A/N: Yo. Just to let you know, this is a short story consisting of five chapters, and I haven't taken into account anything that has happened so far in season 3. If you're here because you follow my profile from that one Gravity Falls fic I wrote a year ago, I have more Gravity Falls stuff on the way soon :)

I'm going to tell you a little story about taking chances.

When I was seven years old, my parents moved me downstate to Los Angeles where I transferred to a new school, about halfway through its first semester. Even at seven, I knew I would be an outcast in the collection of smart, well-dressed children that was my class. They made me wear an obnoxiously large sticker on my first day that said Hello! My name is Janna, when it may as well have said Hello! I'm the new misfit. I was the girl that drew skulls instead of flowers, the girl that poked the ants' nest at the side of the playground and watched the chaos unfold, the girl that stole her parents' matches and set fire to her cousin's Barbies. Somebody like that would not be hanging around with the dainty little blonde princess whose mom packed crab cakes in her lunchbox.

Which is why I was just as surprised as my parents when I came home one day clutching onto a glittery slip of paper - an invitation to a real birthday party from the coolest girl in school, Maria Williams. I knew it was one of those invite-everybody-in-class-so-nobody-feels-left-out situations, but my young heart still fluttered as I slowly realized what the jumble of colorful letters were telling me.

Maria was different from the rest of the class. Rather than unabashedly stare me down like the other gawkers among us, she barely even acknowledged my presence. She wasn't concerned with my hobbies, who my mommy and daddy were, whether I had any pets. That's not to say she was purposely ignoring me - on the rare occasion that our eyes did lock, she'd smile or wave. She just seemed content to let me be. I suppose that's what drew me to her in the first place.

Her hair was brown, straight, and silky. Her eyes matched. She wore hoodies and jeans, not dresses or skirts. At recess she played soccer with the boys, not jumprope with the girls. And I'd look up from my spot near the flowerbeds, my ant-prodding twig in hand, and watch her run circles around her male opponents, and I'd wonder if she even knew how fascinating she was. I never thought about why I was so intrigued with her. It was just one of those weird ways that children fixate on other children, wanting to spend all of their time with them for no discernible reason but being too shy to do anything about it.

That might have been why I was so reluctant to get out of my dad's car on the Saturday morning of Maria's party. I kept my seatbelt on, my arms folded, and assumed a stern look so he'd know I wasn't setting foot outside the vehicle until it was safely back in my own driveway. When he opened the door beside me and crouched at my level, I knew then and there that he would not be turning the car around, that whatever nugget of wisdom he had conjured up since hopping out of the driver seat would urge me up the steps of Maria's house and across the threshold of the balloon-adorned doorway.

"Baby, I know this move has been hard on you. And I'm sorry for that. But these guys are going to be your classmates for years, and you can't hide from them forever."

"They're all stupid and lame," I told him. "I'm not going in."

"You don't know that they're all stupid and lame, do you? Why don't you try to make friends with some of them and see if you change your mind?"

"I don't want to make friends."

"Now, we both know that's not true. I know you miss your friends back in Oakland."

I didn't say anything. I kept my arms crossed and my eyes on the seat in front.

Dad sighed. "Listen, Janna, sometimes in life you just have to take chances. I know you think that if you go in there everybody's going to look at you funny, or turn their backs on you, or point and laugh. That, my sweetheart, is your brain thinking up the worst possible situation and convincing you that it's going to happen. And life rarely ever works out that way. Chances are if you go in there you're going to play some party games, you'll get a nice free lunch and some cake for dessert, and you'll get to hang out with Maria, too. You like Maria, right?"

"She's okay."

"And hey, if it really does turn out how you're thinking it will? The worst possible situation? It doesn't matter. Your life will carry on just the same, you'll just know that the people in that house aren't worth your time, and you can move on to worrying about more important people or more important things. You just have to take this chance, baby, this first step. Otherwise, there could be something great waiting for you behind that door and you would never know."

So I walked up the pathway bisecting the front lawn with my dad at my side and the wrapped box of coloring chalk in my arms. Maria answered the door with her mom and smiled at me. She took the box and placed it neatly atop the generous stack of gifts by the door. Then I stepped into her house, said goodbye to the comfort of my father, and everything turned out okay. I was the only kid to pin the tail on the donkey, I ate a huge slice of chocolate cake, and by the end of the day, Maria Williams was my first friend in a town where nobody knew my name.

