. "Was my spot first anyway," she said.

It was dark where he was standing, along the edges of the shrubbery and under the heavy oak tree, so Jess let a smile ghost across his face, only for a second. Then he turned out towards the road and ran all the way back to his uncle's, to beat the setting sun behind him.

Chapter Text

Inside the small converted office above the diner, Luke moved back and forth across the tight space, his heavy boots pounding on the floorboards. His increasing agitation had gotten him up out of the kitchen chair, now pushed back haphazardly from the table, so that he nearly knocked into it every couple rounds he went pacing across the room. He walked to the far side towards the bed, feet kicking his nephew's clothes that'd been left tangled together on the floor, and then walked back to the other side, shoulder brushing against the wall, before turning around again. He straightened his baseball cap on his head, clenched and unclenched his hands by his sides, and muttered to himself as he went.

"Dammit, Liz," he cursed, as he crossed the center of the room. He couldn't bring himself to curse out, even alone and under his breath, a nine year old boy, however much he was the direct source of his frustration at the moment. After all, it was his sister that had sent the kid here to begin with, and if she just managed to keep a job for more than two seconds it wouldn't have come to this in the first place. Luke turned on his heel and started up the right side of the room again. It wasn't as though his relationship with his sister and nephew had become infinitely more complicated in the last week - not anymore than it had been his entire life - the proximity had just closed a significant gap. Luke liked to keep these sorts of things at a safe distance.

Yet, here he was, pacing up and down his floor, wondering where the hell his nephew was with the dark fast closing in from outside the window above his sink. He glanced out the small window once more, and could barely see the treeline against the dimming twilight. It had been over two hours, the longest Jess had gone before coming home after school. He'd said something about a club, but that was only supposed to last an hour. Luke straightened his cap again. As he passed by the bed once more, Luke's gaze snapped to the telephone on the far counter. Although Jess had shown a pattern of deliberately coming back late from school - and Luke had almost complete confidence that the cause for his wearing a path across his wooden floor right now was a unique brand of early onset adolescent defiance that must be genetic - he still couldn't ignore the growing anxiety in his stomach that told him to do something other than wait for the kid to come to him.

As he paced back by the phone he took a deep breath and stopped, reaching out a hand. It hesitated, hovering over the receiver. Cop cars swarming around a small town looking for a missing child was exactly the kind of drama he didn't need in his life right now, and he was sure Jess didn't either. Although it might just scare him into sensibility. Or make him close off even more. Luke rubbed a hand over his face, feeling his stubble that had grown out more than usual in the mayhem of the past few days.

The lock from the door around the corner clicked open.

At the sound, Luke closed his hand and moved it away from the phone, turning around. He took two careful steps to see around the corner and there was Jess, his clothes and hair rumpled like he'd just been running, slipping through the door and closing it behind him. When Jess turned back to face the inside of the room he stopped abruptly at the sight of his uncle. Luke suppressed a visible sigh of relief.

Jess turned his face away and walked into the room, taking swift strides towards the table. Luke followed him with his eyes, not saying anything. He'd come back. Nothing seemed wrong ... he just - Luke rubbed the palm of his hand against the fabric of his jeans. He just was late, as usual.  

“Are you hungry, Jess?”

Jess dropped his book bag by the table, where it slumped empty against the table leg. Luke watched as he walked over to the side of the room where he was standing, bypassing the mattress setup on the floor for him, and hopping up onto Luke's own full size bed, propping himself up against the pillows. Luke leaned back against the counter. His whole body was still tense from moments earlier, and he didn't want to grill his nephew about where he had been. He'd gone 'round and 'round with him in words and shrugs enough times the past few days and it hadn't worked. If anything, it'd driven him to stay out even later.

He watched as Jess opened one of the books always glued in his hand and started reading.

Luke let go of the kitchen counter and moved forward. “Have you got homework to do? Do you … I dunno, need help with any of it?”

Jess flipped the page of his book.

Luke rubbed the back of his neck as he glanced over at the formless book bag on the ground, his eyes fixed to its creases and dark blue fabric as if it was going to start answering him in Jess’ place. “You should probably finish your homework before dinner. Is there anything you feel like eating in particular? I can probably … cook whatever.”

He looked up as Jess shifted his back against the pillows and propped the book up against his knees.

Luke took a deep breath and renewed his momentum. “And I was thinking tomorrow going out, you know if you want to come and help pick it out after school – going out and buying a -”. The telephone went off; it’s ringing filling the whole small room with an audacious abruptness as if no one had been speaking the moment before.

Luke took a few steps back towards the counter and let it ring one more time before picking up the receiver. “Hello?”

Across the room, Jess flipped the page of his book again and shifted his peripheral vision, just for a moment, to see his uncle leaning against the counter heavy on his right arm and dropping his chin to his chest. “Hey, Liz.” Jess quickly turned his gaze back to the book, his grip tightening around it of their own accord. The off-white pages wrinkled up under his thumbs.

“Hey, big bro! How’s everything going? How’s my baby?”

“Good.”

“He settled in okay?”

“Yeah, he’s -,” Luke stood up straight and walked a few paces over to the sink, the phone cord trailing behind him. “I mean, he’s been here over a week, so he’s had time to settle in.” His voice unconsciously dropped lower as he turned his back and gripped the edge of the sink. “As much as he can,” he added.

“Well, come on!” Liz cooed from on the other end. “Let me talk to him, let me talk to him!”

“Uh,” Luke turned back around and looked over towards the bed, where Jess was in the same position as before, eyes fixed on his book. “Right.”

He shifted his gaze between Jess and the base of the phone resting on the counter a few feet away from the bed. With a sigh he picked up the base in one hand and walked over to the bed, his boots pressing down against the wooden floor, and cord connecting it to the wall lightly smacking the ground behind him. He held out the receiver. “It’s your mom, Jess.”

Jess raised his eyebrows in response, but did not move his face up from his book.

“Jess,” Luke said, shifting the phone in his palm so the speaker was facing towards his nephew. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Cool,” Jess said, turning the page.

Luke furrowed his brow and jostled the phone in Jess’ direction. “Well, take the phone.”

“Nope,” Jess popped the word out, sliding his hand against the left page of his book and turning his head slightly to start on the right.

“Jess,” Luke said, taking a breath. “You asked me if your mom had called. Well, she’s called now. You're home. She wants to talk to you. Take the phone.”

“No.”

“Jess,” Luke said, his voice stiffer.

Jess turned the page again.

“There is no way you are actually reading that fast. What do you want me to tell her, Jess? Take the phone.”

Jess let go of the book and it slid down his lap. He reached out and wrenched the phone from Luke's palm with both his hands, throwing it as hard as he could against the far wall. The cord stretched out and Luke lost his grip on the base of the phone. The base hit the ground at Luke's feet the same time the receiver crashed against the wall just above a shelf, between a picture frame and a baseball, sending both tumbling down with it, then smacking hard against the floor. The ball rolled away towards the kitchen and the phone ricocheted into the corner, crying out with a sharp crack as it landed.

Luke stared at the base of the phone on the ground. Then stared at his nephew. Jess still had his eyes fixed ahead, anywhere but towards him.

“Alright, that’s it.” Luke yanked Jess up by the back of his shirt, the effortless way he had by his book bag the first day he’d come home from school an hour late. He dragged him out of the bed, the book tumbling down with him, skidding towards the table, landing face down and pages bent onto the floor. Jess’ feet tripped over themselves, trying to find footing as his uncle dragged him over into the kitchen area.

“Hey!” Jess shouted, just as Luke planted him hard on his feet by the table and spun him around by his shoulders. He got down on his knee and held Jess on either side by his arms, inches from his face.

“You can’t do this! You can’t act like this! You can’t throw things! You can’t give me one word answers! You can’t ignore me! You can’t act out!! You can’t come home late from school and not tell me where you’ve been!!! You can’t throw things !” Luke jostled Jess in place, still holding him firmly by the arms. “I cannot do this if you are going to act like this!! I can't ! I don't know how to do this and I can’t !”

Jess’ shuddering breath reverberated up through his chest and shoulders, where Luke felt it shiver against his palms. He stopped.

Luke loosened his grip and looked at Jess’ face, feeling as if his eyes had passed right through him as he'd been shouting moments before. His nephew was looking right at him, and just underneath his eyes his cheeks were damp, but Luke couldn’t find any traces or glimmering of tears above them. His eyes were completely dry, and his mouth was contorted and chest constricted, as if he’d accidentally let the tears slip out and urgently stopped himself from letting anymore fall just as quickly.

Luke let go and sat back heavy on the soles of his shoes. He took a heaving breath, looking down. “We have to do this together, Jess, or it’s not gonna work.”

Jess said nothing, his arms glued to his side, still staring at his uncle.

“Hellooo?” a voice echoed faintly from across the room. “Hel-” a beeping cut in between, “Helloooo? Is anybody there?” Luke sighed and stood up, walking over to the phone. “Can you h – ear me?”

He first picked up the base, which had fallen face down, and examined the loose square of the number pad. Then he wrangled up the cord trailed over the floor and walked over to pick up the receiver. He turned it over, seeing the cracked casing on one side. “Big broooo?” Luke slowly lifted the receiver to his ear, “Liz?”

“Anybody there?”

Luke sighed, meandering back towards Jess, clicking the hook switch as he went, but Liz’s voice still echoed quietly out of the phone.

“Well …” her voice trailed as Luke came back to stand in front of Jess. He looked over at him, still standing there, motionless the same. The phone made a strange clicking noise and something rattled inside the base as he turned it in his hand. “Oh well,” Liz’s voice filtered out. Jess’ body recoiled at the sound of her voice and his eyes shifted downward, as Luke stood above him with the phone.

The white noise emitting from the phone abruptly went quiet, singling that Liz had hung up. Luke laid the base and receiver separately down on the kitchen table. “Well, you definitely broke it,” he said. Jess’ arm flinched again. Luke watched his nephew’s small frame, his messy dark curls and still damp cheeks, and he felt every muscle in his body rapidly lose all the tension from before.

“Look, Jess. I understand if you’re mad at your mom.”

Jess shifted quickly, as though an invisible force had just let him go, and looked up at his uncle, his eyes hard. “I’m not,” he said. He moved and picked up his bag and his book from on the floor by the table, then went out the apartment door, letting it close behind him.

“Je-,” Luke started, taking quick strides after him. “You can’t just go-” He stopped, as he saw through the window, Jess sitting down at the top of the steps. His bag was in his lap, and his book was balanced on his knees on top of it, his hands smoothing out the bent pages.

After a moment Luke cracked the door open and turned back into the apartment, leaving him be.

Chapter Text

Three days passed before Jess stepped off the front steps of Stars Hollow Elementary and veered left towards the abandoned building again. The first weekend he had since he'd started school in this town was inconsequential. Keeping a wide berth around his uncle, he fixed himself cereal in the morning, hunkered down to watch cartoons, and lay on top of his makeshift mattress reading for the rest of the afternoon. His uncle was occupied with fixing up the hardware-diner below. The door to the apartment was kept open and Jess could hear all the tinkering and moving of furniture drift up from downstairs, along with the occasional warmer spring breeze through the window. The weather was fickle right now, caught between the last lingering breaths of cold and beginnings of warmer seasons. Jess would turn about on his mattress, kicking the throw blanket on and off his legs every few minutes as the temperature shifted. His uncle passed in and out of the room like the small gusts of wind themselves, brushing up against Jess' consciousness and adjusting his level of comfort, but never staying for too long.  

Sunday came and passed pretty much the same and then it was back to school on Monday. He escaped to the library again during recess and just nearly regretted it, the otherwise cool air of the room feeling stuffy around him, while screams of the other kids echoed from outside the tightly closed windows. Ultimately, Jess decided it was better to settle down and read about kids exploring up and down rivers, bare feet in the mud and mosquitoes at their necks, rather than sit by himself on the side of the asphalt. When the final bell at last rang, it took a lot of his self-control, what little practice he had using it on anything other than not opening his mouth, to head back to his uncle's instead.

Tuesday he indulged himself. He glanced at the library doors open to invite in new book club members, as he ran down the hall and out of the school.

"Is that a new book?" Lorelai asked, walking up along the side of the porch through the grass.

Jess glanced down at the green hardback in his hand, a different one from the single paperback he'd been able to bring with him in the move. "Yeah."

Lorelai nodded as she moved to sit down on the step beside him, dusting it off a bit before doing so. "You weren't here yesterday."

Jess' breath hitched somewhere still deep in his lungs, a breeze ruffling the pages of his book out from under his loose fingertips. "No ... wasn't."

Lorelai nodded again, that same shrewd and casual gesture. They sat in silence for a moment, Lorelai looking out into the lawn in front of them, chin in hand, and Jess pressing down the pages of his book as he looked ahead as well, eyes focused on the ground a few feet out. He wondered how long it would take before she figured out the patterns of which days he was coming. When she did, he thought, she'd undoubtedly not keep her word of dropping by every day just in case he would be there.

"Soooo ... how was your weekend?"  

"Normal," Jess answered, turning back to the book in his lap and flipping backwards through the pages he'd already passed through. He'd read this book once before, back home. When he'd picked it up in the library yesterday afternoon it'd smelled familiar, the way all books do, but now all he could smell was the flowers and wood grain around him.

"Well, that's no fun," Lorelai chimed.

Jess bit his lip and turned to her. "Then how was your weekend?" he asked, tensing his muscles as he stared at her, hoping his tone passed well enough for sarcastic.

Lorelai just beamed back at him. "Wonderful! There was a big event at the inn. A group that flew in had a little shindig out by the lake in the evening ... Saturday. Rory and I sat out there and watched. Across the water was all lit up with lights, music playing. It was a lot of fun."

Jess squinted at her. He knew what she was doing - trying to get him interested in coming by the inn. Even though they'd agreed - or she had - that he would keep coming here, she still wanted to convince him otherwise. Which wasn't fair.

He turned away from her sharply and licked his lips before responding. "Well, my mom called." They were the first words out of his mouth without really thinking and he almost immediately regretted them. His mom calling had sounded like a good comeback for all of the two seconds it took to say it, the image of this woman and her daughter sitting out by a lake during a party burning in his mind, but now it felt distinctly stupid, and his eyes fell to his shoes.

"Oh?" Lorelai asked. The genuine and tender cheerfulness in that one syllable made him feel even stupider. "That must've been nice. Did you tell her about your running off after school to falling apart houses?"

"Um, no," he said, fingers brushing across the pages of his book. He swallowed. "I didn't actually ... talk to her."

"Oh." It was quiet between them for a moment. "Did something happen?" Lorelai's words seemed to fold open slowly, like turning back the first page of a book.

Jess frowned, opened his mouth to speak and then stopped, taking a deep breath. He looked up and blinked, raising his voice above the quiet hesitancy of before. "Didn't want to talk."  

"Well, that's alright then. You're not a talker." Lorelai smiled at him even though he wasn't looking, but he caught it out of the corner of his eye. Another second passed and then she spoke again, more subdued. "I think I can count the number of times I've spoken to my mom on the phone, in the last ten years, on one hand, actually." The corner of her mouth dipped on one side and her eyes looked distant for a beat. "Yeah, probably. One hand." She inhaled deeply and cupped her hands in her lap, looking back over at Jess. "At any rate, I know what it's like to be mad at your mom."

Jess wrinkled his nose and frowned. "He said that, too."

"He?"

"My uncle." Jess turned on his spot, eyes catching onto her anxiously. He dropped his hands from his book and pulled up his knees so it wouldn't fall from his lap. "I'm not mad at my mom!"

Lorelai blinked. "Oh, okay."

"I'm not! S-," he paused and caught himself, taking a deep breath to loosen the tightening in his chest. "She is gonna come back an' get me in a few weeks. She just has to take care of some stuff, like find our new apartment ... an' --... and then I'm gonna go back home."

Lorelai didn't respond and he shifted in his spot on the porch, stretching out his legs and kicking the heel of his shoe against the step below him. "I just have to be in this stupid place until then."

"Alright. Not mad ... at your mom." Lorelai bunched a hand in her curls, lolling her head his way. "Are you mad at your uncle?"  

Jess' brow crinkled together. "No?"

"Well, you can't be mad at me then. I'm a delight. So ... all the anger's just for show? Channeling Tommy Shaw?"

Jess fixed his eyes on her wearily.

Lorelai sighed through to a closed mouth smile. ".... Do you like your uncle?"

Jess diverted his attention to the patch of grass between his knees. After a length of silence between them, the next cooler breeze to sweep by making Jess let out an indiscernible shiver, he simply shrugged. As his shoulders came back down he felt slightly as if he'd betrayed the apathetic gesture by imbuing it with too much honesty.

More quiet passed between them, until Jess looked up. "Why d'you get to ask me all the questions anyway?"

Lorelai grinned. "Ask me anything you like."

Jess tucked his tongue in his cheek and shifted his eyes upward, thinking. "What do you do at the hotel?"

"Ah!" Lorelai said, raising her arm victoriously and making a fist. "Well, first, it’s an inn, not hotel. But I just got promoted, in fact! Event coordinator now." She put her arm back in its resting position and shook her head, curls falling in front of her eyes, "Phew! I worked for five years as a maid and then was promoted to housekeeping manager and now event co--," she bought both her index fingers together, dragging out the vowel, "--ordinator! Climbing that corporate ladder and all that."

"And you’re still living in a potting shed?"

"Hey! It takes a lot of money to buy a house, y’know. And it’s a very nice potting shed. You got something against that?" She tossed her glance his way and scrunched her nose at him.

Jess looked away and stretched out both arms on his lap, upturning his palms in a noncommittal gesture. “My uncle lives in an office. It looks like a tiny, tiny apartment but my mom told me it use’ta be my grandpa’s office.”

"Hm," Lorelai hummed. "See, unorthodox living arrangements must be all the rage."

"I don’t even have a bed yet," he offered.

"What?" Lorelai said sharply, fixing him with a wrinkled brow and frown. "Where do you sleep?"

"On a blow up mattress," Jess answered, not seeing what she was so startled about. He’d had a bed before at his mom’s, of course, but this wasn't a "permanent arrangement" anyway. Him living here, that was. He wasn't sure about the bed. But since he wasn't going to be here that long, it'd probably stay a blow up mattress, so he also didn’t see much reason to care.

"Kid’s gotta have a bed," Lorelai muttered to herself, shaking her head. "I have a potting shed and my kid’s still got a real bed. Your so-called uncle needs a talking to."

Jess said nothing, hoping Lorelai wouldn’t try and come find his uncle. Jess had a feeling he’d get in trouble for lying if his uncle knew what he was really doing after school. Plus, Jess thought, as he looked out at the peaceful scenery around him, light sprinkling down through the cover of tree tops and broken down awnings ... this was definitely … something he liked having to himself. Even like this, with this strange talkative woman insisting to sit beside him, the building was still here, away from everything. It was still misshapen and secluded, still dusty and broken down, and still a house that hadn't been a home for a very long time. He peeked over at the woman beside him, tilting his head and considering her. He had another question to ask.

"Why do you live in a potting shed?"

Lorelai twitched her gaze his way, the lightest spark of uncertainty in her eyes before they twinkled mischievously again. "Why not?"

Jess tucked in the corner of his mouth and nodded, the question tumbling down through his mind and sticking somewhere inside. A lot of ‘why not’ answers came to him.

