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'Did you go out of your mind? What were you thinking?'

He doesn't answer. His look is fixed somewhere between his worn army boots and her oil-soaked slippers.

'At least look at me while I'm talking to you, will you?' she demands impatiently.

He rolls his eyes and takes a small paperback copy out of his baggy jeans pocket.

She paces to and fro over the squeaky kitchen floor, then takes the cigarette pack from the dinner table and lights. She gives him a long look, her smoke letting thin white lines up, dissolving on their way towards the ash-colored ceiling. Then she drags a chair to sit across from him, her eyes never leaving his face.

'Why do you hate me so much?' she asks incredulously and he snaps up. When Liz talks, there's no buildup, no lead to where she's going. She just drops stuff as she goes.

'What?'

She looks at him pointedly.

'I don't hate you... Jeez.' Jess shakes his head once, lost for words.

He feels a lot like a blind man trying to read lips. Lost for any clues to his mother's thought process.

'Look, can't we get this over with already?' he asks and the book closes with a clasp in his palm. 'You can ground me or whatever.'

He drains the last words with such sarcasm, even she gets how little of a parent figure she is to him.

She lets out a sigh.

'You know, maybe I should,' she says thoughtfully.

She takes a drag and lets a smoke circle out. Jess watches it disappear and then gets up, shoving the book into his back pocket with a quick move.

'Well, I'll be in my room. Facing the wall or something.'

'I'm sending you to your uncle's,' Liz says and Jess freezes in his pace.

There. Another thing she just drops. Unnecessary information she just decides to get rid of.

'Huh?'

'Your uncle Luke, my older brother, we put some of my clothes into his sports bag in third grade. He never attended another baseball training. I'm sure I've told you that story.'

'A great story it is,' Jess deadpans, his eyes fixed intently on hers. 'I'm not going.'

'I'm sending you,' she answers simply. 'You're going to Stars Hollow,' she announces happily, as if she just decided it. Jeez, she just did.

Jess blinks a couple of times.

'You can't be serious.'

'You're leaving tomorrow.'

'Are you crazy?' he asks, suddenly agitated. 'I'm not staying with my old bachelor uncle in your creepy mistake of demography hometown.'

'Watch your tongue, mister. I'm trying to do what's best for you.'

'You're trying to do what's best for yourself. You're getting rid of me so you can have Hank or Huck or whatever his name is over without me in the way. So you can sip your booze without me hiding it. Without me watching. Without me listening as he beats you up after a bad hockey game. You don't give shit about me.'

'And you do?' Liz heats up. 'Is spending the night in jail what's best for you, Jess? ' Cause that's where you'd be, had I not come to take you.'

'I'd be fine,' he dismisses stubbornly.

'Oh yeah?' Liz laughs and reaches back to put her smoke out in the half full ashtray on the kitchen table. 'Your homies weren't there last time I checked, were they?' she asks then. 'What was that guy's name... Troy? Right. This Troy is a future convict and he's only using you to load all that shit on your back.'

Jess exhales noisily.

'You don't know...'

'Oh, but I do, honey. I do know what Troy smokes, what he prefers, what he sells, who he sells it to.'

'And you joined New York's finest without my knowledge, obviously' he mutters, irritated by her sudden interest in his latest acquaintances.

Liz ignores his comment and continues.

'I also know who Troy buys his stash from, and had he asked me, I would've given him a way better connection. Everyone knows Larry sells shit. You should've asked me. You should've found Jason. But that's not the point. The point is, Troy is bad influence. He envies you because you're smart.'

'Please.'

'You are,' she insists. 'I have no idea who you take after, but you're smarter than all those guys put together. You read so much, you have brains and you're way better than them.'

'If I'm so great, why are you sending me there?'

''Cause I'm bad influence, too,' she says simply.

'And this uncle of mine isn't?' Jess narrows his eyes.

Liz smiles strangely, as if reminiscing something.

'In fact, I think you'll like him.'

'I don't like anyone.'

'You'll like him.'

'And if that's a bad sign?'

'Can't be.'

His eyebrows rise questioningly.

'You're smart, remember?'

Their eyes lock for a moment and he thinks it would be so much easier if he simply hated her. Every time he tries to read her, he ends with another papercut. And she's a book that consists of the same page, cutting the exact same place over and over again. With nothing new to be said, they're going through the same lines, same perfect circles. Dancing over their lost way to normality.

His first childhood memory of her is Liz sitting in a big armchair, hands hanging loosely by her sides. He must have stared, because she told him to come closer. Stay with me. Please. Then she dozed off. When, two days later, the social worker took him to see her at the hospital, she asked him what took him so long. 'I've been waiting for ages, peanut... it's so boring in here. Wanna do some mischief?'

'Come on, now,' she clasps her hands suddenly and he looks up, snapping out of the memory.

'Chop-chop, you gotta pack, and I gotta do some bills.'

He watches dumbly as she takes an old newspaper and starts scribbling some numbers in the margins.

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