On a mostly unrelated note, Maria Williams was also my gateway to the world of lesbianism, though I had no way of knowing that at the time.

I was nine years old the next time I went to her house. She invited me over for dinner after school. She showed me her rabbits, Fluffy and Rover, and I gently stroked that bit of fur above their noses and between their ears. I didn't want to pit them in a fight against each other, I just cradled them one by one in my arms and pet them. I was a more subdued version of myself around Maria. Probably because I didn't want to scare her away.

She led me upstairs to her bedroom, which looked like it had once been bombed with purple paint. In one corner of the room, a ceiling-high shelf housed more books than I'd ever seen in one place - though I'd never stepped in a library before, so that may have been why. She sank into her purple bedsheets and I apprehensively sat cross-legged opposite her. While she read to me what she called her favorite passage from a book called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, my fingers played nervously with the sheets in my lap, because all I could think of was that I wanted to kiss her. Her eyes were absorbed in the book in her hands, her lips looked soft and plushy, and I wanted to lean forward and kiss her.

I never did, of course. I remember feeling gross about myself for even thinking of it. It was slightly harder to fall asleep for months because I kept thinking something was wrong with me, but then a new kid showed up at school and kept talking about his two dads, and I didn't feel so bad after that.

I was never really close friends with Maria despite how much I sometimes longed for it, so after that day at her house I never got an opportunity to ask her if she ever thought the same things about me. If she ever thought about holding my hand or kissing my cheek. I got the feeling she didn't. If she did, I would catch her gazing at me from across the classroom like she always caught me. She would look away shyly and a smile would creep onto my face, because we were young and we liked each other and one day we would be together.

On my last day of elementary school, I looked up just before opening the door to my mom's car, and she was walking towards me along the road that all the parents would park on at pick-up. She had been walking home by herself for almost a year now. As she passed, her eyes met mine, she smiled, and she tucked her hair behind her ear. I wanted to say something, like, "I'll see you soon," or, "stay in touch," but the words didn't come out and I ended up staring after her as she disappeared down the lane with my mouth hanging open. I didn't know that it was the last time I would ever see her.

All summer long I contemplated whether things could have been different. I tossed and turned in bed in the middle of the day and thought about her long brown hair and her pretty freckles. After a while the daydreaming fizzled out, because I realized my feelings would most likely have never amounted to anything. We were very young. We were both very quiet. Even if both of us were madly in love with one another I didn't think either of us would have had the guts to do anything about it.

And then I got to thinking that I shouldn't be so quiet, and that I shouldn't go about my life like I'm treading on egg shells. I recalled my old man's advice, and decided that going into middle school I wouldn't be so reserved anymore. I pictured Maria's house and how I took the chance of entering it and I wondered how many doors I'd walked past since then that I hadn't opened, out of irrational fears and insecurities. I decided that when the next person came along and made my heart beat irregularly I'd be a hell of a lot more open about it, because what was the worst that could happen? They could tell me to hit the road because I was ugly and my very existence disgusted them, but my life would go on, and I'd know that that person wasn't worth my time, just like my dad told me.

Enter Jackie Lynn Thomas.

Or, wait, I should mention briefly the three years between leaving elementary school and entering high school; a bunch of other girls in various shapes and sizes waltzed in and out of my obsession, and I learned a decently effective way of relieving myself of the urge to touch them. There were some boys, too, actually, but they were few and far between, and none of them ever sparked the same intensity inside of me that ladies could. I even kissed one of them, a kid called Jake. But, well, somewhere between his tongue swirling haplessly around my mouth and his - at times - abhorrent BO, I figured I'd forget about guys for the time being.

Okay, now enter Jackie Lynn Thomas.

The moment we met is a vidid memory in the back of my mind, where it will remain for eternity, as dramatic as that sounds.

She was ahead of me in the lunch line. A nameless, faceless girl among many in my first few weeks at Echo Creek High. I heard her voice ask the lunch lady for a bag of salted chips.

"Out of chips," came the monotonous response.

"Oh. Sorry, could you check out the back? The lady that served us the other day said the same thing but there were some out back."

Lunch lady sighed.

This exchange bored me, until the girl muttered in my direction, "she must not get paid much."

"Didn't you hear?" I said, my eyes still finding more interest in the deep-fryer. "That's Mrs. Hazel. Her husband died choking on a bag of potato chips."