He thought that living in a shed sounded ridiculous, because people were supposed to live in houses or apartments. And if you were living in a shed at a hotel, you should probably be trying not to live there anymore. But Lorelai made it sound like it was just their home. He also wondered why you would live in a place like that if you had a job, which she did, and she had even just told him she’d been promoted. Most of all, he thought you shouldn’t live in a potting shed if you had a kid, just like his mom had him and was off looking for a new real place for them to live right now.

Yet, even as all these different objections came readily to his mind, none of them seemed right. None of them seemed like they would answer his question of ‘ why’ well enough if she answered to them. He supposed she just looked like someone who would live in a potting shed, and sit around on the porches of old buildings in the afternoons, and not tell on kids who weren't where they were meant to be.

So he needed a better reason to ask before he got an answer. That, at least, was fair. 

The afternoon melted away, the sunlight on the trees and pavement and sides of building getting deeper in shade and thinner in breadth, as the air grew cooler. Jess made his way back to his uncle's. Luke didn't comment on his being an hour late, the ruse of his book club having held up, and simply nodded to him from where he was working as Jess headed upstairs. Once there he flopped belly first down onto his mattress, a puff of air displacing with his arrival. Jess rolled over so he lay on his back in the dim light of the small room. Contours of afternoon sunlight spilled over the dark wooden floorboards and furniture, catching on the edge of the mattress at the foot of his uncle's bed. Jess watched the ceiling fan above him turn slowly, the burnished oak slats spinning round in time with his thoughts.

He turned over in his makeshift bed so he was lying on his side. He lifted his hand in front of his face and spread out his fingers, watching the empty space in between them.

A little girl his age, and a mom with sometimes green stripes in her hair, who sat around on abandoned house porches in her spare time, while the two of them lived together in a potting shed behind an inn.

It was strange …. and familiar. Jess was working it around in his head, trying to understand why even if it all sounded so strange and displaced, it also sounded like something out of one of his books. Those books that made him feel like he could hold an entire world inside his hands, fingers wrapped around each side from start to finish.

Jess let his hand fall to the mattress with a soft thud, his palm sticking to the plastic material it was made of. Somewhere ... at the edges of all this ... was a porch protected by treetops and solace, the kind of quietude and presence where he could lose track of the time he had to be here . The time he had to spend until he was going to go back home.

That building was one thing when he’d found it. It was just an isolated, falling apart, abandoned home. It was still like that. Nothing about its facade had changed. Except for Lorelai being there.

Jess turned his head and placed his hand under his cheek, staring out into the apartment and letting his thoughts drift through his mind like the coming and going of a tide. He was going home soon and everything would be back to just the way it was before.

He looked at the two books tossed on the floor in front of him - the one brought with him from home and the one from the library. He wouldn’t return it.

The creaking of the fan above him and the humming of the refrigerator filled the room. His vision lapsed in and out of focus as his eyelids grew heavy. The shadows morphed and crept westward across the floor. Just as his eyes closed, another thought occurred to Jess, and he bolted upward onto his knees. His eyes snapped open and the blow up mattress bowed and whined under his weight. He sat, looking ahead in the room, the moment easing through his limbs and tightening in his stomach. That girl ... was probably in the same school as him.

Jess took a breath. Something about the very notion was unsettling. He shifted and sat down on the mattress with his back up against his uncle's bed behind him, the blanket pooling around his legs. He moved carefully, but this thought went around in his head faster than the thoughts before it, only repeating over and over.

That girl - Rory - was probably at the same school.

Chapter Text

Jess pulled back the door and slipped inside the library. He shut the door tightly behind him, just as the second bell rang and another stream of kids rushed out of their classrooms towards lunch. He sighed, leaning on one arm against the door frame, feeling like he'd narrowly dodged a stampede. The hastened shuffling of the 4th grade classes between rotations of lunch and recess left little time or room for him to slip upstream through the crowds and make this way to the library. Technically, he was perfectly allowed to be in the library instead of on the playground right now, but not without a teacher's permission, which he had no plans to ask for, and not for as late as he was letting that time bleed over into his next class period. 

Jess walked up through the shelves, nudging the protruding spine of a book with his hand. He would skip school altogether if he could get away with it. He observed the titles as he walked, shoes shuffling against the thinly carpeted floor and pressing his fingertips along spines as he went, as if he could tell a worthwhile read just from the touch. He needed to find a good selection of books for today, taking three or four at a time if he could. There was plenty of room in his backpack. He’d only managed to secure one book the first day he’d made it to the library, but the clock on the far wall ticked off minutes in his brain, as it grasped at memories of titles and authors he needed to find. 

As he walked, his mind wandered with him up and down the stacks. His hand ran lazily along the books in a serpentine pattern that matched the periodic rise and fall of a gnawing feeling in his stomach. The feeling had been there ever since he’d realized it lying up in his uncle’s apartment yesterday afternoon. The sinking, swishing, sharp feeling in his gut hadn’t gone away. 

Jess ran his hand along the spine of a thin volume on the shelf, the cover linen and deep purple. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time . 

He'd been jiggling his legs, nerves jumping up and down his spine all day long, waiting until he could escape to the library. He knew what she looked like - he'd seen her picture. Rory. The name felt round and heavy inside his head. 

He pulled the book off the shelf and placed it inside his bag. 

She wasn't in his class and he'd tried really hard not to look if she was in his lunch period, but after he'd taken the last bite of his sandwich and was left listless under the stern gaze of lunchroom monitors who wouldn't let him leave early, it was hard to help it. He'd scanned his eyes up and down the rows of lunch tables and hadn't seen her face, or that light brown hair, or keen blue eyes. The relief sunk right through to the bottoms of his feet.  

Jess traced his way backwards through the rows of shelves, back up towards the authors at the beginning of the alphabet. The colors of the books in this section blended together in clumps of brown and black and dark blue hues, until one stood out in faded green. J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan . 

Jess was glad he could hide in the library now, avoiding the landmines of the playground and his peers yet-to-be-identified faces. He did not want to see that girl. He did not want to recognize her face from that photograph, anymore than he wanted to go by the inn.

He slid the book off the shelf and opened it, the threaded spine creaking as he bent it back gently, the dusted grassy acidic scent with a waft of vanilla drifting up to his nose. The well-worn smell brought him back to the feeling of being in his apartment with his mom, lying on his bed and holding a book open over his head. His mom would come home later in the afternoon and tell him she'd brought back dinner. He'd put Peter or Wendy, or whoever it was that paragraph and that day, carefully back on the little bookshelf in his room and go join her in the kitchen, knowing the book would be waiting for him when he returned. There was no more comforting a feeling in the world.  

Second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning.  

He dropped the mossy green book into his bag and continued down the row, grabbing Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH as he went. This was all he had right now, until he went back home. Until his mom put everything back to how it had been, with him back beside her, and this restless feeling in his stomach gone. The memory of his shelves filled with all his books was just within his reach. No motel lobbies, no desperate phone calls, no reading over and over the single book he still had with him. 

Drifting a ways down the aisle another title caught his eye. Jess peered into his unzipped bag at the three books he’d already taken, glancing at Treasure Island sitting on the shelf in front of him. He dared a quick look back at the librarian's desk in his sight, seeing no one there again, and set his bag down at his feet. He pulled the book off its place on the shelf, gliding effortless out from between the two volumes squeezed on either side of it. He opened it up and read over the familiar first few lines. 

Only a few weeks back it had all disappeared out from under him so quickly. The last thing he remembered from before was the bus ride, wedged up against the window with a duffel bag on his one side and his mom on the other side of it. He’d fallen asleep with his head leaning at a weird angle against the edge of the seat and then he’d woken up here. But this town wasn’t his town and this school wasn’t his school. His bed wasn’t even his own bed. Not anymore. His mom … 

Jess snapped his head up just as the bell signaling the end of recess chimed three times. He looked back down at the words he’d been reading, then folded up the book, the pages pressing neatly together. From outside the library windows, he heard the dim bustle of kids being shuffled back to their classrooms. He was supposed to be with them. The sinking feeling in his gut came back with a sharp renewal as he faced the library doors and thought about the chances of seeing that girl at school. He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want to look. 

He’d fallen into such a deep, strange sleep on the bus to Stars Hollow that he didn’t wake up until he was already in his uncle’s apartment, and his mom had already left to go home again. 

Jess let the last book fall from his hand and into his open backpack, the hardcover thumping against the other books nestled in there on its way down. That was four. He zipped the bag up securely and listened as the noise died down out in the hallways. 

Jess estimated he had a few more minutes before he was definitely too late getting back to class - and he had a few more weeks he had to be here before he was going home, where everything would be back to normal. He'd be in an apartment above New York City with his mom, and his shelf would be full of books, and smiling photographs of little girls seen from abandoned porch steps would get to remain just that.    

When Jess came back to Luke's straight from school there was a large box right in the middle of the room. A box itself wasn't strange, considering how many deliveries were being made to the store now on a regular basis, but it was for it to be upstairs in the middle of the apartment. Jess gripped the brass doorknob as his line of sight was dragged to the far left of the room, where his uncle was knelt down among long pieces of wood, metal springs, and loose screws rolling along the floor.

"Dammit," Luke cursed, just as a connecting plank of wood he'd been holding up fell a short few inches and smacked loudly against the floor. Jess turned his hand against the doorknob and then let his arm fall to his side, so that the doorknob sprung back into place loud enough that Luke heard. His uncle turned awkwardly from where he knelt on one knee with the other leg half crouched, nearly falling backwards. He had a screwdriver in his hand and stared silently at Jess, building project momentarily forgotten, as his nephew stared impassively back at him.

"Oh, hey," Luke finally got out, wetting the roof of his mouth. He gestured his screwdriver at the half assembled item in front of him. "I ... got you a bed."

Jess leaned to the side a little to peer around his uncle. It looked like half a bed right now, maybe, if he squinted. But from his new angle he could see an actual mattress pressed up against the wall on the other side, and a new set of light blue sheets to fit a twin sized bed, and the old orange comforter from his blow up mattress folded on top.

"Cool."

Luke turned back fully towards the bed, one hand holding up the piece of wood he was currently trying to work a screw into. He scratched at the curls of dark hair above his temple with the handle end of his screwdriver. "Yeah, I know there's not much space, but this side of the room is pretty empty and I figured ... you know, a bed." He trailed off, pausing for a moment in the awkward silence, and then moved to start working on turning the screw again.

Jess listened to the squeaking sound of the metal and the periodic grunting of his uncle before making his way back over to the right corner of the room. The blowup mattress had already been deflated, so he crawled up into his uncle's bed without taking off his shoes. He dumped the small collection of books he'd gathered earlier in the library out onto the bed and sat cross legged in the deep dip of the worn mattress. He set about stacking and re-stacking the books in different categorizations of size, and title, and color. As the tension in his mind fell back with the rhythmic flow of his hands passing over his new collection, he remembered Lorelai being upset about him not having a proper bed. He wondered if he should tell her that he did now, the next time he saw her, if only because she'd seemed so strangely worried about it.

Jess thought about books and Lorelai and having a bed, while he listened to his uncle's intermittent cursing on the other side of the room, and the anxiety he'd felt throughout the day started to ease away just enough that he eventually fell asleep on top of the pile of books. He woke up in the later evening, looking around and rubbing the sleep from his eyes, finding himself somehow tucked away under the soft orange comforter of the newly assembled bed and his books stacked on a nightstand nearby.

Chapter Text

Jess had stared out from underneath his comforter at the books placed on the nightstand for a long while. He felt the soft giving mattress underneath him and the scratchy starched sheets that hadn’t been washed since coming out of their packaging. The orange comforter billowed around his neck and lower face and as he stared Jess felt the urge to tuck all his limbs and most of his head in under the bedding as if something in the dark would get him only if he exposed any part of his body below his watchful eyes. 

There were seven books total stacked on the nightstand, all but one of them from the school library. He could hear his uncle’s snoring on the other side of the room. Jess glanced quickly at the alarm clock, seeing that it was still quite early in the evening, but his uncle was an annoyingly early-to-bed-early-to-rise kind of guy. Jess wasn’t sure he could fall back asleep right away, but in lieu of taking a book from the nightstand and reading it under the dim light of the bedside lamp or a flashlight under the covers, he simply stared at them. Something felt unconscionable about how they had ended up there. His uncle had moved him while he slept, even taking the shoes off his feet without Jess having woken, and likewise had moved his books while he was sleeping as well. Jess very much doubted his uncle had flipped the inside covers to see that the card wasn’t stamped to indicate them being properly checked out, or if Luke had even noticed they were books from the library at all. And yet, Jess had a weary feeling in his body like he was in danger of getting caught. Or maybe it wasn’t fear of getting caught, but he still felt his anxiety spike at the thought of his uncle handling his books while out of his sight. 

Jess sat up, scanning his eyes across the dark room, and then slowly depositing the comforter and bed sheets from bunched over his shoulders. He leaned over the edge of the bed, looking down at the shadowy space underneath it. Then he shifted and grabbed the books in two handfuls off the nightstand, flopping down on his belly and leaning precariously over the edge of the bed, stuffing the books underneath it. He tossed all but one so they were shoved far back into the dark and then rolled himself back onto the mattress properly, one book still clutched in his hand. He lay with the covers tossed aside for a moment until the realization that all his limbs were exposed once more had him quickly pulling the orange comforter over his whole body. He turned on his side and lay curled up in the near complete dark of the covers, except for some pinpricks of moonlight making their way through the threadbare areas of the fabric. He tucked the one remaining book in his hand close to his chest and closed his eyes, soon drifting off to sleep. 

Lorelai sighed, killing the engine in the jeep and leaning on the steering wheel. She’d pulled over to park on the side of the back road leading into downtown from the inn. This area was still fairly on the outskirts of town, but not as far as the inn—about halfway between the two. Before the jeep, it was about a half hour walk, once she'd found the shortcut by the abandoned house and the little footbridge over Potter's creek, although both were in a precarious state of near collapse. She gripped the wheel tighter, took a deep breath, and let both go at the same time. It had been a long day. There had been some especially pernicious guests at the inn and she'd gotten another call from the bank about her loan application, saying they just couldn't accept it at her current salary. 

The thing is, Lorelai had never imagined she would still be in the potting shed almost a decade on, Rory having just turned ten last fall. On the plus side, there had been leftover strawberry shortcake after the Hartford Ladies Society luncheon at the inn today. She grabbed two plates wrapped in tinfoil, balancing them precariously in one hand while she pulled the keys from the ignition with the other and pushed the door open with her foot. 

She looked down at the gap between the floor of the jeep and the unpaved ground, glanced at the wavering plates of cake and the perilous high heels of her shoes, before kicking the heels off and jumping down onto the pebbly road in her stockings. She grabbed up the heels in the same hand as her keys before tossing them into the passenger seat, then slamming the door closed, and beeping the keyfob three times for good measure. She needed to start bringing a pair of sneakers to change into. She shuddered at the thought of the trek she was about to make and the rusty nails sticking at odd ends out of a splinter-laden porch awaiting her. She didn’t have many professional outfits to begin with and she could only imagine with horror the runs that were about to appear all up and down her stockings.

Transferring one of the plates to her other hand, she began the march down the dusty pathway. She had no idea how she’d ended up in this situation, carrying leftover cake to go visit some sullen kid who she knew nothing about. The situation was absurd on the face of it, but then again, she’s sure Mia putting up a teenage girl and her baby in the back potting shed had looked even more absurd. That the teenage girl was now in her late twenties and still living in that same potting shed made the whole affair a tragicomedy in two acts that even Samuel Beckett would scratch his head at, meaning Lorelai couldn’t help those familiar, creeping feelings of doubt, inadequacy, and shame coming up. What if, what if, what if . Nevertheless, she was determined to beat them back down with a good dose of projected self-confidence and a few more dozen jokes about her childhood. No, there wasn’t time to—at least outwardly—feel sorry for herself. There was too much on her plate. She chuckled, as she looked at the tinfoil covered cake she was carrying, the abandoned porch now in view. 

She set down the one plate beside her on the step and unwrapped the other, running a finger through the icing. It didn’t take long for him to show, sporting the usual glowering but thoughtful expression on his face, his eyes flickering in a way that made her wonder if he was simultaneously disappointed and relieved to see her sitting there again—as if she was meant to be confirming a suspicion of his, routinely failing to do so, and there was no way yet of knowing if that was horrifying or comforting. 

"Ah, there you are kiddo. I was wondering if you were coming." She gestured at the cake with her frosting stained index finger. "One of the good things about working at a place that serves food—there's always more than enough of it. My friend made the cake and an extra 'test' cake as she called it. Honestly, I think she just wanted an excuse to try out a new recipe. Our new concierge complained, like 'I don't know what we're gonna do with all this cake'." Lorelai shook her head in mock irritation. "I said, you eat it of course! It's cake!" She held the plate out towards him. "See? These are the kind of shenanigans and bounties you are missing out on."  

"I'm good," Jess said, not yet moving to sit down. 

All at once Lorelai got a very serious look on her face. "Absolutely no one is good without cake." 

"I am.” She watched him look around the space with a strange scrutiny, then reach into his bag to pull out a book as he always did. He was so quiet. She’d never met anyone for whom she couldn’t talk enough for both of them, but so often his silence seemed louder than her words. 

Lorelai took another bite from her own plate and hummed. "More for me then. Cake is, in fact, if you didn't know, one of man's greatest inventions. Next to pop tarts and liquid eyeliner."

She watched as Jess seemed to eye the different features of the building around them—looking at the broken windows, the screen door, the underside of the porch. "What're are you looking for?" 

"Nothing." He rocked back and forth on his shoes avoiding her gaze. "I just need a place to put it." 

"A place to put it?" she echoed. 

"Yeah," he said, stepping back and looking up at the building. He held up the book in his hand. "I don't have a bookshelf." 

Lorelai gave a small laugh. "It'll just get dirty or torn up if you keep your books out here. I mean I understand the desire to have a secret reading clubhouse or whatever but it'd probably be better to keep them at your uncle's." 

Jess looked down at the book in his hands, his fingers sliding against the cover of the paperback, its pages tanned and browning. "Never mind," he said with a huff, walking back over to where she was sitting, plopping roughly down on the porch step beside her. "It's stupid. I don't care if they get dirty and torn up." 

"You're the complete opposite of my daughter then. If you even get a little nick on one of her books she starts reading you your Miranda Rights." 

"You said the inn you work at has a library." 

"Oh yeah, it does." 

"So you live there, you said. So you have bookshelves." 

"Ah, well, the inn has bookshelves. But I mean, Rory doesn't keep her books there. They're for the guests, and even though a part of me thinks maybe Mia would let her, I don't want to impose too much, plus our potting shed's our little house. But Rory doesn't actually have a bookshelf for her books there. We keep them in the bottom drawer of an old dresser we have. And along the floor and walls at this point. It's a growing collection so we're slowly being edged out by all the books. Well, no, we’re quickly being edged out by all the books. It’s becoming a dire situation." 

Jess let his fingers sprawl across the bent and worn cover of his book and she could tell he was thinking. He was always thinking. At the end of all that internal contemplation, he just shrugged, having gone somewhere deep inside himself and come up with nothing he wanted to share. Lorelai wondered not for the first time, what is going on with this kid? She wondered if anyone had ever thought that about her, or if she’d disabused all potential mystery by always going at a full tilt into rambling about all her personal problems, even if those problems masqueraded as humorous anecdotes. 

"So anyway, with the great book tsunami of 1995 on its way, I've been thinking it’s time to leave the old homestead ourselves." 

Jess finally looked over at her. "What'd'ya mean?"

