Jess spends a long, frustrating day in Manhattan author-wrangling, and when he gets home his cousin is sitting at Hartfield's table, playing poker and looking sheepish.

"Hi, Jess," she says, already wincing.

"Oh, hell no," Jess says, and Willa, ensconced happily in April's lap, laughs and claps her hands, like she always does when Jess gets angry. "Don't tell me you stole Luke's truck. Please, please don't tell me that."

"No," April says stubbornly, lifting her chin. "I…stole Taylor's."

"Oh my God," says Jess.

"Well, he never uses it! It just sits outside the town hall gathering dust!"

"You didn't tell me that," Hartfield says accusingly. "Jess, she didn't tell me that."

"You would've called my dad," April says reasonably.

"I'm gonna call your dad," Jess says. "Come on. Up."

"Everyone knows where the keys are," April grumbles, hitching Willa up into her arms and rising to sullenly follow Jess out of the room. "The football players steal it all the time. They have a running bet on who can keep it the longest without him noticing."

"Thanks for watching Willa, Hartfield," Jess says. Hartfield nods, clamping down on a grin that Jess really doesn't appreciate. "Sorry for the teenager."

"You should be, she's been kicking my ass," Hartfield says, gathering up the cards.

"You owe me thirty bucks, old lady, don't forget," April says.

"She'll put it towards your bail fund," Jess says, and snatches Willa right out of April's arms. "Come on. March."

"Look, please, please don't call my dad," April pleads, stomping up the stairs just a hair too close behind Jess' heels for anybody's comfort. "I just want to stay the night and then I'll go home in the morning, okay? I just needed some space."

"You realize you're asking me to be an accessory here," Jess says, trying to juggle a squirming Willa while digging his apartment keys out of his jacket. April huffs and reaches over to snatch Willa back, making a face and jiggling her up and down to make her laugh. Jess scowls at them both. "I can't believe you stole Taylor's car."

"You said I could come over whenever!" April cries.

"With permission," Jess says. "I didn't mean 'commit grand theft auto and then run away from home.'"

"You ran away from home all the time," April says resentfully. "Luke says you did it at least six times."

Calling him 'Luke,' not a great sign, Jess thinks resignedly. There's no way he's getting anywhere close to a full night's sleep tonight. "Okay, at least three of those were false alarms due to his inability to check his own answering machine," Jess says, "and the rest of them were, you know. Not a big deal."

"Did you really drop out of school to work full time at Wal-Mart?" April asks.

Jess finally shoulders through the front door, rolling his eyes. "None of your business," he says.

"Oh my God," April says, "I should've known that was true, that is just a stupidly, nearsightedly practical enough thing that you'd do."

"Give me my kid and go sit down," Jess says, and April obediently hands Willa over, scowling all the while. "I'm calling him."

"Jess!" April practically stomps her foot. "Come on. Please?"

"April, look at me," Jess says, pitching his voice to sound serious, and April looks up, startled. "Letting him think you're not safe when you are is cruel. I'm calling him."

April opens her mouth, then closes it again. Her jawline tightens, and her shoulders hunch. "I'm not going home until tomorrow," she threatens.

"I'll negotiate that," Jess says, pulling Willa close, beneath his chin. She starts to fuss, probably anxious for dinner, and Jess sighs. "Just - just go sit down."

April stares at him for another moment, then turns on her heel and strides off towards the living room. Something slams angrily, and Jess winces as Willa starts to whine.

"You know, I was under the impression that I only have one kid," Jess tells her. Willa's whine hitches, right on the edge of turning into a sob. "Fine, fine. Keep your pants on."


"She's there?" Luke says, more of a demand for confirmation than a question. "Put her on the phone."

In the living room, Jess' TV is blasting MTV so loudly the pictures on the hallway wall are rattling along to the bassline. He could make an issue of it, but Willa seems to be enjoying it, wiggling along as she eats her dinner. And it's not like Jess has much leg to stand on, when it comes to loud music.

"Yeah," Jess says, "I don't think she wants to talk to you right now."

"Put her on anyway."

"Luke, you know if I take the phone in there she'll just refuse to talk to you."

"Well figure it out!" Luke says. "She can't do this, she can't just take off and not tell anybody."

"I know."

"It's irresponsible and selfish and her mother - "

"Could threaten your custody agreement," Jess says.

"That's - " Luke stammers for a second. "Not what I was thinking about."

"Still true," Jess says.

Luke sighs. "She's okay? Not injured or bleeding?"

"She's fine," Jess says. "Car's fine, too. She even filled up the tank."

"I don't give a crap about the stupid car," Luke says. "Taylor never even drives the damn thing. I keep telling him that leaving it parked for weeks at a time will kill the battery." He pauses. "Don't tell April that, though."

