Thanks to everyone who reviewed - I truely do appreciate all the feedback. This chapter was difficult- this is the third rewrite I've gone with. First, Jess got mad and left the dinner early. (as he did last time). Then, I made it that he turned the numerous insults Emily threw at him into jokes. But I didn't thinl that fit at all. So this is the middle ground. You'll have to read to see what I've finally decided with!
Disclaimer: I do not own Gilmore Girls.
Rating Warning: Theres a lot more cursing in this chapter thatn usual- but hey, need I remind you this is Jess we are talking about.
Chapter Three: Of Games and Distractions
Luke was a total bastard.
Already anticipating a scheme of mine to ditch out on dinner early, he had forbidden me from taking my own car. So now I was sitting in the passenger's seat of his truck- or more like seated against my will, whilst pondering various ways of causing Luke pain. I was just considering dousing him in gasoline and lighting him on fire when we pulled up to the achingly farmilar Gilmore house
And all thoughts of Luke are dragged out of my mind.
This house hasn't changed since the last time I was here.
Flashback
I pull up the driveway, thinking that its a serious acomplishment that my car has made it this far without stalling- sometimes it could hardly make it around the block.
And then I wonder if Rory had given me the wrong address.
This house is huge- bigger than my old school in New York. A handsome fountain gushes importantly in front, and the large oak doors are staring at me almost threateningly, as if they know I don't belong here. Because it has just become so very clear how very far out of Rory's league I am. These people would be expecting some kind young stud- a future doctor- to be dating their grand-daughter. Not a sulky, bad boy, former New Yorker who was barely passing his senior year and not attending college.
Suddenly, my car looked ten times more threadbare, and my clothes looked ten times more worn out. I felt like complete dirt- dirt on the bottom of these people's fancy Italian shoes. It seemed unbearabley not fair that while I was lying in my mother's apartment, shivering like mad because she couldn''t afford heat, these people were sitting here in their manshion full of money.
I did not belong here.
End Flashback
I did not belong here.
We were standing out of the car and I was just starring at the house, my head still aching and my heart pounding scarily fast. My discomfort must have showed on my face, because Lorelai looked at me sympathetically.
"You okay?" she asked softly.
I could not answer. My throat was still clenched dry and shut. I couldn't have spoken if I wanted to. My mouth opened and something between a cough and a moan escaped my cracking lips.
"Listen," Lorelai says with a sigh. "This is not going to be easy- and its certainly not going to be fun."
Yeah, cause I thought it was going to be like Chuckie Fucking Cheese.
"But, you've just got to grit your teeth and know that whatever happens, you will not die." She smiles and then looks curious for a moment. "Hopefully." She grins awkwardly at me and I feel anything but reasured. She gives my shoulder a small squeeze. "Just hang in there, okay?"
Hoping that the ability to speak comes back to me soon, I nod at her and follow Rory and Luke onto the doorway. Lorelai turns to me one last time before ringing the door bell.
Damn, I hate bells.
O
We're sitting on the couch in the living room with our drinks. Emily and Rory are exchaning small talk, Richard and Luke are having a quiet converstation, and Lorelai is shooting me furtive glances from behind her Martini. Me? I wondering if the tongs in the ice box will be sharp enough to go all the way through my heart.
I stare with complete focus at the bottom of my scotch. I'm not a fan of drinking anything other than beer, but I have a feeling beer is much too below the Gilmores and their five thousand year old fancy French wine. Holy Shit- I really, really could kill for a cigarette.
I'm keeping track of the night with an ever constant score. To see which of us, me or Emily, can irritate the other inconpsicuously. I'm not sure how inconspicuous Emiyl Gilmore can be, but living the way I did has made me rather sly.
"So Jess, what is it that you do?"
Emily Gilmore must have finished catching up with her grand-daughter, and now she has moved on to me.
I spend as much time as possible clearing my throat. "I write.' I say, using all of my effort to keep the sarcasm from my voice and sound mildly interested in the conversation. Luke is looking tensely at me and Rory and Lorelai are glancing fearfully at each other. Emily and Richard are giving me their full and undivided attention.
"What things do you write?" Emily says, and she speaks slowly, sounding out every syllabel, as if she's speaking to a retarded chimpanzee.
The urge to spit back something at her overwhelms me but a glance at my uncle keeps me back. "Books- I write books." I say simply, speaking quickly.
"You're books must be quite good if you can support a living off them." Emily says, still talking loudly and clearly as if I can't understand her.
"Do you get enough from yours books to pay the bills?" Richard Gilmore speaks to me for the first time, thought thankfully he is talking to me like an intelligent human being and not some bum from the homeless shelter.
"I also work at a publishing house." I say flatly, hoping for the subject to change, fast.
"Fullfilling work?" Emily asks loudly.
I raise my head higher. "Pays the bills." I say, meeting her gaze for the first time. We stare at each other, hatred etched in both our faces for several seconds until Lorelai breaks the silence.
