It starts, as so many poor collegiate decisions do, with Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice, gulped down greedily in a friend's dorm room. Not that Rory Gilmore's doing too much of the drinking herself, but with the end of sophomore year fast approaching, she wants to enjoy a bit of a last hurrah before the run up to finals, which explains why she's cracking open her third beer of the night. The one that, as Morrison so eloquently put it, you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and what difference can it make?
It makes a difference when her own roommate, Jenny, cracks a terrible joke and Rory snort-laughs, spilling some of that damned third beer on her teal short-sleeved top.
"Here, lemme help you with that," Dan offers, getting up from his recliner, but Rory declines the assistance, grabbing at paper towels from the dresser next to the futon she was sitting on to dab at the stain--not a big deal, she'll just have to throw her in her hamper once she gets back to her dorm--when her eyes fall to a magazine she hadn't noticed before.
She smirks at Dan and Steve, the gracious roommates-turned-hosts of the evening. "Looks like you guys missed some cleaning."
"Hey, Playboy's high-brow reading material," Steve protests, going for defiance despite his blush, and he tosses the magazine onto Rory's lap. "See, they mention easy dinners and cocktails for two on the front!"
The glossy cover falls open to one of the first few pages and Rory automatically scans it.
"Thanks to all those years of reading," she thinks to herself before she can't think anymore.
It's not that she's scandalized by the woman on page five, since the model is wearing a classic, classy, midnight blue lingerie set: push up bra, lacy thong, thigh-high stockings, and high heel pumps. Nothing too slutty or revealing. Probably the kind of content guys glance by when they're trawling through Playboy to do other things.
No, the problem is that the woman could've passed for...well, not her mom, exactly, but maybe a fictional cousin, with the sharp, attractive contrast between her pale skin and jet-black hair. Not to mention her toned arms, mischievous smirk, and perky tits.
At that realization, Rory's stomach flips the same way it had when Professor Walsh, her Alcohol in American Literature professor and a distinguished novelist already at age 35, laughed at a dirty double entendre in a Hemingway short story. Or like it did last week when she unexpectedly bumped into Mrs. Egnatchik, one of her favorite librarians on campus, out at a restaurant a couple of weekends ago.
She doesn't have a type, exactly: Professor Walsh ("you can call me Aoife, if you like," she'd told the class on the first day, and Rory hasn't done that yet, but the name is awfully pretty) is 5'10, all lithe limbs and long, dark hair in vintage, thrifted dresses, whereas Mrs. Egnatchik is a shorter, bottle blonde who wears no-nonsense blouses and slacks and wouldn't look too out of place in a spin class with some twenty-something college students.
It's the first time in a while that she dims the bright lights in her mind, lets herself loosen up enough to actively acknowledge her bisexuality somewhere other than the lucid suspension between waking and sleeping, when she's in a dream about a date and she's out at a coffee shop or a bookstore with a woman, not a boy.
She'd had an inkling of that recognition with Paris long after they'd become friends, that a latent attraction lay underneath their initial passive aggressiveness and childish "anything you can do, I can do better" competitions. And plenty of her girlfriends and classmates at Yale are attractive, too. Thinking that doesn't have to be weird.
What's weird is considering older women, like the one she saw in Playboy, who looks to be in her mid-thirties, if Rory had to guess, as she sneaks one more peek before closing the magazine and returning it to its resting place on the dresser, joking, "Now that I read some Playboy, I'm ready to cook a roast chicken, so I'll have to have everyone over for a dinner party!"
Her friends' laughter pulls her back into the evening, but her thoughts about Professor Walsh and Mrs. Egnatchik stick with her when she's back in her dorm after the party's wrapped up, trying to sleep.
For a flash of a second, her stray thoughts about her mom's resemblance to that random model resurface, too.
___
Stretching herself thinner over the summer and going for a more ambitious internship than a part-time reporting gig at the Stars Hollow Gazette probably would've been the right move, but she'll have all of junior year and next summer to beef up her resume, and, in any case, she's going to fucking Yale. Doors will open for her.
Like her bedroom door is right now, in mid-June, with her mom announcing, "It's the working girl's first day at the presses!"
Rory yanks the blankets up over her head. "'S too early."
"I have coffee, fresh from Luke's, for you. Unless you want to stay in bed, in which case I'll happily drink it--"
"I'm getting up."
Lorelai's responding grin is the epitome of smug satisfaction. "Thought so."
Rory sleepwalks her way to the kitchen--coffee first, then shower is always the Gilmore girl way.
"Better?" Lorelai asks, almost teasingly, after she's taken a couple deep drinks of her beloved jitter juice.
"Of course. You should know," Rory answers, managing a little sass of her own despite being up at an earlier hour than she'd like. "You gifted me your favorite addiction."
"But imagine if you'd gone to college without such a refined coffee palette," Lorelai counters. "You oughta be thanking me, kid."
Rory lifts her cup toward her in a half-joking, half-heartfelt gesture. "Here's looking at you, mom."
It'll be helpful to get out of the house more often precisely so she can do less looking.
She hardly means to, but her mom's wearing her usual summertime mix of flowy sundresses and t-shirts and cutoff jean shorts, showing off bare arms and collarbones, uncovered legs, sun-kissed shoulders--
"Snap out of it," Rory chastises herself in the shower, shaking her head to try and dislodge her weird thoughts. "She's your mom."
She spends the rest of the morning on autopilot while her mom gets ready to head over to the Dragonfly, pretending everything's fine.
"No need to be nervous about this internship," she rationalizes. "It's just the Stars Hollow Gazette, after all."
The office is a hop, skip, and a jump away from her house--she could honestly bike here if she awoke early enough--but going through the minutiae of driving helps calm her apprehension, as does the routine to her first day--seeing where her computer is, being introduced to everyone around the office, getting the green light to use the coffee maker in the kitchen, etc.
Plus, her first article will be a write-up on Stars Hollow's upcoming 4th of July festival and its history.
"Research," Rory notes under her breath. "Right up my alley."
Conducting interviews isn't exactly her strong suit, given her introverted nature, but she'll have to get used to it to be even a half-decent journalist or reporter, and this is about as low-stakes a story as she could write to start. It takes her about a week to get it done, which feels like too much time, but Diana, the editor, says it's fine, so she relaxes a little.
Her inner perfectionist nags at her as summer continues, though. Insists she should be aiming higher, refusing to settle for the comfort of another three months and change in Stars Hollow.
Take that worry and throw in her weird feelings toward her mom, and it all adds up to Rory not feasting on sweet and sour chicken and crab rangoon on a lazy Friday night in mid-July.
"You okay, Rory?" Lorelai asks, using chopsticks to gesture toward her half-eaten takeout container.
"Sort of," she mumbles, shrugging half-heartedly. "I just--I kind of wonder if I made the right choice, taking an internship here with the local paper. I feel like I could be doing more."
