"Lane. La-ane. Lane!"
Lane whirled around, a chunk of hair sticking in her mouth. The sunlight coming in through the Gilmores' kitchen windows had gotten stretchier, longer. How long had she been sitting in this uncomfortable wooden chair, rapping away at the pots and pans on the table in front of her? Thirty minutes? An hour?
"Sorry," she said. "Too loud?"
"Too long." Lorelai grinned, standing in the doorway. "Never let it be said that we don't support the arts in this household, but when you started, McCartney was still in the choir."
Longer than an hour, then.
Lorelai faux-pouted. "Y'know, your family is gonna start catching on when you come home late every evening fat, happy, and looking like you just ran for Disney Endurance."
"Lorelai!" That was Sookie, somewhere in the living room, buried in wedding bouquet flowers. "Have you seen the tape?"
"Check by your foot."
"I did."
"Check by your other foot."
"It's not there!"
"Check behind the couch's foot!" Lorelai pointed at Lane, shaking her head. "Too many signs and symptoms, kiddo. At this rate Mrs. Kim is gonna find out you're well on your way to becoming Karen Carpenter before summer vacation even gets started."
"Well, I don't wanna be Karen Carpenter with this, I wanna be Debbi Peterson." Lane brandished the drum sticks, raising her eyebrows.
"Home." Lorelai jerked her head toward the door. "Fast! Whoever you are! I don't wanna wake up in the middle of the night with your mother standing over my bed brandishing a crucifix and a 1700's ladle, preparing to club me over the head and drive a stake through my heart all while yelling about how I enabled her daughter's gradual getaway up the Highway to Hell."
"Right."
Lane began dutifully putting smaller pots into bigger pots, stacking pans so that every handle was pointing the same way. Rory was working long hours with Paris at school, trying to become the next Vice President of the plaid-clad rich kids, the cast finally gone, just in time for Sookie's wedding on the horizon. Lane had been practicing drumming here every single night, ever since Sophie at the music store had promised she could use the drum set—her beautiful, beautiful drum set—on Wednesdays and Fridays. She needed somewhere else, somewhere more stable, somewhere she could practice by daylight, and the Gilmore house was the perfect spot. Mrs. Kim would have no problem with her being there after school, and being potentially caught with pots and pans was better than being potentially caught in the dark in a store full of albums, hitting real cymbals on a real drum set.
Lately, it felt like hitting things—drums or pots and pans—was the only thing worth doing.
"Hey." Lorelai's head leaned against the doorframe, pausing suddenly. "You okay?"
"Yeah. Yes. Why?" Lane knelt and yanked open the lower cupboard door, harder than it needed to be yanked.
Lorelai's severe blue eyes lingered on her, narrowing. "No, it's nothing. You just seem—kinda quiet. When you're not Debbi, I mean."
"Do I?"
"Well, if you're headed for Debbi, I'd say you made a pit stop at Stevie Ray and decided to stay a while, sniff some flowers, buy a condo." Lorelai's right hand slid up the doorframe, too, resting there next to a face that looked altogether too doe-eyed and cool-aunty to be ignored. "Something going on?"
But Lane could ignore it. Lane could fake it with the best of them.
"I'm fine." She offered a little smile, dismissive, and went back to carefully arranging iron in the cupboard.
Lorelai opened her mouth to protest, but at that moment, Sookie hollered again.
"Lorelai! The tape's stuck in the—a-and when I turned to get it off, the stems snapped—and the—"
Lorelai didn't turn around, hollering back, "You didn't just accidentally massacre three hours' worth of pastel silk wedding prep by taping it to a coffee table that hasn't been wiped down in a suspiciously long time, did you?"
"Well, maybe we can get creative."
"More creative than homemade bouquets?"
"I can fix it."
"I'm coming." Lorelai shook her head, rolling her eyes pointedly at Lane on her way out into the living room. "I tell ya, Lucy, if I had known this is what friends are for, I'd have signed up as an enemy…"
While the grown-ups were saving Sookie's big day, Lane took her time arranging and rearranging the cookware cabinet. The longer she stayed, the less time she had to be tucked up in her room at home with nothing to do. Dean had been extra clingy since the car incident (understandably), and Rory had been spending every spare minute not at Chilton with him. Between Paris and Dean, she didn't have any social energy left for the little drummer girl down the street. There wasn't even any homework left to do—summer was right around the corner.
The boredom wasn't what was making her beat Lorelai's pasta pot so hard it looked like somebody actually used it once in a while.
Today was the second Friday of the month. CD-drop night.
It wasn't until Jess was gone that Lane realized he'd been holding open a door to a make-believe world—one where she sometimes got what she wanted, and felt like herself, and didn't sense animals digging into her abdomen every other hour. Now her doorstop was gone, and the door was shut. It had been nice while it lasted. So nice that it left a vacuum, one big enough to make her wonder if it had ever been such a good idea in the first place. You couldn't miss what you'd never experienced.
