Rory brushed aside her brown hair and sighed as the pile of books to file on shelves intensified. Moby Dick was at the top of her stack. Moby Dick; it made her think of everything that she had just spent the last week trying to push out of her mind.

Just last month she had been a student, a journalism undergrad, a future Yale alumnus. But everything had changed. Mitchum Huntzberger had rocked her foundation, made her question everything she had once envisioned. His words were going through her head that night when she suggested doing that awful, stupid thing.

"You know the beginning of Moby Dick, when the narrator says that when

he finds himself growing grim about the mouth and wanting to knock people's

hats off, he takes to the sea?" she had said to Logan.

"Yeah," he said.

"Well I feel like knocking people's hats off," Rory told him.

"So I guess we got to take to the sea," he answered, before proceeding to join his girlfriend in taking a joy ride in some random, yacht club member's boat.

It was the stupidest decision of her life. It was her fault, all hers. He had said it was not theirs to take. But she grabbed his hand and led them to it anyways. She had spent the night in jail and decided to take time off of Yale. Her whole world had been turned upside down.

She was now living with her grandparents in the pool house and had a job at a bookstore in Stars Hollow during the summer. The burden of her legal situation had not yet been cleared; she had yet to appear before a court and hear her sentencing. It was downright scary; her name was not cleared, she was not guaranteed a prison-free future. But nothing could compare to Lorelai's disappointment.

Their relationship, the perfect mother and daughter friendship, had been destroyed. Everything Lorelai had been working for her daughter to have, everything Lorelai wasn't lucky enough to experience herself, everything that they had spent their lives working for, was ruined by one terrible decision.

She hadn't seen her mother in a little while. She wanted terribly for her to comprehend that she was still the same Rory. But she felt like somewhere between the sleeping with Dean and the getting arrested, she wasn't the same Rory. And that pained her greater than anything any judge could sentence her to.

She felt like some typical, indolent, slacker of a teenager, going nowhere in life, freeloading off of a family member. It made her feel terrible at the same time, because she had been working for everything that she had just thrown away. But for now, she would have to rely upon her three dollars above minimum wage income and her grandparents' pool house to contemplate where her life was headed.

"Rory?" the manager on duty called out.

"Yeah?"

"Would you mind closing tonight? Sarah just called in sick."

Rory thought for a moment and then decided she was humoring herself by thinking that she might actually have something to do. She never had anything to do anymore. Two years ago she might have had plans with her mom to spend the night in with take out and a movie, but now, she didn't have her idealistic mother-daughter relationship to comfort her. Lane also was out of the picture during that week; she was on her Seventh Day Adventist Tour, as Rory had dubbed it, booked by none other than Mrs. Kim.

"Sure. I can do that."

"Great, it's only three more hours. I'm going to leave now. The keys are where they usually are. Count all of the money twice. Turn all of the lights off."

"Got it."

"Thank you so much Rory."

"I'm glad to be able to help."

She sat there, waiting for those three hours to pass. About halfway through the first hour she saw it: Jess's car. It was still its same horribly beaten-up, brown self. She recognized it instantly and remembered the last time she had seen him driving it. It was right before he told her he loved her, right before he proceeded to drive away.

It was almost funny to her. She had spent so long agonizing over his penchant for running away and leaving her stranded and tried to humor herself by thinking that driving away was a slight improvement.

Her eyes fixated on the fact that while Jess's car was present, he himself was yet to be found. She wondered where he was, what he was doing, and if, perhaps, she would see him. She got so caught up in daydreaming about whether or not life had worked out in California with Jess, what he had done from that point on that she didn't notice the "ding dong" that went off in the bookstore whenever anyone walked in the door. It was him of course. She knew it the second she saw his dark hair from behind and spotted his familiar 5'9" frame and favorite Bukowski book in his back pocket.

He had come back to Stars Hollow during a family emergency and, amidst the shuffling across the United States, had lost his copy of Catch 22. He was tired and worn out, feeling jet lagged although he had ridden no jet, and lacked energy to search for the novel himself.

"Excuse me, do you have Cat-"

"What are you doing back here?" she asked, perhaps in an overly startled tone.

"I'm great, thanks for asking," he said, being his typical sarcastic self.

