Sugar And Spice And
All That's Nice
(four girls josh lyman can't handle)
i. lorelei gilmore
Five-year-old Josh Lyman likes Kindergarden. He likes taking the schoolbus with his big sister Joanie, and he likes snack time, opening his lunch box and trading chicken salad sandwiches for tuna and sharing his grapes (which he doesn't like very much) with the other children. He likes play time, especially building forts, and he likes seat work, writing his name and learning things, so one day, soon, he'll be just as smart as his Daddy.
The only thing Josh Lyman doesn't like about Kindergarden is that birdbrain girl Lorelei Gilmore. She talks louder than anyone else in the whole class, and knows more big words (and more bad words), than any of them. She's very funny, until you're the one she's making fun of and then she's not funny at all, just a stupid poo-head girl with stupid pigtails and stupid clothes.
Lorelei Gilmore wants to kiss him. She announces this to the class at large as their settling down for show-and-tell. Josh got to bring in one of his Daddy's ties today, and he's really excited about standing up in front of the rest of the class and showing them how his Daddy ties his ties before going to work in New York City every morning, and then stupid Lorelei looks him square in the face and announces, "I'M GOING TO KISS JOSH LYMAN AT PLAY TIME!!" at the top of her lungs.
Everyone laughs, and some of her dweeby birdbrain friends start chanting "Josh and Lorelei sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.."
He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't want to kiss her, of course, but he doens't want to hurt her feelings either, so he just kind of sits their and plays with his shoelaces. Mrs Higgings tells the girls to settle down, and they do, but after that he's way too embarrassed to do show-and-tell. That makes him feel really sad, though, because he knows that his Daddy will want his tie back, and he doesn't want to tell him he wasn't brave enough to stand up in front of class because of a stupid girl.
He's morose for the rest of the day, but as they're waiting for the bus on the way he home, he kind of lingers back and catches her as she's coming out of the potty. His Mommy always says that when you feel bad, you should try to make others feel better, and then you'll feel better too, and she also always says that sometimes you need to be the bigger person, and in that spirit, he walks up to her. "Lorelai," he says, seriously. "You can kiss me know if you really want to."
Lorelai goes as red as the corduroy skirt she's wearing and starts giggling hysterically. "I don't want to kiss you!" She calls loudly, scampering down the schoolhouse steps and towards the school busses, laughing gleefully. "You have cooties!"
--
A week later, Josh decides that the only way to get back at her is to make her kiss him. No, make her want to kiss him. He's talked it over with Joanie, and she explained that the thing about kissing is, both people have to want it, or it's fake. He overhears Lorelai telling one of her friends that she's going to be Maid Marian for Halloween, and that's when he hatches his plan.
When his Mommy asks him if he's thought about what he wants to be for Halloween this year, he sadly dispenses of his planned costume as a pirate-baseball-player and tells her he wants to be Robin Hood. His mother raises her eyebrows and asks if he's sure, and Joanie giggles into her homework in a way that isn't at all big-sisterly, but he stands firm, and so, on Halloween morning, he puts on his green shirt, matching green hat, and a pretty neat bow and arrow.
Kindergarden is extra-fun today, because there's apple-bobbing and musical chairs and treats for everyone, but he hardly pays attention because he's so busy waiting for the perfect moment. It comes when they're both lining up for extra candy corn, and he turns to her and says, "Do you like my costume?"
She makes a pouty face and looks him over. "It's okay, I guess. Mine is MUCH nicer though, right?"
"Yeah, 'cause you're a girl," he reasons. "But we kind of… match." He chooses his words slowly and drops his voice to a mysterious whisper. "Do you know what happens at the end of the story?"
When she nods but doesn't seem to get it, he whispers: "Robin Hood and Maid Marian kiss!"
She stares at him. Then a grin spreads over her face. "So you have to kiss me now," she says, bossily. "Cause you made your costume match mine, because I had the idea FIRST."
Josh grins at her wickedly, savoring the moment. "I don't want to kiss you!" He proclaims, triumphantly. "YOU HAVE COOTIES!"
Her face crumbles up and he's horrified to see tears welling up in her eyes. "Don't cry," he says, quickly. "I'm just kidding-"
But she's howling already, and trying to kick him. "YOU DUMB, MEAN, BUTTPLUG!" She shrieks, infuriated, and it occurs to him that he's pretty sure he's never seem her cry before, not even that time Ellie Macdougal pushed her off the swing set, and that makes him feel, if anything, worse. Mrs Higgins hurries over to them, and as she shrieks even louder, he's pretty sure she's grinning at him wickedly from between the fingers covering her face.