Jess smiles at Willa, who raises one of her hands to offer him a handful of toddler-sized chicken pieces. He takes one politely. "She's just angry," he says, and tosses it in the trashcan when she's not looking. "What'd you guys fight about, anyway?"

"She's - it's complicated," Luke says. "She's been having issues at school, and her mom and I...it's complicated."

"Right," Jess says thinly.

"Do me a favor and try not to make her hate me anymore than she already does," Luke says, in a tone of voice that tells Jess he actually really means that, despite his efforts to make it a joke. "I'll drive up tomorrow and pick her up. I can't leave until Caesar gets in for his shift though, but - she can stay at your place while you're at work, right?"

"She can watch Willa for me," Jess says, and the girl in question makes a happy noise at the sound of her own name. "Don't worry about it."

"Right," Luke says ironically.

"And I couldn't make her hate you if I tried," Jess says, trying for supportive.

"Right," Luke says again, and snorts.


April spends the bulk of the evening holed up in Jess' living room with the television, and thinking back to his own sullen teenage days, Jess leaves her to it. The thing about being young and angry is - you don't know that you're young and angry, all you know is that your head hurts and your hands shake and the whole world feels like an obstacle course made of knives, just waiting to cut you up if you make the wrong move. It doesn't really matter if you're the one in the wrong, because that doesn't change how you feel. Jess refuses, with every ounce of his being, to be one of those adults who try to reason with kids with the kind of logic they're not equipped to understand yet. That never did anything but make it worse, when it was him.

Willa goes down with relative ease, probably due to the general state of chaos of the entire night. It's a weird thing about this kid, that Jess has learned through trial and error: there's nothing that pisses her off more than lullabies, and quiet, and just - soothing things in general. Luke once tried to put on one of those Baby Genius sleepytime DVDs, and according to Lorelai, Willa screamed at them both like she was being murdered for the better part of three hours. ("Just out of spite," Lorelai had said. "She finally calmed down when Luke broke the disc right in front of her, but she was still kind of resentful, I could tell.")

Disaster child, Jess thinks fondly, brushing his knuckles down the apple of her cheek. Willa sighs in contentment, and strangles her owl a little tighter, drifting easily into sleep.

The living room is quiet now, probably as a courtesy to Willa, but Jess still leaves it untouched, setting up in the kitchen with the slush pile that never seems to get any smaller, no matter how much of it he manages to get through. He keeps an eye on the clock, and watches it spin around twice before April finally breaches the doorway, shuffling her feet and grinding her teeth.

"Hey, so," April says, "do I get fed, or do I have to forage for berries outside?"

"You're welcome to give it a shot, I think there's a tree a few blocks down," Jess says. "It might be quicker to make a TV dinner, though."

"I'm vegan," April tells him.

Jess frowns. "Since when?"

"About two weeks ago," April says.

"Okay," Jess says slowly. "I have...pasta."

April wrinkles her nose. "Is it made with eggs?"

Jess pauses. "Why don't we order something," he says, and reaches for his laptop.

His phone beeps with another call twice while he's tracking her down a salad, and by the time he hangs up April is already scowling at her own cell phone and watching him warily. Jess pointedly tosses his own cell phone aside, just as April cuts hers off mid-ring.

"My mom," she tells him, and sits down at the table. "I don't wanna talk about it," she finishes, with a belligerent twist in her voice.

"I didn't ask," Jess says.

April makes a face, and reaches for Jess' discarded pile of slush. "What are these, stories? Are all of these yours?"

Jess snorts before he can stop himself. "No," he says. "It's my chunk of the slush pile from work."

"What's a slush pile?"

"It's the unsolicited submissions from writers who don't have agents," Jess says. April frowns, leafing through the stack. "Everything gets read by at least one of us. We split it up every week and then take the ones we like to everyone else."

April pauses at one of them, a small frown tugging at her mouth as she reads. "This is," she says.

"Yeah."

"They misspelled - "

"Yeah," Jess says, and pulls out the only 'yes' he's found so far in this bunch, a weird Tom Robbins esque piece that would fit well in the surrealism collection that Matthew's curating. "Most of them are like that. Read this one, though."

April takes it eagerly, and Jess can practically spot the second she gets interested; her shoulders straighten and her eyes narrow behind her glasses. Jess idly clicks back and forth between Word files as she reads, trying to watch without making it obvious.

"Okay," April says, when she's finished. "I don't think I get it, but...I think I can see it."

"The point isn't to get it," Jess says, taking the paper back and folding it carefully back into his laptop bag. "At least, this writer's point isn't. There's generally only one barometer that you can always judge writing with, across genre and style and whatever else, and that's the writer's command of their own story, right? How well they pull off whatever it is they're trying to pull off. If you can read it, and understand what they're trying to do, and then see the level of skill they employed to do it - that's the important part. Stuff like innovation and creativity and plot and language - all of that is kind of window dressing, at the end of the day."

