Luke: Where'd you get the black eye?
Jess: You wouldn't believe it.
.***.
When Jess was five, he saw a spider inside of the Frosted Flakes box.
He couldn't see it's eyes but he knew it was looking up at him, and he screamed, and he threw the box on the ground. That's when Mom came in. Frankenstein Mom, Jess always thought of her, when she was in those moods, when she would hit first and ask questions later. When she loomed over him, and looked down, and grabbed his arm, and shook.
"We have one box of cereal. Do you understand me?"
Jess tried to tell her that he knew there was only one box of cereal, that the one box of cereal was basically the only food in the house, which is why he'd climbed on a chair to climb on the counter to grab it. He tried to tell her that there was a spider, with it's eyes maybe looking at him right now, but Mom had already let him go (that spot on his arm would turn purple later, he knew, he was five but he already knew that) and she got the bowl and the spoon and the milk and she poured.
The spider wasn't in the bowl, but Jess knew it was somewhere in the box, and he cried, and Mom hit him, and kept hitting him, until he ate every last bite.
.***.
"I've got Frosted Flakes," Uncle Luke said.
"That's Gre-e-e-at," Jess said, imitating the cartoon tiger, thinking about the spider.
.***.
When Jess was seven, he refused to take a bath.
They were in a different apartment, this one cheaper and dirtier. Dad was gone, again, and Mom was as good as gone. She brought home an old guy that stank like booze (Jess was seven, but he already knew what booze smelled like) and she'd told Jess to play out in the hallway while she brought him back into her room. When Jess went back in, because the landlord told him that the hallways wasn't for playing, the booze-smelling man was in the kitchen. Jess shuffled, looked at his feet. "Your mom's sleeping, kid," the man said. "But it looks like someone can use a bath."
He gave Jess a piece of bread because, "if you're a messy eater, mine as well be messy before you're clean." He asked Jess about his school day, which Mom and Dad never asked about, ever, and Jess told the man that he got put into the Advanced Reading group and that he was reading The Wind in the Willows. The man gave him another piece of bread and said, "Hey, why don't we take that shirt off."
The man tugged the shirt over his head. The man tugged off Jess's pants. The man ushered him into the bathroom, "mine as well be messy before you're clean."
To Mom's credit, she yelled and him and kicked him out and explained to Jess that usually she'd call the cops but there's the coke, you know, but really, Jess, if someone touches you there again you run and scream and yell for help.
Mom, Jess knew that day, Liz, would never be the person he ran to.
.***.
"Hey Jess, you wanna help me fix this tub?"
For a decade, he'd avoided climbing in a tub. He took showers at schools if they lived in an apartment with only a tub. He got girlfriends just so he could shower at their place.
"I'm going out," he told his uncle, and Luke just shook his head like he didn't expect anything else, and Jess left.
He thought about running, and screaming, and yelling for help. He wondered if he even knew how to do that, anymore.
.***.
When Jess was eight, Liz left him for a week. He would go to school and use his key to get back into the apartment. He ate everything in the house, even the olives, even the Frosted Flakes. He drank the milk and then the orange juice and then it was just water, and mostly stale bread.
He had an uncle somewhere up North who could help him, but he didn't remember Uncle Luke's number. He stayed at his friends' houses until their parents asked him, pointedly, if his mom might like him home for dinner, and then he went back into his getting-colder apartment, and he'd look around, and he'd cry, just a little bit, even though he was too big for crying.
The middle of the night was the worst. Even Frankenstein Mom would let Jess cuddle next to her when he got scared. Now it was just him, and blankets, and a teddy he hadn't cared about in years. But he cared about the teddy that week. The teddy was the only thing in the world that knew that Jess was afraid Liz wasn't coming back.
He didn't want to call 9-1-1, even though in school that's what they said you should do. He knew that 9-1-1 would probably decide that Liz wasn't a good mom, and take him away and put him with people who may be okay but would probably be even worse. And they wouldn't be Liz, who made him pancakes on Sundays and made up stories to listen to instead of television and brought him to the library. It wouldn't be his mother who he loved, even though (he was only eight and he knew, he thought) she didn't deserve the desperate, unconditional adoration of a child.
.***.
"I'm going camping with some buddies from high school," Luke said.
"Sounds riveting."
"So, you'll be here. Alone. Unless-I mean, you can come. If you want."
"Yeah, pass."
.***.
Jess was told, when he was thirteen, that he should probably sleep on the floor. In the living room. He didn't particularly like sleeping with his mom anymore (mornings, recently, had become quite embarrassing, though Liz would laugh it off and say, even more embarrassingly, "my big boy") but he preferred sleeping in any bed to sleeping on any floor.
The men had become more frequent since Dad officially walked out (good riddance, like he was ever around anyway, like he ever gave Jess a damn dime.) The men, who sometimes looked at Jess and smiled. Who would offer him whatever they had, acid, weed, coke. Who would beckon, with a hey-there crooked finger, for him to join them in the bedroom.
So, no, Jess didn't like giving up his bed to that. He spent the week finding an older girlfriend, one who also had absent parents but these were absent in that rich, flying-off-to-Paris way. He lost his virginity to her (Sarah, she was almost sixteen, but she had a bed and she had food, food everywhere, and he told her he was fourteen, that he'd started school late.) And he slept in her bed for almost two months.
Liz never asked where he went at night.
.***.
At Luke's, there was a bed, a dumb, blow-up bed.
"I'm not sleeping on the damn floor," Jess said (okay, maybe yelled.) He had very strong feelings about it. He had images of Luke wooing some Stars Hollow single moms, of his blow-up bed being scooted out into the kitchen, down the stairs, into the diner. "I'll sleep outside before I sleep on the floor."
"If you sleep outside, it's the ground. The floor's a step up from that. And, by the way, it's not the floor. It's a bed, Jess, come on, it's not like I had notice you were coming. I couldn't go out and buy a whole bed with half a day to plan!"
Jess snorted. Jess tried to keep up the show that he was the tough guy on campus. "Look, if you don't want me around..." He didn't know how to finish that sentence. He was out of places to go.
Luke sighed, took off his stupid backwards cap and crunched it between his hands. He closed his eyes and Jess looked at the ground, knowing that this was his uncle, trying to think of a way to let him down easy. "Okay. Okay. You take my bed tonight, and tomorrow we'll go buy you a bed off the ground. Deal?"
Jess stopped mentally counting his meager pile of money. "Really?"
"Yeah, I need some time on the ground. I hear blow-up beds are good for your back."
"I hear the exact opposite, actually."
Luke pointed a finger at him and Jess flinched. Luke, thank god, didn't notice. "One night, buddy."
"One night," Jess said, climbing into a real bed, pulling the covers up to his chin. He slept long and messy. He sprawled. He slept like someone who didn't worry about what the world would be like when he woke up.
.***.
this is just a preliminary chapter to a longer work (plot to come in chapter 2.) every time i get to Jess's stuff on Gilmore Girls, i feel like i wanna rescue this kid. so i'm gonna try.
hope you all like it. remember, reviews are good for the soul.