He ends up getting a twenty-minute time out, and when Mrs. Higgins tells her the side of the story she's managed to collect from Lorelei, his Mommy says he's going to miss trick or treating this year for being hateful. By the end of the day, he's the only kid in the neighborhood without a stash of Halloween candy hidden under his bed, and he's pretty much come around to the conclusion that kisses from girls aren't worth this kind of trouble.
ii. miranda hobbes
To twelve-year-old Josh Lyman, all girls are incredibly annoying.
There's the stupid kind, who are just plain dumb and that's annoying, then there's the girly, pink and frilly kind who talk in high voices, and obviously that gets on his nerve. Then there's the teacher's-pet kind that pretend to be oh-so-grown-up and tell tales on you for smashing the classroom window with a misplaced baseball.
And then there's the cool kind, and they all remind him of Joanie, and honestly, he can live without that.
So, that year at summer camp, when the counselor's announce that next Saturday there's going to be a social with the girl's camp on the other side of the lake, he's not wild about the whole thing. Some of the guys from his cabin come up with an elaborate scheme involving corn syrup and jello falling from the ceiling on the girls, but then seem to change their minds about it. On Saturday, they all troop across the lake in boats, and there's a few games and punch and s'mores, and then they're expected to "mingle", whatever that means. Some of the younger boys get the younger girls involved in a game of Marco Polo, and the older kids all troop into a corner to play Spin The Bottle. Josh kind of hangs around at the fringe of both groups, spectacularly self-conscious because the only thing he knows more certainly than that he doesn't want to play Spin The Bottle with a bunch of giggly girls is that he can't hang around playing Marco Polo with a bunch of eight year olds. He's looking around for his friends from the cabin, and his eyes land on a girl with messy red braids perched on a log, immersed in a book. She looks… nice.
Making sure none of his friends are looking, he walks over and sits down next to her. "Hi."
"I'm reading." She doesn't even look up from the book.
"I can tell," he grins. "What's the book?"
She holds it up mutely. To Kill a Mockingbird. "I've read that," he says, brightly. "I really liked it. I liked the part where-"
She looks up, eyes sparkling at him. "I'm kind of reading."
This is fun.
"Well, but you can read later," he reasons, grinning at her. "I'm Josh."
"Miranda." She smiles back reluctantly. "Don't tell me which part you liked, I'm not that far yet and I don't want to get spoiled."
"Kay." He watches the fireflies for a second. "What do you guys do at your camp?"
She shrugs, trapping her fingers between the pages with a resigned kind of sigh. "Same as you guys, probably- activities and stuff. I do speech and debate sometimes, that's really fun."
"You do speech and debate?" He's impressed now. "That's cool. Me too," he explains, "I'm on the debate team at school, but there's no girls on that team. I didn't think it was a girl thing."
"It doesn't have to be a girl thing for me to like it," she shoots back angrily. "It can just be a me thing."
He laughs. "I guess. So you guys don't… braid your hair and paint your nails and stuff all day long?"
"No, we don't, jerkface." She opens her book again and buries her head in it, her eyes whizzing from line to line so furiously he's sure she's only pretending.
"Sorry," he mumbles, sheepishly. "I was kidding."
"No, you weren't."
"Yes, I was!"
"That's what they teach you on your Debate Team?" She raises and eyebrow, and he laughs, relieved to see her smiling again.
"I really didn't mean it," he explains, staring at camp fire in the distance. Camp fires still make him nervous. He begged his parents to send him to a camp where there wasn't a fire at night, but they couldn't find one, and his Dad thought it'd be a good idea for him to "face it". "My sister used to go to camp," he says, quietly. "I'm sure she never braided her hair all day long."
Miranda laughs. "I didn't think you had a sister. Boys who have sisters usually don't say dumb things about girls."
"I-" the word 'don't' hangs on his lips, but he doesn't say it. "Yeah. She'd be pretty mad at me, if she knew what I just said." Which is true.
"Good for her." They smile at each other, and Josh suddenly notices that red hair is kind of pretty on girls.
"Miranda!" Another girl comes running towards them from the spin-the-bottle side of the campground. "Ohmigod, you like totally need to come play with us. Lulu just had to kiss a guy on the cheek!" The girl dissolves into giggles, and only then seems to notice Josh sitting on the log next to her. "Oh. Hi."
"Hi," Josh mumbles, feeling that this girl incorporates everything he hates about them in one body.
Her eyes narrow suspiciously as she glares at Miranda, and demands: "What are you doing?"
"We're…" Miranda blushes, heavily. "We're just talking."
"Yeah?" The girl studies both of them critically then turns back. "You should come play with us. Don't be such an outsider, or you'll turn into a total freak." She walks away, her bouncy curls bobbing around her like a cloud of self-satisfaction.
Josh glances at Miranda unsurely. "You should go hang out with them," he mutters, staring at his shoelaces.
"Why?" She snaps, trying to catch his eyes.