"I didn't mean it that way. Just…I haven't seen you in a long time. I thought you'd never come back to Stars Hollow."

"Neither did I. TJ died, I thought I'd come back for my mom."

"TJ?"

"My mom's…fourth…oh what the hell, I can't even keep them all straight. He's my mom's most recent husband."

"Ahh I'm sorry. He was your step dad. That must be pretty hard," Rory said, her typical sensitive and caring self.

"Nah, it's not big deal. He was kind of a loser. The first time I met him, he offered to do a portrait of me on his etch-a-sketch."

"Nice," Rory snickered.

"Yeah."

"So…at the risk of being too forward, what are you doing here Rory? It's almost October. I mean, I know Yale is only 22.8 miles away, but still, isn't the commute hard when you're a fulltime student?"

"Umm…was a fulltime student." She felt awkward. She wasn't the Rory that she was when she was with Jess. She had changed and she knew it. For some reason, despite his inability to be open in their relationship, right then at that moment she was inferior to him in her mind, because she had betrayed who she was. Jess never pretended to be anyone he wasn't, even when who he was wasn't good enough.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that I'm taking time off from Yale."

"I never would have thought that."

"Yeah well you never can be too sure of anything nowadays."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Jess, now I'm the one afraid of appearing too forward, but how long are you going to be in town?"

"A while."

"Do you want to maybe get some coffee tomorrow or something?"

"Sure. Around 11 o'clock?"

"Great. I'll see you at Luke's. Oh and by the way, here's Catch 22."

Rory was surprised at the lack of anger she had towards Jess when she was confronted with him that night at the bookstore. During her graduation from Chilton, when Jess called her without ever speaking or saying anything during the conversation, she vowed that should she ever have an encounter with her former boyfriend, she would speak her mind. She had anticipated much yelling and fury during such an interaction. But she sensed in him that night that he had matured since leaving for California and had genuinely cared for her.

It was 10:45. She had fifteen minutes to mentally prepare herself for coffee with Jess. It wasn't a big deal, but at the same time it was. She hadn't seen him in a year and there were so many feelings inside of her that were still unresolved, all on top of her current situation with her court hearing and hiatus from Yale. Somehow Rory brushed everything aside and managed to focus her energy and making a bet with herself that Jess would be at least ten minutes late.

Three minutes early was the real answer. When she arrived at Luke's, Jess was already waiting for her.

"Wow, you're here early," she mused.

"Why do you sound so surprised?"

"I'm not, just…"

"Huh," he said, in the same tone as that of his seventeen-year-old self, which made her smile, "I think you are surprised."

"Fine, I'm surprised, Jess," she said, giving in. "Now, I really need some coffee so if we could find a place to sit, that would be good."

"Whatever you want Rory."

"Good. 'Cause what I want is coffee."

He smiled to himself, musing over her caffeine addiction, which he always secretly admired.

They sat down, after she got her coffee of course. Rory couldn't just pour out everything that had taken place is the last few months to this person who was sitting in front of her, someone who felt and looked like a stranger, even though she knew he wasn't.

"So tell me Rory," Jess said, finally breaking the silence, "What made you decide to take time off from school? That is so not like you."

"How do you know what's like me?"

"We dated. I assume that accounts for feeling like I know you quite well."

"Yeah, well. I don't know what happened exactly. It's a long story. I should probably start with what happened after you asked me to run away with you."

"I'm sorry about that, by the-"

"Don't be," she said, quickly.

He was sorry though. He realized, in retrospect, that he was totally out of line. He even decided that he would have said no to running away with himself, had he been in her shoes.

"Okay. So what happened after I saw you at Yale?"

"I slept with Dean," she said with a mouth full of an apple Danish. He found the way she sounded with food in her mouth slightly charming, and slightly reminiscent of the way Rory admired Elaine Robinson's hamburger eating scene in the graduate. She had even called it "classy." Rory was the only girl who Jess had ever enjoyed watching movies with. All of his fond memories eased the pain he felt while hearing what she had just told him.

"Wow…I never would have thought that," he said.

"Why? What's wrong with Dean."

"Nothing…there's nothing wrong with Dean. Just, last I heard he was with, what's her name…Lindsay, right? Yeah. He was married to Lindsay."