"So what you're really saying is, you can tell whether they're good or not," April translates.

"I mean," Jess says, and rolls his eyes. "Sort of."

"That's pretty much what you just said, only more complicated."

"Yeah, but it sounded better."

April smirks, a disconcerting experience for Jess, who used to see that very same look on Luke's face every day between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. "How often do you find good stuff like this, anyway?"

"Uh," Jess says, "sometimes. Maybe more often than you'd think, but it's not...common. There's usually a reason someone doesn't have an agent."

"Do you have an agent?"

"Chris is my agent," Jess says. "So I'm not sure that counts, since I'm his only client. Also, he sucks at it."

"I bet Rory has a few things to say about that."

"She says several dozen things about it every time I speak to her."

April smirks again. "I tried to read your book," she offers. "I didn't really get that either."

"But you could see it?"

"Yeah," she admits, and pulls out another piece from the pile, flipping through it lazily. "You're probably used to that, huh," she says, her eyes on the pages. "People not getting what you're going for."

"I'm used to not getting things in general," Jess tells her, without thinking very hard about it. It's the only way he's ever found to actually say things, instead of talking around them. "I try not to let it break my heart anymore."

April buries her face in the paper, her hair falling over her shoulder to cover her face. She suddenly looks very small.

"When I was," Jess says, and falters slightly. He has a very strong urge to shut the fuck up, suddenly, and with the equally strong instinct to keep talking until she starts talking too, it's a hell of a fight inside his head. "I did drop out of school to work at Wal Mart."

April turns a page, and doesn't say anything.

"I was miserable when I was your age, you know," Jess says. "I hated Stars Hollow. I mean, I loathed it. The only good thing about living there was Rory, and the whole time I was with her I was fucking it up, sometimes on purpose. Because I hated myself too, was the thing, but I didn't know that, at the time." He clears his throat. "The only thing I did know for sure is that I had to leave, I needed to leave. So I dropped out, and I got another job. I bought a car, and started putting money away. I didn't plan to just take off like I did, that was...well, I fucked that up too. It was a whole other thing. But I did plan to leave. And I never wanted anybody's help, because I thought it'd be...admitting something, or opening myself up to something I didn't want. I thought it'd be like losing the battle to win the war, and I didn't want to do it that way. I wanted the whole damn victory to myself."

"I don't mind Stars Hollow," April says quietly.

"It's not a horrible place or anything," Jess admits. "Just, not the place for me. You fit in there, though. They like you."

April goes silent again, her fingers crumpling the edges of the paper.

"It had more to do with me than it did with them," Jess says. He hasn't talked about this out loud in awhile, he realizes distantly, since Mari, if he's remembering right. That was the thing about Mari, she was excellent at getting your secrets, especially the painful ones, the ones you didn't want to admit, even to yourself. It made her a great writer, and a fucking horrible lover. "My mom kicked me out, and I knew that Luke said no at first, to taking me in. They argued about it a lot, and I overheard some of it. I felt like - I resented it from the beginning. And I hated him a little, for that. He didn't deserve it, but." He shrugs.

"I didn't know that," April says.

"She said it was because she wanted him to straighten me out," Jess tells her, "but it wasn't even about that. She had a new boyfriend, was the thing." The memories are still sharp-edged, even after all these years. He'd spent as much time as possible out of the apartment back then, but he still had to sleep and change his clothes and shower, and that was always, always when Liz would have those loud phone conversations, saying exactly the things that he shouldn't have had to listen to. It was like she wanted him to overhear. "And Luke tried, but he didn't know what the hell to do with me, or how to talk to me. He does a lot better now, but back then, it was like - he'd go back and forth between extremes all the time. He either didn't give a crap what I did, or he cared so much he'd treat me like a five year old. It drove me crazy."

"He's so overbearing!" April erupts, her chin jerking up. Jess leans back to listen, triumphant. "That's exactly it, he's just - one second he's cool, Casual Dad, and he can be so...nice and earnest and likeable, and then the next it's like he turns into 1950's Dad, who blows his lid whenever I wear a skirt or sit within six feet of a boy."

"He's got," Jess says, struggling for the right word, "issues with...I don't know, protectiveness. He doesn't know how to...leverage his instincts against his common sense."

"I don't even like boys!" April exclaims, and then her cheeks go dusty red, and she drops the paper. "Um."

"Well, that must make it suck even more then," Jess says, deliberately casual. April bites her lip, and Jess looks away, giving her a moment to get herself together. "I can't imagine he's going to handle that very smoothly when he finds out."

"Yeah, um," April says, "yeah. I don't." She rubs at her face, and her hand is shaking visibly. "I haven't told my mom either, or anything. I'm still, um. Working it out and everything."

