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Rory goes to Harvard. This changes everything.
Rory chooses Harvard. Richard gives her a brief smile and a tight-lipped congratulations and an envelope of cash, then retreats behind his newspaper. Rory knows then that she’s hurt him, damaged their relationship maybe beyond repair, that he feels that she is rejecting this part of his life. Rejecting him.
So she masks her hurt feelings behind a smile and thanks him for the money and that night she cries in Lorelai’s arms, asking her Why couldn’t he just be happy for me? For my choice?
Lorelai tucks her daughter under her chin and murmurs, “I don’t know, hon. I just don’t know.”
Rory chooses Harvard, and it changes everything.
On the last Friday night before Rory’s graduation, Emily makes an announcement.
“This is the last Friday night dinner,” she says. “Consider your debt paid.”
She stands up and vanishes into the kitchen.
Rory and Lorelai look at each other across the table. Rory's eyes are huge. "What should we do?" she whispers.
Lorelai doesn’t go after her.
Rory is going to Harvard, and now there’s no money to pay for it and no grandfather to foot the bill. Lorelai quietly returns the backpacks they’d bought for their trip to Europe, gets refunds on their plane tickets.
“I don’t mind,” Rory tries to reassure her, over and over, “I don’t mind, really, we’ll go after I get my degree. I promise, Mom.”
Harvard is expensive, and their summer is suddenly empty. So Rory swallows her pride and goes to Luke and asks for a summer job.
Luke stares at her, coffee pot in hand and wavering dangerously over the cup that he's trying to pour. “You, work here?” he repeats dubiously. “Oh, I don’t know...”
“Please?” Rory begs. “I could really use...the work experience,” she finishes lamely.
Luke looks at her half-hearted smile and gives in without another word. He tosses her an apron from across the counter.
“Okay. You got it,” he says. “You can start this afternoon washing dishes.”
He pays Rory in cash each week, way more than minimum wage, but when Rory tries to give him the money back he waves her off.
“You’re good for bringing in customers,” he tells her. “You talk to ‘em, make ‘em smile. The extra is all tips.”
“You got a job? At Luke’s?” Lane demands when she finds Rory behind the counter counting out change. “Can I have one too?”
“No,” says Luke immediately. "No. I don’t need any more help."
Lane follows him around the diner, hands clasped beeseechingly. “But I’m a hard worker!” she argues. “And I have a great memory. And Rory’s going to Harvard next year and I'm off to join the nunnery, and I’ll never see her again, and I really, really want to spend our last summer together. Even if it’s just working together. You don’t even have to pay me, Luke, please.”
Luke looks down at her pleading face and capitulates.
“All right,” he says, resigned. “You’re hired.”
Lane works all summer, every shift Luke will offer her, and by the end of the summer she has an envelope of cash that she hides under her floorboards, between her Johnny Cash and Nico cds.
She walks into the diner one day, shock all over her face. “I can’t believe what I did,” she says, and drops into the nearest chair. “I can’t believe what I did.”
“What, what did you do?” barks Luke. He doesn’t mean to shout but he’s experiencing a Jess-related flashback. Nothing good had ever happened when a teenager comes home saying something like that, he now knows that from experience.
Lane says, still in that stunned voice, “I’m not going to Seventh Day Advantist college.”
Luke puts a hand on his chest. Turns out he’s not having a heart attack but it was a close thing.
“Okay,” he says. “So what?”
“I applied to Hartford Community Colllege,” Lane answers. “I didn’t even tell my parents. And I got in. And when I found out, I thought, There’s no way Mama Kim will let me go. Just no way. And then I thought, But I want to go. I want to go to college where you can sit at a desk next to a boy and wear lipgloss if you feel like it and read Cosmo.”
“You can’t read Cosmo at Seventh Day Adventist college?” Luke asks quizzically.
“No, it glamorizes vanity and worldly pursuits.”
“I see. Go on.”
“And I knew there was no way my parents would pay for it. But then I thought. They can't stop me if they're not paying for it."
Luke waits. And waits. Lane hangs limply in her chair. "And?" he prods.
"So I went to the bank with the money I had from working here and got an account and a checkbook and I wrote the check and mailed the check and now I'm going to a real college. A real college, Luke.”
Lane's going to college, and it changes everything.
Jess calls Luke from California.
