Spelling Error
(Author's note: This story joins several others in a continuity. In order, they are "Baby, Baby" [happened the previous fall and is something of a set-up], "The Woman with the Cipher Tattoo," "The After Party," and "The Big Con.")
Chapter 1: I Am Bored
From the Journals of Dipper Pines
Friday, July 5, the Mystery Shack: In my time, I have confronted earthly and unearthly horrors. Some have threatened to end my life and those of their friends. Some have threatened horrors even worse than death!
But none of them are as soul-wrenching as one of my sister's sleepovers.
Mabel's at it again. You'd think after our little adventures with the Admiral's ghost and the world's biggest con, she'd want a little down time, right?
Wrong. This evening after dinner she bopped up to the attic, where I was transcribing photocopies of Grunkle Ford's most recent notes on the supernatural into Dipper's Journal of the Uncanny 1 (pages 33-42, and I'm not finished yet).
"Hi, broman," Mabel chirped, hopping up on my bed and using it as a trampoline. "So why aren't you down in the gift shop whispering sweet nothings into Wendy's ear?"
"Because Wendy's ear isn't there," I told her. "She's off at six, remember? It's nearly eight."
"Righhhht," Mabel said. "Boingy! Boingy! Boingy! So that brings me to my request. Get out."
"What?"
"I NEED the attic, Dipper," Mabel said in her sing-songy "do what I want or face the consequences" voice. "Grenda and Candy and Amy are coming for a sleepover, and the guest room's too small. You sleep there tonight and let the girls take over the attic."
"Absolutely not," I told her.
She launched herself off the bed, tackled me out of my chair, and flung me to the floor.
After five minutes of enduring her holding me down and tickling me I gave up. What is it with girls and sleepovers? I grumbled a little, but I put my supernatural journal and the copies of Grunkle Ford's notes away, got my pillow and blanket—Mabel's is always covered in glitter—and trudged downstairs.
Mabel has redecorated the little guest room. Of course. It's small, only about ten feet square, but she took advantage of the limited space by plastering posters of boy bands on all the walls. Except on one she has a poster of a unicorn, but she's been using it as a dartboard.
There's no desk, but she has a little table and a chair, so I shoved her makeup and craft supplies into a cardboard box and now I'm sitting there recording these thoughts in my daily journal. Meanwhile two floors up above me it sounds as if the girls are not only taking over the attic but taking it apart.
OK, I think I've described Grenda and Candy before. Grenda has a deep voice and a build like a junior-league wrestler; Candy is petite and Korean (I think—or maybe Chinese? I'll have to ask Mabel) and once she had a serious crush on me for about twenty-two minutes. Amy Lowrance, though, is someone new in Mabel's circle this summer—Mabel just met her a few days ago and I saw her for the first time this evening. She's our age (13) and is in the eighth grade (like us, but here in Gravity Falls, of course). Her mom and dad own and run a pharmacy. She's a cute girl, a sort of redhead, but not in a Wendy way, more a sort of rusty-red brown way, and her curly hair is sort of bristly. She's all right, I guess, but with Mabel's friends you never really know.
Anyway, Candy's family is off somewhere visiting relatives, and Candy is staying with Grenda for two weeks. And Amy's parents are off in San Francisco for a weekend pharmacists' conference, and SHE's visiting Grenda until Tuesday. And Grenda's parents are OK with her having a sleepover here tonight . . . and tomorrow night . . . and the night after.
I'm not surprised. Grenda has anger issues which she relieves by punching things. Like telephone poles, mailboxes, the pillars that hold up the roof of her family's porch, a police patrol car (once, but it required serious body work), small trees, unicorns, and guardian ogres. I imagine Grenda's being away for a few days is like a vacation for her folks.
Anyway, the girls are upstairs giggling and squealing. And here I am in the new guest room, off the Museum and really kind of small and cramped and smelling of Mabel's paste and orange-scented perfume and colored markers, and I have my computer but the wi-fi signal is weak and slow here, and I don't have ANY of my books and I'm afraid to go up to the attic to get them because I might fall victim to a makeover ambush.