"Well, getting a house. Someplace for all those books."

She watched as Jess frowned and she couldn't help but feel a tension building in the air, although she had no idea what she’d said that could have put it there. Jess set his face neutral again, leaning forward with his hands planted on the steps and looking up at her. "You're not gonna be a potting shed person anymore."

Lorelai laughed. "I might be a potting shed person for only a little while longer, but I promise you I'll take all the personality of a potting shed person with me wherever I go." She sighed, a gentle smile falling across her face. "That place is my home. Not just the shed, the whole inn. It's a place, but ... it's probably the most important home I'll ever have." 

Jess stared at her a moment longer, then he turned and opened his book, not saying another word. And as hard as it was, Lorelai followed his lead.  

After getting through the next few chapters of his book, through which Lorelai remained mercificully quiet for the most part, Jess returned to Luke’s and swung the door to the apartment open. He leaned his weight into it so it opened up into the room with one jolted movement that made his uncle startle from his place sitting at the kitchen table.

“I’m back,” Jess said, standing in the doorway. “Is this diner ever going to open?”

Luke worked his mouth open and closed for a second, staring at his nephew from where he sat hunched over a skewed pile of invoices and insurance paperwork that put a crick in his neck just by being there. “Close the door,” he said at last, turning back to his work and pressing the heel of his hand against his temple.

Jess kicked the door shut behind him and walked over to his bed, tossing his backpack on top of it. Glancing to make sure his uncle’s back was still to him, he bent down by the edge of the bed and quickly reached into his bag to stuff the book underneath the covers before standing again.

“And yes. It is going to open,” Luke’s voice came from behind him, strained, tired, and laced with practiced gruff annoyance. He was still looking at the papers spread in front of him, head pressed against his hand. “Soon, probably.”

“Soon,” Jess echoed, narrowing his eyes.

“Soon,” Luke affirmed, sitting back in the kitchen chair, the wood creaking under his weight, as he tossed the pencil in his other hand onto the table. He spread his legs out and folded his arms.

Jess scrutinized his uncle’s back for a moment longer and as he sat faced away from him he slid open the nightstand drawer by his bed and slipped a couple books in there underneath some papers. He looked back at his uncle a moment longer and when no more came of it he turned and climbed up on top of his bed, laying so that his wavy black hair fanned out against the light blue pillow and he could stare up at the ceiling above him. Sooner would be better than later. He still had his doubts, but the place was slowly transforming to look a bit more like a diner, instead of a carved out hardware store with a stove and coffee mugs in it. Or, maybe more accurately, it was starting to look a bit more like the dumping grounds of a restaurant supply catalog.

Decals had been plastered up in the windows, bright yellow cursive lettering spelling out such enlightening and enticing messages as “good food”, none of which Jess knew to be inside yet, given how many plain scrambled eggs with milk he was having for breakfast. And of course, there were the boxes.

Boxes upon boxes of remaining items had been coming to the doorstep, at such a rate and number Jess would never have guessed so many things needed to be had in a diner. He’d step out the front door to get to school in the morning and have to navigate around a collection of packages at his feet, only to come back and find new ones to climb and hop and shimmy over in the afternoon. With a couple of the larger deliveries he’d made more than one graceless fall, balancing precariously on one foot while the other leg was up over the box behind him, hand reaching for the doorknob and crashing forward with the door swinging open, the bell jingling to mock his sprawled arrival.

There were packages of napkins and menus and salt shakers, napkin dispensers and to-go cups and coffee sleeves, stir sticks and filters and cutlery bins, oven mitts and fry baskets  … and the food. Jess wasn’t even sure where all the food was coming from. It seemed to just appear within every corner of the building and just as soon disappear into the back storage room, making it a significantly harder place to escape to for reading. Stacks and cans and bins and jars of nonperishable items, with so much of it staring at him that Jess didn’t want to eat anything that required condiments for at least a year. He’d been present for his uncle going on more than one rant about the disgusting eating habits of people, while rings of giant tubs of peanut butter and dill pickles surrounded his feet, as if his future customers were going to be pairing the two together.

There was always so much packing tape and cardboard on the ground that some days Jess could barely see the tile floor. And Luke made him carry it all out to the back dumpster, in between having him dash around placing new delivery items in a barely recognizable organizational system, spread across the shelves and tabletops and the floor. They were both drowning in a sea of the miscellaneous while Luke heaved and sighed and rubbed his neck, looking like he wasn’t enjoying this business very much at all, before it even opened.

Jess was not above lying and saying he had homework to get done, backing up towards the stairs as he said so and dashing up them as soon as his uncle distractedly waved his hand. Well, the having homework part wasn’t a lie, the getting it done … not so much when he had a slowly growing collection of books stamped “Property of SH Elementary ” hidden underneath the hanging comforter of his new bed.

Jess was more than ready for the place to open and be done with it. But then people would be there, swarming around the otherwise quiet room, and navigating through crowds of townies would certainly be worse than piles of sugar packets. Who knew how long it would last anyway. Jess didn’t know much about starting a business but his mom had started one out of the back of a friend’s hair salon once, selling terribly knitted scarves and custom made pouches, and that had lasted all of a month. While his uncle admittedly seemed more prepared, his mom had at least had her own sign.

“So,” Luke said, uncrossing his arms and getting up from the table. Jess turned his gaze to watch his uncle dragging a chair over towards the bed. Luke turned it about and sat down with his arms across the back, demeanor seeming to have suddenly shifted to a more cheerful one. “What day do you think we should open?”

Jess eyed his uncle from his position and then flicked his eyes back up to the ceiling. He didn't particularly have the energy to answer anymore than honestly, so he thought about it for a second before opening his mouth. "A Sunday. Cause then people will come ... after church." Luke quirked an eyebrow at him, leaning in on the back of the chair. Jess sat up. "People seem like they go to church here."

"That is ... true." Luke gazed off to the side as he thought. "That's actually a good idea, Jess. So, what do you say? You gonna help me out on the first day—this Sunday?"

Jess' face twitched as he pressed his hand down into the comforter, his dirty sneakers bunching up the sheets at his feet. This Sunday? That was three days away. "Do I get paid?"

To his uncle's credit he looked taken aback only for a second before responding. "Um, sure. I'll give you five bucks."

"That's not even minimum wage."

Luke sat back, a frown teasing down the corner of his mouth. "How do you know what the minimum wage even is?"

Jess shrugged.

Luke rubbed the knuckles of one hand against the palm of the other, frowning and then shifting his expression to neutral. “Okay, I’ll give you ten bucks. If you actually help.”

“Sure,” Jess said, laying back down against the bed. He continued staring at the ceiling, hands folded against his stomach, and Luke eyed his nephew for a moment before getting up and going back over to the last of the paperwork he had to finish. The time at which the diner was ready to actually open had honestly snuck up on him, but there was no use putting it off, especially when he needed the income even more so with a kid under his roof. He’d hoped the prospect would at least excite Jess a little. Maybe helping him out on opening day would be ... engaging. He sighed, picking back up the stub of a pencil he’d been using (all his good ones seemed to keep vanishing), and sent up a small prayer hoping everything would go smoothly on Sunday. 

Chapter Text

Jess was woken up by the sound of running water and slamming doors and a few mumbled curses, so he rolled over in bed, bleary eyes focusing on the alarm clock on the far desk. It was 4:20 am. On Sunday.

Jess closed his eyes again, his head heavy with sleep, with a vague thought that he might be dreaming. That is until he felt a large figure looming over him and popped an eye open to see his uncle standing there. "Get up, Jess."

"What?" he croaked out.

"Get up," Luke repeated, walking over to the sink and shutting off the water. "If you want time for breakfast and you want your ten bucks."

Jess closed his eyes again and next felt the cover being pulled back from tucked around his body. "Hey!"

"Come on, Jess." Jess focused his eyes on his uncle and saw the frown deeply embedded on his face and anxious eyes darting around, hands rubbing together. His voice sounded worried and excited at once, but Jess couldn't puzzle that out right now. It was 4:20 am. He rolled over and pulled the covers back up, all the way over his head.

"No."

"Jess ..." Luke placed his hands on his hips.

"I’m a little kid," Jess said, somewhere between a mutter and a whine, words muffled by his comforter. "I need sleep." 

Luke rolled his eyes. "You sleep enough. Come on, it'll be fun. You agreed to this. I would get up way earlier when I was younger than you to go fishing with my dad."

Jess buried his face against his bed, reaching up for his pillow, wondering why his uncle was talking so much. Eventually he heard him move away, footsteps echoing throughout the small room, from one side to the next, doors and plates still slamming, hearing a frying pan starting to sizzle on the stove. The smell of eggs reached him under the covers. After a few more moments and squeezing his eyes shut so tightly it was giving him a headache, Jess couldn't ignore the racket his uncle was making any longer, and he sat up in one motion, throwing the covers off and kicking them away from his feet, face scrunched up sleepy aggravation.

He sat there blinking for a moment longer, until his brain caught up with his body, and he let himself slide out of the bed. Making his way over to the kitchen table he rubbed sleep out of his eyes, as Luke produced two plates of eggs and dashed over to the far desk. He grabbed a pencil and notepad, tucking them into his back pocket. "Eat up," he said, walking back over and sitting down. "Something special for today."

Jess stood and wiped his nose, examining the plate of eggs. There were dashes of red and lumpy white in them and they smelled like garlic. Admittedly, it was an appealing smell, and he slid into the seat, picking up the fork. "What's in 'em?"

"Cream cheese, garlic, bit of tomato," Luke answered around a mouthful. He took a hurried gulp of milk next, and Jess felt this was a very offensive act of hypocrisy so early in the morning, since Luke had chastised him on multiple occasions for "scarfing down his food". He was too tired to comment on it though. Jess pushed the food around on his plate before spearing a lump of egg with his fork and taking a bite. The sharp mixture of the garlic and cream cheese zinged up his nose and through his mouth, livening his senses almost immediately. He swallowed and blinked. It tasted great.

He started scraping the food into his mouth more eagerly, aware now that his stomach was grumbling. If he had to be up so early, at least there was good food. True, it was still eggs, but much better than the bland scrambled ones they'd been eating almost exclusively for the past weeks, with exotic flavor breaks for fiber bran and sugary cereal every couple days. Maybe his uncle could run a decent restaurant after all.

"Alright," Luke said, clapping his hands and then dusting them off on his pants. Jess looked up at him, hunched over and fork halfway to his mouth. "Finish up, get dressed. We have to open by six and there's still some tables to set." 

After he finished eating and deposited his plate into the sink, Luke having already headed downstairs, Jess thought about just crawling back into bed, but his curiosity got the better of him. He threw on a fresh t-shirt and jeans and stamped down the stairs, being met by the distinct smell and gurgling sound of coffee brewing. It was still dark out but the sun was just beginning to pink the horizon. Luke set him about putting out napkin dispensers and bottles of ketchup immediately, while he prepped in the back—a place that Luke had deemed off limits to Jess because there were "knives and an oven back there". Jess pointing out that there were knives and an oven upstairs as well did nothing to shake this rule. Just as the clock had ticked over to half past five and Jess had glanced up to make sure his uncle wouldn't notice if he wiped some salt he had spilled on the table just off onto the floor, he saw a woman standing framed in the glass panel of the front door. The place wasn't supposed to open for another thirty minutes, so Jess wasn't sure if he should let her in. She was an older woman, her hair short cropped and graying, with an expensive looking blouse and necklace on. Jess stared at her for a second and she arched an eyebrow at him, a playful smirk on her lips with a question in her eyes. Jess shouted back for Luke.

His uncle emerged from the back, halfway through asking him what he needed, when he saw the woman standing there. Jess watched his uncle’s face light up almost instantaneously, looking a little surprised but with a toothy grin that Jess was pretty sure he'd never seen before. Luke made his way over to the door and swung it open.

"Mia!" he said, standing back so she could step in. "You know we don't open until 6 AM."

The woman waved her hand dismissively at him, as she stepped inside and surveyed the room.

"Oh?" she said, her voice smooth and refined. "And did you really think I wouldn't be the first customer on your step when you opened up this place?" She turned to Luke, smiling. "I'm not letting any other ragamuffin beat me here." 

Luke smiled back, holding out his arms and giving her a quick tight embrace. "I never doubted it for a second."

"Oh, hush," she said, waving a hand again. "And figure out what excellent meal you are going to serve me."

"An omelette?" Luke asked, tucking his hands in his back pockets. He looked about as anxious as he had since he'd woken Jess up, but his posture was a bit more relaxed.

"With a coffee and side of oatmeal, I suspect." Mia moved over towards the far table by the window, one down from where Jess was standing, salt still scattered across the surface.

"I'll whip up something extra special," Luke said, turning and ducking into the back.

Mia situated herself in the seat and then looked around her one more time, eyes finally landing on Jess. "Hello, young man."

Jess just stared back at her, trying not to look as wide-eyed as he felt.

Luke came back around with a mug and coffee pot in hand, pouring some for their first customer. "Oh, uh, this is Jess. Liz's kid. He's staying here for a while." Mia nodded, as if that small explanation made perfect sense. "Say hi, Jess," Luke directed at him, voice tense.

Jess continued to stare.

Luke turned back to Mia, placing the coffee pot down on the table. "Um, sorry. He's ... adjusting." Jess snapped his eyes over to Luke and grimaced. Mia looked back over at him and Jess felt his cheeks heat up at being watched with such a careful gaze, like she knew exactly what he was about.

"Oh, it's fine," she said at length. "He's just like you when you were that age. Shy and observant." She picked up her cup and took a sip, smiling over the rim at Luke. "He looks so much like William, too."

"You think so?" Luke said, looking skeptically at Jess.

"Oh, yes. We knew each other as kids, you'll remember. He had a mess of dark hair and that same intelligent, troublemaker spark in his eye."

"Well, troublemaker is certainly right," Luke snorted.

Jess grimaced further, not enjoying the experience of people talking about him like he wasn't there. He glanced down and brushed the errant salt off onto the floor.

"Hey, Jess," Luke said, looking back at him. "Go get some cream from under the counter, on the left side."

Jess couldn't immediately think of a good excuse as to why he shouldn't do this, so he went back behind the counter and bent down, finding the bin of creamer on the far end. He came back with the packets of cream cupped in both his hands and carefully dumped them on the table, watching the conversation continue to play out between his uncle and this woman. He'd never seen his uncle smile so much in the course of a moment. They were talking about boring things right then - about the business and Mia sharing what seemed to be her own experience. Resigned to the fact that he wasn't going to get any answers as to who this woman was exactly, Jess went over and climbed on top of a bar stool, chin in hand as he played with a straw laying there, swinging his legs. Noting the time, Luke went in back to finish making Mia's meal.

The clock ticked silently between them, Jess resolutely not looking her way as he flicked the straw back and forth along the counter top. Her voice floated over to him eventually however, still startling him despite having suspected it was coming. "So, how do you like Stars Hollow so far, young man?"

Jess turned in his seat and stared at her, feeling a little defiant. He didn't like being called 'young man' either. "It sucks ," he said, voice hard on the last syllable. It came out harsher than he intended, in both words and tone, but he didn't regret it. Nevertheless, he hoped Luke didn't hear him from the back, and quickly darted his eyes that way to make sure.

He didn't know exactly what was supposed to happen when you were rude to old ladies, but he didn't expect her to chuckle. "No, I'd think as much. Your mother was never one for it either."

Jess narrowed his eyes, definitely not liking this woman talking about his own mother to him. Like she knew her. Which, logically, she most probably did, but that felt far too strange to Jess, the idea knotting his stomach. Him and his mom didn't belong here.

"But you must be a smart boy," she continued, eyes sparkling as she looked at him. "You'll get on."

Jess' defiance deflated at her words and he frowned down at the floor.

"You will," Mia said, a firm smile in place, voice warm and commanding at the same time. Her eyes pierced him with a fierce assessment and gentle contemplation. "You've been getting on by yourself much of your life already. I can tell. I've seen the ones like you show up here before."

Jess tilted his head as he still looked down at the floor, and Mia took a moment to add some cream to her coffee, stirring it in and having another sip. With a satisfied sigh, she placed the cup down, and glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. "And if I know anything about this town - and I think I do, having lived here as long as I have - it won't let you get away with that ‘getting on by yourself’ for much longer."

Jess looked back up at her, brow crinkling, unsure what her words meant. Just as he was trying to work them around his brain, repeating what she'd said back in his head, Luke appeared with an omelet and bowl of oatmeal and three more people showed up at the front door. Luke let them in, switching the sign from closed to open, and from there the people started coming in droves, all eager to see the new diner on scene in their town. The place quickly became overwhelmed with the hustle and bustle of people, noises of cooking, chatting, and silverware scraping against plates. Mia left pretty soon after people started filing in, and Jess never got to question her as to what she meant - not that he would have. But without her presence, her strange words soon faded from his mind.

As it turned out, Jess' most important instruction of how to help out on the opening day very quickly became "stay out of the way". He ended up sitting up at the foot of the stairs to the apartment, curtain pulled aside as he watched the busyness of the diner unfold in front of him. He went upstairs to grab a book at one point, but came back down to read it on the steps, pausing every now and then to watch. It was interesting to watch the morning rush thin out and a mid-morning lull settle over the place, interrupted by a sudden onslaught of noon customers when church let out. The thought crossed Jess' mind just as the church going crowd was evening out, that Lorelai might show up here. She might even have her daughter with her. The realization still made his stomach drop with anxiety, so he scooted back up by two steps and hid himself slightly behind the curtain, making sure to keep a watchful eye.

Things remained uneventful, at least to Jess' eye. His uncle was rushing back and forth everywhere, between the kitchen and the tables, talking in rushed breaths more words than Jess thought he'd ever seen out him. Aside from the hurried pace of everything, people seemed to be enjoying their meals and nothing had crashed or spilled. So at least Jess thought things were going smoothly, until a little way into the afternoon lull, four or five people still left eating, Jess saw his uncle run past the stairs and into the storage room, holding his stomach and looking pale.

Jess stood up on the step, book in hand, watching past the doorway of the storage room. Luke didn't come back out. He looked through the diner and no one else appeared to have noticed his uncle's mad dash into the back. He climbed down the stairs, pushing the curtain aside and letting it catch on his shoulder, as he just stood on the threshold between his safe spot on the steps and the diner. Biting his lip he stepped out all the way and walked into the back.

Once he crossed over into the cool storage room, walking a little ways in until the noises of the diner faded behind him, he didn't see his uncle anywhere in sight. He moved forward, crossing through mazes of crates still laying on the floor and past the first few rows of shelving. A strong unpleasant scent, one that vaguely reminded him of the cream cheese and garlic eggs from that morning, hit his nose. "Uncle ... Luke?" he called out, turning around the corner of the next shelf. Suddenly, he saw his uncle kneeling on the ground, his head pressed against the cool concrete, next to a small puddle of vomit.

Jess' first instinct was to cover his nose, until it hit him that his uncle was barely moving, only breathing sharply in and out. So he ran up to him and shoved his shoulder, panic climbing up through him. "Hey!" he said, shoving his shoulder again. Luke didn't look up. Jess stood back, his mind racing. Should he call 911? He’d almost called 911 once before when he’d thought someone had been breaking into the apartment back in New York, but it had just turned out to be his mom’s boyfriend coming home late and a little bit drunk. He should go get someone from the diner, right? He should get someone and tell them his uncle was sick.

