The book Jess has been writing has gone through several stages in the past year, and by "several stages," he means "deleting the entire thing in frustration and starting from scratch." So, maybe he's been writing several books, and this is just the only one that's stuck. Depends on the definition, maybe.

He goes back and forth with himself on who to let read it first, and rejects Rory as a possibility immediately. She's way too nice. Matthew's the same, and everyone else he knows will take too long to read it. Jess still isn't convinced that Luke even got around to finishing his first one.

Boy Chris will tell him to take out the love interest, which is the exact thing that Jess doesn't want to do, even though he knows it'd make it more palatable. So he gives it to the other Chris. For objectivity.

"I don't like it," she announces, walking straight into his office without knocking.

Jess closes his laptop, ready for this. "Okay," he says. Willa, in the little makeshift playpen that Jess sets up for her in the corner, jumps up in delight, clapping her hands.

Girl Chris adores Willa and is happily adored in return, so practically every conversation they have is conducted over his daughter's head, which is probably a major reason why they get along. Not that this Chris really actively gets along with anyone, it's more like - she allows them to spend time with her, and endures as much of it as she can before she has to leave and smoke a cigarette.

Other than Willa, anyway. "Hey there," says Chris, plopping down on the opposite side of the books that Willa's been carefully stacking, in some mysterious pattern that Jess hasn't figured out. "What's up, Willa?"

"Chris!" says Willa. She can pronounce it perfectly, due to the abundance of Chrises in her life. "Hooooooot!"

Chris takes the stuffed owl with a grin. "Thanks," she says, holding it up next to her face and turning a smug look at Jess. "Check it out, I got a present."

"We're learning to share, right Willa?" Jess says. Willa, tired of standing, snorts and plops down on a stack of hardbacks. "Also how not to destroy other people's stuff. Like forty dollar Barbies."

Chris laughs, carefully handing Hoot the Owl back. "Barbies are dumb, anyway."

"Hoot, hoot," Willa says, tucks the owl under her arm, and wobbles off to greener pastures. Chris catches a stack of books, steadying them as Willa hits them with a stray foot.

"So," Jess says, "lemme guess, too pretentious?"

"No," Chris says reluctantly, "though now that you mention it - "

"I did my best! Any residual pretension is just a side effect of my personality. Sorry."

Chris just rolls her eyes. "No. It's incongruous."

"Incongruous," Jess says.

"Yeah." Chris sits up on her knees, absently reaching out to carefully steer Willa away from the open door and back towards Jess' desk. "So you've got your protagonist, right, the unnamed narrator. She's got the story at college, which is like, one book all in itself. But then she's got this whole other story at home, about her family, and the missing brother and the marriage with the parents. And you try to fit them together just by going back and forth, like interspersing the scenes, but it doesn't work, because they're still different stories. Different tone, different voices, even. It doesn't fit."

Jess opens his mouth, then closes it again. Thinks about it for a second. "Shit," he says.

"The college story is sad, and kind of weird, but it works," Chris continues. "The family story is also weird, but it's funny. Work out the parallels between them. You don't have to like, rewrite the last half of the book, it's nothing that dramatic. You throw a stone at college, so make the ripples show up at home. That's the key."

Jess frowns at his computer, thinking. "Right."

"And you gotta give her a name," Chris says definitively. "You're not fucking Philip Roth. Get over yourself."

"Fuck off," Jess says with a groan. "I hate Philip Roth."

"So give her a name then," Chris says, and turns away to start playing with Willa, conversation over. Jess hates her, just a little bit.

Willa spends the next weekend in Stars Hollow with Luke and Lorelai, doing dress fittings and cake tastings and who knows what else, and Jess sits in his apartment and hates this fucking book more than anything he's ever hated in his life. He stays up all night Friday, then sleeps until two o'clock in the afternoon. He does the same thing Saturday, and on Sunday he calls Matt and Girl Chris.