"If you're trying to ask whether or not they were still together when we had sex, yes, they were. And I feel awful. I don't know why I did it. I don't really talk to him anymore. That's the least of my worries now."

She didn't want to tell him that she got arrested. She thought somehow he'd be disappointed in her, and made a mental note to herself to withhold that information from the story.

"So then what happened?"

"Well, I met this guy at Yale, Logan. He seemed really snobby and equipped with a difficult to adhere to monogamous tendencies, but then we got together somehow, but still I felt like I was forcing him to be something he wasn't by being his girlfriend. But then once we were together, he was fine. But I had dinner at his parents' house; his grandfather and mother basically said I wasn't good enough for him. I don't know. Then his dad, who's this huge newspaper mogul guy, offered me an internship, and I took it. I thought I was doing a really good job. But he said that I'd make somebody a great secretary, and that I don't have 'it' in me. I don't know…I really thought I was doing a good job. And I had planned my whole life around this childhood fantasy of being a journalist, which maybe sounds stupid, because maybe nobody's supposed to know what they're going to do with their life, I sure didn't," she said, surprising herself with the way she was suddenly taking the conversation to a whole other place, "because I never would have thought I would just take a boat and wind up in jail and come back here, and you know, I was pretty sure that taking this internship would lead me to being a journalist which would require me to leave Stars Hollow, but maybe I was wrong, because look where I wound up. Maybe I never had it all so figured out after all."

"Whoa, Rory, stop. What?" he was intrigued. "Steal a boat?"

"Yeah, that's right. I stole a boat, with Logan, but it was my idea."

"How did it happen?"

"We were at his sister's engagement party, and his dad had just told me that he didn't think I had what it took to be a journalist, and I just wanted to get out of there, and so I suggested taking this person's boat."

"I see."

"We got caught when the person came looking for their boat and noticed it was missing and sent the police to search for it, and I was in a jail cell." She suddenly noticed him staring at her with the saddest look on his face. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I don't know. I guess I feel…disappointed in you…"

"Oh…" She felt slightly angry at his words. He had no reason to be disappointed at her for making a mistake. She had tried to reassure herself that this was all her recent episode was: a mistake. He, on the other hand, had made many mistakes, such as getting kicked out of his house, even though it had brought him to her, and crashing her car, even though it wasn't his fault and she had spent an entire week trying to convince the population of Stars Hollow just that. Of course, he did leave without saying goodbye, even though he was young and naïve, unaware of what he wanted, and he did return only to be more open with his feelings. Damn it, Rory thought, why am I justifying all of his wrongdoings? She was growing increasingly upset at how in her mind, she had some little rationalization to excuse all of Jess's mistakes. And what made her even sadder was the fact that all of his adolescent mishaps didn't compare to her arrest and leaving everything her mother and her had worked for behind.

"I mean, you were always the one I could turn to when I couldn't get my act together."

"Oh…"

"You never stopped believing in me, and I of course failed you and all of your efforts. But you know what- Rory, why are you crying?"

"I don't know. Everything's falling apart."

"Not everything. Your mom's always going to be here for you. Luke loves you like a surrogate daughter. And your grandparents always adore you."

"Well my grandparents may be helping me out with my living arrangements and all, but my mom and I don't have the relationship we once did, and Luke has no reason to see me in that regard anymore."

"Rory, you made a mistake. And please, you think Luke doesn't like you because of one mistake you made? I screwed up so many times, and I'm pretty sure Luke doesn't hate me. You're acting irrational because it feels like everything is falling apart. But it's not. Everything will work itself out."

"Jess, when did you get so wise? She asked, smiling.

"Oh, I've lived."

She laughed at this. He was acting like himself again. Acting like the boy she had fallen in love with during her junior year. Back when he had a troubled and dark mystique, but in a boyish way, before his life took a turn that looked as though he was driven towards a lifetime of wallowing in regret and mulling over the decision of getting a GED.

She looked into his eyes and saw the same boy she saw that night in the street, when she first decided that he was her little Dodger. She knew she liked him then; she had just been too scared to admit it.

And it was because of this that she found herself saying, "Jess, do you think, maybe you could stay here an extra week or something?"