Sick Call

(June 18-25, 2016)

Early Saturday morning: Wendy tiptoed into the attic bedroom and whispered, "Dipper? You awake?"

Dipper groaned.

"Dude, I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do?" She sat on the edge of the bed, jouncing him a little.

He shook his head, which felt as if it might just roll off the pillow and bounce on the floor.

"Listen, you just call for me if you need anything," she said, placing a cool hand on his cheek. "I know how rough this is."

He tried a weak smile and nodded his thanks. She left quietly, and almost the moment she had closed the door, his phone rang—his parents' house phone's ring tone. He groaned and picked it up. "Hello?"

"You sound terrible!"

Dipper's eyes felt hot. He closed them and said, "Just hoarse, is all. Sore throat. Hi, Mom. How was the drive home?"

"It was all right. Well, there was this one time a crazy driver nearly ran us off a bridge. But about you, now, if your throat—"

That was Mom. Her stories lacked detail, like the time she had casually remarked to Dipper, "You know, when Mabel and you were born, the doctor didn't think you'd live out the day." And that was all. He'd had to wait for Stanley finally to give him the whole story of how the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and the hospital staff had to put him on oxygen.

Now Dipper cut in: "Wait, what? Off a bridge? Mom, where did that happen?"

She answered with impatience: "Oh, I don't know—south of Gravity Falls, on the highway, before the freeway. We were still in Oregon. I don't remember the name of the bridge or the river, but we started across this deep, I don't know, gorge, and then this maniac driver—what, Alex? Just a minute, Dipper. What? I'm on the phone! All right, I'll tell him! Your father says the driver was in a Mustang GT. Anyway it was red, and it came roaring up behind us and passed us on the bridge at maybe a hundred miles an hour! I thought he was going to bump us over the edge! But we're all right, so don't worry about that. About you, now: Mr. Ramirez called and told me you were sick."

"I have a summer cold, Mom, that's all. Just a bad cold. What happened with the car?"

"Nothing. Your dad swerved just enough for the whatever it was—all right, Alex!—the Mustang to miss us, that's all. I told you, we're fine and Billy's fine. It's you we're worried about. Summer colds can be serious. Have you been checked out for strep?"

"Mom, Melody's had some medical training, and she checked my throat last night and this morning. No white spots or ulcers or anything, just pink. It's not strep, it's a simple sore throat." He didn't add that Melody's medical training took place when she was working as a counselor at a summer camp. It was basic, but he was pretty confident she could spot a strep infection.

Grudgingly, his mother said, "Well, I'm glad somebody at least looked at it. You have to take care of yourself, Dipper. Now, I've told Mr. Ramirez exactly what to do. How much of a fever do you have?"

"Last time they checked, which was about fifty minutes ago, a hundred point two."

"Check it again."

His headache seemed to be getting worse as the conversation went on, but he didn't want to tell her that. "Mom, please—"

"Do it to make me feel better. Please."

Groaning, Dipper retrieved the thermometer from his bedside table. It was the one Soos and Melody had bought back when Little Soos came home from the hospital—the electronic type with a sensor that you pressed against your forehead, not one that had to be stuck under the tongue or in less reputable places. He turned it on, pressed the "scan" button, and swiped his forehead until the thermometer beeped. He read it and said into the phone, "A hundred point two, Mom, same as last time."

"Record it once every hour," Mrs. Pines said. "Write it down, I mean. Keep a record. What are you taking?"

"Acetaminophen," Dipper said.

"You have to be very careful with the dosage and the frequency," she warned.

"I know that. They're taking good care of me, Mom. Don't worry."

"If that fever goes above a hundred and one, you go straight to the Emergency Room, do you understand?"

"Yes, Mom." No use worrying her by telling her that Gravity Falls didn't have an emergency room, not as such. There was the municipal clinic, though, a kind of mini-hospital, and either the doctor or a nurse-practitioner was on duty twenty-four hours a day. And the clinic was no more than five minutes from the Shack.

"Any aches? Pains? Sore throat?"

Well, all of them, actually, but Dipper said, "Nothing bad, Mom. Really, it's just a cold."

"Nausea? Are you vomiting? Do you have diarrhea?"

"No, no, and no," Dipper said.

"If that fever hangs on for more than two days—"

"Someone will take me to see the doctor on Monday if I'm not better," Dipper said. "Please don't worry."

"You sound terrible. All hoarse."

"I just have to get over it."

"Plenty of liquids!"

"Yes, Mom."

And it went on like that for about five minutes before Wanda Pines reluctantly hung up, but not before asking, "Should your father and I come up there?" and getting a firm "No, really, I'll be fine."