Just as he was about to run back out into the front, Luke let out a loud groan and hefted himself up on his knees. He slumped back against the wall, his baseball cap falling off his head and brown curls damp with sweat. “Nearly passed out" he started, blinking up at Jess. “Smacked my head.” 

Jess blinked back down at him. He watched as the smell of his own sick hit his uncle's nose and he sat up quickly, holding his head a second later. "I threw up," he said glumly, a statement more to himself than his nephew standing next to him. "I threw up and smacked my head and nearly passed out."

"Huh."

Luke groaned again and sat forward, resting his elbows on his knees and cradling his head in his hands. "Oh god," he muttered. "There's so many of them, it doesn't stop! And the food! There's so much of it. People are pigs."

Jess didn't know how to respond to that, besides a sarcastic comment that he'd chosen to run a restaurant, and sarcasm probably wasn't what his uncle needed right now. So he bent down and picked up the baseball cap, holding it out to him.

Luke tilted his head in his hands and faced his nephew, watching his blue cap waver in his hand as he held it out to him. That's right. He realized then that he didn't really have a choice. The last several hours had been the most stressful that he could remember in months, the lead up to this moment nothing compared to actually being in it. He had no idea how to run a business. His dad had never even had a checking account. The hardware store had been failing at the end of his dad's life, and it was pretty damn hard for a store to fail in a town as small and loyal as Stars Hollow. Maybe there was just a curse on their family—and here he was thinking he could just decide to turn it around into a successful diner? Luke let out an involuntary groan again and pressed his hands against his eyes.

Except it wasn't something he just thought anymore. It wasn't just a crazy idea he'd had that he could bail on if it got too hard. He had to take care of this kid, for however long it took for his sister to get her life back together.

Lost in his own thoughts, stars still swimming behind his eyelids, Luke felt a soft fabric flop down onto his damp hair and realized a second later Jess had haphazardly replaced the cap on head. He opened his eyes again to look at his nephew.

"I'm gonna get a mop," Jess said. He tramped off around the corner towards the very back of the storage room.

Luke took a deep breath and bracing himself with one hand on the shelf next to him he stood up on wobbly legs. He held his stomach and took a couple more deep breaths. When Jess reappeared, dragging the large mop behind him, Luke mustered up a small smile. "I'll clean it up," he said, taking the mop in hand. "Go back out front and if anyone needs anything tell them I'll just be a moment."

Jess shrugged and turned to leave when Luke stopped him by clapping a hand on his shoulder. "Hold on sec." Luke steadied himself, leaning a bit on the mop, other hand still propped on Jess's shoulder. He shook his head. "You're, uh … thanks for helping out. You've been a good kid today."

Luke sighed, turning over the new cordless phone in his hand. It seemed convenient enough but it had only come in a sickly light blue color and the casing was made of cheap plastic. He'd bought it at the same time he'd gotten Jess' new bed, to replace the phone Jess had broken. In the meantime, he'd been much more inclined to use the phone down in the diner, but today's call couldn't be made in the middle of his open business. It had taken a while but he'd found some extra help that wouldn't drive him up a wall, and he'd been stretching it thin as it was, so he was grateful for the moments it gave him to field phone calls like the one he'd received four days ago, if he wasn't so grateful for the phone call itself.

Apparently, Jess wasn't doing so well in school. A call from his teacher informed him that he was failing to turn in half his homework and doing pretty poorly on what he was turning in. She'd also mentioned that his nephew had been arriving to school late and if it happened for much longer she'd have to send home a note and it would go on his record. Luke wasn't even sure why a fourth grader needed a record.

He sat down at the kitchen table, phone still in hand. He'd assured the woman that Jess should be getting to school on time. Of course, he couldn't take Jess to school himself because the times overlapped with him needing to open the diner. It had crossed his mind that maybe he should switch around the hours and open the diner later, but he'd miss out on a whole slew of early breakfast crowds that way and he certainly couldn't afford it. There was a no win situation for him there. The only real option was talking to Jess and trusting him to get in line. 

Somehow Luke doubted talking to him would work given their past track record. But this wasn’t an issue he could just leave alone. It was with a formidable amount of cowardice that he hadn't approached his nine-year-old nephew about all this yet, which is why he was now sitting down staring hard at the rounded number pad of a clear plastic blue phone.

So he dialed.

It picked up after several rings and Luke leaned one elbow back against the table. "Liz?"

"Luke?"

"Hey, Liz." He took a deep breath. "Glad I could get in touch with you."

"You just caught me!" she said, a smile evident in her voice. "I was about to head out the door."

"Oh," Luke adjusted himself more comfortably against the back of the chair. "Well, I wanted to talk about ... uh, Jess."

There was a pause and a shifting on the other side of the line. "What did he do?"

"Nothing. Er, I mean, not nothing but ...," Luke rubbed his free hand along the back of his neck, lowering his voice, "I guess he's not doing so well in school here?" He trailed off the statement like a question, concern lacing his tone. When there was no response for several moments he held out the phone to make sure it was still on. "Liz?"

"Is that all?"

"That's - whad'ya mean is that all?"

There was a rustling over the line. "You called me for a reason, right, big bro? Cause I do have somewhere to be."

Luke resisted the urge to ask where, fairly certain he'd be disappointed by the answer. "I'm new to this, you know. I just wanted to, I dunno, see what you usually do when this kinda stuff happens. How do you discipline him? He won't really talk or listen to me. And I don't know -,"

"Whoa, whoa, brother," Liz laughed. "Slow down."

"It's just -," Luke stopped, taking a deep breath and leaning forward, his voice dropping, "I don't know what to do."

"Don't do anything."

Luke sat back again, frowning. "Don't do - what?"

"I mean, don't stress yourself out about it big bro. Just let him be. You don't have'ta be so involved!" She chuckled. "I know you, you'll give yourself an ulcer."

Luke opened his mouth to respond and then stopped short, thinking over what his sister had just said. "Do you mean you want to talk to him about it?" He rubbed a hand along the side of his face, sighing. "I guess, well, yeah. That'd be good. But I still think if he's staying here I should be involved when stuff like this comes up. It'll be a while, I'm not just ...," Luke looked up around the room, at the bed he'd put together for Jess against the far wall, one of his small jackets thrown across the arm of the couch, boxes of sugary cereal Luke himself would never buy sitting on the kitchen counter, and the feeling of the weight of the new phone in his hand, "I'm not just babysittin' him."

"Listen, bro," Liz started, voice distracted, "Jess gets into moods and things, he's just a kid like that. If you don't give him any attention for it, it'll all blow over. Whatever's going on with his school will work itself out."

"Liz," Luke said, his voice straining with the frustration that inevitably arrived at any point in a conversation with his sister, "someone has to do something!" She started to say something but Luke cut her off, rubbing the back of his head and getting up from chair, pacing across the floor and mumbling, "Maybe a tutor or something, I mean, this kind of stuff is actually important, Liz."

"Oh, come on, Luke," Liz admonished through the line, "A tutor! Really? Don't put that kind of pressure on him. Some kids just aren't that good at school."

"Yeah, but he can’t just be making Ds in half his classes. He has to be encouraged to at least try.”

"Well, have him pull them up to a C if you have to,” Liz half-laughed, “He’ll be fine. You and I weren’t the brightest crayons in the box, remember? And we’re doing okay. It’s not like he’s gonna be a rocket scientist or anything important.”

Luke shook his head. “I’m doing okay now,” he said. “It’s yet to be seen with you.”

"Oh, don’t pull that with me, big bro. I’m doing the best I can."

"Yeah, yeah," Luke trailed off. "It doesn’t make sense that he’s doing so bad though. He reads so much."

Luke couldn't think of a time he hadn't seen his nephew with his nose in a book. Even when he was spending Saturday mornings lazily watching cartoons on the TV, there'd be a book laid open across the arm of the chair that he'd pull into his lap and read during the commercials. And as much as he seemed to hate going to school or apparently doing any work related to it, he was even in an after school book club. Luke started to give voice to that fact, wondering aloud about the problem in front of him, but stopped himself short, having a suspicion that sharing this kind of information about Jess would be something only to elicit a laugh from his sister. It was her voice through the phone that brought him out of his thoughts.

"So? Dad liked to read, too, and he ran a hardware store. And you had to keep track of his budget when you were barely passing algebra. Doesn’t mean he’s smart."

Luke stopped his pacing across the room, grimacing. He honestly didn't know if his nephew was smart. Maybe he wasn’t in the traditional school sense, but given what he remembered from his own youth the kid at least read books a heck of a lot more than the average nine year old boy. Not to mention, he acted clever at times to the point of it being infuriating, and always seemed a little quieter and a little older than maybe he should. Luke didn't know—Jess could very well not be smart enough to do well in school. But even if he wasn't smart enough, he was still all those things Luke could see—clever, quiet, obsessed with books—and that couldn't count for nothing. 

"Well, he’s something," Luke muttered.

"A smart-ass?" Liz laughed.

"Liz …"

"Oh, I’m just joking, don’t be so sensitive." Luke made his way over towards his bed and it creaked under him as he sat down, rubbing his face with his one hand and letting out a heavy sigh. "Stop stressing yourself out big bro. Just let him be. It’s not like I can afford to send him to college or anything anyway."

Luke grunted, folding one arm and tucking it under the other with the phone pressed to his ear. "I'll look into what's going on with him."

"Do whatever you gotta do," Liz chimed, jingling her keys in her hand.

Luke leaned forward. "Yeah and you do what you've got to do. Have you found a cheaper place yet? Or a job?"

Liz let out an exasperated breath. "It's not so easy finding a cheap apartment in New York City, you know." Luke bit his tongue on asking why she'd needed to run away to the city in the first place. "And landlords don't like kids, causing damage and stuff. I'm lucky that Jay let me back into this place, telling him I was shipping Jess off to his uncle probably helped."

"Telling him Jess' uncle was going to cover your next few months of rent probably helped," Luke muttered, wondering how much damage Jess could have caused when he’d probably been holding himself up in his room to read.

"I'm lookin', I'm lookin'," Liz placated, "Don't worry."

"I always worry."

"That's your problem, big brother! Don't let Jess give you more grief than it's worth with this whole school thing."

Luke shook his head, ignoring her comment. "You should call me in a couple days. You know, to check in on the job hunt and Jess and everything. Maybe talk to him."

"Sure." 

"Three days," Luke said, trying to make his voice sound severe. "Around the same time, alright Liz?"

"I got it," she responded, "Love ya', love to Jess -" and just as Luke started to say something else he heard a click before the line went dead.

Chapter Text

Jess never liked school. He might have liked it once when he first started kindergarten, but that was when school consisted of making hand-turkeys at Thanksgiving time, and adding simple numbers using dried beans, and being able to read earlier and better than everyone else in his class, while being a bit proud for that instead of just bored. But by the time first grade came around—and he saw his teacher’s face twitch in mild annoyance anytime he corrected her spelling, or used too many big words, and there was less down time during which he could read whatever he wanted—from then on him and school had a well-founded mutual grudge towards one another. It only seemed to have more against him the older he got, deciding that every boy in his class (and some of the girls) should always be taller than him, not to mention louder than him, and rougher than him, and more inclined to teasing than him. No one had bothered him at Stars Hollow Elementary so far, but he kept very far away to himself, so shoving and name-calling had been traded out for awkward glances and covert whispering.

Jess still liked his school in New York better than here. At least in New York everything was familiar. He knew things about his school in New York, even if they weren't always great things. For instance, he knew that the third fluorescent light above his seat was burnt out, and that the second water fountain on the east hallway didn't work, and that the left door handle to the library would stick if you didn't yank it just right. He knew that the bottom of the stairs to the playground flooded when it rained and they served chocolate pudding in the cafeteria on Fridays, except the last Friday of every month which was tapioca. He knew that the clock on the front office wall was three minutes fast, and the secretary would let him take more than one piece from the bowl of hard candies on her desk while he waited, because he knew his mom would always pick him up after school, but he also knew she would always be at least a half hour late.

Jess liked knowing all these things. He could count them up and down in his head and by their recitation he was able to make it through each day. He didn't know any of these things about Stars Hollow Elementary. The sticking point was that if he started to find out any of those sorts of things then it would already be too late. He had to remain oblivious to the ins and outs of this school and town and all its people, because he wasn't going to be here for much longer. If he didn't know anything about this place then the sinking feeling in him made sense because it meant he wasn't supposed to be here.

For now, however, here he was. So instead of being outside during recess—getting to know how wide the gaps between the monkey bars were, or which swings creaked if you pumped too high, or any of the kids he was stuck here with—Jess was once again in the library, choosing books off the shelves to discreetly tuck straight into his backpack. As he was doing so, he wondered just how long he could stay after the bell for class rang. He'd been pushing it further and further each day. Maybe today he could stay late enough to actually get some reading done.

At five minutes till he found a spot hidden away from view of the librarian, hunkered down with his back pressed to the shelf, and made stilted way through paragraphs and pages, glancing up at the clock every few minutes. At ten past he made his way back to his classroom, wondering if they had even noticed his absence, and heard the teacher through the door going down the roll call. He stood outside the door for at least a minute before he pushed his way inside, just as she was repeating his name the second time. At fifteen past the hour, he was back in his seat in the last row of the class, kids twisting and turning their heads around to look at him, and Mrs. Kendall vainly trying to get their attention back to the board, all the while staring Jess down.

At the end of the day, Jess was sitting on his hands in his seat, while all the other kids were beginning to pack up. 

"Alright, class," Mrs Kendall announced. "Have a good afternoon, don't forget your homework. And Jess, can you stay after for a moment?"

A chorus of "oooohs" sounded up from the boys in the classroom and Jess glowered, lowering down further in his seat. The teacher admonished them quickly and the taunting faded into subdued snickers right into the final bell ringing triumphantly throughout the classroom. As all the kids rocketed out of their seats, Jess stayed in his, and watched the teacher at the front of the room shuffling her papers around her desk. Finally the room was cleared out and an eerie silence settled over the rows of empty desktops.

"Come up here please, Jess."

Jess slid out of his seat, metal chair legs scraping against the floor, and shuffled his way up to the front. The long desk sat squarely before Jess, flat wooden surface stretching out between the two of them. Mrs. Kendall slid a paper across.

Jess licked his lips and looked down at it, the boxes of black ink all jagged and faded—a form that had been photocopied several times over. The crisp new ink of Mrs. Kendall's pen filled in the blanks. "What is it?" he asked.

"A late-arrival-slash-absence form. You need to get your guardian to sign that and return it by tomorrow, Jess."

He continued to stare down at the paper.

Mrs. Kendall sighed and tapped her pen against the desk. "You skipping after lunch today is another matter we had to record, but you've arrived late to school six times already in the last week and a half. Is there any reason you can give me for that, Jess?"

Jess pinched the ends of his jacket sleeves between his fingers and palms, blinking once. He felt the next sentence form easily in his head, like a line he was reading out of a book. "My uncle is late taking me to school."

Mrs. Kendall pursed her red lips and looked thoughtfully at Jess, who darted his eyes up to her and then quickly back down at the form. It was a lie. He walked to school on his own each morning and Luke always pushed him out of the diner in plenty of time to get there. But he meandered along the way purposefully, shaving off as many minutes as he could from the school day. The lie settled heavily in the air between him and the dark jagged-lined paper below. 

It didn't feel wrong to Jess for him to tell a small lie, not anymore than it had all the times he’d been doing so with teachers and neighbors and other kids since he was six years old. No, he didn't have lunch money this week because he kept forgetting it on the table at home, not because it wasn't there. Yes, he saw the new episode of Power Rangers on TV last night, not that he'd woken up to his mom yelling two days ago because the TV was stolen. No, he smelled like cigarette smoke because he'd walked by some teenagers in the park, not because his mom's boyfriend hadn't gone outside like she'd asked him before she left for her night shift. Yes, he was going to the book club after school twice a week, not sneaking off to an abandoned building. 

He was used to lying—that didn't feel wrong. But it felt wrong somehow to now put that lie on Uncle Luke.

"Well, you need to get this signed." Mrs. Kendall pushed the paper forward, and Jess still stared downward, not moving his arms from his sides. She let out another sigh and Jess thought he could smell the peppermint gum on her breath. "I know changing schools can be hard, Jess. Especially in the middle of the year. But I'm sure lots of kids here would be willing to be your friend, and you'd have a good time in class, if you were a little more open and put in the effort." She nudged the paper forward another inch. "Sometimes we have to take responsibility for our own situations."

"Huh." Jess reached out and swiped the paper off the desk, looking up at Mrs. Kendall. "Can I go now?"

Mrs. Kendall retracted her hand and pursed her lips together again, even tighter. "Yes, you can go." Jess curled the paper in his hand and walked towards the door, ignoring his teacher's belated umpteenth reminder to get the form sighed as his back retreated around the corner.

Jess slung his bag off his shoulder and roughly dropped it at an angle against the side of the porch, the weakened wood of the support beam rattling as the bag hit against it, heavier than usual with a number of library books still tucked inside.

"Whoa, there," Lorelai said, straightening up from her spot already seated on the steps. "What's up with you?"

Jess paused, frown firmly set in place on his face, one hand tucked into his pocket and the other one still grasped firmly around the sheet of paper. He was determined with a childish aspiration to keep an ill mood over the later events of the school day. Lorelai's questioning expression searched his own, poised primly on the edge of the top step, and Jess grappled with the inclination he felt to tell her, like a sinner at a confessional, and the more realistic assumption that he'd get himself in trouble. His hand uncurled from the paper he was holding, bunched and wrinkled from his tight grip, and he held it out for her.

Lorelai looked from his open palm to his down turned face and reached out a hand, taking the paper.

She read over the note.

Jess dropped his arm and stuffed both hands in his pockets as she read, unsure why he'd had the compulsion to give her the note intended for his guardian, and even less sure of why he felt the vague unease of guilt and trepidation as she read it now.

Her eventual response caught him off guard.

“Wow," she said, "I don’t think I started skipping classes until I was at least thirteen. You’ve got me beat.”

Jess glanced up at her and then moved sideways away from the steps, ducking his head. It wasn't a scolding, but somehow what she said still felt like an admonishment.

"Let's see," she hummed, looking back over the note. "You skipped homeroom and half of geometry after lunch period. Three times, homeroom. Late after lunch everyday of the week." She licked her lips and pressed them together, and Jess watched her, seeing a slight tension in her movements, but not hearing it in her voice. "Why'd you skip?" she asked, words falling with lazy curiosity out of her mouth, jaw moving against her cupped hand. Jess stayed silent, looking away from her. "Where did you go?"

"Library."

"Oh, of course."

The quiet continued on between them and Jess kicked at the side of the porch.

"Did you skip school back in New York?"

Jess titled his head to the side before giving it a small shake.

Lorelai let out a rough sigh, and Jess felt it tinge up through his spine and shoulders, looking stiffly down at his feet. "You just don't want to be here, huh?"

He shuffled in place, arms still hanging limply at his sides, and didn't look up to meet her eye. The space of grass and mud between him and her sitting on the porch step stretched out longer in front of his eyes.

"You know, kiddo, I know what it's like to hate where you're at. I really do."

Jess waited for her to finish, but nothing else came and she looked a little tired. So he kicked out his leg and nudged the step more gently, before turning and picking at a peeling piece of paint on the porch railing. The paint chipped away easily and dirt worked its way under his fingernails. "Do you hate it here? This town?”

Lorelai sat up straighter, dropping her hand from cupping around her chin. "No ... No, definitely not."

