I got no use for moonlight
Midnight mini golf would become a tradition. Six or seven of the teenagers would sneak in one night every summer to watch Mabel and Pacifica face off. The only thing at stake was gloating rights in the group chat for the rest of the year. The first year they did it (for fun, that is), Candy, Grenda, Dipper, and Wendy were only watching to cheer Mabel on. They didn't antagonize Paz or anything - if they did, it was in a playful manner - they just knew Mabel better. It was fine. Better than the way things had been before, at least.
It happened at one hole that Pacifica swung her first hole-in-one since the game began, and a voice rang out above everyone else's murmurs and side conversations, demanding the audience's attention.
"YEEEAAAH, PACIFICA! WOOOOOOO!" A ponytailed brunette wearing, like, six different colored scrunchies yelled from the sidelines, clapping and grinning. "Show 'em who's boss!"
Pacifica didn't bother hoping no one noticed her blushing, but she did try to brush it off with a casual response.
"Um, you do realize you're the one I'm showing up?"
"And them," she clarified, pointing to the portholes along the pirate ship where the ball had zoomed past the first few tiny creatures who were supposed to have intercepted it.
Or sappy poetry
Lazy Susan had started hosting karaoke nights some weekends at the diner, and it came as a surprise to absolutely no one that Mabel took to inviting her brother and all their friends up onstage to sing with her. For the most part, they were able to get into it. There was just one girl who always passed on singing herself, and Mabel was, amazingly, able to hold out on dragging her up there by the arm until the twins' 15th birthday dinner. She caved and start singing some top 40 stuff in her head voice at first, but after a few songs of pretending to be embarrassed by Mabel's exceptionally loud vocal style and dramatic stage presence, she forgot about trying to sound good and just started screaming the words and striking obnoxious poses on the more dramatic lines. Once she'd run out of breath, she waited for We Built This Township on Rock and Roll to fade out and set the mic down on the stool.
"Okay, I'm never doing that again," she bluffed on her way back to her seat.
Mabel shrugged, "Fair enough," and continued with her marathon.
Dipper was giving Paz a look when she sat back down in their booth.
"What?" she asked defensively.
"You, like, actually enjoyed that." It was a minor thing, sure, and she shrugged it off like he'd expected, but he'd learned to recognize what it looked like when she enjoyed something versus when she forbade herself from actually having any fun for the purpose of saving face. Force of habit, he guessed.
Some nights that summer, Mabel had sung something like Uptown Girl or Valerie and jokingly pointed to Pacifica on lyrics like "Stop makin' a fool outta me" and "When she's walkin', she's lookin' so fine." Just because she'd been close by. Friends did that, didn't they? She was just really into those songs, or maybe they'd just done them on Glee or something. She had to quit reading so much into everything.
Love at first sight's for suckers
Wasn't that her system? Meet a boy in her age range, fall in love with him for like an hour, move on to the next one. According to Dipper, it hadn't been happening as much since they'd gotten to high school. She'd said there were some cute boys in her classes, and a few girls she didn't mind looking at, but she didn't put as much energy into pursuing them anymore. He and Pacifica were in the gift shop, waiting for Mabel to come downstairs so they could go to movie night at Candy's house, and he'd mentioned this shift in her behavior with little to no prompting.
"Ready!" she called out as she swung the door open from the living room.
How long had she been wearing makeup? Aside from the occasional rhinestone bomb to the face? Now she was showing up with shimmery green eyeshadow, winged eyeliner, and bright blue lipstick. It wasn't something to be ignored, but before she could say anything, Soos walked in, twirling his key ring around on his finger.
"You doods ready to go?" he asked.
"Yup," Dipper replied, jumping down from the checkout counter. The guys were the first out the door, but Pacifica hung back for a second.
"You don't... need that, you know."
"Hm?" Mabel looked like she legitimately didn't understand the comment.
"The makeup."
"I know," she giggled. "It's just fun." Her face fell a little bit. "I mean, why do you wear it?"
She couldn't answer. She hadn't even thought of the irony of that statement coming from someone wearing full coverage foundation, mauve eyeshadow, and false lashes. Was it not a chore for some people? With Dipper sitting shotgun on the drive, the front of Soos' truck was filled with enough conversation that you'd barely notice the silence in the backseat.
When they arrived at the Chius', they jumped out, thanked him for the ride again, and Dipper strode ahead of them again to get to the front door.
"I like the color," Pacifica spoke for the first time in roughly ten minutes, pointing to Mabel's face. Mabel gave her another curious look. "Your lipstick."
"Thanks!" she beamed. "It was only, like, five bucks, and it stays on forever, look." She was right. It didn't leave any mark on Pacifica's hand, but from how flushed her face was when they entered the house, you'd have thought everyone else there could see one.
At least it used to be.
