Pages from a Scrapbook
After Dipper and Mabel Pines returned to their home in Piedmont, California, after spending part of their Christmas break in Gravity Falls, they looked forward to June, when—their dad said "sure" and their mom said "we'll see"—they intended to return to the Mystery Shack and their friends for a third summer in Gravity Falls.
Still, life goes on. They were in high school now, and Mabel, especially, was upset when their schedules didn't allow them to have the same classes at the same time. They did have home room together, along with English and Algebra 1, but they didn't share the same lunch period or their other classes. They did manage to share a seat in the bus on the way to school, but after school Dipper had track practice. Sometimes he caught a ride home with an older student athlete, and sometimes their mom drove over to pick him up.
Homework was heavier and harder than it had been in middle school, but they coped and helped each other out. After dinner on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Dipper walked down the street to the Morgensens' house, where he took guitar lessons for forty-five minutes. Mabel usually spent that time knitting or working on an art project.
Or—scrapbooking. She kept up the habit, as Dipper kept up his journal-writing habit. Here are a few things that she devoted special pages to in the winter and spring of 2014 as they waited, hoped, and determined to go back to Gravity Falls.
1: Squirmy Pink Piglets
Saturday, January 11, 2014:
Saturday morning at eleven, and Dipper was in his room playing "Shoot the Mooks" on his GameGuy when he heard the siren-like howl of his sister from next door: "Ohmygosh, ohmygosh, ohmygosh, DIPPER!"
So he rolled out of bed and padded to his sister's bedroom in his sock feet. The door stood ajar. "What's wrong, Mabel!"
"Nothing! Come and see! Come and see!" His twin was sitting cross-legged on her bed, still in her sleep shirt and shorty pajamas—she was lazy on weekends—and her laptop rested on her legs. "Soos! Dipper just came in! Say hi to him!"
"Hey, dawg!" came Soos's voice from the tinny speakers of the laptop. "Can't see you, dude."
Dipper hopped onto the bed beside Mabel. "Here I am. What's up?" Then he realized that the background looked strange, like a barn, not like the Shack. "Where are you?"
"I'm in my second cousin's, like, barn? And I just showed Mabel—wait a minute—these little guys." The picture on the monitor spun, and for a moment Dipper didn't know what he was looking at—some weird mutant semi-human monster with six or eight heads, he thought—but then the image clarified. Piglets, squirming and wriggling and rooting in the straw.
"They're over a month old now," Soos's voice said. "They're finally all weaned an' junk. These are Waddles's kids, and Mabel gets to pick one."
"They're all so great!" Mabel said, clenching her fists and staring with wide, wide eyes. "How can I choose just one?"
"Here, Hambone. I'll set up my laptop on this crate. Just a minute. There. Now I'll show them off to you one by one. Hey, Juan, you hand 'em to me and I'll hold 'em up, is that cool? It is? Give me the first one."
On the screen, Soos's big hands appeared holding a squirming little piglet. "Dude, is this a guy or a girl? Huh? Juan says this one's a little girl. She's kinda marked like her mom. See on her back, she has these darkish spots? Juan says they'll turn black over time. OK, next one."
Each one caused Mabel to squee. Dipper thought they were all pretty much alike—but then he didn't have Mabel's sharp eye for porkly charm.
The fourth piglet, another female, almost caused Mabel to faint with delight. She was smaller than the others, but looked a lot like Waddles, though unlike him, she had not just one, but two dark pink spots on her face, one around each eye. As Soos held her up, he said, "Juan says this little girl one is kinda the runt of the litter. Oops! She's peein' on me, man!"
"That's the one!" Mabel yelled as, on screen, Soos's hands dripped beneath the piglet. "Yes! Yes! Yes!"
Dipper said, "Sorry about the accident."
Holding up the piglet as the last drops fell, Soos chuckled. "Dude, with my kid I've had worse. OK, Mabel, this is the one. What are you gonna name her, dude?"
"Widdles!" Mabel yelled.
"What?" their mother called from downstairs. "What did you say, Mabel?"
"Widdles!" Mabel yelled louder. "Because she widdles!"
"Whatever, dear," her mom called.
Soos said, "Okay, cool, now, I understand you guys get off a day from school a week from Monday, for like, Martin Luther King day? So Stan says he'll pay for the tickets if you two want to come in for a quick visit. You can, like, fly up after school on Friday and then fly back home on Monday afternoon, and you can come and get to know your pig. Sounds funny when I say it."
"We'll be there!"
Dipper said, "Uh, Mabel, we'd better ask—"
"We! Will! Be! There!"
Soos chuckled. "Give me a call when it's, like, all worked out. They're all weaned now, and so Juan's lettin' me take this little guy—uh, gal, I guess—home in a pet carrier. We got a nice heated little pen for her and Waddles out back now, and if it gets really cold, she can come inside. Abuelita won't be back from Mexico until April, so nobody's gonna mind."
"Put 'em all on screen again!" Mabel said. She did a screen capture of all the piglets, but with Widdles prominent on top of the pile. "I'm gonna print this out!" she said, jumping off the bed and running out of the room, clutching her laptop. Dipper heard her yell, "Scrapbookportunity!" as she raced down the stairs.
And then Mom's voice: "Mabel! It's time to get dressed! Remember your schedule!"
