Disclaimer: Gilmore Girls is owned by Amy-Sherman Palladino, Warner Bros., and all those other rich, smart people.
A/N: Well, this musing-type fic was inspired by watching 'Rory's Birthday Parties'; specifically the scene in Lorelai's old bedroom where Lorelai is telling Rory about her last birthday in the Gilmore mansion. I was thinking about that scene, coupled with the flashback scene of Young-Lor and Chris on the stairs in the episode 'Dear Emily and Richard'. Some type of non-brand cold medicine may have inadvertantly helped also.
If you can't guess who's POV this is from, then, well, you're kinda sad.
Tell me if you loved it, or if you thought it was pure crap.
XXX
When I was little- before I had learned the art of sneaking out- I used to sit on the stairs and listen in on the conversations of my mother's different group meetings with the women of the club. I'd overhear the scandalous gossip, not really understanding, but also knowing that whatever the people they were talking about had done, it had been bad.
I distinctly remember one specific topic that they went on about for weeks. One of the younger women from the club had gotten pregnant out of wedlock. Now, I was only around seven or eight, so the first thing I honed in on was 'club', because I really, really didn't like going there. My parents would force me to put on nice dresses and have disgusting foods with adults that I didn't like because they'd talk about me as if I were something to look at, and not a real person. The other part, well, I was pretty much left in the dark, having not been old enough to know what 'pregnant', or 'wedlock', really meant.
They kept meeting at my house, year after year, but by the time I was twelve, I was much more interested in seeing my friends than listening in on the stairs to my mother and the women from the club. The only reason I'd ever eavesdrop on them by then was to make sure they were too wrapped up in their discussions to notice me slip out my window; a trick Christopher and I had discovered earlier that year. I quickly figured out that they wouldn't have clued in even if I had been stomping around and throwing things against the walls on my way out.
Of course, there are only so many lucky breaks people are blessed with, and mine unfortunately ran out the night after my fifteenth birthday. My parents had forced me to attend a birthday party they were throwing for me, which of course I only agreed to in the end because Chris was going to be there as well, since our parents were old friends. After I had been harassed by numerous women I used to listen in on when they would meet with my mother, all saying how much older I looked, and how fast I was growing up, and how they remembered when I was this tall, blah, blah, blah. Chris and I escaped from them for a few minutes, and after making out for a bit, he promised to throw me a real party the next night with a bunch of our friends- without parent supervision. Music to my ears.
Well, I never got to go to that party, since my parents caught me. I couldn't believe my luck; I had snuck out hundreds of times before, why did they have to catch me now? They were supposed to be at a function of some sort, too, so I had expected that I'd get at least a few hours of fun before returning back to my personal hell, which I had started fondly calling my home. I was reprimanded and sentenced to accompany them to a stuffy office party the next weekend, which I had gotten out of before.
Looking back, I don't think it was a good thing that my parents restricted me so much. I understood that I was the daughter of a prestigious and wealthy name, but I felt like a dog on a leash, and I knew that soon, that leash would be broken. I just never knew what sort of drastic circumstances would finally lead to it.
I found my way to those stairs again, except this time I was older, wiser (some would argue), and definitely not so naïve. The gossip of that young woman getting pregnant out of wedlock came screaming back to me at that moment, even though it had been about seven years since I had heard it. 'Pregnant' wasn't a word you wanted to hear accompanied with 'out of wedlock', and yet that was exactly what I was about to tell Emily and Richard Gilmore. Their daughter, the next in the Gilmore line and their sole heir, was officially an all-time screw-up.
They were confused, angry, hurt, and almost any emotion you could think of that was the opposite of happy, excited, and thrilled. Emily and Richard Gilmore did not want their first, and maybe only, grandchild to be fatherless. 'It's bad enough that this child has teenagers for parents,' she recalled her father saying.
Telling Christopher wasn't any easier. He was shocked, and almost in denial at first, as you would expect any sixteen-year-old male to be at this news, and yet he still was going to go along with our parents' plan for our lives; our futures. I was on the stairs again, except this time I had a companion, and not one who wanted to be there. And still no one had asked how I was feeling, except for a maid who had seen me throwing up that morning. Didn't anyone care how I felt about the whole thing? I thought I was one of the most important things in this scenario, and yet there I was, invisibly sitting on the stairs. No one realized that I had already accepted this change to my life, and how much I hoped this child would know how much I loved it, despite the circumstances.
Everyone had found out at my sixteenth birthday dinner-party my parents had insisted to throw; to show as if nothing was different. They had kept it hidden, so wasn't it a shock to all the club members when they learned Emily and Richard Gilmore's teenage daughter was pregnant?
I began eavesdropping on my mother's meetings again, since I wasn't allowed to go out anymore. I'd sit on the stairs and listen, except this time I was much more aware of what they were discussing; I was no longer a young girl who was just looking for a way to pass the time. I could always tell when my mother had left the room, because that was when the words would float up the nicely polished stairs, over the ornamental carpeting, and into my ears: 'pregnant', 'out of wedlock', 'what a pity'. And I knew exactly who they were talking about now. Me.
The gossip kept going, so I learned to ignore it. By the time I was eight months along, I was too busy worrying about giving birth to another human being, let alone what people thought of me. I had dropped out of school, had told Chris numerous times that I didn't want him to take a job with my father, and had somehow avoided giving him a firm answer on the whole 'marriage' thing. I was past caring what my parents had to say.
It felt wrong to bring Rory from the comfortable and kind hospital to the gigantic, fragile, and cold place that she was supposed to call 'home'. I had said no to Christopher's proposal, and by the end of that year, he was going to be graduating and heading off to make something of himself. I was more worried about Rory growing up correctly than anything.
We stayed for a year. Well, a little over a year. My parents had wanted to have a nice little party with only the four of us and Christopher for Rory's first birthday, but Chris hadn't been able to make it. Still, Emily and Richard always wanted the best for their granddaughter, so they had had a special dinner to honor her. Why did they bother? She was only a year old; it's not like she understood, I questioned to myself.
I had resolved that I didn't want Rory to grow up in this type of environment. Hell, look where it got me. I could only imagine how over-bearing my parents would be to my daughter, let alone me.
I had to make a life-altering decision.
So a week later, I sat on the stairs one final time, holding my breath. My father was still at work, and my mother had been puttering around the house, yelling at the maid. Everything was packed up and waiting at the top of the steps, including a sleeping Rory, so all I had to do was wait for the opportune moment. It came when my mother left to pick something up.
When they finally noticed I was gone, it was too late. I was on a bus headed to Stars Hollow, a town Chris and I had driven through right after he had gotten his license. They had lost me.
And yet still, I can't help but think of those damn stairs.