"I bet that's something that takes a while," Jess says, his voice even.

"Yeah," April says.

The buzzer goes off with God-like timing, and Jess taps her arm playfully, something he's done with her a million times. April seems to sag at his touch, and her eyes are wide and scared behind her glasses. "That's probably your salad. There's water and other stuff in the fridge; help yourself."

"O-okay," she says.

Jess has to force himself to turn away, his stomach churning more and more, the farther away he gets. He wouldn't know how to do the hugging comfort thing anyway, even if she wanted that from him, he tells himself. It's not his style. He thinks about Willa, as he pays the delivery kid, and the storm in his stomach turns to ice. It's not his style, but what if it needs to be? What happens when Willa wants to run away? He can't imagine that she won't, at some point. He doesn't want her to get to the point where she actually does it, because just the thought of it makes him sick. He has a feeling he's fucking this up. He hopes he isn't, but Jess is used to not getting things.

April's a bit more composed when he comes back into the kitchen, fussing about with the piles of paper, a bottle of water already open and half empty. She smiles at him wanly and thanks him for the food in a small, but solid, voice.

She fusses some more as Jess sits back down and tries not to watch her, opening the lid and arranging and rearranging her napkin half a dozen times before reaching some internal realization that seems to pacify her. It's a shitty little dinner salad from a hipster pizza place a few miles away, the only restaurant Jess could find that didn't view hardboiled eggs as a compulsory salad ingredient, and Jess had had to buy an order of breadsticks to get to the minimum delivery requirement. April doesn't say anything, though, and stares at it like it's the most fascinating pile of dry spinach she's ever seen.

"April," Jess starts, and she jerks like she's been hit.

"You can't tell anyone," she says.

"No, yeah, I won't," he replies quickly, and watches her sag again, out of relief or something else, he's not sure. "I was just gonna say, I have dressing in the fridge."

"Oh," April says, and blushes. "No, dressing usually has dairy in it. Like buttermilk, or eggs, or other stuff like that."

"What can you eat?"

"Just anything without animal products," April says, forcefully cheerful. "I feel much better. Like, cleaner. More energy!"

"Now I know that's bullshit," Jess says, smirking.

"Shut up," April says back. But she's smiling, just a bit. "I eat a lot of fruit."

"You have to take vitamins, don't you?"

"Just a couple!" April makes a face at him. "Shut up."

"No, I didn't say anything. Sounds like fun."

"Shut up," April says again, and laughs. Jess shrugs exaggeratedly, and turns back to his laptop. "Aren't you hungry?"

"Willa and I had chicken pasta," Jess says. "You know - yummy animal products."

"Stop trying to goad me into being a jerk about it," April complains, her mouth full of spinach. "I'm not one of those annoying vegans. I refuse to be."

"Sure," Jess says.

April does a little harrumph with her shoulders, and eagerly shoves another forkful into her mouth. Jess tries not to feel guilty for not feeding her earlier.

"I give it a month," Jess says.

"I'll take that bet," April says immediately. "I make it more than a month, and you owe me..."

"Careful," Jess warns.

"...fifty bucks?" Jess snorts. "Okay, forty? Is forty good? It's the price of this DVD set I really want."

"What DVD set?"

"Um, Carl Sagan," April says. "The Cosmos show he used to do."

"You are such a nerd," Jess teases, and April sticks out her tongue at him. "I'll buy you the set if you make it more than a month."

"Sweet," April says.

"Starting tomorrow," he adds, and her face falls in outrage. "Hey, come on, it's gotta be fair."

"Fine," April grumbles, around another forkful of salad. "I'm keeping track and I'm gonna hold you to it. I'll tell Rory about it too, so she'll come after you if you go back on it."

"I don't go back on bets," Jess tells her, halfway offended. "I mean, promises, sure. But bets? Bets are sacred."

"Suuuure," April says, grinning.

Jess shakes his head at his laptop, playing it up just to make her laugh again. She doesn't disappoint.

"Thanks," April says, after a moment, in-between impatient forkfuls of salad.

"Don't thank me yet," Jess says. "I have a feeling you'll be singing a different tune after six weeks of no animal products. Or six weeks of Luke complaining about it, maybe."

"That's not what I meant," April says, and taps his arm playfully, an imitation of his earlier action.

"Oh," Jess says. "Well, yeah."

"I'll figure it out," April assures him matter of factly.

"I'm sure you will."

April nods, and chews, and Jess shakes his head, and tries to go back to his reading. She sounds like a cow, is the thing. A loud, teenage cow.

"You and Luke fought about the vegan thing, didn't you?" he asks, after a second.

"He's not nearly as funny as he thinks he is," April says darkly, and stabs her spinach violently.

"Oh my God," Jess says.