She was an addict going through withdrawals. That was all.
She missed the CDs. She missed the free fries. She missed knowing someone out there past the gazebo understood and appreciated the thread that could be followed between Beck and B.B. King.
Now, with Rory trying to vice Paris's presidency and Sookie prepping for romantic security and Lorelai nearly graduated from business school, suddenly Lane could feel herself slipping backward.
What did she have? What could she really do besides hitting the drums in the music shop with all the lights off, dreaming of the day she'd be someone else, somewhere else? At least even here, in the kitchen of someone else's home, she could pretend she was going places too. She could pretend going places wasn't going to make her mom hate and disown her at the drop of a very expensive hat that may or may not have belonged to Benjamin Franklin. She could pretend the way she'd pretended while Jess had been holding the door.
And so what if, when she was quiet the way Lorelai had implied, it was because she couldn't hold back the withdrawal pains? So what if every time she went into Sophie's Music and saw a khaki jacket or heard the Distillers over the speakers, she sensed a relapse coming on?
She couldn't change anything.
All she could do was keep drumming. Keep pretending.
Liz was crying.
She was upright at the table when Jess came out of the bathroom, heading for the door. Her hair was all in her face, and she was reading a tabloid, chuckling slightly at a picture or an ad or something. But there were tear tracks down her face, and her mascara was completely smudged off.
He hadn't slept a full eight hours since he'd gotten back home. The days were short and fast and wet in the spring, and they'd started to swirl together, places he visited and books he was reading, like someone had thrown his daily routine into a blender. His city friends seemed lackluster and inerudite, worse than they had before, and talking to them and hanging with them had become so colorless he'd just stopped trying.
It was always the same thing with them—drink, smoke, fool around, kill time. Cut class. Throw bottles, explore corners of the city nobody cared about. Every day was becoming just—nothing. He might as well have been living in a glass of water, absolutely no taste and no excitement. Books were the only thing making any waves, so he spent his time outside reading, craving trees and wide-open spaces in a way he'd never done in his life and refusing to think about why.
"Can you believe this stuff they put in here about JLO? I mean, I thought I was a wreck!" Liz huffed out, flipping a page.
Jess crossed to the front door, zipping up his coat. "I'm goin' out."
"Hey, wait a minute," Liz sniffled, pawing a hand across her face. When he didn't stop, he heard her scoot the chair back. "Wait a minute, c'mere."
Jess stilled, sighing, and turned around. She was in one of those syrup moods. Pointless, messy, sticky. He knew what it was all about before she said anything. When she reached him, she put her hand on his face, then his shoulder, then dropped it. Maple traveling everywhere before it dripped off the plate. The familiar stench of pot was all over her.
"You seen my purse anywhere? It's leather."
It was just like being in Wonderland. Jess kept one hand on the doorknob, waiting for the Mock Turtle to roll its way out of the dining room after her.
"No."
"The blue one."
"No."
"It's missing."
"I'll make posters." Jess opened the door.
Liz put her hand on his hand and pulled it off the doorknob. Her palm was clammy. She'd been drinking. "Hey, you gonna get something to eat while you're out?"
Jess studied her face, shifting so that he could feel taller. She'd let go of his hand and he watched another tear drip out of her left eye, unprompted, and hit the tile floor between their feet. She didn't usually make him pause at the exit. She didn't usually ask about food.
His voice sounded quieter than he'd thought it would when he replied. "I dunno. Maybe."
"With what?"
He squinted. "What?"
"The food, how you gonna pay for it?"
"With money?"
"Yeah, well, where'd you get the money?"
The air in his lungs got piping hot. Jess's fingers curled again around the doorknob and he looked her up and down, taking in the bedraggled jacket with the cigarette burn on the shoulder that had been there since he'd been five, the one with Jimmy stitched inside the collar. The hair that was wet on all the ends. The creaky smell of beer and salsa. It had happened today—maybe tonight. Maybe an hour ago. Typical.
"Jess?" Liz raised her eyebrows, another sniffle breaking out. "C'mon, Jess, where is it?"
Jess was already shaking his head before she'd finished. "I don't have it."
"Hon, you gotta have it, just give it to me, okay?"
"I don't have it." He jerked the door open.
She was talking over him. "You gotta have it, now give it back, okay? Okay? Jess!"
He hadn't gotten two steps out of the apartment before she followed him. Liz stood in the stairwell, mascara all over her lower eyelids, barking at him from concrete heights the lower down he got. Freedom and traffic and the anonymity of the city was just a few flights away, but her voice echoed after him as he stormed down the stairs.
"Jess, you have my purse—"
"No I don't."
"You took my purse, you have it, now you get—"
"I don't."
"You get back here, now you know you have it, so you give it back—"
"I don't, I don't," he snarled, stopping on one of the landings. Finally raising his voice. Matching her volume. He glared up at her, but she wasn't looking him in the eyes. "I don't. Have it."