"Helena," he blurts out, the moment the call connects. "That's her name."

"What?" Matt says.

"Give the phone to your wife," Jess demands.

Matt grumbles, but obeys, and Jess repeats himself.

"A little obvious," Chris says, skeptically. "Loyal young lover, betrayed by - "

"No, no, I got rid of the boyfriend," Jess says. "It's the brother. The brother's under the spell, right? And the parents, they're Hermia and Lysander, and the college is the forest. Right? The college is the fucking forest!"

Chris is silent for a minute. "Are you drunk?" she asks.

"No!" Jess runs his hands through his hair; looks at the clock. He hasn't even gotten out of bed yet. "I just woke up."

"Oh my God, you're such a freak," Chris says. "Hold on. Let me get dressed, I can't talk to you about this when I don't have pants on."

"Jesus, were you guys having sex?" Jess asks.

"No, I just don't have pants on," Chris says blankly.

Jess sighs, and lies back down.

"I think you're missing the point of the allegory, here."

"I thought you were trying to be less pretentious, Jess."

"I am!"

"And so making this into an abstruse Shakespeare retelling accomplishes that goal how?"

"It's not abstruse, it's - it's not a retelling, anyway, who said it was a retelling? It's just the names, that's all. A fucking theme. The story's still the same, I'm just trying to invoke the motif of Midsummer, not turn the book into an elaborate metaphor."

"You literally just used the word 'allegory.'"

"I'm - no I didn't."

"You literally did."

"Well, I didn't mean it."

"Are you sure you're not drunk?"

"Yes! Would you just - "

"Okay! Okay, explain the brother to me again. And keep it simple, Harold Bloom. Is he dead or not?"

"Of course he's fucking dead, he jumped off the roof of the dorm."

"I don't remember reading that!"

"Well! I...okay, my bad, I added that last night."

"For fuck's sake, Jess - "

"It's a funny scene. I mean, I think it is. The whole thing is a comedy. I think that's what I was missing before."

"I regret everything about our acquaintance. Literally every single thing."

"Excuse me, which one of us is a Nick Hornby fan? Not me. It was not me who said 'black humor is the only type of humor that smart people can enjoy.' And you call me pretentious - "

"You're taking that out of context!"

"Look, are you gonna read it again or not? I have to leave to pick Willa up in like twenty minutes."

"I hate you."

"..."

"Okay, send it to my work email."

"It's funny, okay. It's a comedy. Remember that."

"Shut the fuck up."

When Jess gets to Lorelai's house, there seven texts on his phone, reading as follows:

u didn't tell me the suicide scene is the OPENING FUCKING CHAPTER

helena's a terrible name for a nineteen year old

ok nvm helena's not that bad i can't believe u actually changed his name to demetrius u have GOT to change that back

jesus christ jess mixed metaphors much

ok i KNOW u were drunk when u wrote this dinner party scene. quit fucking lying

IF YOU MISSPELL JUDGEMENT ONE MORE TIME I S2G. IT'S E-M-E-N-T, JESS. JUDGEMENT. JUDGEMENT. JUDGEMENT. JUDGEM

ENT. JESUS!

"New girlfriend?" asks Luke.

Jess scowls at him and puts his phone away. "You're a little obsessed with the topic of my love life, Uncle Luke."

"Just checking on your emotional health and well being," Luke says. He squints at Jess. "Your shoes don't match."

Jess scowls deeper. "How was the child?"

"A disaster. She knocked over Sookie's practice wedding cake. It made Martha cry."

"Which one is Martha again?" Jess asks.

Luke's still eyeing his shoes. "Seriously, why don't your shoes match? Are you drunk?"

"Why does everyone keep asking me that?" Jess' phone buzzes in his pocket again. "I'm writing a book, okay?"

Luke frowns. "Is that supposed to be a logical response somehow?"

"Just give me my daughter back."