Jess worked another line of thin paint off of the porch, squinting his eyes as her words. It made sense that she wouldn’t hate it here, given how pleased she seemed with every word she spoke about it. No matter how strange he felt it was—how different and backwards from things he knew—she seemed really happy. The joy she enthused was almost inescapable, filling up the small space they sat in, trying to escape and break out beyond the realms of this space, infecting ideas and places that almost certainly made him frustrated and sad—a daughter at his school, a woman at his uncle’s diner, an inn and a potting shed in this town. Her happiness took shape in the things around him that he was determined to hate and tried to push the gnawing, horrible feeling in his gut out, back down the street, out of this school, out of that diner, out of this town, all the way back to his home and his mother beside him. He couldn’t stand it.

"That doesn't make any sense." He saw Lorelai shift and tilt her head inquisitively towards him. “I would hate it if I lived in a shed.”

Lorelai bit her lip, a small smile between her upper lip and teeth, that Jess thought meant she had somehow found his logic more amusing than pointed.

He pushed on, feeling as though he had to defend his thinking. "My mom’s looking for a new apartment or house for us right now. Cause she wouldn’t want to live in a shed either.”

Lorelai smiled. “Fair enough.”

“So where did you hate then?” he asked. 

Lorelai was quiet for a moment. “Um ... my parent’s house.” 

Jess felt something twist in his stomach but he pushed it aside. “And that’s why you live in a shed?” He tried to sound as incredulous as he could; tried to convey the blithe simplicity with which he thought trading out the basic necessity of a home for a potting shed was resoundingly ridiculous.

"Alright, punk," Lorelai said, with mock aggravation, "We have gotten way off track from you skipping classes." She held out the note that Jess had handed to her earlier. "Take this."

Jess scowled down at it but reached out his hand, taking it back.

“You should go to school, you know.” 

“Why?”

“Well …,” she trailed off, looking thoughtful, then broached her next words experimentally, “Your mom would want you to make good grades for when you see her again, right?"

Jess shrugged. "Not really."

Lorelai looked at him for a long moment and Jess couldn’t meet her eyes due to the expression she held, as if she was trying to read him like the water-logged pages of a book. At last she asked, "Kiddo, is there something you want to tell me about things back home?"

Jess snapped his head up, meeting her gaze at last, and then breathlessly, quickly, answered. "No."

“Okay,” Lorelai responded easily, and he felt embarrassed for having been momentarily caught off guard. “Then see what your uncle has to say about it when you show him that note.”

Jess scoffed. Then he let out a sigh, moving to sit down on the step next to Lorelai. “I just wanna go home.”

“I know,” Lorelai said. “You’ll get there.”

Jess let her say the words; he let them wash against his ears and worm inside his brain and he let silence without objection follow them. And yet, he couldn't help but feel as if they were altogether less sincere than the things she had said before, as if she, like himself, simply wasn't sure what else to say to make her meaning understood.

Chapter Text

When Jess made it back to Luke's the lights in the diner were already out, the storefront dark. He made his way in through the dim light of the outside afternoon wash and climbed the dark stairs, keeping his hand against the wood siding of the wall. When he opened the door to the apartment, the room was lit by a single lamp and the window opened, spilling in a harsh glow of light as the setting sun cast downward at just the right angle to shine exactly through the small window above the sink. Jess squinted and watched his uncle's shadow move across the glow, setting plates out on the table.

"I closed up early today," he said, glancing up at Jess in the doorway.

"Why?"

Luke shrugged, resting his hands on his hips and looking over at the phone on the kitchen counter. "Figured we could have an actual dinner tonight, instead of just leftovers from the diner after nine. It's not good for your digestion to eat so late anyway."

Jess scrunched up his face in incredulous fashion as he slipped his backpack off his shoulders and let it thud to the floor just in front of his feet. He unzipped the front to take out his library books—planning to sit at the table with one in his lap, reading the small print under the shadow of the table—when he saw the note sitting on top of his books, wrinkled and stuffed in the top of the bag. He eyed his uncle across the room, watching him take out a handful of silverware from the drawer to set by the plates.

Jess took the note in one hand, eyes ghosting over the words, the creases folded through the phrases and the line where his uncle was meant to sign. He thought about his conversation with Lorelai. He thought about how she'd never said it in so many words but he could feel the touch of the paper against his skin, the paper that she'd held in her own hand moments before, that she would be disappointed in him if he didn’t show the note to his uncle. The very fact of that felt strange to him and then he remembered the rest of the conversation, trying to probe gentle reasons out of him as to why he should care about school and his time here and how he behaved, and how she had asked, as he looked down at the collection of library books in his backpack, if everything was fine at home.

Jess checked that Luke's back was turned, then crumpled up the note and dropped it in the trash can.

"Come on and sit down." Luke gestured with a knife in hand to the open seat pushed out facing back to Jess' bed, where he always tended to sit each time. Jess kicked his book bag over to the wall and slid into his seat, while Luke produced a pan of chicken that smelled like several spices Jess didn't recognize, and slid it with a spatula onto each of their plates. He also added some steamed broccoli and a side of black-eyed peas, which Jess concluded immediately he wouldn't be touching. After everything was set Luke put a glass of juice down in front of Jess and a beer for himself, sitting at the opposite end of the table. They stared at one another, plates left untouched in front of them.

Luke shrugged his arms and clapped his hands together. "Alright, dig in."

They ate in silence. The forks clinked against the dinner plates and the afternoon sunlight filtered through the half drawn floral print curtains, bathing the already brown interior in a thin sheen of orange hue. Jess finished his chicken and even ate about half the broccoli, until he was sitting listlessly pushing the peas around on his plate and occasionally smashing them into white porcelain with the tines of his fork. He looked up at his uncle, who continued to diligently make his way through the food piled on his plate, looking steadily down at every bite he took, only once in a while shifting his gaze to grab up his beer and take a sip. Jess slouched back in his chair and shoved the mashed peas and broccoli to one side of his plate for a final time before taking a deep breath.

"Am I going home for spring break?"

Luke stopped chewing. “What?”

Jess poked at the edge of his fork with his pointer finger, flicking it upward so that a shred of green flipped off onto the table. “I dunno. I was wondering cause it's coming up and I didn’t know … if I was gonna visit back home.”

He avoided his uncle's gaze, his chin tucked against his chest from his slouched position and hands falling to his side on the seat of the chair. Truthfully, it hadn't crossed his mind at all that he'd be going home for a visit. The whole notion set his nerves tingling, unsure how to even understand the idea of "visiting" his mom back in New York only to return here a short time later. It reminded him of walking out of the field with the abandoned house, the path from one world to the next suddenly achingly slow and clear, when a gulf of ethereal transportation was supposed to be between them. But now his mind kept turning over the image of Lorelai’s face earlier today on the porch and the cold shadows that spilled over the usually sun soaked green lawn and knotted wood. 

Is there something you want to tell me about things back home?

It made him not want to go back there; to not see her again, because in the end he wasn’t even supposed to be here.

He didn't quite understand what Lorelai had been asking, but he'd been so on edge after the question that he took his leave of their porch earlier than usual, the sun higher in the sky. He'd seen his own shadow disappearing in front of him as he ran back to Luke's. If he couldn't visit the abandoned building anymore, he should go back to where he did belong: with his mom.

Luke twisted his fork in his hand. "Your mom … she’s uh … well, you know, it's complicated why you’re here … and … we haven't talked about, I mean, just missed a few calls and uh … you know, it’s not spring break yet and …”

“Is she gonna come down here?” Jess felt his stomach twist even as he said it, like he knew the answer already, like he was asking a stupid question, which he always hated. He'd much rather stay silent than face up to the fact that there were things he still didn't understand—and couldn't do anything about.

“Uh …," Luke turned the fork around and around his hand, "I dunno. We’re gonna work all that out when she calls this week, okay?”

"Okay."

Luke took a deep breath, eyeing Jess' plate with the vegetables pushed aside, and his own half finished beer. "You know, actually, there was something I wanted to, uh, talk to you about."

Jess sat up, pushing back away from the table. "I wanna go to sleep," he stated simply.

Luke blinked. "Oh. Well, I did want to ..." he trailed off, watching his nephew's downcast expression, which seemed different from the apathetic and uninterested face he usually wore. He sighed, wishing he could have foreseen that Jess would want to visit his mom over spring break, and wishing even more that his sister could have foreseen it herself. It didn't seem fair to dredge up all the stuff about his school right now—the kid was just having trouble adjusting and Luke wasn't even sure how to best broach the subject. Cooking a dinner that the kid only half ate wasn't enough to make a more comfortable conversation. So instead he nodded, setting down the fork and waving his hand away from the table.

"Alright, brush your teeth and everything and you can go to bed early."

"Can I read in bed?"

"I thought you wanted to sleep?"

Jess shrugged, looking down at his lap and playing with the hem of his jacket, which Luke was just realizing he hadn’t taken off since getting home. No sarcastic quip, no bitter stare—just that subdued expression as he waited for the answer; just like he'd had to wait to hear his uncle fumble over his words as to whether or not he was going to see his mom.

Luke licked his lips, letting out a huff. There it was—whatever it was. That kid that he could see so clearly in front of him; above all the other confusion and mess and trouble understanding his nephew, beyond the constant uncertainty of what he was even trying to do here; that picture of a little boy sat eagerly half-off his chair, asking if he could read before bed—that picture at least was always in focus. So Luke nodded again and got up to clear the table as his nephew went over to his backpack and started pulling out piles of library books, carrying them over to dump on his mattress. They were definitely going to have a talk soon about his schooling, but for now, the kid could read.

Jess had successfully avoided coming into confrontation with his teacher over his lack of signed and returned absence note up til this far into the day. In fantastic irony, he avoided returning the note detailing his multiple tardiness by being consistently late. First coming into class in the morning, he arrived well after the first lesson had already started. He then took a strategic break to go to the bathroom right before the class let out for lunch, staying long enough that he missed the transition, and then opted to skip lunch altogether and head straight to the library. Now once the recess period ended, he could still come back to class late, but from there things would get tricky. He would undoubtedly be caught at some point, either during the free period between math and geography during the waning hours of the school day, or if nothing else, held after the final bell rang.

It wasn't so much that he feared the reprimand or consequences of not returning the note. He just did not want to deal with Mrs. Kendall's pursed peppermint lips again so soon.

Jess wheedled away the time in the library between lunch and recess, able to even finish one of the books he'd picked up, and finding a handful more to tuck into his bag. The bell had already sounded through the building, signaling the end of recess five minutes ago, and Jess was still sitting in the back corner by the window, wedged in the nook created by two connecting bookcases. He finished his book and after closing it carefully, and putting his pencil away in his bag, he sat and stared out into the library.

He didn't want to go back to class. It was strange though. He hadn't wanted to go to class since the first day he got here, and he'd continuously tested the limits until the point that he finally did get in trouble, but today was entirely different. Today he didn't want to go back not because he didn't want to have to participate in the rest of the school day, but because he didn't want the school day to end. It wasn't just the inevitability of having to confront Mrs. Kendall again. No, he didn't want the school day to end because he didn't know where he would go afterwards.

Of course, he'd go back to Luke's, just like he did on any other Wednesday afternoon. He'd go back and he'd arrange himself on the new bed for him on the far side of the apartment and he'd dive into his books and wait out the afternoon, until he had dinner in the evening, and then he'd go to sleep. He'd wake up in the morning and go back to school. He'd get through the day just like this one and then ... he didn't know. It was a whole day and a half before the fact might come to fruition, but he already felt like he was standing on that front step of the school building, his mind and stomach churning, that same lost and inscrutable feeling he'd had his first few days here, unsure where he should go, unsure if he should go back to that abandoned building. Somehow, he already knew what would win out in the end. He'd run and hide.

Jess sighed, standing up from his spot nestled against the bookcase. If he already knew, maybe there was no point then in prolonging the inevitable. However much longer he was here, until his mom came, he'd just have to repeat the same routine day after day, drifting immobile through the places all around him. The glaring lights of the school hallway, the musty smell of the wooden apartment, the clanging and grease dripped air of the diner, the cold floor of the storage room, the impenetrable, uninterrupted sunlight streaming on open lawns of the town around him. It didn't matter that he froze as he walked towards the door of the library, the pit of his stomach empty and flipping, feeling as if he was starting to fade already, lost in between the pages of all those places, with no actual narrative being written. He’d at least felt like a story was unfolding whenever he met with Lorelai, but most recently he wasn’t sure he liked where that story was going. He was afraid to turn the page.

The sound of a door slamming shut caused Jess to turn his head, seeing the backs of the three librarians disappearing into the media lab. He glanced over towards the front desk and saw that it was empty. The small office behind the desk was empty as well. He was, however briefly, completely alone here. No one had even noticed he was here to begin with.

That's when Jess noticed, beyond the front desk, beyond the glass of the office windows, beyond the open office threshold, into the back of the room, there was a door. A heavy metal door, with an exit sign above it, and no one around. The kind of door that, he was certain, led outside the building.

Jess didn't think about it much, he simply walked over past the desk, and into the office, and before he was even much aware that he had moved at all, he was standing there.

He glanced around the office and the empty library beyond, his palms starting to sweat. Even if he did leave, he had no clue where he would go. The abandoned porch? Would he just wait out there all afternoon, able to stay until Lorelai showed up? If she showed up? He didn't know if she would come one way or another and he didn’t want to find out.

Logically he knew his teachers would find him missing, eventually. It wouldn't be like missing the first period or coming back late after lunch. If he was gone the rest of the day after being there in the morning then panic would ensue. But the door was so tempting; the wide space for misbehavior that the clucking librarians had left open for him was too great. And the suffocating feeling—the weight pressing down on him, making his bones ache and head feel congested, at the thought of having to spend one more second in this school—was too strong. He just wanted fresh air, even if just for a moment. That was the closest comfort he’d known to books since coming here.

He turned the handle, his sweaty hand clammy against the cold metal. The door creaked as it opened and he peeked out, seeing the schoolyard and the chainlinked fence beyond that. He stepped one foot out the door and then wedged his body between the door and the jamb, propping up his other foot and letting the door fall against it, halfway in and halfway out. 

He glanced around the yard, seeing he was in the back corner of the playground. It was quiet, so all the other grades must have finished recess for the day. He pushed the door in and out against his sneaker and turned his head back into the library office, seeing it still empty. With a sudden surge of urgency he slipped around the other side of the door and caught the handle with his other hand so that it didn't close all the way. Standing on the outside he held it open by an inch and surveyed the playground further. The area beyond the fence led out to a wooded area that he suspected went towards the local lake—probably why there was a fence to begin with. It was facing away from the streets and the edges of the town. Jess knew he could climb over that fence and out of this place and not be seen, so, so easily it was almost laughable. His fingers gripped lightly around the door handle as he leaned forward. He felt himself gravitating towards that escape route. He felt like running away was his best and only option.

The slam of the door was a sharp electric crack through Jess’ body and he jumped as he turned. His fingers had slipped away from the door handle. The siren call of running away broke inside him and he felt a panic rising up in its stead. 

Crap! Crap! He was locked outside the school. He couldn't run away. He couldn't just leave school. His uncle would kill him. He would be dead. If his uncle already got mad at him for coming back late from school, skipping it and getting a call from the principal that his nephew had vanished suddenly from the premises would make his head explode. Then Jess would never be able to come back again, late or otherwise, cause he would be dead. Or if he wanted to avoid being dead, he'd have to run out into those woods and find an abandoned boxcar and live the rest of his days out there.

He should have just let it alone. He should have just not even worried about it and gone back to see Lorelai at the abandoned building. But then he felt that knot in his stomach from what she had asked him and he knew going back to see her meant admitting that the knot in his stomach—the lump in his throat, the weightlessness in his chest, the swirl in his head as he stared at the foreboding steel of the exit door in front of him—had all been there before he'd even come here. The feelings had existed long before all the things he'd thought had put the feelings there. He would have to admit that he was upset with his mom, but that he didn't understand why . There were questions he had, which he didn't have the answer to, and situations in his life and emotions all inside of him, that he didn't understand.

Jess ran a hand through his messy hair and paced in a small circle before throwing himself against the betraying door with a defeated slump. He was in trouble, in more ways than one. As he moved to stand up again, unable to stay still, his jacket sleeve caught on the door handle, and as he pulled away, the handle twisted downward and the door opened. Jess stopped. He untangled his jacket and grabbed the handle while the door remained slightly ajar. He closed it and after a second he turned down the handle and opened it again. Closed it ... and opened it. The latch was broken.

"That is stupid ," Jess muttered, pulling the door open wider and slipping back inside. 

The door closed uselessly behind him, the shift in the air blowing up the back of his hair, and he lifted his head to see three librarians staring at him.

Chapter Text

"What were you thinking, Jess??" Luke railed, throwing one arm widely up in the air, as Jess sat glued to an out turned chair by the kitchen table. "Why would you - you just - leave the building?? Break into the library office and try to leave the building?? What were you going to do?"

Jess gripped his hands around the seat of the chair, sat so far back and so straight that his feet didn’t touch the floor. The events that culminated in him currently sitting here had transpired quickly and without bombast. The librarians had called his teacher, his teacher had called the principal, the principal had called Luke. His uncle had come and signed him out and marched him up the stairs with silent scowl through the busy diner and sat him right down in this chair.

"You've been skipping classes?" Luke continued. "Just - not going on time to your first class? You were lying and saying I didn't get you up in time! You lied again today after you already got in trouble!! You told them I made you help open the diner! Are you trying to get social services called on me?" Luke gave a wry and not the least bit amused laugh, throwing his hand in the air. "Of course, they didn't believe that. They tried to send home a note and where is that by the way, Jess? Oh yeah, probably just threw it out, huh? Just thought you could get away with it, with skipping classes? What's next, smoking, joyrides, knocking over a liquor store, huh?"

Jess furrowed his brow but quickly straightened it back out, conscious of his uncle's scrutinizing gaze. He darted his eyes towards the floor, staring at his dangling shoelaces. He listened patiently as his uncle recounted the last few weeks' events in his hastened disbelief.

"I mean, well, you're stealing already. They went through your bag and found tons of stolen library books! I went around your bed and throughout the apartment and found even more. Dozens of them! Written in them! This is ridiculous Jess! I don't - I don't even know where to begin. They want the books back undamaged, replaced or - and skipping. SKIPPING. You can't skip school, Jess! You're in the fourth grade, what even do you have to skip? Snack time??"

Luke's heavy breaths slowed as he rubbed his hand against his face. He pulled out a chair from under the table, clattering against the floor as he dragged it across from Jess and sat down. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and folded his hands together, rubbing them against one another as he screwed up his face, twisting his mouth, as he stopped and started a few times. Jess watched him rigidly. At last Luke let out a sigh.

"You have to go to school, Jess."

"Why?" Jess sucked in his breath and clamped his mouth as soon as the word left his lips. He hadn't meant to say it, but the question had popped out like a reflex. He gripped his hands tighter around the chair and kept his eyes on his uncle who had startled and stared back at him.

"Because ... you do." Jess expected his uncle to be mad, all fiery words and hand-waving and finger pointing, and a "because I said so" authoritarian tone to match his words, but it came out slowly, softly, and then Luke's eyebrows knitted together, as if confused at his own proclamation. He rubbed his hands against one another, looked away, rubbed his palm against his knee, stood up, walked a few feet to the right and then sat back down with a plop. "I'm no good at this," he said, as if to himself.

