Save the Manatee!
1: It Begins
(June 2015)
That year's California state championship track and field meet took place in Clovis, near Fresno. Dipper did his best, but—
"Sorry I didn't win," he told Grunkle Stan and Wendy in the rental car after the meet.
"Hey, dude, second place is nothing to sneeze at!" Wendy told him.
"Like a kitten!" Mabel added. She had been riding high since Thursday, knowing that they'd be heading back to Gravity Falls from the San Jose International Airport on Saturday evening. She giggled and repeated, "Like a kitten!"
"Stop it," Dipper complained. He and Wendy rode in the back seat of the rental, a white Nexxus four-door sedan. Mabel was in shotgun position, and Grunkle Stan, of course, was driving.
"Hey, Dip was the team captain and assistant coach," Stan pointed out as he narrowly beat a yellow light. "And the Piedmont JV team is the state championship team, so give him that!"
"Yeah," Mabel agreed, swiveling around as far as she could while keeping her seat belt on, "Good job, Captain Dipster! and to be fair, you had to come back from the bad ankle sprain that bastard Wildon gave you when he knocked you down back in February!"
"Pumpkin!" Stan bellowed. "You're in mixed company, so watch your damn language!"
"Damn straight!" Wendy shot back.
Dipper got into it: "Yeah, what the heck, Mabel?"
"He swears like a kitten, too!" Mabel chortled.
"We gonna make the flight, Stan dude?" Wendy asked. "I can drive if you want me to."
"You're still underage for rentals," Stan said. "I don't want the hassle of a ticket. Anywho, we're gonna make it in plenty of time. You kids just settle back and relax. Blindfolds are in the glove box if anybody wants one."
"Blindfolds?" Wendy asked.
"Tell you later," Dipper said.
Mabel seemed conciliatory: "Wendy, Dip probably won't tell you about this, being so modest and all, but he did win five first place sprints this season, including one two weeks ago. Not bad for a guy who missed like six weeks on account of an injury."
"I'm proud of my dork," Wendy said, reaching to hold his hand. Am I comin' in, dude?
—Loud and clear, Lumberjack Girl. God, I missed you so much!
Same here, Dip. You're lookin' hot to me, man! I'd kinda like to try a mental make-out session—we're in the back seat and all! But I guess the moaning would make Stan and Mabel suspicious.
—Later, then! Dipper thought to her.
They had once gone through a sometimes terrifying adventure with an ancient water spirit, and they had not only escaped with their lives, but had also gained a weird kind of telepathy from it—whenever they touched skin to skin, they could converse and even, they had learned, exchange feelings. The previous summer, they had discovered those feelings could lead to—pretty pleasant outcomes, we'll say.
Stan was saying something: "Hey, tomorrow after you guys have rested up, I'll take you all out to see where Ford's and my houses are gonna be! Manly Dan and his crew have got 'em both framed in!"
"Awesome!" Mabel said. "When's the housewarming?"
"When they're finished!" Stan snapped. "Probably late fall. Remember, sweetie, it ain't just walls and ceilings and floors—there's plumbing, there's electrical wiring, there's painting and paneling, the whole nine yards."
"And furnishings, Stan," Wendy reminded him. "Gotta have furniture and appliances and decorations and stuff!"
"Oy! Sheila and Lorena will take care of that department! I can already see I gotta make another gambling expedition this summer to pay for all that. Or else find a quiet way to dispose of some valuables I collected when Poindexter and me went up to the Arctic."
"Valuables?" Wendy asked.
"Shh. Statue of limitations," Stan said. "Hey! Fishin' opener is Monday! Soos says we can take his boat. Who wants to go?"
"Wait," Dipper asked anxiously. "You're not bringing your joke book, are you?"
"That's a funny book! But, nah, you've heard 'em all."
"We'll go!" all three teens said in chorus. And then they laughed. "Jinx!" Mabel shouted. "That's three sodas I got comin', one from Wendy, one from Broseph, and one from Grunkle Stan, just for luck!"
"You'll get 'em one at a time, over three days," Stan said. "Definitely not all at once!"
