There are five things Dean Forester will never tell Rory Gilmore.
1. He's already read every book she's ever lent him. He read Anna Karenina on a long car ride, and again by candlelight while huddled in an empty church while winter winds howled down the walls. He didn't compare them to banshees, though, because real banshees didn't sound like that. He appreciated Tolstoy's style, if not his plots, but of the Russian writers he liked Pushkin better. Maybe it was in his nature to enjoy a story about a good game of cards.
2. When he said he'd kill Tristen for giving her crap at the dance, he hadn't meant it, not really. He knew how to sound like he meant it, because sounding like meaning was often scarier than actually meaning it. But Tristen was just a boy, a poor, annoying fool with a crush on a girl who already had a foolish crush of her own, and Tristen hadn't done anything to deserve death. Besides, dealing death with bare hands was a rare occurrence, one to always be avoided.
3. In Chicago they did call it pop, so he learned to call it pop, and back West they called it pop too, but down South it was Coke, no matter what it actually was, it was Coke. You walked into a dingy diner, the gum-snapping, slow-drawling waitress came to take your order, and when you asked for a Coke, she asked what kind, and cherry and vanilla weren't the type she meant.
4. He's smarter than any of the residents of Stars Hollow know or could possibly guess. Other students are athletes, musicians, cheerleaders, shining on the school auditorium stage or rousing school spirit on the football field. He gets straight A's, quietly and persistently, and he's going to an ivy league school as soon as he's done with the high school in this little town - or any little town. Rory wants to be a journalist, and that's fantastic. He wants to be a lawyer, to shine some measure and justice in ordinary people's lives. And he's going to go to Stanford to make it happen. Palo Alto is nice no matter the time of year.
5. His name isn't really Dean Forester. Dean is his brother's name, and Dean is a mechanic, but Dean is leaner, sharper, blonder, and would use a copy of Anna Karenina to start a blaze for a corpse before he'd read it.
But when he kisses Rory and tells her he loves her, that's all truth, and it hurts like hell when it has to end.