"Jess," he started. He stopped again. He sat forward, placing his fingertips to fingertips, looking at the floor instead of his nephew. "Jess," he said and stopped again, biting his lip. Jess wondered if his uncle was ever going to form a full sentence again. Maybe he had made Luke so mad that his brain had overheated. The thought flitted by and instead of the normal tinge of amusement that might have up-ticked Jess' lip he felt a sharp wrench in his stomach. He waited, sitting desperately still, for Luke to finally say something, even just so he could parry back and fill the eerie gaps of silence between his name.

Luke propped one hand on his knee, elbow bent out as he looked at his nephew. "Jess," he said once more with some finality. "I know school can be hard. And all that. But you have to go." He rubbed his other hand across his forehead before continuing. "One, it's kinda the law. And secondly, if you wanna go to college one day and get a good job -"

Jess cut him off, feeling more assured in his interruption now, although still wary of his uncle's anger. He had a good objection though. "I'm not goin' to college."

Luke stopped his various ruminations with his hands and dropped them in his lap, looking dead-on at his nephew. "Of course you're going to college."

"Nuh," Jess said, shaking his head so that his hair danced across his face. He felt confident in knowing something his uncle clearly didn't, and spoke a bit louder. "My mom said so."

"Your -," Luke's mouth hung open after the utterance, and Jess wondered if he was going to repeat his name several times again. Instead his uncle turned his head and under his breath said Jess’ mom's name with all the intonation of a curse. "Liz!"

Luke stood up from his chair, the legs scraping against the floor, then walked around the table to the kitchen sink. He picked up the dish towel and twisted it in his hands for a moment before throwing it against the basin. Jess frowned and turned in his seat. His uncle was obviously mad at this fact, but he didn't really understand why. "Cause it's expensive," Jess said, as a way of explanation, the same one his mom had given him. "And my grades aren't that good anyway."

His uncle turned around quickly, back against the counter but leaning forward. "You're in the fourth grade!" Jess jumped at his uncle's sudden renewed volume, the man’s face flushed red and neck strained, somehow harsher sounding and sending a harder chill through Jess than all the ranting and scolding before. "God," Luke said, bringing both hands up to scrub against his face again. He paced back towards the table. "Sorry, I -I wasn't yelling at you."

Jess bit the inside of his cheek, white knuckles gripping the seat of the chair once more, and eyes carefully following his uncle.

" ... in the fourth grade," Luke muttered, his words muted by his hands still covering his face, eyes screwed shut. He looked vaguely ill, swaying on his feet as he stood in place. "You don't tell a kid in fourth grade ..."

Luke lowered his hands and opened his eyes, daring a look at his nephew, sitting stiffly in the chair below him, his soft face scrunched up in a mix of confusion and apprehension. Luke took a deep breath, puffing out his chest and rolling up his sleeves, before grabbing the back of the chair and setting it down to face towards Jess again. He sat down hard and straightened his expression, eyes firm on his nephew and mouth a stern line, pointing a finger in his face.

"Here's the deal," he said, voice rough and commanding. "You're going to go to college. Because you can. You're going to go to college and you're going to study whatever you want. And you're gonna get a degree and do whatever you want. You're gonna do anything and be anything you wanna do or be. And that's final." He nodded and sat back, arms folded across his chest.

Jess said nothing, watching his uncle's stern face looking back into his, conscious of the confusion and vulnerability probably wavering across his features. He didn't know it until it happened, but he really did not enjoy getting in trouble with his uncle. At least not like this. He knew increasingly as the weeks went on—the minutes he was prolonging staying out of class and the growing piles of books hidden around his bed—that he was doing something wrong. It just did not register with him that what he was doing would affect anyone. He didn’t think anyone would ever miss the books if he took them. He didn’t think if he scribbled them with his thoughts, that anyone would ever miss the clean white pages. He thought if he didn’t show up for class, it wasn’t as though anyone would really miss him being there.

Yet now, he saw his uncle's reddened face and heard the strain in his voice, and Jess thought maybe it wasn't books or clean white pages or even his presence that was missed by anyone. It was someone expecting more of him. He'd never felt that before. He hadn't even known it was there—but now that it was gone, he missed it a little, too. He wanted it back.

Luke sighed, lowering his folded arms. "Okay, we need an action plan here." He frowned in thought while Jess watched, waiting. "Alright, here's the deal. If you're having trouble with your schoolwork, then I'll get you a tutor. If you're bored in class, then I'll talk to your teacher." He lifted his index finger, opting to hold it aloft rather than point it at Jess this time. "You're gonna do your homework after school everyday and I'm gonna check it. You'll eat a snack first. But then do your schoolwork. No ifs, ands, or buts."

Jess felt himself barely nodding, unsure if he should say anything, and no idea what he would say if he had known.

Luke went on, "You're gonna have a future, even if I have to drag it out of you, and out of your teachers, and principal, and your mom. You're a smart kid, I know you are. You read all the time and you figure things out in your head and know and say things that most kids your age couldn't know or say. So you are - and maybe ... maybe school will always be hard or always be boring, god, I really don't know. I've never done this before. But the point is you're smart enough and good enough to have a future. And you need to at least go to school and do your homework for that. Got it?"

Luke swallowed and Jess watched his throat bob. "And I wanted to ... apologize, for before." Luke cast his eyes downward as he rubbed the pads of his thumbs together. "About the whole thing with the phone. Y’know, when your mom first called."

Jess’ face scrunched up in utter confusion, still sat far back in the seat, his feet dangling above the floor. That had happened weeks ago.

"I-," Luke cleared his throat and straightened to look Jess in the eye. "You were still being a brat. But I shouldn't have yelled like that. I’m sorry."

Jess sat there, the silence holding fast to his voice, swelling up somewhere in his throat, a sore and constricted feeling that tickled up to his eyes. He gave his head a quick shake, letting go of his fast grip around the seat of his chair, and casting his eyes back up at his uncle.

Luke heaved an exaggerated sigh and slapped his hands against his thighs, dragging himself up. "You're not off the hook for now though. Things are gonna change going forwards but you've gotta fix the mess you've already made. I cannot afford to re-buy all those books you wrote in. So you have to figure it out."

Jess finally found his voice, leaning forward in his chair. "Bu-"

"No buts. You stole something. You damaged someone else's property. You have to face the consequences."

"How am I gonna -"

"Figure it out," Luke said. He moved towards the door to go back down to the diner. "Like I said - you're a smart kid."

Chapter Text

Jess began to notice that the street lamps on his way down the back roads of Stars Hollow were being tied around with pastel ribbons and bushels of colorful flowers. The town was moving with a different energy, the air was starting to smell like fruit trees, and the late afternoon was warm enough for only a light jacket. The kids in his class were talking with one another about planned trips to the beach or amusement parks or different fairs around the county. From their descriptions, Jess imagined there must be a meadow of wildflowers somewhere nearby that was leased out each Spring specifically for childhood romping with golden retrievers in tow. It wouldn't have surprised him in the least if every single boy his age in Stars Hollow had a golden retriever.

The airy mood that seemed to permeate the atmosphere the past week failed to infect him, as he lugged around a backpack full of library books he was meant to replace before the break from school started. It was heavy on his shoulders and everyday he carried it back and forth from school, not with the anticipated striking mood to read anymore, but hoping inspiration of how to fix his current problem would occur. It didn't. He thought about just returning the books as they were, and hoping no one would notice or comment, or most probably have just gotten sick enough of him to let it slide. Luke was very clear however, that he was not going to be hit blindside or otherwise with a charge for all these damaged, stolen books, and Jess felt that stern gaze and pointed finger and some shadow of his uncle’s expectations pressing down on him each moment of the day.

It was the Friday before the last half week at school when he finally let down his shell of pride and realized one of the only options he had left. 

She was sitting in her usual spot on the steps when he walked up to the abandoned building, just in time for what would have been their regular meeting day anyway. He stood in place watching her and she smiled back at him. It was all still there, exactly as he'd left it. Despite everything that had happened the last few days, he was still here, too. So without any more acknowledgement between them, he sat down next to her and told her what he'd done.

Jess expected some sort of expression of admonishment or exasperation or at least a weird half-lecture like he’d gotten the other day when she’d found out he was skipping, but all he heard next was a bright, loud burst of laughter. And it didn’t stop. Jess looked over at her, bewilderment written all over his face. But she just kept laughing, holding her stomach and shaking her head, curls bouncing around her face, and then holding her fingertips up to her lips as she tried to subside the snickers.

“You’re -,” she choked out, pausing for a moment to collect herself again. “You’re stealing - you’re stealing library books.”

Jess felt his face flush, pressing his palms down on the step.

“You know you can get those for free, right?”

Jess’ face grew even redder. “I know!” he shot back, whipping his head away from her and kicking out his legs. “I wanted my own,” he grumbled, folding his arms.

Lorelai contorted her mouth away from a snicker, and looked down at him more seriously. "There are other ways to get books ... you know, like maybe ask-"

"I used to have lots," Jess cut her off, arms folded tightly against his chest. "Before they made me come here."

"Ah," Lorelai commented, toying with the charm on the end of her necklace. She gave him a side glance before continuing. "I had to leave a lot of my stuff behind at my parents' house when I came here, too."

Jess' mouth twitched and his eyes fell. "It's not ...," he started, and then stopped almost as abruptly, feeling his mouth going dry. He didn't know what he had wanted to say, but the objection had bubbled up all the same.

Lorelai leaned back on one hand, looking out towards the sky. "Why don't you just ask your uncle to buy you some more books, for while you're here? You know, instead of slowly dismantling Ben Franklin's dream."

Jess squinted his eyes up towards her.

"Founder of the first public library,” she said. Jess bit the inside of his cheek and turned outward again, cataloging that bit of information away.

"He wouldn't," he said.

"You can't know if you don't ask."

"He wouldn't!"

The elasticity of the springtime air caught between them and Jess brought up a hand to push his waves of hair away from his forehead. 

"I'm sure you'll get to see your old books soon enough."

Jess licked his lips, willing the moisture back into his mouth even as he felt his voice constrict with the immanency of his words. He leaned over, pressing his stomach against his legs and his forehead between his knees. "I won't," he muttered.

"You won't?"

Jess leaned in on his legs deeper, his own hands pressing against his abdomen. He hated this feeling—the kind that made the spring air feel like electricity coursing through his veins, like the world would tilt just off its axis at any moment and take him with it, like he wasn't quite tethered down the same as everyone else around him. He'd thought it was the fault of losing their apartment, and getting on a bus, and having to be here, but he knew now it started sooner. He had first felt it sear sharp inside him that afternoon when he came home and walked into his room.

"My mom sold them."

"She - ... your books?"

Jess nodded.

"I'm sorry, kiddo." He felt Lorelai slump back against the step next to him. "That's really unfair."

Jess removed his hands from cupped in his lap and curled them around the lip of the step again. "She sold 'em cause the rent."

"Oh."

Jess knew adults did unfair things sometimes, and he knew his mom had lost her job, and he knew that was just after all the yelling on the phone. He knew all that—he just hadn't known she was going to sell his books. He came home one afternoon from school and found his room turned upside down, the small shelf in the corner empty except for scraps of paper and a tract fluttering on the floor from the breeze of his opened window.

"Mom, where are my books?"

Jess swallowed and pushed down the feeling. "She said she needed the money from 'em, so ..."

Lorelai bit her lip. "Yeah, but ..."

Jess shut his eyes again and remembered the empty bookshelf sitting there. It was a bookshelf with loose screws and peeling white paint and only two shelves, both which fell down if he put too much weight on them, so several of his books were stacked on the floor beside it. 

His mom had bought him all his books. He remembered many of the places where he had got them, whether it was the corner shop, or someone selling them on tables by the sidewalk, or found on the discount shelf of an actual bookstore. He loved all of them just the same as he loved the memory of her buying them. It was one of those things he really knew he loved about his mom. The kind you write to fill in the blank on pink construction paper for mother's day in kindergarten. 

I love my mom because: she buys me books.

She never said no if he asked for a book. She said no to a lot of things, or she just wasn’t there for him to ask in the first place, always busy at work or out on a date. Yet, when they were out together, and there happened to be a book nearby, the answer was always yes. She’d look at him and smile, buy him the book, hold his hand, and sing old love songs on the way home.

So Jess knew he could count on a book. 

It had hurt at the time, when he’d found out she’d sold them, but he hadn't thought about it much in the days following. Everything happened so fast after that. Just under a week later, they had to leave the apartment. His room became a shell of itself with shells inside—of his empty dresser drawers and a bare mattress and his one lone bookcase in the middle of it all, preemptively struck. Jess clung to the things he thought he knew. His mom was working on getting her job back, getting the apartment back or finding a new one, and getting him back home with her after that. Everything that had happened from the day they left for the first motel would go right back to normal, the way it had been the day before.

Except, when he thought about it, Jess wasn't sure if that accounted for his books. If everything went back to the way it had been just one day before, the shelves on his bookcase would still be dusty and empty. He didn't know if he would go back home, forget about this place and have everything be the way it was supposed to be once more, only for his bookshelves to still be staring barren back at him from where he now stood. It was something his mom couldn’t take back. It was something that felt bigger than all the other losses. 

So he’d quickly come up with something resembling a plan, although it felt more like an impulse. If he found all his old books at the school library here, and brought them back with him and forgot where they came from, he could fill his shelves back up on his own. He'd never even have to ask his mom to buy him more books. He'd take care of it himself. Something like this could be his responsibility, because his mom had to deal with so many other things. He’d be able to make everything just right again.

"I had a bunny once!" 

Jess startled, looking over to Lorelai who had suddenly made this pronouncement. 

"I mean, admittedly, I was not as attached to the thing as you seem to be to a good piece of literature. You've always got your head in a book. I'm worried one of these days you're gonna be walking along, just reading as you do, and bam! run into a telephone pole or fall down a manhole like an Acme cartoon character. But I still liked the rabbit, I mean, even if I wouldn't get near it. And then one day I came home and my parents had given it away. And it sucked. Not really cause I missed the little thing so much, but because it had been mine, and it made me feel really ... it made me feel like I couldn't count on anything, if they would just give away my pet without telling me." Lorelai took a deep breath. "I mean, what would they give away next? Would I come home and my dollhouse be gone? Would I get home and they'd be gone? My nanny? The maid? Actually that was really likely. But would I be in trouble when I got home? Would I be moving schools? Going to etiquette classes? Would I have done something wrong and not even known it? Who knew? It felt like something could just fall out from under me at any second. Or I was always falling anyway. So, I guess I thought, what difference did it make? They never told me or asked me anything, much less talked to me about how I felt. They just ... gave away my bunny."

Jess looked between Lorelai and his lap, darting his eyes to catch a glimpse at her face. "I'm sorry," he said.

"Well," she turned to him, her eyes glimmering softly. "I'm sorry your mom ... sold your books."

Jess shifted in place, looking down at his feet. "I didn't, um ... I didn't just take the library books." He sucked in a sharp breath. "I wrote in them."

It was quiet for a moment. "Why?"

"Cause then ... they're mine."

Lorelai smiled. "Except they weren't." Her voice was delicate and nudged him gently in place.

"I know."

"Did you not think anyone would notice?" she asked, shifting in place on the steps, so she was leaning back against the railing and facing him. Jess turned to match her position, meeting her gaze.

"I thought I'd be back home before anyone noticed."

Lorelai chuckled. "Aaaaah, the perfect crime! I'll be 90 miles out, on the ferry to Manhattan, before they even notice they're gone!"

"I don't take a ferry home."

"Figure of speech, kiddo. Okay, so, you wrote in them. And people noticed."

"My uncle says I gotta return them or replace them or somethin'. He says I gotta do it on my own. But I don't know how."

Lorelai hummed, glancing upward in thought. Jess settled more into the back of the porch rail, stretching out his feet, and the toe of his sneakers nudged against her ankle. "You know, it's not the same exactly," Lorelai started again, "But I got in trouble in high school for drawing in my chemistry book once. But I drew it all in pencil, so the teacher made me go back and erase it all by hand. You think that would work?"

Jess bit the inside of his cheek. " ... I didn't write much. And it's all in pencil."

"Alright then," Lorelai grinned, sitting forward. "That's a plan, isn't it?"

Jess let out a small groan. It was a plan, but it was going to be a pain to carry out.

Lorelai laughed beside him. "Tell you what. I'll help."

"Really?" Jess asked. He kept the edge in his voice just to make sure.

"Really." She nodded and a smile fitted on her face.

"Okay." Jess let the agreement fall from his lips easily.

"You have to promise me one thing though."

Jess sighed and tilted his head at her, folding his arms across his chest.

Lorelai made a show of taking a deep breath, leaning in more as she fixed her eyes on him seriously. "No more skipping."

Jess scoffed. "That's it?"

"That's the price of my assistance."

Jess let his arms drop. "Well, I already got the whole lecture from my uncle and had to promise him, so you don't need to waste your time."

"It’s not a waste of my time." She leaned back against the porch. "But yeah, your uncle made you promise?"

"Yeah. He said I was too smart to not do good in school. And if I was bored he would talk to the teacher. But that I had to do good and prove I was smart first."

"That's really good, kiddo."

Jess made a face. It wasn't really good as far as he was concerned. "But he's making me show him what my homework is and then writing it down on the fridge everyday! And he's making me sit down and do it soon as I get home, after I have a snack. It sucks. And then he checks it. It's stupid."

"Kiddo ...," Lorelai drew out, waiting for him to look at her again. "That's really good."

Jess shrugged and pointedly looked away, staring out across the lawn.

Lorelai nudged his shin with her opened-toed shoe. "Would you rather him not care at all? Or just think you can't do it? Or just get mad and not help?"

Jess let himself look back over at her and frowned. All this time his uncle had expected, or hoped, he would go to school, do well in class, and come straight back to the diner afterwards. He’d made sure to get him out the door on time every morning and was always there when he got back, asking about his homework, asking if he was okay, asking him how things were. It was ridiculously annoying, but ... he couldn’t remember his mom having ever done those things.

"I think you've got someone in your corner there.” 

She brushed back her hair and let a mischievous smile fall back across her face, tucking up her one leg and leaning against her knee. "Also, I like that little rant you just went on." She held her hand up to her heart and gave a fake sniffle. "So proud. You're becoming so talkative."

"Gross," Jess said, sticking out his tongue. When Lorelai looked his way he clamped his mouth shut, curling in his lips.

Lorelai quirked an eyebrow at him and he shook his head. "I'm gonna make you talk."

Jess shook his head again, his curls brushing across his eyes.

"I am. I am gonna talk so much that you're gonna open your mouth just to shut me up. I'm gonna talk about boring things. Boring adult things. Taxes ... taxes," she trailed off looking up towards the sky. "Mortgage payments ... don't actually have one of those. Need to call back the realtor, actually. But taxes, and work schedules, and doctors appointments, and buying toilet paper, and washing dishes, and brushing your teeth every night without being asked!"

Jess kept his mouth closed, fighting a smile trying to squirm its way out of his mouth.

Lorelai looked back over at him and grinned wider. "Oh, and changing the filter on the water pitcher, and vacuuming and dusting, and filing your taxes again, and changing the oil in your car, and watching the news to check the weather!"

Jess shook his head back and forth vehemently, but when he stopped and caught the toothy smile on Lorelai's face just before she opened her mouth to start again, he dissolved into a fit of giggles. He bent over into his lap, laughing, and spat out between gulps of air, "Shut up, please!"

"Ugh, how rude!" Lorelai fell into laughter following after him and Jess sat up, face flushed and stomach muscles sore.