Liz's lips pursed. "Then where is it, huh? Cuz it's not up here!"
"Y'know what else isn't up there anymore? The stereo," Jess said, throwing up a hand. "Or the mini fridge, but hey, I guess it's nice havin' some elbow room for once; rare find in these parts."
"What are you talkin' about?"
"The TV's missing also, that big square black thing that sometimes plays moving pictures?"
"Jess," Liz huffed, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes. They probably came away black and inky, and she clapped them together, pointing the prayer-fingers down at him. More tears were building; he could see them shining under the florescent lighting. "When are you gonna grow up? It's after dark, it's rainin' outside, and where are you going?"
"Away."
"Not with my money you're not—"
"I don't have it."
"Then where is it?"
"Same place as the rest of it."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Means whittling probably doesn't pay more than the pawn shop on 47th." Jess kept going, taking the stairs one at a time, shoving down the heat in his lungs.
"Barley did not take my stuff, you hear me?" Liz's voice wound up, up, straight to the ceiling. She was shouting over the lump in her throat, he could hear it. "Hey! He didn't take it, and—he's comin' back, y'know. He is, you wait. We had a bump in the road, but it's not—he's comin' back. And I am gonna ask him!"
Jess shook his head, subtle, knowing she wouldn't see it from up there. "Might wanna check the jewelry drawer, maybe he forgot some earrings."
"Stop that!" Liz was openly weeping again; it sounded like she had her hand pressed up against her mouth. Her lipstick would be staining the doorknob for the rest of the weekend. "Stop with the mouth, he didn't take it, all right? It's different. Okay? Jess! Hey, you come back here! Jess!"
He left her squalling at the top of the stairwell, shoving the door to the outside world open as hard as he could. Anyone behind it would have been knocked out cold, lying on the sidewalk in the old gum and the puddles, and he would've stepped right over them on his way to the trees. It was drizzling, tiny flecks of almost-rain flicking down in every streetlight's glow.
Jess made his way toward Washington Square Park, trying to breathe deep through his mouth, trying to cool down. Liz would be crying all night, breaking things, laughing too loudly at whatever magazine she drowned herself in at 4 AM. He was in no hurry to get back—he could be out until dawn, and she wouldn't have noticed. She'd either sit in the armchair by the door, waiting for her man to walk back in and breaking down when it didn't, or else she'd go cold and pull her mouth down and pretend it was no big deal. When that happened, it was usually time for a smoke. The apartment would fill with the smell and all of Jess's clothes would stink for the next two weeks. She'd be drunk within the hour and warm right back up. She'd grab his arm when she saw him again and tell him about the men she'd known and the putzes they were—and then she'd talk about her dad, and fishing, and Founder's Day punch, and she'd be a mess on the couch and the cycle would begin anew.
Then he'd toss a blanket over her and go to bed, waking up periodically to hear her wailing explanations to his uncle on the phone.
Luke had called Jess six times since he'd returned to New York. Six times, he left a message on Liz's answering machine. Six times, she had hollered at him across the apartment that she was deleting the message. Six times, Jess had ignored it all.
Talking to Luke would have added more barbed wire. He didn't want to talk to Luke. He didn't want to talk to Liz. He didn't want to talk to his 'friends' or his conscience or his teachers. He didn't even have the energy to write in the margins anymore. Couldn't even talk to Proust.
But more than once that spring, Jess could hear Lane Kim at the oddest of times, cropping up in his imagination when he was hungry or apathetic or when he'd been walking for too long. You can't copy my English notes. Do not even joke about tofurkey. This is not a free face. Did you know you're secretly a nice guy? We're good. He wasn't sure he could talk to her even if he had any way of contacting her. He wouldn't know what to say. So he rarely thought about it. There was no point in entertaining the idea of communication—especially not with someone who probably didn't miss him anyway.
That didn't stop him from remembering her semi-anxious babbling when things got quiet.
A horn honked nearby. He passed The Strand and suddenly, Jess knew exactly who he wanted to talk to. Just for a minute. Just to hear her voice.
The last time he'd heard it, she'd been telling him not to worry as she climbed into the ambulance, holding her arm at an awkward angle, trying to catch his eye as glaring red lights flashed over his mistakes. The last time he'd heard it, her voice had been wobbly and tight with pain. He wanted to hear it the way he kept hearing it when he was falling asleep, or when the traffic came to a standstill, or when the book he was engrossed in suddenly picked up speed. Normal. Warm. Fast. Sharp.
She didn't hate him; his mind was sure of that. Now he just needed to call and convince his chest.
Jess turned on his heel and made for the nearest payphone. As he walked, sidestepping pedestrians, he had the fleeting realization that he'd do anything to get this feeling out of his lungs—and that Rory would be the perfect distraction.