"Lorelai let her eat most of the cake," Luke tells him smugly. He finally steps aside, letting Jess over the threshold. "The parts that weren't on the floor, anyway. Just warning you. They're all watching some cartoon in the living room. There's some dancing involved."

"I hate you," Jess says passionately.

"Seriously," Luke says. "Why don't your shoes match?"

Jess hits him as he walks past.

"You need to put the boyfriend back in," says Girl Chris.

Jess groans. "I just took him out."

"Yes, and in the process we completely miss the entire point of Helena's anger. Like, okay, we get it, but it's got no teeth. You need to drag her across the coals, Jess. You're being too nice to her!"

"I am not."

"You are! Oh my God, she's not based on somebody you're in love with, is she?" Chris wrinkles her nose. "Because that's pathetic."

"No," Jess says, who hasn't been in love with anyone since he was eighteen. And Helena is definitely not based on Rory. If anything, she's the anti-Rory. "Look, I took out the boyfriend because I put in the suicide. How am I supposed to write a book that starts with a suicide and ends with being left at the altar? It's fucking sadistic."

"That's the point. And don't end on the wedding scene, Jesus. We need to know what happened with him before she freaks out at the dinner party. If we don't know the context then she comes off like she's just lost her mind or something."

"Oh my God, that fucks up my entire timeline," Jess says with a groan.

"You're the one who fucked it up! I told you you didn't have to rewrite the entire book," Chris says, with a pointed lack of sympathy. "And the suicide's funny, so it doesn't count. You're fine. Put the boyfriend back in."

"Can I just," Jess says, kind of helplessly, "if I add dates to the chapters, can I just put everything wherever the fuck I want? Would that be confusing?"

"That's," Chris says, and pauses. "Okay, what, like, a Time Traveler's Wife kind of thing?"

"It's called a non-linear narrative," Jess says.

"Well excuse me, Mr. English Major," Chris says. "Fine. Okay. Try it and I'll read it."

Jess sighs. "Fine."

"Fine."

A long pause, wherein they both glare at the empty spaces around each other's heads. Willa, dozing peacefully on the couch, starts to snore.

"You're still gonna change the brother's name back, right?" Chris asks.

Jess snaps his laptop shut. "Yes, okay? Yes!"

"Jeez," Chris says, flipping her hair over her shoulder. "I was just asking."

Two days later.

"I said change the brother's name back, Jess, to the one he had before, not give him my name!"

"It's an inside joke," Jess tells her. "With the other Chris. Not about you."

"You're such a prick," Chris says, and throws a notebook at his head.

Jess was ready for it, and manages to dodge out of the way. "God, would you ease up?! This is an abuse-free workplace!"

"You killed me off!" Chris says, fuming. "You made me a dude, and you killed me off on the first fucking page of your novel!"

"Not everything is about you, Christine! I know a lot of Chrises!"

Chris, this particular Chris, lets out a cry of rage, and stomps out of his office. Jess sits back down in his chair, and winces as he hears the front door slam.

"So," he says. "That was my editor."

Sheila, sitting in the chair opposite, nods, grinning ear to ear. "She seems nice," she says.

"Okay, wait, I don't get it," says April. "So Helena's not the same Helena from A Midsummer Night's Dream, but her parents actually...are Hermia and Lysander - ?"

"No, forget the Shakespeare, Jess, I told you to stop bringing up the stupid Shakespeare," says Chris. "Just - forget Shakespeare. Helena's just a girl. Her parents are just parents."

"But, no, okay," April says, "Helena and her mom, that's a lot like Helena and Hermia in the play. Like, they act more like friends than mother and daughter, and then there's the whole Thomas thing..."

"I told you putting the boyfriend back in was too sadistic," Jess says.

"I like it!" April says eagerly. "It's super messed up. But Thomas leaving Helena for her mom - that's like, totally Shakespearean. Or maybe - Greek tragedy. Yeah - totally Greek tragedy."

