A/N: Thank you reviewers and those of you who read but didn't review! Sorry it took me sol long to get this up, I've been keeping my fanfic-chapters on different external harddrives, so it's taken me some time to finish. Anyhoo, I'm back with a new chapter, and for those who like Cammie, I think you'll really like this chapter. Cammie's been in a couple of stories now, and I felt I wanted to expand on her character a bit, so we had a little heart-to-keyboard kind of talk. Enjoy chapter 24!

Disclaimer: I, the author of this story, do not own any of the characthers associated with Gilmore Girls. That honor belongs to the wonderful Amy Sherman-Palladino. I have no intention of making any money on this (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm losing money over it...).

24. Pursuit of Some Kind of Happiness

"How'd you find me?" Rory asked neutrally when the sound of clicking shoes behind her stopped.

She'd fled to the old bridge, and sat there with her feet dangling, the soles almost touching the water. A couple of yards ahead, a family of ducks were engaged in something that looked to violent to be playing (they could possibly be related to the infamous Armbrewsters considering how they seemed to try to drown one another). She felt so stupid for dropping the bomb like that. After all, she was the one who had asked for the secrecy.

"Jess told me you liked to hang out here," Cammie replied and sat down next to her, opting for sitting tailor style on the bridge.

The little duck family stopped their little drowning game for a while, and began swimming around the little pond, acting all duck-like. Neither Cammie, nor Rory said anything for a long time.

"How's Jess?" Rory finally asked, keeping her gaze fixed on the swimming ducks.

"Bookboy's fine. Mostly fine… He's okay," Cammie responded fleetingly.

"He's 'okay'?"

"He caused quite a scene. After you ran out, half the town came tumbling through the dining room doors, wanting to congratulate you and see your ring and offer you advice. Jess blew his top and yelled at them like I've never seen him yell before. Seriously, it was shocking. I'm not even going to repeat what he said, 'cause I kiss my mother with this mouth."

Rory furrowed her brow.

"I was under the impression that you didn't talk to your parents," she said confused, remembering how Jess a couple of days earlier had told her about Cammie and how she and her parents had had a falling out over Cammie's sexuality.

"Figure of speech, you know. Sounds better than 'I kiss the first good-looking, reasonably sober girl I see when I'm out partying with this mouth'."

"You really do that?"

"Why do you think I'd step into a bar for otherwise?" Cammie smiled slyly. "The trick is to find the ones who are just drunk enough. Sober people can be so stiff, and drunks I'm not even going to talk about."

"Bad experience?" Rory asked, finding the idea of Cammie walking around kissing people increasingly funny.

"I had to bury a pair of perfectly worn in Converses because the vomit on them wouldn't go away, and it looked and smelled like something biohazardous."

"Yeesh…" Rory made a face, recalling with vigorous clarity how she'd felt after she'd had too much of Patty's Founder's Day punch (she was pretty confident any tar on her soul had been washed away that time).

"Took the words right outta my mouth, girl. Anyhow, I told Jess to go back to town to his uncle's place and chill out."

"And he actually did that?" Rory was surprised. Sure, Jess was a reformed man, but when he got angry it was like rewinding back to when he was seventeen and angry at the world in general.

"I told him that if he didn't go immediately, foul things would happen to him. I may also have implied that anything he'd feel like doing, no doubt exploding a bit more, would result in something he'd definitely regret. It was like turning on the lights. He gruffed at me and toddled off."

They both fell silent again, watching as the ducks floated around in the water. In Rory's eyes, their lives seemed a whole lot easier than her own, even if being a duck would involve getting drowned by your family.

"What do I do?" she then asked, feeling she couldn't escape the inevitable question.

"You go back," Cammie replied simply.

"You don't understand Stars Hollow. This," Rory pointed to her engagement ring, which she still wore on the wrong finger with the stones facing the inside of her palm. "…is everybody's business now, and it's my fault. I wanted to have a nice, long engagement with a nice little wedding sometime in the future. Not some whacky town shindig shoved upon me with Patty giving me five failed marriages worth of advice and grandma hiring miss Celine, because if the town can pull a crazy stunt for my wedding, then she is entitled to at least one small thing, because after all, me and mom are her family even though we chose to go to our neighbor's cat's wake instead of a distant cousin's funeral."