I just hope the noise level falls to a dull roar so I can get some sleep. It's going to be a long, long weekend . . . .
"Um . . . truth, I guess," Amy Lowrance said, blushing. She, Candy, and Grenda sat on the floor of the attic. Mabel lay sprawled out on her old bed, head hanging over them, upside down. All she lacked were the googly eyes glued to her chin to be a perfect Mr. Upside-downington, but she figured the others were too sophisticated for that.
"EEEE!" Grenda squealed. "Okay, okay, tell the truth: Do you think Mabel's brother's cute?"
Amy blinked. "Um, Dipper? Well . . . he's kind of sweaty and awkward, isn't he? Um, no, I guess not. Sorry, Mabel. He just doesn't appeal to me."
Candy shrugged. "That leaves more Dipper for me," she said.
"Ooooh!" Grenda said with a smirk. "Are you two an item?"
Candy adjusted her round glasses, glanced shyly down and off to the side and said, "Not really. He does not feel the same way. And I think he has a crush on Wendy. Anyway, I have moved on since he shattered my heart."
"Man, does he ever have a crush on Wendy!" Mabel said from where she lay, rolling over onto her stomach. "She finds it sort of sweet and cute, and she doesn't mind. I think Wendy's kinda off high-school boys right now, you know, too many bad experiences, and Dipper's so shy he's not, well, like them, not pushy and handsy and all. I think Wendy'd be up for a little of the old smoochie-smoochie, if Dipper wouldn't morph into such a dork around her. But he's just so incredibly shy about it!"
"The good ones are always like that," Grenda grumbled. "It took Marius forever to work up to our first kiss. Man, I had to kiss him like six thousand times before he kissed me once!"
"Okay," Amy said, "Mabel's turn. Truth or dare?"
"Oh, truth," Mabel said. She pulled her hands inside her sweater sleeves and waved them while her eyes rolled in different directions. "What have I got to hide?"
"How many boys have you kissed?" Amy asked.
"We want NAMES!" Grenda roared, pounding the floor.
"Oh, there are so many!" Mabel said, sticking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth as she thought. "First was Mermando, he's a merman. We had to break up though because his family forced him into an arranged political marriage, and now he's King of the Manatees."
"Oh!" Candy said. "I hope that his back does not get lacerated by the propellers of trolling motors!"
Mabel leaned her chin on her palm. "Then last year at school in Piedmont, there was Larry, but he's not a good kisser. Worse than kissing a leaf blower. I know what I'm talkin' about here, ladies! And, um, after the Fall Festival dance there was Hugh DeVille, but unfortunately he has braces too, and after we locked together for three hours, I'd had enough of him. That's two . . . Christmas party at the school gym, Tony under the bleachers. No zing, you know? And then . . . . "
Mabel went through another six names, the last one from the previous night, following the Gravity Falls fireworks show. Grenda threw a pillow at her. "You are a WILD THING!" Grenda shouted.
"You are a kissy slut, I think," Candy added.
Amy laughed. "Candy!"
"Is that not a good word?"
"I'll take it as a compliment," Mabel assured her. She picked up the pillow. "One, two, three, four, I declare a pillow war!"
If Soos and Melody had bought down-filled pillows, feathers would have flown. However, these were all memory-foam pillows. True, after the epic screaming pillow battle, many of the pillows probably would have preferred amnesia.
Melody put in an appearance and firmly asked for a little less noise, and the girls promised they'd quiet down. Candy suggested telling ghost stories. So they told the one about the escaped homicidal maniac with a hook for a hand, and the one about the hitchhiking girl who turned out to have died exactly one year before the guy picked her up, and the one about Bloody Mary in the mirror, and . . . .
"Heard all these," Grenda complained. "Boring!"
"Yeah," Amy agreed. "The trouble is, there aren't any new spooky tales."