I finally turned and regarded her shocked expression. If anybody else's face had been in the place of hers, I'd have kept the lie alive, just for my own amusement. But, holy shit, her eyes were diamonds and her hair was crystal and she looked like the living embodiment of a goddess. And I'm not even exaggerating. It was unfair how attractive she was, unfair to her fellow womankind. It was like God - or any other higher power there may or may not be - made her first, and then gave up with everybody he made after.

"I'm kidding."

Her laugh was music to my ears, but the dreary woman reappeared and announced, "no chips," and I could feel crystal-hair girl slipping out of my fingers.

I had to say something to keep me on her radar. Anything. "I have some chips in my bag." Yeah, okay, it was a little desperate, but it caught her attention. "You could have some, if you like."

Essentially, I had transformed into a new person within minutes. I was usually selfish with my food, even territorial, glaring at people passing by my table as if they were about to make a grab for it. But there I was that afternoon, sat across from a beautiful girl with a bag of chips split open between us. Being freshmen, we asked each other about our experiences in high school thus far. I didn't have a lot to say, because I'd been choosing to breeze through it unnoticed like every other phase of my life. I was pretty content just listening to her talk, though.

When the bell rang, she told me her name, I told her mine. "J-squad," she said, offering a fist bump. "I like it."

J-squad. Jackie and Janna. Janna and Jackie. It rolled off the tongue, didn't it? I was getting ahead of myself. Realistically, I knew she was about eight rungs higher up the social ladder than I was, and without the permanent possession of potato chips I'd be lucky to even smile at her again.

That's why I almost spat out my water when she appeared opposite me the very next day.

"Hey Janna," she said, pulling out a chair before hovering beside it. "Mind if I sit here?"

I swallowed the water too fast and it hurt my throat. Mind if she sits there? What kind of a question was that? "Sure," I choked out.

Jackie grinned and waved a bag of salted chips in the air, opened it, poured half of them out onto my tray.

The rest was history.

We saw each other nearly every day, and she'd always stop to talk and brighten up a fe minutes of my time in the mind-numbing penitentiary that was our high school. She wasn't always around at lunch, and I found out en route to the bathroom one day that this was because she also hung around with a group of skater kids out on the front steps. I remember pressing my face up to the glass like a child at a zoo as I watched her grind the concrete railing, and while I was somewhat nervous of all the attention she was getting from the guys, that was overshadowed by how much more alluring I found her on a board. She made everything look so easy.

I found out she lived really close to my house. Then I found out that she skateboarded to and from school, and then, through a process of elimination that would make any stalker proud, I found out what time she rocked up to school every day. I knew it was lame, but all I had to do to see her every morning was leave home a few minutes later, so I did. I was expecting to develop some kind of morning ritual where I'd wave at her as she passed and she'd wave back. Maybe I'd eventually spice it up a little, get a bit more flirtatious, maybe I'd wink at her or slap her ass.

I got a whole lot more than what I bargained for, in a good way. Rather than sail past me with her glorious butt on display, Jackie stopped next to me and offered me a ride, which entailed me squeezing onto the board behind her and gripping onto her shoulders.

I was about ninety-eight percent sure I was going to die, at first. Jackie really didn't hold back hurtling around corners, whether we were teetering on the edge of a busy road or not. The next morning, she brought me a helmet to wear, and that made me feel the tiniest bit safer for all of two minutes. But I got used to it, and when I perfected the art of waiting around at my locker pretending to look busy and not pathetic, she started giving me rides home as well.

For the first time in my life, I was able to talk to somebody I had a crush on without my words spewing out like they'd been translated to Chinese and back again. I attributed this to Jackie being extremely laid-back about anything and everything, so much so that she spread her nonchalance to anyone around her. We'd talk about our common interests - mostly video games and Netflix series, or which teachers we disliked most, or where we were going to meet up later that day to undress each other.

Alright, I made that last one up. We never talked about that. But a girl could dream, right? Regardless, I looked forward to leaving my house in the morning, I looked forward to leaving school in the afternoon, and I looked forward to falling a little more in love with her every day.

"I'm gonna teach you how to ride," she told me one afternoon.

"What?"

"I'm gonna teach you how to ride." She picked up her board, took two strides across my front lawn to where I stood. "Then one of these days, you can take me home instead. I mean, after all, I have been giving you a ride every day and you have yet to repay me."

I wanted to tell her I could repay her in other ways, and then lick my lips. But that would have been a bit upfront. And gross.

I chose to say, "alright, skater boy. Teach me how to ride."

"Right now?"