"Rory. First of all, stop giving me the 'you don't know Stars Hollow'-crap. I managed to make a decent life for myself in Philly, and I'll be damned if I'll let this town stop me from doing the same here. Second, this is your life. Stop acting like you have to live it like others want you to. No one can take your wedding away from you. And third, if you have five failed marriages behind you, you shouldn't hand out advice."

Rory wanted so desperately to tell Cammie she was wrong, that there was so much more to the issue, so many finer details that she as an outsider couldn't even begin to comprehend about Stars Hollow, but she found herself incapable of forming the words.

"What was it like? Splitting from your parents?" she asked instead, glancing over at Cammie.

"It wasn't the most pleasant thing I've ever done," Cammie replied, not contesting the change of subject. "They just couldn't tolerate that their baby daughter, the most promising debutanté of her year, was so intent on destroying everything they had built for me and my brother."

Rory tried to picture Cammie as a debutanté, but there was just something about the colorful girl beside her that didn't fit into the debutanté-mold. "Then again," Rory thought. "Neither did I…"

"I was 15 when I realized I would only ever play for the girls only-team," Cammie continued, twirling a lock of hot pink hair around her right index finger. "I planned on waiting 'til I was 18 to move, and get away from Pittsburgh high society. Mom and dad knew pretty early on that I was… well, they called me defective. And they never let me forget about what a disappointment I was. I think they were somehow banking on guilting me back into heterosexuality. On my 17th birthday I decided I couldn't wait another year to get out, I wanted no one to ever put me down like my parents did, so I went to talk about them about getting legally emancipated. I figured that since they didn't like me for what I was, and I wasn't all sunshine and rainbows about living in a household that despised me, it would be a win-win situation. All hell broke loose, and I got to hear things that no teenager should ever have to hear from her own parents."

"So you left?" Rory inquired, finding it impossible not to see the parallell between Cammie's life and her mother's.

"I did. I got a lawyer, filed for emancipation, transferred money from my family-account to a new, private one before my mom and dad could freeze it, and yes, I wouldn't put a stunt like that past them. I even changed my name."

"What? Cammie's not your real name?"

"I've still got my old last name, but I tweaked my first name. Cammie was what my friends in Pittsburgh used to call me. It had way more happy memories attached to it than Camilla. Anyhow, I took my money and my new liberated self and moved to Philly. Haven't talked to my parents ever since," Cammie concluded and let out a gust of air.

There was a sense of pride in her voice, but Rory also picked up on a sort of sadness hidden underneath. Still, she was in awe of the balls it must've taken Cammie to cut all bonds to her family, much like Lorelai had done. Not even Rory herself had been able to do that.

"You remind me of my mom," Rory said, smiling. "She fled the Hartford high society when she was 16 and got pregnant with me."

"Jess told me there was something slightly unconventional about your family," Cammie noted.

"Mom and grandma still can't hang out like any other mother and daughter. Grandma is disappointed, because in her eyes mom threw away all her potential, and mom thinks grandma is stuck in a dream, and refuses to see that what happened turned out to be the best for everyone involved. My dad has disappointed me and mom more times than we can count, and then I sort of grew up to become the great big hope for the Gilmore name."

Rory gave a humourless laugh.

"You know, I was valedictorian when I graduated high school, or well, Chilton prep. I remember I talked about my role models in my speech, how the person I most wanted to be like was my mom, because she is so strong and independent. Some inspiration I drew from that… First I steal a yacht and then I do to her what she did to grandma and grandpa, and run out on her and our dream, and then I can't even shake off my old self and evolve," she said bitterly. "I still care too much about what others think of me, and I can't even remember when I last told someone to just can it."

"Rory," Cammie said, moving closer to her. "Being strong and independent doesn't mean you have to be like me or your mom and run away from things. You see how that can turn out."