He’s at a payphone by the boardwalk, and he has to press his ear hard against the receiver to hear Luke’s voice. In the background, he can hear the everyday diner noises he got used to, living with Luke those couple of years; spoons clinking and ice rattling in glasses and the scrape of chairs along the scuffed floors. It’s almost like Jess is really there.
“You get there okay?” Luke asks. “Your dad pick you up at the bus station?”
“Yeah, sure,” Jess says, sardonic. The phone call was a stupid idea. He doesn’t know what to say now, and it’s clear Luke doesn’t either. Stupid, stupid. He suddenly wants to spill about Jimmy, how stupid he’d felt walking into the man’s house, his dad’s house and seeing the new life he’d made for himself. Here in California. Without Jess.
He can't do this. “I gotta go.”
“No, wait,” Luke argues. “Jess—”
In the background, Jess can hear her voice.
“That’ll be seven ninety-six. Here’s your change.”
He’s gotta ask.
“Is that her?” He waits. No response. "Luke, come on. Just tell me."
Luke sighs, loud and gusty into his ear. “Yeah. I was gonna tell you, but.... She’s working for me over the summer, her and Lane. I shoulda told you. Didn’t think you’d want to know.”
If Jess closes his eyes, he can almost see her. Apron strings wrapped twice around her waist, hair pulled back in a tidy bun, pencil and notepad in hand.
“Hey, Luke?” he says. He can’t bring himself to ask. But Luke must hear something in his voice anyways.
“Jess, come home,” he says.
“Luke—”
Luke can’t just say things like that, the way he does. He was the one who thought Jess should leave, and now here he is, saying, Come home like it’s nothing. Like they could go on like they had before, picking up shifts and washing each other’s t-shirts along with their own loads because neither of them are good at remembering to do the laundry regularly.
“I mean it, Jess. Come back. I’ll wire you the money.”
“I don’t need the money,” Jess scoffs, though he probably does, he almost certainly does. He definitely does.
“Yeah, I know you don’t,” Luke says, dry as the freaking Sahara. “Just...come home, okay? Caesar wants to take a vacation. Could use you back. We'll work it out. Just think about it.”
He thinks about it. It only takes a minute.
“Okay,” Jess mumbles. “Okay.”
Luke picks him up at the bus station in exactly the way that Jimmy didn’t. The ride back to the diner is mostly silent. But then near the end, Luke stops the pickup and throws it into park on the gravel lot by the pond. He cuts the engine, and rolls the window down. From across the pond, a swan trumpets noisily.
Luke stares at his hands for a while. “Jess, things have got to be different this time,” he begins.
“Yeah. I know.”
“I guess I can’t be too mad about you not finishing school, seeing as how I couldn’t make it through my senior year either.”
Jess raises his head at that. “You didn’t?”
“Nah,” Luke says. He seems embarrassed. “Dad had gotten sick by then, wasn’t doing too well...”
He trails off, lost in a memory. Then he clears his throat. “I just wanted more for you than I had. But if what you want is working at Walmart, working at the diner, well, I guess I can’t make a fuss. Maybe you’ll get your GED down the road, like I did. Anyway...you’ll figure it all out eventually, you’re a smart kid."
He’s rambling. Luke does that when he’s nervous.
"I just want you to be okay. Safe. Have a roof over your head. You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” Jess says. “Yeah, I know.”
When they get to the diner, Rory is wiping down tables. Luke carries Jess’s duffle upstairs.
Jess shuffles his feet. “Hey."
Rory scrubs the table with fierce concentration. “Hey.”
“Rory, I-”
“You’re in my way," she interrupts. She's holding the bottle of Lysol like a weapon.
“What?”
“You’re in my way. I need to wipe down that table.” She pushes past him and squirts cleaner on the surface of the battered linoleum table.
“I think I might have loved you too,” Jess says.
Rory stops wiping but stays leaning over the table. “You can’t just leave,” she says. “That’s what you did. You just left.”
He grins. Just a little bit. “But I came back.”
She glares at him. Her hair’s falling out of her messy bun, and there’s a pencil tucked behind her ear, and Jess’s chest aches.
“Sure, okay, you came back,” Rory challenges. “How long are you going to stay this time? An hour? A day?”
“Pretty sure I’ll be here tomorrow. You on the schedule too?”
“Yeah, I’m working. Why?”
Jess hunches his shoulders, shoves his hands down in his pockets. “Maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee after you get off. We could talk.”