Dipper sighed and tried to close his eyes. He wanted to sleep, that's all.

But . . . Mabel came in, carrying a tray. And wearing an old-fashioned nurse's cap she'd gotten from Lord knew where. "Breakfast is served, oh suffering Brobro!" she announced. "Plain oatmeal, a slice of unbuttered toast, a half-glass of OJ for the vitamin C. Sit up and eat!"

"I don't like any of that," Dipper complained. "Except the OJ." But it was easier to sit up than to quarrel with Mabel, so he did, leaning the pillow against the wall at the head of his bed and sitting against it. The oatmeal was bland. The toast was bland. The orange juice was quite good, but his sister had brought him only four ounces of it. "I'm supposed to have lots of liquids," Dipper told Mabel. "Mom said."

"I'll bring you a big glass of water after you eat every bite of this," Mabel told him.

He drank the OJ and finished the one piece of toast, but three-quarters of the oatmeal was all he could manage. Mabel took the tray and then returned with a glass of water with ice and a bendy straw, plus Dipper's toothbrush and toothpaste. "How'm I supposed to brush my teeth in bed?" he asked. "I can go to the bathroom for that!"

"You're too ill," Mabel said.

Dipper frowned at her. "Well, I have to pee anyway, so gimme."

He took the toothbrush to the bathroom, did what he had to do (and brushed his teeth as well) and then came back to bed. "You ought to wear your slippers," Mabel said.

"Too much trouble."

"Science proves that a hundred and ten per cent of all the germs in the human body come in through the feet!"

"Where did you learn that?" he asked, getting back into bed and pulling up the blanket. "It makes, like, no sense!"

"That's just 'cause I made it up," she said. "What time is it? Since you're sidelined, I gotta go help in the gift shop. You want me to floof your pillow?"

"No, thanks."

"C'mon. Let me floof."

"It's fine, really!" Dipper said.

"You prefer an unfloofed pillow?"

Dipper put the pillow on his face and said through it, "It's my favorite thing in the whole world."

"Huh," Mabel said. "I thought you had a cold, but I was wrong. You've got the galloping grumpies!"

After she left, he put the unfloofed pillow back behind his head. He turned on the radio to the Gravity Falls station—KGRF—and set the volume so low he could barely hear the Awesome Eighties playlist that the DJs relied on every morning. He kept the radio soft enough for him to fall asleep.

Only to be awakened when Wendy came in and took his temperature again. "What is it?" he grunted.

"Hundred point one." Wendy wrote something down on a sheet of paper.

"Are you keeping score?"

"Your mom's orders, Dip. She called Soos and made him promise to make a record of your temp. At least you're down a tenth of a degree since this morning."

Dipper sighed. "What time is it?"

"Eleven."

"Hey," he said, "it's your break! Go do your break stuff."

"Nah, I wanted to see you," she said, smiling. "I'd kiss you, but you may be contagious."

"I probably am," Dipper said. "Grunkle Ford thinks I picked up some kind of virus Wednesday night, maybe an extradimensional one." He coughed, covering his mouth with a tissue. "Wendy? I'm sorry we can't go on our camping trip."

They'd planned for a hike on Sunday and then an overnight stay up near Ghost Falls, but that was before Dipper woke up on Friday morning with aches in his joints and a foul taste in his mouth. He'd soldiered through a madhouse day at the cash register before confessing at dinner that he thought he was a little sick. That was when Melody took his temperature and discovered the low fever (a hundred point three at that time), shone a light into his open mouth as he ahhed, and gave him two acetaminophen tablets before sending him to bed. She'd called his Grunkles, and both Stan and Ford had briefly visited before letting him get some sleep.

Then Saturday morning he'd awakened to a very sore throat and a headache, and the rest was history.

"No biggie," Wendy said. "Not your fault you got sick, and we got time left in the summer. Hey, you want anything?"

"More orange juice would be great."

"Back in a sec!"

She returned with the juice, a full glass of it, and Dipper regretted he'd asked for it, because with her came Ford. So much for a chance to chat privately with his girlfriend. Ford pulled up a chair and said, "Describe your symptoms this morning."

"It's a summer cold," Dipper protested.

No use. Ford was taking his pulse, and Wendy gave him a rueful smile and a shrug before she set the glass of juice down on his table and waved good-bye as she left to go downstairs to her job.

"Grunkle Ford, I'm OK, really," Dipper said.

"Now, now, I have a medical degree, you know. Though it's true I never actually practiced. Anyway, I brought some portable scanners up with me. I need to examine you. Alien viruses are nothing to take lightly."