"Pretty good, I'd say. Mom's happy, she's got the inn and Luke and Sookie and me. She's got the townspeople… And you're happy, right?"

"The only thing I've done, and I'm pretty sure it's the only thing your mom's done too, is to run away from the problem. I don't talk to my family, at all. I haven't seen or talked to any of them in five or six years. I'm not sure I would recognize my brother if he passed me on the street. I can't even say I envy your relationship with your mom, though I'd like to, because I've been on my own for so long I've almost forgotten what it's like to be in a parent-kid-relationship. That doesn't sound very happy now, does it?"

"Oh…Yeah, now that you put it that way…" Rory mumbled, looking down.

She knew, of course just how chilly things could be between Lorelai and Emily, but she couldn't imagine what it would be like to be in Cammie's situation. God, where would she be today if she had completely cut her bonds with her mom the time she stole that yacht and took a sabbatical from Yale? Not in a happy place at least, she decided, chewing on her lip. She scrunched up her face at the thought of more functions, proper clothing, drinking the nights away with Logan and his friends, and ugh! She'd probably be Mrs. Logan Huntzberger by now if she hadn't gotten out of that illusion.

"Bad memories?" Cammie asked as Rory went through her 'what if'-scenarios.

"Not bad memories, not really anyway. More like bad choices. Bad, bad choices."

"'Stealing a yacht'-bad?"

Rory laughed and nodded. Stealing a yacht… There was a story for any future grandkids. If there would ever be grandkids. That sort of requiered kids to begin with and kids required… well, everyone knew what kids, or rather their existence, required. The road not taken yet. Technically, she'd gone down a road like that, waved goodbye to her "giftship". Now Rory just wished she could have taken another road that led to that same destination.

"Look," Cammie said, interrupting Rory's metaphorical road-thinking. "I'm not pretending to be some relationship-expert, given the lack of relationships in my life in general, but you and Jess need to stop beating around the bush. You also need to realize your mom is your mom and her job is to occasionally do things that you find stupid. Capisce?"

"So what should I do?" Rory asked, her mind still in the 'the road not taken'-gutter.

"Forgive your mom. Tell her to keep the nutheads that live here on a short leash. Make up with Mariano." Cammie wiggled her eyebrows.

Rory snorted.

"God, you need a life," she scolded Cammie playfully, but a plan was already forming in her head.

"Why? I could be living vicariously through you!"

Rory got up from the bridge and began walking back towards the town.

"Hey, where are you going?" Cammie called after her.

"To fix things!" Rory called back over her shoulder. "Could you maybe live vicariously through someone else for today?"

She could hear Cammie croon "Aah…" to herself, then call "I'll go bug Taylor if it will make you happy!"

Rory smiled to herself. Seeing Cammie annoy the hell out of Taylor might just be a show too good to miss. On the other hand, what she had planned was too good for her to miss, too. She fished out her cellphone from her jeans pocket, calling her mom on speed dial.

"Babe, light of my life, fruit of my loins, the reason I stay sane, I am so, so, so sorry," her mother answered almost immediately.

"Mom, I'm not particularly happy that you pranced around in my embarrassing paper hat, but I get it that in your twisted mind, you needed another hat, and yes, I'd like to know my Texan-cowboy-name, but not now. I need to ask you something."

"Okay, that was easy…" Lorelai muttered. "Go ahead, shoot."

Rory asked her question, and smiled at her mother's answer, thanked her and promised a Casablanca-movienight next time they were in the Hollow. After the call, she steered her steps towards the Crap Shack. No one would be home, but just in case Babbette would be out, she'd have to sneak in, collect some stuff and sneak out undetected. Now that the entire town knew she was engaged, there were no measures of care that were too grand or too weird.

By some freak coincidence, she managed to sneak into the Crap Shack by taking a very confusing route home, which ended with her trampling through the woods from Bootsy's to the Crap Shack, and then to her destination via the same woods, albeit in a different direction. Rory smiled once again, and wrote a text to Jess:

The tree where you asked the Question, 8 pm. Don't let anyone see you.

A/N: What's Rory up to? Guesses welcome, review and let me know what you thought!