I shrugged. "I got nothin' else to do today."

The smile on her face made the butterflies in my stomach explode. She was inviting me to spend time with her, and she was happy that I'd accepted. So far, so good.

I let her into my kitchen and made smoothies. She sipped from a straw while smiling out of the window. She always seemed to have this look on her face like the chaos of the world outside couldn't touch her. I knew she couldn't be invincible; I knew some things in her teenage life must have bothered her. She never let it show, though.

"How long have you been skateboarding?" I asked her over the kitchen island.

She looked up at me with those dazzling blue eyes and said, "as long as I can remember." She pulled at the neck of her shirt until it stretched over her left shoulder, leaving it bare. My heart got ahead of itself and started to race. "Come look at this."

She could have said anything at all and I still would have bolted to the other side of the counter. She was showing me a scar on the top of her shoulder, a faint red line warping the natural beauty of her skin.

"I got that when I was five. My dad was teaching me to ride one of those Penny skateboards on the street outside my house, but I wiped out hard. Fell face-first into the pavement and a shard of glass sliced through my shoulder here."

"Can I touch it?" There was nothing really perverted about that - I would have asked the same of anyone. Scars are cool.

"Go ahead."

I traced my finger along the scar, overextending as much as I could without being too obvious. Once I was done committing the smoothness of her skin to memory, she covered it back up with her shirt.

"I haven't injured myself once since that day, though," she said with pride.

I, on the other hand, injured myself after about fifty-seven seconds of riding Jackie's board without her guidance. See, the problem with being insanely attracted to your teacher is that you will inevitably attempt to show off to them with no concern for the lack of skill in whatever you are being taught. In this instance, I decided I would weave from side to side on the sidewalk like a snake, because that would surely impress her. I fucked it up the moment I tried to turn a single degree to the left.

My feet took on a life of their own and hurled me into the grass lining the sidewalk. My elbow must have hit a rock or something, because - once my body had settled and my head had determined which direction the sky was - I found a small trickle of blood running from it. Jackie sauntered over to me like she'd seen this coming from several thousand miles away and knelt at my side. She reached into her backpack and tenderly explained how she'd packed a miniature first aid kit into her bag the day after I started riding to school with her, then she stuck a band-aid over my elbow.

Yeah, I was in love. I had never felt so wanted before.

I didn't let that one fall deter me from learning to skate, just as Jackie didn't when she was a kid. By Christmas, I was proficient enough to drift along sticking to the center of the sidewalk, even around corners, but I struggled to keep up an above-laughable speed with the added weight of a passenger. I also had to take a long detour to avoid the steep hill on our route to school, because I kept bailing in fear right at the top of it and leaving Jackie to quickly gain control of the board.

I knew she was only teasing me about not repaying her for the rides every day, but I still couldn't shake the thought that I was taking advantage. So I started to bring gifts to school - small, silly things, like the bags of chips that she liked, or a diet-cherry-vanilla Dr Pepper that took three convenience stores to find. I don't think she understood the reasoning behind these gifts, though, because she started bringing me things in return. The strangest thing that ever landed in my lap at lunch was a little turtle plushie, because I think I mentioned once that I found turtles cute. I couldn't tell whether that plushie was the cutest thing I'd ever seen, or if I just loved it so much because it was from her. Either way, the turtle earned a permanent place beside my pillow. Sometimes, I'd get angry and throw it across the room, because I hated how simply looking at the thing could stir up such mushy feelings inside of me. It would bounce off the wall without a sound and I'd pick it up within seconds, silently apologizing to its beady black eyes. To the turtle, I was a deadbeat abusive partner who would never change her ways, but I supposed it was better to take my mood swings out on an inanimate object than on anyone around me.

It wasn't long before something happened that I'd always expected, dreaded, but repressed in the back of my mind. In the end, it wasn't one of the skater boys that stole Jackie's heart, it was a guy she'd known since elementary school called Marco Diaz, who I knew through a mutual friend of ours, Star Butterfly. Yes, her actual name was Star Butterfly. She had a magic wand and was literally from another planet, but I won't bother explaining that here because I don't want to take up days and days of your time.

Anyway, Marco was a nice enough kid, I guess. Here's the thing: When you're attracted to people of the same sex, no matter how funny or charming or pretty or caring or flirty you are, there's an upwards of ninety-percent chance that somebody will take no romantic interest in you purely because of the body parts you possess. I usually didn't let this get to me too much, but with Jackie it was different. Truth be told, I cared about her far more than any of the girls I'd taken interest in before. I loved her as a friend and I loved her as more.