Dipper grinned. If Stan was working on it, somehow or other they'd get at least a brief visit to Gravity Falls. Mabel would be over the moon to meet Widdles. And, well, Dipper had his own reasons.
He went back to his own room, put away his GameGuy, and found his acoustic guitar. He tuned it—that had been tricky to learn, but he'd mastered it, which was good because it got out of tune faster than a Bulgarian car engine—and sat on his bed, strumming.
Seven chords he could nail now: C, D, E, F, G7, D7, and A minor. He was working on some tougher ones, too. But with these he was trying to compose his first song. He strummed a few and hummed a melody as he did.
Fitting the words in. That was the hard part.
Quite softly, wishing he had a better voice, he began to sing: "Now you're my hero, you're everything that's cool . . .."
Not quite right, but he was getting there.
He went through the bass line three times, liking it a little more each time he played it, tweaking it now and again.
He heard Mabel running back up the stairs—she had two speeds, off and full—and he set the guitar aside. As he expected, she came tearing into his room a few moments later, scrapbook in hand. "Ta-da!"
"Looks nice, Mabel," Dipper said.
A five-by-seven blowup of the piglet pile dominated the page. Under it she had written, in colorful markers:
THE STORY OF WIDDLES: A PIG'S ADVENTURES BEGIN!
"Needs two more exclamation points," Dipper said.
"Oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh, Mom and Dad have to let us go!"
Dipper shrugged. "Well—they haven't planned anything for that weekend, so—"
Mabel jumped onto his bed and flopped back, arms extended. "I'll die if they say no! I'll just wither up into a little ball and die! Go tell Mom I'll die if I can't go meet Widdles!"
The phone rang.
Dipper waited a minute and softly picked up his phone. He heard Stan's voice, though Stan was speaking with the care and enunciation he usually used when on the phone with Mom and Dad, who still thought he was Stanford: "Yes, the new manager of the Mystery Shack has a wonderful surprise for Mabel, and everyone here would love to see the kids again. I thought I might fly down and accompany them back up here, because I have a kind of surprise for the whole family—"
Quietly hanging up, Dipper said, "You're gonna survive, Sis. Grunkle Stan's on the case."
"Oh, my gosh, what'm I gonna pack? What's the weather like in Gravity Falls? Can pigs fly on airplanes? I wanna bring her back! Can we have her declared a helper pig? You can wear Wendy's hat! I won't tell her that the dumb high-school vice-principal told you not to wear it in school! But I will tell her you wear it all the time around here! Where is it? There it is! You ought to brush it. Do you think we need to send it to the cleaner's? Oh, your guitar! Are you—"
"Not taking the guitar," Dipper said. "Not this time. I want to be able to play it better before letting Wen—letting everyone listen to me."
"Wendy!" Mabel said, bouncing up to her knees. She began to poke Dipper. "Boop! Boop! Boop! You're gonna serenade her! What are you gonna play? You're pretty good at 'Folsom Prison Blues!'"
"Not her kind of song," Dipper said. "No, don't say anything to anybody about the guitar, OK? I want to get better. Let it be a surprise next summer."
"Awww." With a slight malicious twinkle, she said, "I bet you got time to learn 'Straight Blanchin'!"
Dipper smacked her with a pillow.
Ten minutes later, their mom had to come upstairs to break up the pillow fight. "Sometimes you two don't even act like you're in high school!" she scolded. "Mabel, it's nearly noon, so please get dressed!"
"Uh—who was on the phone, Mom?" Dipper asked, picking up the pillow Mabel had wielded as a weapon and tossing it back on the bed.
"That was your great-uncle Stanford," she said. "I suppose you'll both just pester me about what he wanted, if I don't tell you, and it's not certain until your dad and I talk it over, but he's invited you up next weekend. Would you like to go if everything works out?"
"Sure!" Mabel said, turning red in the face from the effort of containing her enthusiasm.
"Yeah, that'd be cool," Dipper said with the kind of shrug a fourteen-year-old boy gives to show that what his mom had just said was, like, no big deal, whatever, man, but I guess it'd sorta be OK with me, YAHOO!
"All right, then. But you have to shape up! Dipper, tidy up your room, please. And Mabel, for the last time—get some proper clothes on!"
They agreed. As soon as their mom went back downstairs, Mabel held up her palm for a high five, and Dipper slapped it. "Yipe!" she said, shaking her hand as if it smarted from the impact.
"You high-five harder than I just did," he said.
"Yeah, but—wait, let me see your hand. You, too!"
"Yeah," he said. "I thought at first it was the guitar playing causing it, but—well. We are gonna be fifteen next August."
They put their hands together, palm to palm. Their ring fingers were definitely wider than they had been. Over the next few months they would grow to be like two fingers, joined side by side, the second one shorter. And some time that summer, maybe earlier, maybe later, the pinky would completely divide and they'd have ten fingers, like adults, not the normal eight that kids had.
"I guess we're really, truly growing up," Mabel whispered, looking a little fearful, a little stricken.
Dipper hugged her. "Yeah, but that's not bad. Not as long as you're young enough so you can get excited by a new baby pig." He let her go. "Now get changed so Mom won't say we can't go up to the Falls, OK?"
"OK." She headed out the door, and behind her Dipper said quietly and sincerely, "Mabel? One more thing that you're not too old for."
She turned. "What's that?"
"Last tag!" And he smacked her over the head with his pillow.
—More scrapbook pages to come . . ..