"Mabel could tell you stories about what she and Dipper did last summer," Candy said. "Dipper is a ghost annoyer."
"Well . . . only two or three ghosts," Mabel said. "But plenty of other creepy stuff. Like his unwashed underwear!"
"Oh, girl!" Amy said, falling over backward and laughing, "I'd trade you that for my brother's smelly socks! Gah-ROSS!"
"But there were other supernatural creatures besides ghosts," Candy said.
"Yump!" Mabel said. "I think the worst was the Shapeshifter. This one time it made itself look exactly like Wendy, and the two Wendys had to fight each other, and Dipper picked up Wendy's axe and chopped the monster in the stomach—"
"No freakin' way!" Amy said, her hand over her mouth.
"Oh, yeah, and it bled green, but it's almost impossible to kill a Shapeshifter, and it recovered and we froze it, but it took on Dipper's form as we were freezing it."
Amy had to have the whole story then. After telling it, Mabel said, "Hey, I think there's a sketch of it in one of these books." She rolled off the bed and from the shelf near it she took Volume 3 of Grunkle Ford's Journal (Yeah, yeah, Bill incinerated them, but Dipper found a way around that, see the story "Baby, Baby" if you really want to know). She found the sketch. "I think it's an alien. Or a mutation."
"That's why my folks won't ever let me go into the forest here in the valley," Amy said. "People tell such strange stories. Like there are supposed to be real Gnomes."
"Oh, there are," Grenda said. "One of them ate our cat food one night."
"I did not know you had a cat," Candy said.
"We don't," Grenda said.
"Yeah, and I almost married all of them once," Mabel told Amy. "Gnomes, I mean. Not cats."
"We don't have a cat," Grenda insisted. "It was for my grandma's feet."
"What kind of book is this?" Amy asked.
"Oh, it was written by my Grunkle Ford. He had this house built years ago. He's a paranormal researcher, really into weird stuff. Then his twin brother, Grunkle Stan, took over the house for about thirty years and turned it into the Mystery Shack museum and gift shop. Now they're both kind of permanent house guests of old man McGucket, since Soos got married and he and Wendy took over running the Shack and live here now. Long story, boring."
"What's this one?" Amy asked, reaching for another thick book. "'Dipper's Journal of the Uncanny?'"
"My bro wants to follow in Grunkle Ford's footsteps," Mabel explained. "That's his, and I guess it's sort of private."
"So he wouldn't want us to look in it?" Amy asked.
"No, definitely not," Mabel said. She flopped to the floor. "So what are you waiting for? Open it!"
As it happened, Dipper's journal opened at page 33, where he had begun reproducing Ford's notes on "The Riddle of the Fey."
"Is that even English?" Grenda asked, pointing at the letters Dipper had printed under the heading:
KSB AFTITBJ ZA RIFMTKP AWWJ NTWW VTCYFG SLXFYJ FYC KIFYJAZIX KSBX!
KSBP XLJK EB IBJDLBC EP XTCYTRSK ZA KSB YBOK ALWW XZZY ZI IBXFTY AFTITBJ! (Note: 6B 18SO-f7)
"No, it's a code of some kind," Mabel said. "See, it starts up on the next page in normal English."
In Celtic Europe there are legends of the Fey Folk. My researches have indicated that in Gravity Falls the legends are true. On a night of the new moon, when the sky was quite dark, equipped with my night-vision glasses I once spied a ring of fey-folk (the British call them "fairies") dancing in a forest clearing. By a rather dangerous method, I learned the secret of calling them, which because of the great danger encoded above should NEVER be done lightly, or without full knowledge. However, I record the method here for its scientific interest.
"Fairies dancing? I don't believe it," Grenda said.
"It sounds far-fetched, I think," Candy agreed.
"Let's try it!" Mabel said, reading silently through the incantation.
"That's a really bad idea," Amy said.
Mabel laughed. "Little teeny fairies? C'mon. What could go wrong?"