"'Cause," he mutters. "You know."
She sighs, heavily. "I'll go. If you want me to."
"I don't… I'm not saying…"
"Whatever." She gets up. Josh raises his head to see her walk away, looking defeated and feeling monumentally confused.
Girls are incredibly annoying. All of them.
iii. addison montgomery
Seventeen-year-old Josh Lyman has fallen in love
It's so pathetic he tries to not even think about it, but he can't help himself. She's perfect. And hot. Well. She doesn't look it, not at first glance because she's got braces and she doesn't dress like the cheerleaders, who pin up their skirts every morning during assembly and wear lipstick even though it's not aloud, but she's not like that, thank god.
She's classy and beautiful and smart, and who cares if she's a total freak? So is he. They're like a nerdy version of John and Jackie Kennedy. And dude, he knows JFK cheated on his wife all the time. It's a metaphor. He's just saying. They're perfect for each other.
She sits in front of him in AP English and because they're the only two people in that class with no lives, they're also always the only ones who have actually read the books they're supposed to be reading -and both of them usually have finished them by the second class. She loves Jane Austen -like there's a girl on the planet who doesn't, or so says his mother- and he tried that (because they had to read it for class, not because he's a wimp, okay?) and actually liked it, because it was much funnier than anything else they'd read that semester and because it was the perfect story. For them. He's just like Mr. Darcy all awkward and brooding and stuff -although mainly awkward, and also not so much handsome and broody as, well, pimpled, gawkish and shy- but he's like Mr. Darcy because he said something not-so-nice about her at the very beginning of the school year and she heard and ever since then she's hated him and really, it's not fair and all. And clearly that Skippy Gold who walks her to class on Mondays and Wednesdays because he's got World History across the hall is bad news, just like Mr. Wickham.
And she's Elizabeth. Or course she is. She's got the eyes, and also she manages to be totally annoying but it doesn't matter because you have to like her anyway. And so Josh sits there, every English class of the winter term, staring at the curve of her neck and that gorgeous auburn hair and smiling at the way she sometimes does her AP bio homework during class and still manages to say smarter things than any of the other girls in the room.
He argues with her, sometimes, during class discussions, because sometimes what she's saying is just too girly for him to handle and makes no sense whatsoever, and the way she says it, like Moses brought it down from the goddamn mountain, drives him up a wall- but then she looks at him and raises one eyebrow, and he gets tongue tied and, Jesus Christ, does he sympathize with poor Mr. Darcy when they discuss the proposal scene in class a few days later.
He thinks about asking her out to homecoming, but can't quite muster up the courage to do so, and drives around in circles in his Mom's car for about an hour, listening to the radio and turning it up every time they play Silly Love Songs.
One of his friends is throwing a post-Homecoming-bash, a big one, with booze and everything because his parents are out of town and his older brother is home from Yale to chaperone. He's halfway through his third beer, sitting in a corner with his buddy Jake who's taking care of the music, when he spots a brilliant red head in the crowd, draining a plastic cup like it's soda, which he's pretty sure it's not.
"Dude." He's so shocked he nearly knocks over his beer. Jake follows his gaze.
"Really, man?"
"Did you know she was coming?" He realizes his voice has gone up several octaves and quickly drains his beer.
"Josh, dude. Come on." Jake shakes his head and gently slips the Exile on Main Street out of its jacket. He takes his deejaying work very seriously, and is renowned throughout the school for selecting his records with the care of a general sending troups into battle. He watches Addison Montgomey's red head wave through the crowd as his fingers scan the track list of Exile for the right song for this particular moment."She's a total freak."
Josh thoroughly disregards this, squares his shoulders and empties his friend's beer. "Put on Je t'aime," he instructs, referring to what Jake calls the let's-get-some-action record that his older sister brought back from England a few years ago and has brought almost every teenager in the neighborhood a happy memories to focus on during AP Calculus.
"Dude." Jake says, seriously. "Are you sure? Because the power of the Je t'aime… it can't be denied, man. That thing is the shit."
"I'm counting on it," Josh replies, scrambling to his feet.
"It's on your head, man." He watches as Jake tenderly returns the Exile on Main Street to its jacket and instead pulls the sacred jacket from the pile next to him. "Good luck."
Josh nods and makes his way through the throng of people dancing, talking, drinking, until he's sees her, talking to a friend of hers in a corner. God, she's pretty.
"Hi."
She frowns at him. "Hey."
The beers doing something to his stomach, or maybe it's those gorgeous eyes. Liquor courage. He hopes Joanie's in his corner, wherever she is. "You wanna dance?"
"I, uh…" She goes beet red. "Sure."
He leads her onto the impromptu dance floor, loops his arms around her carefully, and thinks that this is the greatest thing he's ever done.