"Okay, okay, I promise."

"Promise what?" Lorelai asked, trying to subdue her giggles, genuine confusion in her voice.

"I promise not to skip. Promise." Jess sat up a little as he said so, his voice evening out. He thought it might be okay, if sometimes people expected certain things of him, if they were also going to help him get there.

"Oh," Lorelai said, sitting up again. "Okay. Obviously, my plan all along."

Chapter Text

Luke was becoming a little too familiar for his liking with the shape and color and absolute silence of his new telephone. He jiggled his leg as he sat watching it, waiting for Liz's call. Jess was probably going to get back soon and after Luke had specifically chosen the day of his book club for the extra time it would give them, Liz still hadn't called as arranged.

Luke glanced between the alarm clock on the nightstand and the telephone on the table, his restlessness mounting under the increasing tick of red numbers and prolonged silence of the phone. 

"Oh, for Pete's sake." Luke pushed up from the chair and strode over to the phone, grabbing it up from the rest and punching in the numbers with the pad of his thumb. He held it close to his ear and folded his other arm under his elbow, while he waited out the ringing. Finally the ringing cut off with a click and a breathy, upbeat voice breezed in from the other end.

"Hey! What's up?"

"Liz, it's Luke."

"Hey, big brooo!"

"You were supposed to call." He sat back down in the kitchen chair.

"Oh, come on. I was going to."

Luke frowned, hearing the distracted note in her tone. He pushed past it. "You were supposed to call before four. Before Jess got out of his club."

"I was going to."

"It's ten till, Liz!"

He heard Liz heave a sigh on the other end. "Well how long is this conversation gonna take?" There was rustling coming through the line and the sound of a door being closed then locked.

"Where were you? Why didn't you call?"

"I was out." There was more movement and what sounded like a TV set being flicked on in the background.  "I was at a store."

Luke leaned one arm against the table. "Doing what?"

"Shopping! Sheesh, Luke."

"With what?" Luke asked, switching the phone from one hand to the other. It was too small—the speaker pressed against his cheek. "Did you get a job yet?"

"No, not yet," Liz sighed, clicking her tongue. "I got some money."

Luke stood up. "My money? My money, Liz? The money I gave you a month ago?"

"Nooo!" she shot back. ".... that's gone already."

"What?"

To his chagrin, Liz laughed into his ear, although whether or not it was breathy with nervousness or dismissal, he couldn't tell. "I've got it all under control. It's all cool." 

"Liz! That money was to cover your rent!"

"Oh, relax big bro!" He heard the shuffling of bags as Liz set about putting them down and flopped onto the couch. "It's just a little extra expenses here and there. Little clothes, little jewelry, makeup, night out with a friend. I need to have fun, too."

"You have too much fun!"

"Luuuuke," she whined, "I’m getting a job. I put three applications in this week. I put one in at the store I was just at! And anyway, more importantly, I met-"

"Oh god," Luke groaned, "Don’t - don’t finish that sentence, Liz."

"I met a guy!" The silence permeated between them and Luke heard a car horn and someone with a thick New York accent shouting in the background, undoubtedly through an open window on Liz's ground floor apartment. "He’s great, he’s talking about letting me move into his place; covering all the expenses. Very good guy."

"Liz," Luke said, "You don’t need to be hooking up with some guy. You need to be finding a job, getting your own place-"

"I can do both, can’t I? I told you, I’m putting in applications. I don’t understand why I can’t have relationships, too. I’m not a nun."

"Cause you’ve got a kid!"

"That definitely doesn’t make me a nun,” Liz said playfully. “God, just cause you’re celibate doesn’t mean the rest of the world has to be!”

Luke waved a hand by his head as he paced across the floor, mentally swatting away the comment. "Yeah, but you’re not currently raising said kid! You need to start doing that before you go looking for a boyfriend!"

Liz huffed and Luke could practically see her slouched into her couch, a pout on her face. She still acted like a teenager. "I don’t understand why you always object to this. You never liked Joey, either! Maybe if you’d been a bit more accepting he’d have gone through with the wedding." Luke pinched his eyes together, feeling the headache starting to thrum alive in his right temple. "Doesn’t Jess need a father figure, anyway?"

He needs a mother! Luke thought, but stopped himself just short of it, conscious of the fact that Jess might walk in at any moment. Luke glanced up and around the apartment, taking a deep breath, and then catching the bathroom door ajar, pulling it open and ducking inside.

"Oh," Luke said, the sarcasm tripping over his harsh whisper. "And you really think the winners you hook up with are going to be his new daddy?"

"You’re so critical! You don’t even know this guy. He’s a really good guy, Luke!"

Luke grunted and turned in the cramped space, plopping down on the lid of the toilet seat and knocking over a half empty bottle of shampoo.

"Maybe when I come down I’ll bring him to meet you. And Jess."

"Don’t you dare," Luke said, leaning forward, the seat creaking under his weight. His raised voice echoed off the tiled walls and he mentally kicked himself, trying to stay quiet.

"Luke-"

"No," Luke cut her off, dropping down to a whisper again. "You come down here; you visit your son. Don’t bring some guy with you."

There was silence on the other end and after a moment Luke wondered if the call had dropped, until he heard his sister's labored sigh and her tense voice tickling his ear again. "So, was there something else you wanted to talk about? Jess' school?"

Luke felt his jaw tense in time with his grip around the phone. He leaned back and lifted his eyes to the ceiling, noting the flickering bulb in the overhead light and that he should change it soon. Listening to his sister's lip smacking on the other end of the line, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, inhaling the minty tang of the uncapped toothpaste on the sink beside him. He needed to scold Jess about that.

I'm not goin' to college. My mom said so.

"No, it's fine," Luke replied at last. "Everything's fine ... I've got it all under control."

Chapter Text

Jess dropped his bag onto the porch and it landed with a hard thud. It’d been straining on his back all day long. There had to be at least fifteen books in there (he hadn’t really counted) and although they were mostly slim paperbacks, it added up. Lorelai was already sitting, legs crossed and facing inward on the porch, instead of on the steps as usual, and Jess sat mirroring her, the zipped up bag between them.

Lorelai let out a dramatic sigh and reached into her purse, pulling out a long box of fresh pencils, which she overturned onto the floor. The tips were round and flat, unsharpened graphite circles trapped within the wood. But the erasers on the ends were bright hot pink, full bodied and unshaved, jarring against the otherwise muted wooden tones around them. Jess bit his lip as he looked at them.

“Our tools,” Lorelai said, gesturing to the pile.

Jess let out a sigh of his own and leaned forward from his sitting position, unzipping the backpack and overturning it so the books spilled out the same way Lorelai had upended the box of pencils. Once all the books had slid onto the floor, he tossed the otherwise empty bag to the side, letting it land at the edge of the steps. The pile of books and pile of unsharpened pencils lay side by side, daring one or the other to be picked up first.

The silence stretched between them. That by-now-familiar spring breeze swept through the rails of the porch and with the twitch of Lorelai’s hand she reached into the pile and pulled out a book. Involuntarily Jess took a sharp intake of breath, a twinge in his stomach, as she overturned the squat and slim hardback in her hand. The volume was a dark green, front and back, the spine worn just enough to show spatters of white paper coming through, a few dents on the front of the cover, and a subdued yellow title spread across it: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  That was one Jess owned back at home—or did until recently—and he’d taken solace in rereading it early on, in the dim light of the desk lamp while laying stomach down on his uncle’s mattress. He imagined himself escaping down a river, but in lieu of finding a raft, he’d use the inflatable bed he was being made to sleep on. As his lips had curled into a small smirk at the thought he’d taken up the pencil tangled in the bed sheets and jotted it down in the margins.

Now the thought had to be erased.

Lorelai’s eyes flicked up to Jess, seeing his own glued to the book in her hand. She picked up a pencil and flipped it over, eraser end facing Jess as she held both it and the book out to him.

“Here,” she said. Jess hesitated but then reached out and took one in each hand, setting them down in his lap, teeth still worrying at his lip. “Is there one you want me to work on?” Lorelai asked, scanning the pile.

Jess looked over the books and halfheartedly shrugged one shoulder. “I didn’t write much in The Phantom Tollbooth.”

“Yeah?” Lorelai asked, extracting the blue book from the pile.

“I thought it was silly,” Jess said. “It tried too hard.”

Lorelai wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but let it pass without comment as Jess opened his own book on his lap, gripping his fingers around the thin pencil. Lorelai pried open her's, brushing her hand along the soft pages and thumbing through them looking for pencil marks. She finally found a cluster of pages with Jess’ handwriting scrawled across them. It seemed to consist of mostly a few underlined phrases, some pencil strokes drawn out from them leading to a few snide comments in the margins, and sometimes just a large clunky series of question marks written over parts of the page.

Her fingertips traced the words until she looked up and saw Jess with a concentrated look on his face rubbing away at the pages of his own book. She picked up a pencil, flipped it over, and started gently erasing the lightly written words. Next to one paragraph was written out 'I want you to know I am rolling my eyes' in the small but precise script of the boy across from her. Lorelai couldn't help the laugh that bubbled up at reading that comment, and she almost felt reluctant vanishing it from the page.

Lorelai only vaguely understood the urge to write in a book, having done it a few times herself as a child. But these scribbles seemed to be different from the occasional doodles and highlighting she’d done in her textbooks as a teenager. Those had been illustrations mostly of boredom, the hours ticking away as her eyes crossed, reading over an assigned passage or a dusty old volume off her father's shelf that he had demanded she read in order to be a fully informed and well-cultured young woman. On more than one occasion the underlining of a passage in a second edition print with a garish pink highlighter had been a sheer act of rebellion—feigning innocence of course. But in this case, it was easy enough to tell that the boy sitting in front of her had a strong affinity for reading. She could sense it from the moment she met him, recognizing a pattern of getting lost in pages with such silent enthusiasm she'd only ever seen before in her own daughter. Their conversation a few days ago had only made it clearer. If he acted apathetic to everything else in the world, books were the exception. 

Yet, her daughter's love of books meant she would never even dream of writing in them. She treated the pristine white pages in all her collections cataloged under the bed and along the walls as if they were sacred shrines. She opened them carefully so as not to crack the spines, she wouldn’t touch them if her hands were greasy after a snack, and she stacked and stored them precisely in their tiny makeshift home even without a proper bookshelf to keep them on. In contrast, when Lorelai watched this boy carry his book of the day around—aside from its already worn appearance from being in and out of the library—he didn’t seem to treat them with that same sort of reverence. He’d bend the cover all the way back and fold it over as he read, toss it haphazardly into his bag as he got up to leave, let the pages tear and wrinkle under his eager fingers as he turned them over, and sometimes would stuff the whole thing into the pocket along the front of his oversized hoodie. And of course, as a scandalized librarian had evidently recently discovered, he always wrote in them.

Lorelai scrutinized the writing under her hand as she turned through a few more books, working at cleaning the pencil marks, always lightly and neatly written, but thicker in thought in some places than others. They were mostly childlike musings—a wondering comment here, a snide remark at a character’s naivety or the dramatic irony there, a joke scribbled out, or a guess at what would happen next scrawled across the sepia or white margins of the page. They were similar to the kind of remarks Rory would make to her—or Mia or Sookie or anyone within the general vicinity—about whatever book she was reading at the moment. As Lorelai swept away a collection of eraser shavings, she bit her lip thoughtfully. Maybe he was having a conversation with the books themselves, in the absence of anyone he felt he could talk to about what he was reading.

Checking back through the pages and seeing no more pencil marks, Lorelai went to pick up the next book. As she came upon the first pages covered in his scribbles, she couldn't shake the feeling that despite this apparent impiety in the treatment of his books, there was still something else she wasn't getting. There seemed to be just as much reverence in the way he wrote the words or circled certain passages or underlined the right sentences. As if it was its own kind of worship; like the pages her daughter carefully kept clean—something just as sacred was being transferred between the pages of the book, the tip of his pencil, and the boy on the other end.

They sat in companionable silence for a good while, nothing but the sound of flipping pages and eraser ends scratching gently against paper between them. They'd gotten through about a quarter of the books when Jess' eyes flicked up just for a moment and caught sight of the coffee cup resting on the floor by Lorelai's knee. He hadn't had a reason to pay it any mind before, as she almost always had one with her—a light brown cardboard cup with "Independence Inn" emblazoned across one side of it in a scrawling fanciful script. But today it was different.

Lorelai peripherally noticed Jess' halted movements and looked up to see him staring. She passed her glance between him and the direction he was looking, unsure what had caught his attention.

"Your coffee cup," he said, the words falling from his mouth slowly, lifting one hand to point at it. Lorelai shifted her eyes over Jess' expression one last time and then grabbed the cup, looking at it inquisitively.

"Luke’s." He said the name slowly and deliberately.

"Oh, yeah," Lorelai turned the cup in her hand so that the logo was facing her. It was printed across the cardboard sleeve wrapped around the otherwise plain white to-go cup. The letters were in a clunky, solid brown design, resting inside the yellow outline of a cup and saucer. "Finally found some good coffee in this town!" Lorelai grinned triumphantly. "I was going to the wrong places all this time. Although I usually just get coffee from work. Not that the coffee at my place of work isn’t delicious, don’t go around saying I said contrary, okay kiddo?" She pointed a serious finger at him. "Don’t need a libel suit on my hands." She turned the cup again, so the logo was facing outward at Jess once more, and took a small sip.

"Plus, we serve our coffee with a smile. The guy at that diner was a real grump."

Jess’ mouth quirked upward. Without taking a breath Lorelai continued on her rant.

“I mean, not a lot to ask to get a cup of coffee right away when you’ve been running around all day for work and you’ve still got a side trip to help expunge the record of a vandal on your agenda! He tells me to wait,” she huffed mid-sentence, “when all I want is a quick to-go cup.” With a small pause Lorelai shifted her frown into a smile, that twinkle Jess had grown familiar with back in her eye. "So I had to pull some charmin’ and tricks from up my sleeve, you know, to get that grouch to pay attention." She waved one hand dramatically, as if the low awning framed porch they were on was a high proscenium stage and the whole lawn in front of them was filled with a captive audience, rather than only the slightly perplexed boy sitting across from her.

"What I did is, I tore a piece out of the paper and wrote down a fake horoscope for him.” Her smile widened as she took on an exaggerated mystic impression to her voice, “'You will meet an annoying woman today, give her coffee and she’ll go away’. And he finally gave it to me!”

She laughed to herself as if she’d just told the funniest joke in the world. Under any other circumstances Jess would have reacted to her story with a cocked eyebrow and silent wonderment at how she managed to imbue her life with all the colorfulness of a vaudeville routine without falling flat on her face in her heels. But given the details he could conjure up in his mind—of the exact setting and exact disgruntled diner man and his exact expression when she handed him a ripped piece of paper with that ‘horoscope’ on it—he couldn’t help but let his face flash a wide grin, sharing in her obvious amusement, even if for just a moment.

Lorelai finally stopped laughing and took another big gulp of her coffee, downing the last drop. “Mmmm,” she hummed, delighting in the taste. “But if I’m gonna have to keep going there, cause somehow this Scrooge has found the secret to a perfect cup of coffee, I need to find another way to keep him in place.” She sighed, resting her elbow on her knee and tapping the side of her cheek with her fingers, mumbling, “Named the place after himself … maybe I’ll call him Duke for a while. Seems like the kinda thing that would piss that sorta guy off ...”

Jess let the grin fall from his face and turned back to his book, lifting the eraser and rubbing studiously, knowing it unreasonable to think he could give anything away about knowing the diner owner in question, but worried nonetheless. Lorelai picked her book back up in turn and flipped through, finding another marked up page. The conversation faded away, back into a comfortable silence, the occasional breezes in the air drifting through and tickling the backs of their necks.

"Soooo," Lorelai said as she transferred her book into the growing pile of finished ones and made to pick up another. "Spring break starts this Wednesday." She peeked a glance up at Jess' downturned face and then went back to the book. "Are we still gonna meet?"

Jess halted the movement of his pencil, twitching his head upward only slightly, his hair, displaced by the coming and going breeze, falling across his eyes. It was really the first time either of them had acknowledged that they even "met" on a regular basis, outside of the time it had been respectively begrudgingly and stubbornly decided in the first place. Now the question hung in the air between them, asking the answer to its own necessity. Jess looked back down and brushed away a scatter of eraser shavings.

"I can't. My uncle won't like it.” He blew on the paper to disperse more of the pink shavings still remaining, then planted his tongue in his cheek as he thought. He knew it wouldn't be good to tell her that his uncle thought he was somewhere else all this time—not that she wasn't aware his uncle didn't know that he was here specifically. Jess however had an inkling it probably wouldn't sit well with her that he was lying to him directly about being at a book club. "I can only be out like this on days I have school."

"Ah," Lorelai smiled to herself, tapping the end of her pencil against the spine of her book. "Two whole weeks then. How ever will you survive without me?"

Jess just smirked at the comment and continued on their shared task, placing down his book and picking out another.

"Do you and your uncle have any plans for the break?"

Jess faltered at the question, the end of his pencil catching against the paper and resulting in a small tear. He sucked in his breath and let out a muttered 'jeez', smoothing the paper back over with his thumb. It wasn't really noticeable. "No," he said, turning the page, remembering the conversation the other evening at the dinner table with Luke. The prompted question about seeing his mom, the answer to which he had never shared with Lorelai. "I'm just stuck here."

Jess was still looking down at his book and Lorelai let a sad smile flit across her face before speaking. "Don't think you can convince him to go to that big spring festival shindig the town is putting on? Or is that not your speed either?"

Jess scoffed as he turned another page. "He's always working anyway," he said, closing his book and chucking it over to the done pile, knocking over a few of the ones already there in the process. "And now I don't even have anything to read."

"Yeah, that sucks." Lorelai closed her own book and lightly tossed it onto the floor next to the others. "Although, I still say you should ask him to buy you some. Go by Andrew's ... have you been over there yet?"

Jess shook his head, both at the question of whether or not he'd been to the local bookstore and the idea that he would again consider asking his uncle to buy him any. "It’s stupid," he said. "I'm not asking him."

"Kiddo, you gotta learn to open up your mouth and ask for the things you want and need. People aren't mind readers."

Jess looked at her expectantly and Lorelai let a smile splay across her face.

"Most people," she said. "And no offense to him, but your uncle sounds pretty dense." She picked up her pencil from beside her and tilted her head. "Or maybe he's just a bit too much like you." 

Jess gave an indignant mumble and rolled his pencil back and forth along the floor of the porch, occasionally getting it stuck in the grooves of the warped planks as he went.

"Like I said," Lorelai spoke, stressing her syllables to get his attention. Jess' hand slipped as he rolled the pencil outward and it tripped away from him across the floor and over to Lorelai. She stayed it with the end of her own pencil. "There’s someone in your corner."

Jess twisted his face into a grimace and caught the pencil as Lorelai rolled it back over to him. "Whatever," he mumbled half-hardheartedly.

Lorelai rolled her eyes and looked over the space between them. "Three books left," she said, gesturing.

Jess leaned up on his knees and reached over to grab the far one, plopping back down cross-legged and immediately flipping it open, getting to work. Lorelai watched him for a moment and then grabbed the next one nearest her, red and gold design face down on the cover. Turning it over she read the title and popped a silent ‘oh’ before gingerly flipping it open, the crisp pages making a crinkling sound as she did. “Matilda. This is one of Rory's favorites."