"And Chris," Jess says leadingly, "as in the fictional Chris, I mean - "

"Is like Helena's lost lover! Because she's the only one who stays loyal to him!" April says triumphantly. She wrinkles her nose. "Oh, that's super weird."

Jess nods in satisfaction. "See? It works. I told you - "

"Shut up," says Chris. The real one. "But, okay April, if nobody had told you about the Shakespeare thing, would you have still gotten it?"

"No," April admits, "but I've never read Shakespeare, so."

"You've never made her read Shakespeare?" Chris demands.

"She's not my kid," Jess says.

"But I read Midsummer Night's Dream for school," April offers. "Well, I read some of it. And watched the movie."

"Right. Okay," Chris says, "what about the dad? What do you think? I think he should kill him off, too."

"What? No!" April cries. "The dad's the funniest one! You gotta keep him around. He deserves the happy ending, with Helena. That's what I thought would happen, when I was reading, and it made sense and everything. It kind of makes you feel better, after all the suicide and adultery stuff, because you get to see Helena and her dad get back together in the end." She wrinkles her nose again. "Oh. Ohhhhh. That's super weird, too."

"It works, though," Jess insists. "Right?"

"You're so messed up, dude," April says, laughing. "My dad's never gonna understand this book."

"Right, okay," Chris says, "so you like it, you understand it, that's good. What's the main thing that pissed you off about it? Be honest. Jess can take it." Jess rolls his eyes.

"Um," April says, biting her lip. "I think...did you mean to keep using the British spelling of 'judgment'? That really threw me off, considering how many times you use the word."

Jess turns to look at Chris, who has her face in her hands. "Shut up," she says. "Not a word."

"What?" April asks.

"Nothing," says Jess, grinning. "You're my favorite person in the whole world. You know that?"

"Oh," says April, nonplussed. "Well, thanks!"

"You're welcome," says Jess.

"Look," says Chris, face down on the floor of Jess' office. "If you end on a line of dialogue then it's weird. It's unfinished. It's lazy. It makes the reader expect more, something to end the conversation - "

"The conversation is supposed to be left hanging, that's the fucking point! It's an unfinished conversation!"

"It's heavy handed!" Chris yells into the carpet. "We already know that Chris is fucking dead, you don't need to remind us!"

"You're still just pissed off that I named him Chris."

"It feels like you're rubbing it in now," Chris whines. "Come on. The last voicemail Helena has from him? She just happens to find it in the last chapter?"

"You think I should make it a time skip instead?" Jess asks, frowning. "Okay, no. Okay. If I write it like a conversation, like an actual conversation? When he shows up to her dorm right before he jumps. From Helena's perspective, though, and - yes, okay, yes, we open on him jumping, and end right before he jumps! That's it. It's a closed loop!"

"Ugh," Chris says.

"What? What's your problem?"

"I will give you a million dollars if you change his name to something other than Chris," says Chris.

"Pass," says Jess.

"Come on! Please?"

"You like it," Jess goads. "You think it's congruous."

Chris mumbles something into the carpet, too quiet to actually hear. Jess opens up the latest draft and starts typing, in as smug of a manner as he can.

"Fine," she says, after a minute. "Fine. It's good. Okay? It's in good shape."

"I know," Jess says.

"And if you appreciated my help with this at all, you'd change the stupid brother's name," Chris says, climbing to her feet with a groan. Her hair is a tangled mess, piled on top of her head, and there's rug burn on her cheek.

"Not happening," Jess says.

"I need a cigarette," Chris says forlornly. She picks up her purse, digging through it listlessly. "Aw, shit."

"Boy Chris keeps some in his office," Jess says absently, distracted by the draft. "Bottom left drawer."

"Thanks," Chris says.

"You too," Jess replies. "Thanks, I mean."

Chris glares at him. "Whatever," she says, and strides out. Jess waits, watching the door, and thirty seconds later she strides back in, grabbing her purse from the chair. "You owe me."

"Whatever," Jess says.