"Mmm, Pitt Cola," Mabel murmured. "You can't get 'em in California for some reason."
"Health codes," Dipper suggested.
Mabel ignored him and piped up, "Hey, Grunkle Stan! When we get to Portland, can I drive to Gravity Falls?"
"Huh? Drive? Are you outa your mind?" Stan asked her. "You're just a kid!"
Dipper said, "No, we got our learner's permit back in March—"
"March second!" Mabel yelled. "We could've got 'em on February 28, but first of all, that was when Dip got hurt, and second, they wouldn't let us!"
"Because that was on a weekend!" Dipper said. "They're not even open on—"
Mabel blew a raspberry. "Yeah, excuses, excuses. That's the danged government for you! Lazy bunch of slackers!" She crossed her arms in a grumpy gesture.
Stan laughed. "That's my girl! Fight the powers that be!"
"Anyway," Dipper said, as much to Wendy as to Stan, "Mabel and I took the Driver's Ed course at school—five weeks in the classroom—and then we did six hours behind the wheel with a driving in—"
"Hah!" Mabel said. "That first instructor will never be the same!"
"Not after teaching you," Dipper said. "Anyhow, we finished the six hours of behind the wheel instruction, so now we have to log fifty hours of supervised driving time, ten of them at night, with an adult who'll certify that we did them."
"We got thirty-eight hours already!" Mabel said. "So I figure, Portland to Gravity Falls, an hour and a half each for me and Dipper, but you gotta sign the log sheets."
"Will out-of-state driving count?" Wendy asked. "Can you guys even legally drive in Oregon?"
"Yeah, yeah," Stan said. "Alex told me about the learners' permits on the phone, and I figured this might come up, so I checked. In Oregon, if you got an out-of-state learner's permit and you're fifteen, everything's copacetic. But you can't supervise 'em, Wendy! The supervisin' driver's gotta be at least twenty-one."
"Soos could do it!" Mabel said. "We'd get to drive a Jeep! Or a pick-up!"
"Sheesh! Not Soos! To supervise ya gotta be at least twenty-one and in your right mind!" Stan said.
"That's mean!" Mabel objected, but her train of thought hit a switch and was off on another track: "I can't wait to see little Harmony in person! She looks so adorable in photos! And Little Soos is talking! He always says 'Hi' to me when Soos face-times with me!"
"Girl, you won't recognize Widdles," Wendy said. "She's as big as Waddles now. Ready to have her own piglets."
Mabel sighed. "Yeah, but I don't want to know about it if she does. Soos and Melody can't handle any more pigs, I can't take 'em, and so they'll have to give them away to people who aren't looking for ham and bacon. How about your aunt, Wendy?"
"Yeah, she'd take one or two and agree not to make them into pork products," Wendy said, laughing. "Aunt Sally just farms for recreation, anyhow. She doesn't make her money from that."
Dipper didn't say anything about the prospect of more piglets. He knew that Waddles had been neutered—Widdles was his daughter, but pigs paid no attention to rules about swinecest.
Mabel got interested in the (monotonous) scenery and stopped talking for a time. Stan started making up one of his impromptu driving songs—"Cruisin' through Fairmead, so flat it makes my eyes bleed, here I am rollin' along, singin' a flat-road song… ." Dipper and Wendy held hands for the rest of the drive, making silent plans for the summer ahead—the Mystery Twins' fourth in Gravity Falls.
As the afternoon wore on, they drove through Madera and into the Central Valley, hit the long, straight, boring stretch of 152 West (Stan ignoring Mabel's plaintive, "With a learner's permit, a sloth could drive this highway!"), and as the sun slipped lower in the sky, they took a more serpentine path into the arid Diablo mountain range, through the Pacheco Pass, and then down into the Santa Clara Valley, here sort of rural—though if you drove far enough north, you came to the urbanized "Silicon Valley," in the northernmost reach of which Alex Pines worked.
But they weren't going that far. From the town of Gilroy, Stan took 101 north, then 85 to San Jose. They returned the rental car a little more than two hours before their 8:30 PM flight, took the courtesy shuttle to the airport, and arrived with time to spare. Mabel insisted on dining at Sushi Boat, and Wendy agreed to join her, but Stan said, "Look, if I want to eat bait, I'll just wait for the fishing opener! C'mon, Dip, I saw a pizza joint down the terminal a ways."