Jess lifted his gaze to see Lorelai smiling as she held the book open in front of her face, seemingly reading over the first couple lines rather than jumping straight into looking for his pencil marks. He was glad she had her eyes on the book as he felt a faint blush creep up his cheeks at the comment she had made. He'd almost forgotten the book had been in there—he'd read it a couple weeks ago for the first time and kept it firmly pressed in his hand everywhere he went throughout the school day and back at his uncle's, eyes devouring the words on the pages every spare moment he could get, and some that he couldn't. Out of all the library books he had pilfered over the last month it was the one he had most marked up, with his pencil always close at hand.

"It was okay," he said.

Lorelai let out a small hum and turned to the second page, immediately seeing Jess' pencil marks and handwriting heavy all over the paper. It was much more writing, and much more immediately, than she'd seen in any of the other books. Picking up the pencil once again, she got to work, gradually fading the words he had written into pink dust that clung stubbornly to the fibers of the pages until she brushed them away by hand. By this point, after going through this process over so many volumes, she'd stopped paying much attention to what words she was erasing, but when her eyes ghosted over a phrase here or there they were mostly the same as before. A pithy remark, a written nod of agreement, an admission to the observation the story was making, and a childlike contemplation. There just seemed to be many more of them. She turned through the pages at a steady pace, eager to be close to finishing the laborious and somewhat absurd task she'd agreed to undertake with the boy across from her. Although, with the thought, she couldn't help but smile to herself, realizing she didn't really regret it, despite all the inevitable weariness and cramped fingers.

It reminded her of her daughter, who was always sure to bring a smile to her face, but more specifically it reminded her of the day she'd walked in on Rory having turned the inn's kitchen upside down in an attempt to bake brownies. It had been a slow day and she'd gone back to grab a cup of coffee only to be greeted by batter splattered walls and her six-year-old covered in white powder and some raw egg in her hair. And absolutely no brownies to speak of. After frantically apologizing to her new co-worker Sookie (who mercifully took it in stride with a lot of laughter; a fast friendship about to be formed), and reminding Rory that this is why the Gilmore women don't bake, Lorelai had helped her daughter clean up the mess she'd made. She remembered it being one of the more enlightening moments of parenthood—as frazzled and worn out of a twenty-three year old maid as she was, she realized that she wasn’t angry, and only that more adoration was growing inside her for that little girl and her unique personality.

It was a very similar feeling right now, for a little boy who had somehow walked into the only respite in her life. An affection she couldn't quite quantify, grown out of what she'd suspected had only been motherly instinct at first, but now had a genuine quality, as if between all his sarcastic quips and sometimes erring spirit and silent confessions that matched pace with her own childhood memories beating in her heart … she'd made more room in there. Her daughter—beautiful, perfect, the light of her life—and this little boy, whose name she didn't even know. No matter how many messes he made, she wouldn't mind helping him clean them up.

Lorelai turned over the next page, setting pencil end to paper and erasing the notes from the top half of the page margins. As her eyes drifted downward across to the middle of the next page she was stopped by the unusually heavy pencil mark. His writing was consistently penciled in very lightly, as if he gave his own thoughts an airy weight as he came up with them, and written in an exceptionally neat hand for a nine-year-old boy. Except for this one—a sentence that had been underlined in a hand pressing with such force against the paper it might have torn through with just a little more pressure, and haphazardly drawn back over several more times, to the point that the graphite was so thick Lorelai was not sure she'd be able to erase it successfully. Her eyes passed over it; an ending sentence of a larger passage. She reached out her hand and traced her fingers over the indented feel of the thick line underscoring the words. 

These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.

Lorelai looked up, watching with gentle contemplation the boy in front of her, a small pang in her chest at the sight of him, not for the first time. His brow was furrowed and dark curls swept over his face, framing his sharp brown eyes and soft red cheeks, intently focused on the task at hand. She had been wrong on her guess as to why he wrote in his books. Or at least, she hadn’t had the whole picture.

It wasn’t just that he was talking to himself about what he was reading, in place of any person in his life to share his thoughts with. No, it was something in its own right—not a one-sided conversation formed reluctantly from an absence, but a shared communication born from an immense presence. The presence of words on the page, telling him all the things he desperately needed to hear. 

Looking again at the pages laid out in front of her, she saw the swirling light marks of his pencil against the paper differently than before. They were not the restless scribbles of a fraught or bored mind, but a lilting hymn, a synchronized dance, a sacred trade—a dialog exchanged between friends. And erasing them all now wasn’t merely erasing his own thoughts from the page. It was taking back all those thoughts the books had given him and that he had marked down knowing.

You are not alone.

"Okay," Jess' voice broke through the silence, his pencil scratching across the book in his hand one last time. He closed it up and threw it over onto the pile.

Lorelai gave her head a small shake and looked at the last book lying between them. "One more," she said, her voice feeling unnatural to her against the previous quiet between them, along with the intensity of the ruminations that had been swirling in her head seconds before. "You want it? I'm still going at this one."

Jess gave a small nod and reached to take it, absorbing his concentration into the last book. Lorelai checked to see that he was fully immersed in his task before she discreetly placed the copy of Matilda down in her lap and reached over to her purse to pull out a pen and a scrap of paper. She found a pen, but no paper. So glancing around the porch for something to write on that wasn’t an illicitly obtained library book, she picked up her discarded coffee cup and worked her nails under the cardboard sleeve wrapped around it, breaking it and popping it off. 

She gave one more glance up at the boy sitting across from her and poised the pen in her hand, the sun sinking low enough to cast shadows across their porch, as they each finished up the last afternoon they would share together for a while.

Chapter Text

The apartment was mostly darkened by long shadows cast by the setting sun just outside the small window. Jess pulled the library books out of his bag and arranged them in several short stacks on the kitchen table. Shafts of light hit across them in between the shadows, illuminating unsettled dust floating up from the corners of the books as he set each one down. He straightened them out with precise touches of the papered edges against his sore fingertips, dumping his empty backpack down onto the floor. Just as he was finishing up, Luke came barreling through the door to the apartment, making quick strides over to the counter and pulling open a drawer. Taking out a whisk after a few moments of rummaging through it, he turned around and saw his nephew looking expectantly at him from the other side of the table.

Luke eyed the stacks of books arranged in front of Jess on the table, the other papers and salt and pepper shakers that had been adorning it previously all shoved to the side. He walked over towards him. 

"All done," Jess said, placing the last book down on top of another. "I figured it out." 

Luke gave a look to his nephew, who had his hands now folded neatly behind his back, before he reached out to put down the whisk and picked up a book in its place. Luke flipped through it, scanning the pages and seeing them all wiped clean. Jess peeked up over his uncle's hand, watching the white margins of the pages fly away under the rough pad of his thumb, and he felt his stomach clench, although he kept his expression steady.

"Good," Luke said with a brusque nod. "Good." He placed the book back down and grabbed the whisk, heading towards the door. "Pack them up so you don't forget to bring them back tomorrow." 

Jess closed his eyes as his uncle disappeared beyond the door, dropping his hands from behind his back. He bent down to pick up his bag and shoved it back onto the table. He made to start stuffing the books back inside, frowning and feeling the lingering ache up through the joints of his fingers and wrist. His hand paused over the first volume. He picked it up with a gentler intention and folding it open began to flip through the pages, just as his uncle had, but at a much slower pace, as the pages stuttered unevenly against his fingers. His eyes searched past the print, scanning the white margins and white between the rows of sentences and every white space between the words. His eyes were looking hungrily for something to be there; something that he knew wouldn't be there. When the last page turned lamely away under his hand he threw the book into his bag, listening to the satisfying thump, a sour expression on his face.

He picked up the next one—that familiar gold and red volume; Matilda.

After a short hesitation, and against all his better judgment, he opened it as well. Unlike the book he'd just looked through, he hadn't been the one to erase these pages, and he had some morbid need to see for himself just how much had been undone.

It was the same; the pages of some of his thickest writing were wiped completely clean. He thumbed through more quickly, the frustration knotting in his stomach. He felt sick with each page turned, but he needed to get to the end, to close the last chapter on this whole event. He turned over the next page, and the next, and the next, and then something fell from tucked between the pages, landing with a light thwack between his feet.

Jess stopped, folding the book over  with his fingers tucked between the pages. He looked down and saw a piece of cardboard lying perpendicular to his shoes. Keeping his feet in place, he reached over and laid the book down on the table, bending at his knees and picking the cardboard up in his hands. The perforated edges of it brushed against his fingertips. There were words written on it, etched into the soft but stiff material of the cardboard, in a casual but thick handwriting. Jess read the words. He read them again. His eyes, hardened from the sight of all the white margins of the books before him, widened just a little. 

He knew it was Lorelai’s handwriting, although he'd never seen her handwriting before, and he knew not because of any of the logical reasons as to who would have written it or how it would have gotten there, but because the soul of the way the words were impressed onto the paper was all her. The script was all carefree flourish but steady pen strokes, with nonchalant yet substantial press, ink carved deep and impressionably on the surface.  

At that moment the door behind him swung open and Luke strode back in past him, muttering something about spatulas and oven settings. He rifled through the drawer and pulled out an egg timer, before turning around and stopping as he saw his nephew standing in the middle of the floor, looking down at his hands. Jess’ expression was disquieting, his face soft and fingers tightly curled by his chest.

"Hey," Luke said, sensing a need to fill the atmosphere. He stuffed one hand in his pants pocket. Jess' head jolted up at his uncle's sharp voice. "I'm proud of you."

Jess blinked, looking up into his uncle's face. The man stood there with his mouth in a straight line, looking vaguely uncomfortable, but at the same time entirely assured in the words he'd just uttered.

Luke shuffled in his boots but continued on. "If you erased them all by hand ... well, I know that must've not been easy." He cleared his throat. "How about ... over spring break we go out ... and I'll help you get some of your own. Um, books, I mean."

Jess nodded, somewhat detached from the gesture, face still looking as though he was staring off at something else. Luke watched him and was struck with a sudden surge of feeling in his chest. He'd been in a huff all week over the incidents his nephew had gotten himself into—the mounting levels of stress in his life between trying to smooth out a new business and keep track of a little boy who seemed determined to get himself into one thoughtless mess after another. But right at that moment, seeing his soft hair hit by the afternoon light, the shadow falling across his round cheek, and the burning in his eyes, Luke felt a growing tenderness. One which he had no way that he could think to express, except by reaching out a warm hand as he walked back by him towards the door, and ruffling the mop of dark curls atop his nephew's head.

The door creaked shut behind him and Jess tilted his head, feeling the displaced hair fall back into disarray, his scalp tingling as he looked down at the piece of cardboard in his hand. Tufts of hair were just brushed into his line of sight from where his uncle had run his hand through it, but he didn't reach to move them. He read the words again. Then he turned the cardboard over and realized what it was once he saw the other side. The sleeve from a coffee cup. Right.

His hand brushed over the logo on the front, the raised ink of the print pressed against his palm, as he traced his fingers over the letters emblazoned on it. Luke's.

Jess turned the sleeve back over again, to the blank side and the handwriting. He read the words one more time, just to make sure they would sink in as deeply and as confidently as they were etched there.

You are not alone.

As he pivoted in place to grab the order off the back counter, Luke heard the front door chime behind him. He turned around, sliding the plate of pancakes in front of the someone sitting at the counter and then scanned the room for whatever new customer had entered. His face fell when he spotted her settled into a square table at the center of the room. She was looking right back at him, sitting up perkily in her seat, a large fuzzy purse placed on the table next to her, a garishly colorful and floral printed blouse standing out against her swept up dark curls and the bright grin on her face. She lifted a hand and waved at him.

Luke spun on his heel for a moment, facing away from her and letting out a slow groan. He walked back over to the coffee pots and picked one up, figuring he could make some refills after taking her order, and made his way over to her table. He needed to hire some extra help specifically to deal with people like this.

Before he could even open his mouth, she fixed her piercing blue eyes on him and chimed with irritable amiability, “I’m back!”

“What can I get you?”

“No comment on my mysterious reappearance?” she asked, sticking out her lower lip. “The horoscope indicated that I would not return.” She fixed her face back into a wide smile, laying her hands folded on the table in front of her. 

Luke suppressed another groan and put the coffee pot down on the table. He pulled his notepad out from his belt, pressing forward. “Do you want something else or just more coffee to go?” He gestured with his pencil at the table she was taking up.

"Oh, I want to eat here,” she nodded with a sudden uncharacteristic seriousness. “And coffee. In fact,” her tone edged into playfulness again, “two coffees!” She held up two fingers and waved them at him. “No time to wait for refills, just bring me double cups!"

“I can’t do that.”

“Sure you can.”

“I have other customers. I can’t just give you two cups.”

“Sure you can.”

Luke sighed and tucked a hand in his back pocket, staring at her with his expression unchanged. The woman stared back at him, leaning forward on the table until her cheeky smile wavered. “Oh, alright, one cup.” Luke jotted down the order despite its simplicity, expecting her food order next. “But I want ‘em fast!” she said, slapping her hand on the table. “Multiple refills! Every two minutes! In fact, you should just leave the pot!”

Luke blinked and stared down at his notepad, wondering how the hell ‘I can’t give you two cups’ translated in her mind to ‘give me the whole coffee pot’.

“‘Cause that’s the best dang coffee I’ve ever had,” she finished.

Luke dropped his writing hand and looked back up at her. “Yeah?”

“Oh, definitely,” she nodded emphatically. “And I’m not necessarily that picky about my caffeine intake. It’s just gotta be strong and gotta be a lot. But you’ve wrecked the curve in this town. I’m gonna have a dependency now.”

“Oh, great,” Luke said, not sure if a twinge of sarcasm was in his voice or not. The woman in front of him ‘tsked’ at his remark, however.

“Hey, a new business needs to build a loyal customer base. You should be happy to add one more.” She glanced around the crowded diner early on a Thursday morning. “But you seem pretty busy.”

Luke looked up around after her and took a deep breath, rubbing his hand on his lower back. “Yeah, well … a lot of the people in this town have known me since I was like five. And knew my dad, so they're ... curious, I guess. I dunno if that will die out after a while."

“With coffee like this, I don’t think so.”

Luke smiled faintly. “That’s good to know.”

Lorelai smiled back at him for a beat and then furrowed her brow. “So, are you getting me coffee or what?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Did you want a food order or not?”

“Mmm,” she hummed, eyes catching the chalkboard hanging up over the counter. “Get me the French toast special.”

“Got it,” Luke said, tapping the table gently with his fist and walking back to get a mug. He returned a second later and left her a filled cup without incident, so when he came back several moments after with her food he was expecting the conversation between them to be over. But somehow she parted her glossy red lips again before he even made it all the way over to the table and launched into a veritable ramble.

“Must be hard turning over a new business though. Especially a restaurant. I guess it’s good that it’s a small town then. I sorta want to open my own inn one day,” she paused and let out a small chuckle, “But I don’t even have my own house yet.”

Luke’s muscles tensed at the prolonged dialog as he slid the plate in front of her, but he couldn’t help commenting on her last statement. “Huh.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she waved her hand. “It’s a long story. I’m not homeless or anything.”

“Well, thank god for that,” he replied. This time it was definitely sarcastic. 

She pointed a finger at him. “You will be thankful when I’m not sleeping in your doorway.”

“Enjoy your meal,” he said, trying to walk away.

“My name’s Lorelai by the way.”

Luke let out an audible sigh and turned back to face her. “Luke.”

“I figured.”

Luke thought he should end this line of conversation on something semi-cordial, if anything just to make sure someone who liked to talk so much didn’t go around spreading bad word of mouth about customer service. She was persistent to get his attention for whatever reason. As he started to say something the doorway to the diner swung open with a swift bang.

“Lucas!” a man called out as he stopped in his tracks seeing the person in question standing immediately in front of him.

Luke pinched his eyes closed and reminded himself about that extra help to deal with people before turning to face him. “What Taylor?”

Taylor straightened up and set his face into a serious expression, as Lorelai twisted around in her chair to get a better view. “Well, if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a hundred and one times, and with the Spring Festival coming up,” he almost whined, “the tourists are going to get confused.”

“Taylor …,” Luke groaned, crossing his arms.

“Your sign, Luke,” Taylor stressed, as if the topic genuinely physically pained him. “You’ve changed over the business now. You haven’t run it into the ground yet. You can’t just keep your father’s hardware sign on the front of your restaurant. It needs to be taken down.”

Luke tightened his crossed arms. “And I’ve told you a hundred and two times, no!”

“You’re being unreasonable!”

Lorelai picked up a piece of her toast in her hand and bit into it, watching the scene unfold in front of her.

“And you’re being a pain in my ass.”

“Well I don’t see why that kind of language is necessary.”

“Funny, cause I feel the same way about this conversation.” 

Taylor's face grew red with frustration. “I can see you’re going to be exactly the kind of business owner your father was! He never cooperated with the Stars Hollow Business Association or Stars Hollow Tourist Board either!”

“Probably because he wasn’t insane.” Luke walked over to the door and held it open. “Now-“

“Ooh, wait a sec,” Lorelai cut in. Taylor whipped around and stared at her, startled. She turned in her seat and picked up her coffee mug, taking a gulp and then situating herself back around, facing Luke. “Okay, go.”

Luke shook his head and swung the door open wider. “Now order something or leave,” Luke directed at Taylor.

“You can’t just kick me out of your establishment!”

“I established it, so yes, I can!”

Taylor sputtered for a moment and then collected himself, brushing invisible lint off his sweater and starting for the door. “This isn’t the last you’re going to hear about this, young man.”

“I’m sure,” Luke huffed, slamming the door closed behind him.

“Breakfast and a show!” Lorelai’s voice cut in over the murmur of Luke’s growing headache.

Luke looked back up to see her gathering up her purse and taking one last sip from her coffee. “That’s worth charging a price of admittance.” She grinned standing up after sliding some money under her mug. What seemed to be all in one movement she swept by him and out the door after Taylor, Luke stumbling back as she went, wordless over the whole ordeal.

“Bye Duke!” she called as she turned down the street.

“I – it’s …,” Luke started, only to realize he was speaking to empty air. Shaking it off he pushed the door closed once again and turned back into his diner, which between that woman and Taylor felt like a whirlwind had just flounced through it. He walked over to her table to gather up the dishes, just as another loud banging interrupted his momentary peace, his nephew coming trampling down the stairs from the other side of the room.

“What’s for breakfast?” Jess asked, dashing over to his uncle, socked feet sliding on the floor.

Luke held his free arm out, indicating the busy diner around him. “Cereal upstairs,” he deadpanned. “I’m working.”

Jess frowned, his gaze falling to the empty table in front of him, stained with a dollop of maple syrup and a few green bills resting nearby. Luke picked up the money and turned it over in his hand. His eyes widened.

Jess watched his uncle’s expression. “What?” he asked.

“Uh, oh, nothing,” Luke said, jostling the coffee mug and plate into the crook of his arm. “Just ... a customer just gave us a big tip on a cheap meal."

“Cool,” Jess said. “Can I have it?”

Luke frowned and gave a practiced disapproving look to his nephew, who was standing in the middle of his open business with unkempt hair, dirty white socks, and very strange looking turtles on his cotton pajama pants. Still, he felt that same overwhelm of feeling as he had the other day, and reached out to ruffle the boy’s hair once more. 

“Put it towards your books,” Luke muttered, pressing the slightly sticky twenty dollar bill into Jess’ palm. Before Jess could recover from the onslaught of affection, Luke ducked away into the back room, a small smile falling across his face.