She blows a loose piece of hair out of her face. “What on earth would we have to talk about, Jess?”
“Should probably start with all the things I did wrong,” Jess answers, and Rory almost smiles. She slowly unties her apron, hanging it up behind the stock room door. She’s almost out the door when she stops and turns around.
“You came back,” Rory says. She’s biting her lip, and god, Jess has missed her.
“Yeah,” Jess says. “I did.”
Jess wipes tables and drives a forklift and borrows Luke’s truck to take a GED prep class in the evenings. He passes on the first attempt and Luke sticks the certificate on the fridge with a baseball magnet.
“We should celebrate,” Luke says. He's too pleased about it. It makes Jess wish he'd failed a few times first, to keep from giving him any big ideas. “Any restaurant, my treat. Invite Rory if you want.”
“Yeah,” says Jess. “Then we can hold hands and skip afterwards.”
Rory is going to Harvard, but she can’t afford the fancy dorms with a common area and separate bedrooms. She gets a single room that she shares with another girl who’s almost never there. Jessica parties hard, and Rory sees her more often sitting beside the toilet in the shared dorm bathrooms than she does in class.
Rory goes to Harvard, and she couldn’t have afforded the train ticket home every few months without the money she’d picked up working at diner. She can barely afford her tuition, much less her textbooks, so she gets a student work job shelving books at the university library, then a second job working the counter at a diner just off campus.
“Got any experience?” the woman working the tables asks, eying her doubtfully.
“Oh, yeah,” Rory assures her. "I was practically raised in a diner. Just ask Luke."
Jessica, when she does talk to Rory, will sometimes invite her to the frat parties she frequents, but between work and her classes and writing articles for the campus newspaper, there isn’t much time for socializing.
“I can’t,” Rory says apologetically. “I’ve got homework. And work-work. Tonight. And tomorrow. I mean, every night this week, but who's counting?”
Eventually Jessica stops asking.
Harvard is only 1.23 miles from her dad’s apartment, but somehow those promised family dinners never happen. Christopher forgets to call, or has to work, or Sherry’s out of town on business.
Rory’s not really surprised. There are some things Harvard hasn’t changed.
Rory chooses Harvard. Paris hates her for it.
Paris won’t return her phone calls or emails or attend her graduation party. Paris can’t go to Harvard, so she goes to Yale instead. Yale has a great library and decent cafeteria food, but Paris is there, alone with a group of roommates who hate her and no one to talk to and no one to offer her the challenge she needs to push through.
Paris doesn’t know how to measure success without someone else to compare herself to. If she’s at the top of the class, she only knows it because everyone else is failing.
And Rory isn’t here.
Paris is failing her classes by midterms. She checks her grades and isn’t even surprised.
She shows up at Rory’s dorm, her face red and blotchy from crying. She ought to be screaming with jealousy, stumbling across the campus towards Rory’s student hall. Paris ought to be the one here, ought to be the one who got in, the one succeeding. Rory won and she didn't. But she can’t even find it in herself to be angry anymore.
Rory opens the door and Paris falls apart.
“I’m so tired,” she cries. “I’m just so tired, Rory. I don’t think I can do it anymore.”
Rory doesn’t yell at her for failing like her father did or sit there silently like her mom had. Rory just holds her while she cries.
“I really missed you,” Paris hiccups into Rory’s stupidly shiny hair. Rory even got the superior hair genes. Life's so unfair.
“Paris,” Rory says gently. “You know you don’t have to do this to yourself.”
“Yes, I do,” she sniffs into Rory’s damp shoulder. “This is what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to go to an Ivy-league school and graduate with honors and become a doctor and have a life exactly like my parents. And then maybe that will be enough. Maybe I’ll finally be enough.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Rory says, tentative. “Maybe all that would make your parents happy. But what about you?”
“I’ve never been happy,” Paris snaps. “I wouldn’t know.”
“That’s something important to learn,” Rory answers. “Don’t you think?”
Paris drops out before the end of the semester.
She doesn’t tell her parents, not at first, not right away. She drives to Nanny’s house in Boise with her clothes and shoes and books in the backseat and lets Nanny usher her to the kitchen table and stroke her hair soothingly and bring her a plate of pão de queijo and coffee.
“It’s so strange, Nanny,” she says. “I don’t even think I want to go back. Oh, god. What am I going to do?”