They met up at the gate, sat to wait for their boarding time with their luggage stacked around them, except for the stuff that Mr. and Mrs. Pines had already packed up and shipped off to the Shack, and talked about Gravity Falls.
The Gnomes, in gratitude for Ford's having provided them with protection against their dreaded subterranean foes the Mole Men, had signed a contract to protect both Ford's and Stan's new homes from vermin for life. "Jeff learned to print just for the occasion. 'Course, the little devils love to eat rats and mice, anyhow," Stan said. "So it ain't like it's a great sacrifice on their part."
Wendy talked about Tambry and Robbie, who were getting married on the twelfth—"Was gonna be Saturday, but Tambry realized that date was the thirteenth, so they moved it back a day"—and Robbie and the Tombstones had just landed a recording contract with a company out of L.A.
"Fact, your sweetie's in on that, Mabes," Wendy said.
"Teek?"
"Yeah, Teek! See, he's back at his part-time job cookin' in the snack bar in the Shack. Couple of Saturdays ago, he got called to the table of this young dude and his girlfriend or wife or something because they loved the burgers so much they wanted to compliment him! Gave him, like, a fifty-dollar tip! And they got to talking, and the dude is a record producer with Electromix Studio—I think it is—and Teek gave him a USB memory stick with some of the Tombstones' music on it, and next week, the dude calls the Shack from California and Soos puts him in touch with Robbie, so the upshot is, him and Tambry and the other guys go down to L.A. to lay down a dozen tracks—and that's their honeymoon!"
"Whoa," Mabel said. "Good for Teek!"
"Yeah, Robbie's crazy grateful. It's not a whole lot of up-front money, but they get royalties and junk, and it's, like, an official label, not just indie sell-out-of-your-car music."
"Teek didn't tell me about that!" Mabel said.
"Oops. Well, let him tell you the whole story, and act surprised," Wendy suggested. "Teek needs to build up his confidence a little. Hey, he's old enough now to drive with you in his car!" She grinned at Mabel, as if saying You know what that means!
Diffidently, Dipper said, "Um—I should be getting my author's copies of Bride of the Zombie before the end of the month. Hardcover. It's going to be officially published on June 30. And I've got a whole draft of the second book on my—oh, gosh, did I get my laptop back at Security?"
"Boop!" Mabel said, hefting the case.
Dipper whooshed out a sigh of relief. "I gotta get the manuscript for the lake-monster book in shape to send in to my editor by the first of August," he said. "Oh, I did get my check for the first book last month."
"Dip can write a book faster than the publisher can write a check!" Mabel announced. She bopped Dipper's arm. "Am I right?"
He smiled and shrugged. Most of the advance had gone into his college fund—but he had saved out a few hundred for spending money over the summer, and he hoped he could use it to give Wendy surprises and make her happy.
"By the way, you guys, we're all gonna stay the night in the McGucket mansion," Stanley told them.
"Me, too," Wendy added. "Dad and the boys are off bowling in Eugene, and they're gonna spend the night there, so Mayellen says I can have the same room Mr. and Mrs. Pines used when they came up at Christmas."
"Cool!" Dipper said.
"Well, it ain't gonna be a sleepover party," Stan said, sounding grumpy. "It's just 'cause it'll be past midnight when we get in, and we don't want to bother Soos and Melody—they got a new baby, and the old baby ain't always quiet at night if he gets over-stimulated. And you'd do it, Mabel, you know you would!"
Mabel blew a raspberry. "Over-stimulation never hurt me!"
"Two words," Dipper said. "Smile Dip."
"Yeah, yeah," Mabel said. "Laugh it up, Dippity Dog! You're not gonna upset me one bit. This is gonna be the greatest summer yet! I have a good feeling about it!"
And the desk agent said through the PA, "We are ready to begin boarding for Alaskan Air Flight 1122 to Portland, Oregon, at Gate T-13."
"Let's do it!" Mabel said, and they got up to join the line for first class.