"Did I tell you about the dream I had?" she says sharply. "About Giligan's Island?"
"No, no you didn't." Rory says, eager for the conversation to drift far, far, away from me.
"Whatever does Giligan's Island have to do with our previous conversation, Lorelai?" Emily asks in exasperation, her voice back to a normal tone and pace. I tighten the grip on my glass and stare at my drink, wondering if I could drown in it.
"Giligan has everything to do with everything." Lorelai explains, as if her mother should have known this. I take a large sip of my drink and close my eyes.
After the first round, the current standing looked like this- Emily:1. Jess: zilch. But I wasn't worried. There was all night for me to make a come back.
"... And then Giligan and Kirk stopped wrestling and Michel stopped throwing coconuts at the Skipper and I woke up." Lorelai finishes the stunning reacount of her dream, in which nearly every citizen of Stars Hollow made an appearance, and smiled enthusiastically at her parents.
"Dinner is served, Mrs. Gilmore." a scared looking maid announces. I still can't get over the fact that these people have enough money for a maid. God- these people are all the same. They donate to a dozen different charities and expect to be considered saints, even though they still have enough money to buy several beach houses in the Tropics.
I let out a breath and am the last to enter the dining room. I take the only empty seat, which is across from Luke and next to Richard and Lorelai.
"You look pale Jess." Emily remarks as I'm about to take a bite of the disturbing looking salad. Her voice is still slow, loud, and obnoxious."Are you feeling alright?"
"He has a headache." Rory answers for me, her voice ever so slightly irritated.
"I see." Emily interprets what Rory has said and I wait for her to turn it around into something negative. "First a black eye, now a headache. You must not take very good care of yourself."
I live on the edge, you miserable old witch. 'I'm just tired." I say slowly, unable to keep myself from matching her tone.
"Well eat as much as you want." Emily says in the same way, a fake smile plastered on her face. "I'm sure a decent meal must be hard to come by for you."
Emily: 2. Jess: 0. So the second round had gone to Emily. It was time for me to look for a big break, an opprutunity to beat Emily at her own game.
Why don't I just jab this fork down your lousy throat? I force myself into a painful smile and stare at her while I take a large bite. The temperature in the room seems to have dropped twenty degrees.
We make it through the main course without any mention of me. Emily holds conversation with everyone else on the table, only pausing occasionly to stare at me. Whenever she did this I would give her a large, one hundred percent fake smile. Luke looked uncomforatble and kept adjusting his tie. Rory and Lorelai exchanged many glances, and seemed to be eating at top speed. I was thankful; the sooner we were out of here the better.
The dessert plates were just being carried away, Rory was gulping down coffee, and I was counting down the minutes until we could leave, when the conversation came back to me.
"So tell me Jess," Emily Gilmore speaks to me again. "Is it true you dropped out of highschool?"
Luke shifts in his chair. Lorelai pales. Rory looks mortified.
"I went to nightschool." I answer her at length.
"Highschool can be intimidating for those with," her nostrils flare. "less gifted minds."
Do you know that from experience:? Or is it just an observation? I concentrate on staring at my empty place setting and don't merit her with a response.
She notices my lack of reaction and to my anger, continues. "I mean, for some people, the pressure can just be, too much. But it doesn't mean you should consider yourself a loser. I'm sure there'll be something out there for you to succede at."
God, can this woman talk in a normal voice?
"Some people are cut for the Ivy Leagues," she says, with a nod at Rory. "And others are content with being starving artists for their whole lives."
My hands grip the table and my head swims. I continue to stare at the table and I'm biting the sides of my mouth so hard I'll probably have blisters tomorrow.
"Buts its completley understandable," she goes on, as if I was doubting myself hear and now. "As long as you can look at yourself in the mirror without flinching, I guess you're alright." her tone gets louder still. "Do you flinch when you look in the mirror?"
The urge to leave, to run out, to yell something sarcastic and angst-filled retort at her is so strong, I had to curl the edge of my shoe around the leg of my chair to keep myself from springing out of my seat. My hands fall to grip the sides of the table once more and I try my hardest not to meet the eyes of anyone at the table.
And then I'm reminded of the old bullies in New York. The ones who would hold a gun to your head and demand you give them all the money you had on you. The people who tried to scare me. There was one thing I knew about people like this- you had to scare them back. In New York, it meant pulling out a pocket knife.
But, here, at Emily Gilmore's dinner table, it meant not giving her the satisfaction of seeing my react. She wanted me to explode. She wanted me to yell and leave, and to slam the door. She wanted to be able to tell everyone 'I told you so.' And if theres one thing I try to accomplish in life, its to surpirse people and show them that I'm not the scum they think I am. When everyone at the school expected me to to get hooked on drugs, I quit and didn't let anyone see me in withdrawl. When everyone expected me to never go back to school and live as a bum for the rest of my life, I proved them wrong.
