I was 13 years old – it was my birthday. Royston Sinclair III had broken my heart in front of everyone. I’d snuck into your closet that morning and took that green beaded top that was your mother’s, that you kept so carefully wrapped up in tissue paper in your cedar closet. I was never supposed to touch it. But I stole it, and I wore it to school with my Chemin de Fer sailor jeans, and I thought no one was as stylish as I was. But Royston laughed. He said I was cheap. He said the only reason he’d been my boyfriend was because he was mad at Angie Morgan and he wasn’t anymore. He called me loud and weird, and he said there was a rumor going around that I wasn’t actually a Gilmore. That I was the gardener’s daughter and you’d bought me because you couldn’t have children of your own. And I was crushed. And I ran out of class, and I ran out of school, and I went to the mall. And I was sitting in the food court, wishing I had some money to buy a pretzel ‘cause I was starving, and I looked up and there was Dad. Standing in front of me at the mall. He never came to the mall – that day, he went to the mall. And he was furious. “Why aren’t you in school?” he asked. “Tell me right now, Lorelai. Why aren’t you in school?” And I tried to think of something, some lie that would make sense, but I couldn’t. All I could think was that yesterday I had a boyfriend who loved me and today I didn’t. And I started to cry; I just sat there like an idiot, bawling. And finally, after what seemed like forever, I managed to control myself a little bit, and I calmed down. And I waited. I waited for him to yell at me, to punish me, to ground me forever, to tell me how disappointed he was in me. And nothing came. And finally, I got up enough courage to look up at him, and he was standing there with a pretzel. A giant pretzel covered with mustard. And he handed it to me and he said, “Let’s go”. And he took me to the movies. We saw Grease and An Unmarried Woman. Something for me and something for him, he said. He bought me popcorn and Red Hots, and we sat in the dark and we watched. And then he took me home, and he gave me his sweater to cover up the stolen top, and he told you that he’d picked me up from school and taken me to the club for a soda. And that was it. We never discussed it again. It was the best birthday I ever had. I just thought you should know.