An intense scrutiny of his throat, complete with a tongue depressor ("My dad used to call this an ahh stick," Ford remarked) followed. And then electronic scans, poking, prodding, all led Ford to the inevitable conclusion: "I believe you're right. It's an ordinary earthly summer cold, nothing more, nothing less."

After a few minutes, Ford left, and Dipper drifted to sleep again.

Stan woke him up not ten minutes later. "Hiya, kid," he said, dragging the chair over to the bedside and sitting down. "Your Mom called just now and ordered me to keep tabs on you. You gonna survive or what?"

"I'll be OK," Dipper said. "Right now, all I want to do is rest."

"Gotcha, kid. Hey, don'tcha hate it when you're sick an' nobody will leave you alone? You get the sniffles, and it's 'Go to bed. Have some chicken soup. Drink two ounces of brandy.' Meh, who needs it, y'know? Except maybe the brandy. If it's a good brand. Some of the swill they sell in the Happy Bottle, you could use to clean clogged plumbing with! 'Cept it probably eats the heck outa metal pipes. Huh, business opportunity there, maybe. Liquor and wine store for Gravity Falls, an upscale one. Nah, who'm I kidding? Sheila would never go for it. She don't object to a drink now and then, but you know, she associates liquor sales with the mob or some deal. I gotta be respectable, it's a wonder she lets me go gambling, except she likes the excitement and knows I beat the house odds about eighty per cent of the time. Hah! In a week or so, me and Ford are gonna go back to Vegas—"

Dipper finally fell asleep again listening to Stan go on and on. Some time later, Stan realized he was talking to himself and, after putting his big palm on Dipper's forehead and finding it warm but not worrisome, he left Dipper sleeping peacefully.

And that lasted for most of an hour, until Melody came and took his temperature again (back to a hundred point two, time for some acetaminophen). Then around one PM, lunch—chicken soup (really just broth, no noodles or anything), a dry sandwich made with a couple of thin slices of chicken breast, no mayo or mustard, and bread with the crusts trimmed off, with yet more orange juice.

So passed the whole day. The best part came at the end—Wendy didn't have to go home because her dad and brothers always went bowling on Fridays and Saturdays, so she came up and sat with him for a couple of hours, reading his new book, It Lurked in the Lake, chuckling now and then. "Fourteen cameras, dude?" she asked "Really?"

"It happened like that," Dipper said. "And in the end—we were still down to just one."

When the book's equivalent of Old Man McGucket appeared and did his jig of extreme danger, Wendy laughed out loud, but she also said, "Hey, he and Ford are out at the Cipher statue right now. Doc McGucket is welding together this sort of dome of curved metal struts to put around the statue so's it can be grounded or some deal. Keep people from going up to it and shaking hands, I guess."

"I thought you chopped off the hand."

"Yeah, I did, but it's growing back."

Dipper sat up in bed. "What!"

"Remember those bugs? They're like bringing in gold and rebuilding the arm with it. Funny thing, too—the part I chopped off? The forearm and hand? Gone, dude!"

"Gone? What do you mean?"

"Vanished. There's like a burn mark on the ground in the shape of the hand, but nothing solid's left. You wouldn't think stone could burn, but something happened to it. Glad cutting it didn't hurt the axe."

"That's weird," Dipper said. "Even for Gravity Falls." He sank back onto the pillow. "Hey, Wendy? What do you think happened to Bill Cipher? I mean, his voice inside me. It's gone away again."

"Dunno," Wendy said.

"I kind of worry that we might accidentally have left him in the Mindscape," Dipper told her. "I mean the crazy, broken version we found ourselves in right after everything blew up. It's a horrible place. I'd feel guilty if we ditched him there."

Wendy set the book aside, marking her place with a lime-green Post-It note. "I think he'd find some way out, Dip, and back to the real world. Or at least back into the general Mindscape that everybody dips into when they're sleeping. Remember, he's kinda anchored inside you."

"I know," Dipper said. "And I still don't trust that little bit of him, but—he did try to help us. More than once."

"He'll probably turn up again," Wendy said. "Right when you need him." She grinned. "Or right when you don't."

"I guess," Dipper said.

She took his temperature again. "Leveling off," she advised him as she wrote it down. "One hundred even. How are you feeling?"

"Tired," Dipper said. "And my throat's still a little sore. I hope you don't catch this."

"I usually bounce back pretty quick from a cold," she said. "Don't lay awake and worry about it."

Mabel came in with his dinner, starting with hot tea with honey, plus a smoothie. "It's made with no dairy!" she told him. "'Cause dairy produces phlegm!"