Now it was time to prove Emily Gilmore wrong.
I raise my eyes and meet stare at her, my face passive, my tone neutral, and reply. "Every time." I say matter-of-factly. I continue to meet her gaze in another crazed sort of staring contest. I shake my head ever so slightly in each direction and she blinks and snaps her head away from me.
'I suppose you should be getting home, its a long drive." she says to Lorelai.
I allow myself a small grin of victory.
After the third round, the final standing looked like this- Emily: 2. Jess: 10000000. After an unpredictable starring contest victory, Jess Mariano had taken the lead and the competitionl. Beat that.
Now we are sitting in the car on the way home. No one is saying anything. Luke keeps glancing sideways at me, but I'm avoiding his gaze and directing mine at the dark highway out of the passenger side window. At the corner of my eye, I see him turn on the radio. After several minutes of flipping through stations, all either playing obnoxious rap or boring commercials, he turns it off again and returns to glancing at me.
"Emily Gilmore is a..." Luke struggles to find the right word. "Judgmental person."
"Just say it Luke." I say tiredly. "She's a bitch."
"What d- Don't-" Luke stammers and turns his head in all directions, as if he expects Emily to materialize into the truck at any moment.
"Oh come on." I sigh in disbelief. "She's a bitch. You know it."
'Yes, she's bitch." Luke says quietly, shaking slightly afterwards as if he's done something naughty. "But it takes a lot to change her opinion of someone. She saw you as a rebel without a cause, and she wanted you to prove her right."
"But I didn't!" I say, some of the outrage I've been feeling over the night escaping. "I didn't talk sarcastically to her. I didn't retort to any of the wonderful comments she made about my life. I sat there and let this woman frickking critizise me." I run a hand through my hair and sigh again. "If anyone else every spoke to me like that, I pop them in the eye."
"I agree with you one hundred percent Jess." Luke says at once, knowning that he'll have to cool me off soon or things will get really bad. "The way she was talking to you-"
"Like a retarded chimpanzee." I mutter darkly.
Luke shakes his head and goes on. "They way she was talking to you was not right- she shouldn't have done it."
"And you did a great job stepping in." I spit suddendly, wondering why Luke hadn't come to my defense. "I guess I really must be as pathetic as she made me sound."
"Don't even go there." Luke says at once. "Don't even start believing what she said."
We sit in silence for a few uncomfortable seconds.
"If she was talking to you like that, I would've stepped in." I break the silence softly.
"Jess.." Luke tears his eyes away from the road and gives me a long look. "You know those people don't like me. And the wedding is in a week- I just didn;t want to give them another reason to hate me. It was the first Firiday Night Dinner in a long time that the attention hasn't been on me."
If he intending for his words to comfort me, he was wrong. They only make me even angrier.
"So know I see it." I hiss at him. "You brought me there as a distraction. Let the Gilmore's walk all over me so that they woudn't have time to pass judgment on the wedding.It was a good idea. Did Lorelai suggest it? " the words come out venomously, and my desperate need for sleep and the anger I've been shielding for the past two and half hours don't mix well together.
"It wasn't like that-" Luke is searching for words.
"Yeah right." I snap. "Pull over."
"Jess what- were three miles from the dinner-"
"I'd rather walk home. In fact, why don't I just go back to Philly? I've already served your purpose- You don't need me around here."
'Jess-"
"Pull over!"
Ten seconds later, I was walking down the street by my self. I forcefully tore the tie off my neck and continued my journey. I had been set up. Lorelai, Luke, and even Rory had sat by and watched me get verbally abused by the bitch and hadn't done anything! Rory must have been pretending to be nice to me- she was in on the plan too!
I knew I was over reacting big time. I shouldn't have stormed out on Luke and I shoudn't be blaming Rory. But it felt so much better to be thinking about how screwed over I was than how patethic I was. The urge to buy a cigarette came over me again and I remembered the Mini-Market down the street. I reached into my pants for my wallet but realized all to late that I must have left it in Luke's car.
When I get back to the dinner almost an hour later, I contemplate just getting in the car and driving straight back to Philly. Its only when I remember that Marley is still upstairs, along with my manuscript and several precious CDs, that I grit my teeth and enter the diner. Luke is nowhere to be found- he must be at Lorelai's. He mustn't be bothered at all by my actions. Thats just great.
I take the stairs two at a time and look forward to crashing onto my bed when for the second time today, I find Rory Gilmore in my room.
This night might just take a turn for the interesting.
Dun dun dun. I was gunna write more but decided to end it here. The next chapter will hold some good ol' Rory/Jess goodness. (YAY!).
Jess might have come off as a little paranoid, but he always seems to me that he acts before he thinks (which always gets him into trouble.)
Please review- I'd love more feedback and ideas- if anyone's got any!