So it stung a thousand times harder when I found out through word of mouth (one mouth - Star's) that Jackie had asked Marco out, and not the other way around.

Being good friends with both Jackie and Star, it became an inevitability that hanging out with either of them would include hanging out with Marco. And rather than four friends hanging out, it felt more like Star and I were accompanying the new couple on their dates. It didn't hurt too bad. I'd equate the pain to being stung by a bee, except the stinger was coated with bone-rotting acid, and it stung you while you were tied to a bed of nails with a steamroller fast approaching, and the bee was actually a red-hot cattle prod crafted by Satan himself.

Okay, so it hurt pretty bad.

We went to this diner on the outskirts of town one Saturday, called Barney's, and they had the gall to start making out mid-dinner, like they were the only ones in the restaurant. I seriously considered grabbing Star by the shoulders and locking lips with her, just to one-up their audacity. I could have killed two birds with one stone - publicly announcing my interest in girls, and demonstrating to Jackie how much better at kissing they are. In the end, the rational portion of my brain decided that it would also be the quickest way to lose three friends at once.

I used to like the strawberry milkshake at Barney's. Now it just reminds me of Marco's tongue down my silver-haired queen's throat.

Now, here's where things get messy and complicated and so dramatic that I could hardly believe they were happening in my otherwise boring life: Marco was dating Jackie. But, although neither of them would admit it out loud, Marco and Star quite blatantly had a thing for each other. It was written on the walls in bright pink paint that was apparently visible to everybody that knew the two of them except Jackie. I have literally no idea how this happened. Did I mention yet that Star and Marco lived together? Yes, the girl that he was dating was blissfully unaware of what Marco traveling around on inter-dimensional adventures (again, I won't try explaining this), sometimes multiple times per day, with his opposite-sex-very-much-single-best-friend-slash-roommate might have led to.

I insist that Marco was a good guy. But when it came to balancing the two most important young ladies in his life, he was an idiot. I made it to the end of my freshman year without getting too upset that the girl of my dreams was off dating a boy. That boy's parents threw an end-of-year party at their spacious house a few days into summer vacation. And that boy screwed up his first relationship on the very same evening.

I didn't witness it myself, but Marco virtually abandoned her in the middle of a room with her mouth hanging open because Star wanted to talk to him. That would have been kind of excusable, except he managed to do exactly the same thing not an hour later when Star re-appeared and proclaimed her love for him in a dramatic act of spontaneity only Star could pull off.

Now, look, I love Star. I think she's great. But you don't abandon Jackie Lynn Thomas twice to run after anyone. They had a brief, mostly one-sided discussion about their feelings in front of everybody in the room and then Star ran off upset, and Marco followed her up the stairs. Neither of them gave a single shit about the presence of Marco's current girlfriend. I was actually standing right next to her when it happened. The look on her face was of dumbfoundment.

Moments after, the chatter of the crowd around us rose from hushed whispers to normal volume, and I looked to my right to find Jackie was gone. I spun around, looked towards the front door, picked out the teal highlights in her hair through the dense cluster of heads that I didn't care about. With very little grace or patience, I shoved my way through herds of bodies and out into fresh air. She was stalking along the sidewalk, away from the light of the house. I called out her name but she carried on into the darkness. I cut across the Diaz's front lawn, nearly impaled myself on a cactus. Jackie turned around the second time I called her name, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw the tears in hers.

"I know, you told me so," she said, her voice wet with misery.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that I had informed Jackie on numerous occasions how neglectful I thought her boyfriend was over the last few months, because I was a bit of a jealous bitch.

I swallowed hurt. "I didn't come out here to say that."

She shifted from side to side, smeared a tear across her cheek. "Did you know that they liked each other?"

"I... had a feeling."

She looked hurt and confused and angry. I flinched, braced myself for the outburst, but it didn't come.

"I think I need to be alone right now," she said, and turned on her heels.

She passed under a streetlamp and her hair shone, but her usual radiance wasn't there to compliment it. I stood in the dark with my feet glued to the concrete and I thought, I'll see her again. Even if not over summer, I'll see her when school starts.

But then as Jackie exited the yellow glow of the streetlamp and became more of a silhouette, I saw darker hair, darker skin, and suddenly I was staring after my young friend Maria walking away from school and out of my life.

I kicked my ass into gear.