“Ah,” soothes Nanny, petting her arm the way she used to do when Paris was younger and too upset to fall asleep on her own. “Comer sua comida, querida.”
A month later, Paris writes a letter to her parents from the bedroom she’s sharing with Nanny’s granddaughter to tell them that she’s got a job nannying for a family Nanny knows and working at the pupuseria on the weekends.
Mom, Dad, I know this isn’t what you wanted for me, she writes in the fast, stylized writing she has perfected for note-taking. But it’s what I want for me. And I’m sorry if you aren’t happy but-
She hesitates, biting the end of her pen. What was it that Rory had said? Oh. Yes.
You can suck it.
She drops the letter in the mail and goes to put on her uniform. “Estou saindo para o trabalho,” she calls to Nanny.
“Tenha um bom dia, querida,” Nanny calls back from the kitchen.
Paris doesn’t go to Yale, and it changes everything.
Harvard is far away, and Rory can’t come home until after finals, and Lorelai isn’t lonely. She isn’t lonely, because since the inn has been sold she’s been driving into Hartford six days a week to work as an event planner for a corporate-owned hotel. Sometimes after work she’ll drive over to the old Dragonfly Inn and drink her coffee on the front porch and dream of yellow-painted walls and lace curtains and green rattan chairs, but it’ll be years before it’s up and running, with the cost of repairs.
Lorelai isn’t lonely, because Rory calls her almost every day from her dorm room, because when the house is too quiet she’ll slip over to Sookie’s and curl up on the couch, counting Davey’s toes and breathing in his milky-newborn scent from over Sookie’s shoulder and laughing at the way he scrunches his face sleepily.
Lorelai sleeps in Rory’s bedroom more than she sleeps in her own and it’s fine, she’s okay. That’s what she tells Luke in the mornings when he pours her coffee.
“Sure you are,” Luke agrees. “That’s why you’re wearing Rory’s dangly silver bracelet and Rory’s powder blue sweater and carrying Rory’s copy of Anna Karenina with her personal annotations in the margins around in your purse. But sure. You’re fine. I believe you.”
“Hey, how’d you know about the annotations?”
Luke shrugs. “I built all her bookcases.” Then he says, in an altered tone, “You know, you work too hard. Maybe you should get out of the house. Do something. You know, have fun.”
Lorelai gasps. “Fun? Without Rory? ”
Luke arches an eyebrow at her. “It’s possible. Theoretically.”
“Okay," she says. "Theoretical fun. And who am I having this theoretical fun with? And don't say Kirk because you know his mother won't let him out past eight.”
“With me.”
Lorelai freezes.
Luke drops his eyes and keeps his gaze firmly fixed on the doughnut case. “We never finished that card game,” he adds.
“Okay,” Lorelai whispers. Luke always says her mind moves faster than a stockcar on rocket fuel but it’s taking her a while to process this. Her smile’s a little trembly but it’s real. “Okay.”
Lorelai isn’t lonely. She has a life here, a good life she built by herself. She watches I Dream of Jeannie reruns and reads through Rory’s book collection and goes to Babbette and Morey’s for dinner on nights when ordering from Al’s for just one person seems too pathetic, and of course she misses her girl, her pal, her everything, but she’s gonna be okay. She’s gonna be okay, because she went to a movie at the bookstore last night and threw popcorn at the back of Taylor’s head and Luke didn’t even tell her to stop. Instead he took the popcorn box out of her hands and kissed her until she was too distracted to think about trying to ping a kernel off Taylor’s bald spot.
She isn’t lonely, but she’s not sure why she finds herself with her phone against her ear, hearing the click as Emily answers the call.
“Hey, mom.”
“Lorelai,” Emily says, her voice clipped in the way her daughter knows all too well.
Lorelai might have gotten a warmer reception in Antarctica, but she starts to laugh, and laugh.
“Lorelai?” Oh, the frostbite’s still there, but now there’s ample confusion as well. “Lorelai, what on earth is this about?”
“I’m not lonely, mom.”
“Of course you aren’t.”
Lorelai drags in a gasping breath. “But I miss her. I miss my girl. ”
Silence on the line. Then Emily’s voice cracks. “And I miss mine.”
Lorelai laughs and laughs. She can’t stop. And then Emily starts as well, and they're laughing and crying and laughing some more.
Rory goes to Harvard, and everything changes.