And the power of Je t'aime cannot be denied, because half an hour later, he's making out with her, with Addison Montgomery, the Elizabeth to his Mr. Darcy, and even though everything's a blur and this is the most surreal moment of his life, it's also possibly the best. Because her lips are soft and her hands are everywhere, and, finally, he understands what the big freaking deal about girls is.
And even though it all goes to hell in hand basket a few months later when he forgets to ask her to the prom in time, and the way she very pointedly and very publically breaks up with him in the five-minute break between World History and Physics is enough to turn him off them for the rest of his life, Josh Lyman has learned his lesson.
Girls are kind of the best thing in the world.
iv. catherine joanne lyman
"Dad." He waves his hand in the air to signify to his daughter to hang on a second, kid, as he underlines a split infinitive in a grad student's paper, mentally asking himself why-oh-why these people never took Academic Writing 101 as freshmen, sighs, and gives the paper an A- nonetheless.
"Sorry. What's up?"
"Um. I." He looks up in time to see her cheeks flush a deep red that clashes wonderfully with her blonde hair, a spitting image of her mother at her most haywire, only a lot younger. God, she's growing up quickly. "I got my period?"
And half of it he doesn't even know, apparently. Josh drops his pen. It falls on the tiled kitchen floor in a clatter, appropriately enough splattering the entire kitchen floor in red ink. Swearing, he gets to his knees, retrieving the pen but banging his head on the kitchen table. "Fuck! Sorry," he adds immediately, finally managing to glance up at his daughter. "Are you okay?"
Cate makes a face, obviously holding up the snarky comment dancing on her lips with some difficulty as she considers her father's panic-striken expression. "Not really. Do you know where Mom…"
"Our bathroom. Second drawer, behind the q-tips. They're in this pink box thing."
"Oh." That explains why I didn't find them, she thinks to herself, mentally cursing her mother for going to that stupid spa without her, going this weekend, hiding the tampons better than easter eggs and generally being responsible for… everything, including the fact that she's a girl and going through this at all. She contemplates her father's helpless look for a second, and adds, "and marrying this loser" to the list of her mother's transgressions.
Josh attempts a winning smile. "Do I… say congratulations or something?"
"Not unless you want me to give myself up for adoption," she snaps back.
"Oh, my god, you're just as crabby as your mother," he mutters, unable to hold himself back. Then he catches her eye, and the glare is so like Donna's that he immediately recedes. "Sorry. Sorry. Don't tell her I said that. Should I, uh- do you need any-"
"I can read, thanks," she says hastily, and disappears upstairs, leaving him to contemplate everything from the fact that his little girl is not so much one anymore to the possibility of two crabby hormonal Moss women under one roof awaiting him for the next few years. Finding himself unable to concentrate on the essays he's supposed to be reading, he writes Donna a text consisting mainly of an all caps plea for her to COME HOME, but then decides not to send it. Cate ought to be the one to tell her mother. When she reappears for dinner, he tries to initiate the Conversation, but since both of them so visibly uncomfortable and he never really finds a good opener to bring up her reproductive organs, she finally holds up her slice of pizza with a crease between her eyes that she loves, her expression teetering between wow, you're adorable, and my god, you're lame.
"Dad. Really. We don't have to do this."
He breathes a very audible sigh of relief. "Listen, your Mom doesn't have cellphone reception but we could probably get the number of the spa and call her there if you want-"
"I'm actually okay," she smiles, and really, she is. Between health classes, her two best friends who got their periods last month, and her wonderful godmother CJ –whom she called before coming down to the kitchen, but while CJ offered plenty of sage advice such as, by all means give in to the instinct to eat, and hinted that getting a hot water bottle might be an idea, she had no idea where tampons were kept in the Moss-Lyman household- she's holding up, and while she wishes her Mom was here to make her smile about it, really, her Dad isn't as awful about this as she thought he was going to be. Although coming pretty close.
She disappears back into her room before having even swallowed her last bite of pizza, and while he lets her get away with not clearing the table, he does knock on her door, and opens it before waiting for a reply.
"Hey."
"I didn't say come in," she says, flatly, looking up at him from the top of Pride and Prejudice.
"You are as crabby as your Mom," he points, sitting next to her. "That's a great book," he ads, conversationally.
Cate giggles. "You've read Jane Austen?!"
"For school," he lies, or half-lies. "Are you sure you're okay?"
Cate nods. "I'm sure."
"So… how was school?"
"Dad."
"I'm going, I'm going."
Josh retreats, but not before pressing a kiss on her cheek. Cate only squirms a little, and smiles up at him. "Night, Daddy," she mumbles as he's already in the doorway.
"Night, big girl," he calls back, blowing her a kiss. It's only taken him most of his life, but Josh Lyman has learned his lessons about girls and kissing. It's a thousand little moments that makes the world go round.