That was one of their mom's firm beliefs. Milk equaled mucus. But the smoothie had plenty of fruit in it—oranges, strawberries, and raspberries—along with carrot juice. He sipped the icy drink and ate a little of what Melody had sent up, more chicken soup, a small serving of broiled salmon with rice, some raw veggies with ranch dressing as a dip, and a petite wedge of apple pie. Dipper did his best with it and ate all the pie and more than half of the rest. Mabel fussed a little: "C'mon, Broseph! Feed that cold! Starve that fever!"

"That doesn't even make sense," Dipper said. But to oblige her, he finished the last of the soup.

And so it went. Dipper felt about the same on Sunday, a little better on Monday, and—wouldn't you know it, as Stan always said—about back to normal on Tuesday, just in time for another crazy tourist rush. Dipper had missed a perfectly good weekend with Wendy, though she promised they'd make up for it later. "After the Fourth of July, though, 'cause I'm crazy busy in the Shack with all the crowds this time of year, and next weekend my dad has plans."

He supposed he could wait. On Tuesday afternoon, as he and Wendy were taking a quick lunch break, Ford and McGucket came into the Shack and sat down at the dining-room table to show them photos of the now-protected Cipher effigy. A dome about ten feet in diameter and arched high enough to just avoid the top of the tall stone stovepipe hat now surrounded the stature. Chain-link filled in the arches of the ribs, so the Cipher shape was hard to make out from the pictures. McGucket had welded four signs to the sides of the dome: DANGER: RADIATION HAZARD.

"Is there radiation?" Dipper asked.

"Well," McGucket said with a wink, "Sorta. All th' sign really means is that iffen you takes off your clothes an' prance around in the altogether, you're apt to git yourself a bad case of sunburn. Ain't our fault if people misinterpretifies it."

"We think it will cause people to keep their distance," Ford explained.

Maybe, Dipper thought. He asked, "Did you put in screen to keep those, you know, bugs out?"

"No practical way of excluding them," Ford said. "Wendy's identified the species, and they can burrow. If they couldn't get through the mesh, they'd just dig their way underground. We couldn't completely surround the effigy. But I'm pretty confident we've contained it."

"How confident?" Dipper asked.

"Oh, an easy sixty per cent," Ford said.

Which admittedly left room for doubt.

Later that afternoon, Mabel complained, "I've got a little headache. And my throat feels sort of scratchy."

Uh-oh.

Well, when something like Dipper's malady struck, it had to run its course. Melody took the Ramirez kids over to Portland to stay with her family for a little while so they wouldn't come down with the virus. Soos seemed impervious to the bug, but the heavy crowds ran him frantic. The demand and the absence of his sister left Dipper to do his best to man the register and at the same time try to tend to Mabel. It was only fair—she had taken care of him.

But one thing Dipper learned very quickly: While all he'd wanted to do was rest and sleep, Mabel had lots and lots of demands, from pillow floofing to special meals (a baked potato with strawberry yogurt? Roast chicken with egg foo yung?).

Dipper had one bit of luck with her: Teek helped.

And that gave him hope, because Mabel seemed very appreciative of her boyfriend's stepping in to cook her special meals and wait on her whenever he wasn't working.

By Friday morning, Mabel was getting better, but then Wendy got sick—fortunately, she had a milder case than either of the twins, not even a whole degree of fever, but she had to leave only an hour after getting to the Shack on Friday and had to stay out on Saturday. The first day her dad, who seemed more of a mother hen than even Wanda Pines, took her in to the clinic to see Dr. La Fievre, who inside of three minutes diagnosed "Summer cold" and said it was going around.

Wendy spent the rest of that day and all of the next in bed, and after work on Saturday, Dipper drove over to make dinner for her, since Manly Dan's concern didn't extend to canceling his bowling tournament. Wendy was chipper, though, with less than half a degree of fever, and her appetite was good enough for her to eat the steak and baked potato that Dipper prepared.

Later, without cuddling, they watched a crappy movie together, she in bed, Dipper sitting beside her in a chair. Wendy dozed off halfway through it, and Dipper covered her with a blanket, turned off the TV, and waited up in the Corduroy living room until Dan and the boys got home, carrying a bowling trophy, at two in the morning. Dipper reported on Wendy, Dan checked on her, and then he thanked Dipper.

Fighting not to go to sleep at the wheel, though it was only a quarter-hour drive, Dipper got home, finally, at two-thirty on Sunday morning and went to bed and to sleep in his clothes, just like old times, hoping that maybe things might be back to normal by the next day.

Yeah, maybe things would work out. And maybe, he thought before dropping off to sleep, the rest of their summer would go smoothly, after all.

The End