Yeah, alright, she had a thing for Mabel. All her friends had known for a few years now, and she'd finally stopped denying it to them some months back. So what? It wasn't like she could do anything about it. Every hand-grab to lead Paz somewhere, every reach of her arm across her shoulder when the group was out somewhere, every time she dragged her up from her seat to go dance, the way she'd started wearing that blue lipstick more often after that night, anything that could possibly be seen as reciprocation from Mabel was always written off as just her being friendly. By the summer before the twins turned seventeen, all the kids had gotten sick of her inaction.
Look, girls are nice, once or twice
"But does she even like girls?" Mabel was heard muttering from her bed in the attic. Pacifica never really talked about that stuff, at least not around her, aside from mentioning once or twice that an actress on TV was pretty hot, which could've just been an objective statement. "Like, she either can't tell I'm flirting with her or she just doesn't wanna hurt my feelings and just...ugh!" Dipper entered the room to see her lying face down, Waddles settling in next to her, oblivious.
"You obsessing over Pacifica again?" her brother guessed. She'd said something similar to what she'd just been saying to herself back when she'd first admitted to Dipper that she liked her.
"Little bit."
"Wanna talk about it?"
"Not right now."
Waddles nudged her hand with his head.
"Okay," he rolled his eyes and went back downstairs, where Candy, Wendy, and Grenda were watching some infomercial that was getting Grenda surprisingly riled up.
Till I find someone new
"But the pump gives you soap! I'm telling you, Candy, it's a paradox!"
"She's not coming down, is she," Wendy deduced from Dipper's frustrated expression.
"Having another Pacifica crisis."
The girls all groaned in unison.
"Isn't she all about being honest with your feelings and junk? Why hasn't she said anything to her?" Wendy was starting to become just as exasperated as the younger kids had been for the last couple of summers. She and Dipper were only in Gravity Falls during school breaks, though. Candy and Grenda had to deal with Pacifica's totally-not-pining all year round.
"I guess it's different now," Dipper shrugged. "I mean yeah, she's had like 8 billion crushes before, but this is, like, serious. It's not middle school anymore."
"Let's just tell her already!" said Grenda. "I'm tired of the drama; it's tearing us apart!" She grabbed Candy by the shoulder and shook her.
"Iiiit definitely isn't," Dipper furrowed his brow. "But...I dunno, maybe you're right."
She'd suggested this before, but it had always been met with disapproval and insistence that the two of them had to work this out for themselves. Now, the rest of them were uncertain as to whether or not that was the way it would happen.
They were sure to receive a stern talking-to for having kept quiet for this long, but it was probably time to intervene.
ur gonna want to go out to ur front yard in a few mins
Leave it to Dipshit (as Pacifica's phone identified him) to make his texts as vague as humanly possible. But it was confusing enough that she couldn't really ignore it, so she followed his instruction and went to sit out on the front porch of her parents' McMansion and waited for something to happen. After five minutes of mindlessly tapping past Snapchat stories and scrolling through Pinterest, she'd just about made up her mind to go back inside, but was stopped by a pickup truck pulling into the driveway. The driver turned the car off and jumped out, looking shaken and ecstatic at the same time.
"Hey," she greeted the girl approaching her. "Uh, what's goin' on?"
"Why didn't you say anything?"
"What?" She'd heard that roughly 14 million times over the last four summers, but this time was different. It wasn't coming from a place of annoyance, it was more like if your friend had just gotten a full ride to an ivy league school and neglected to mention it until a week before they were supposed to leave. She just wasn't sure why Mabel would ask.
And then she was.
"Oh, my god," she froze, except to push her hair back from her face. "Oh my god they told you oh my god." She knew she shouldn't have, but she felt nauseous. She'd always told her friends she'd tell Mabel the truth eventually, and the time spent putting it off was catching up to her and throwing her to the ground, knocking the wind out of her. Mabel gently pulled her hand back down from her forehead, and Pacifica smiled, despite herself.
"So, could you, like, not tell I was hitting on you, or…"
Paz rolled her eyes, "Well - I don't know ! Maybe you act that way with all your friends -" She was cut off by a pair of lips pressed against hers.
"Yes, very platonic," Mabel said with mock matter-of-factness after pulling away.
Pacifica looked down at her shoes and laughed, "Anyway…"
"Yeah," Mabel backed up some. "So, me and Dipper and the girls were gonna go bowling if you're up for that."
It was bizarre carrying on a regular conversation after what had just transpired, but Pacifica nodded, "Sure."
In the passenger side of the truck her girlfriend (as she was so loudly announcing to the empty street) had borrowed from Soos, she caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror and saw a purple mark just above her upper lip. Looking over to the driver's seat, she saw the same color on Mabel's lips, although some of it had worn off.
"You just had to wear cream lipstick today."
"You know it," Mabel called out the window, seemingly to nobody.
But I never planned on someone like you.