(don't forget to) breathe
It's Thursday, and Mabel is slumped face-first on her bed pretending to be dead because it's a better alternative than doing one more page of her stupid math homework.
Dipper is attempting to coax her back to the land of the living. "Come on, Mabel, you're really close. Just a few more problems.
"No. I'm dead," she says into her pillow.
"You're not dead."
"Bury my bones in the backyard. Burn my homework in my memory. Waddles is the new Mabel."
"Okay, well…" Dipper clears his throat. "Luckily, I know a thing or two about raising the dead. Corpus levitas—"
"NO!" Mabel shoots off the bed and attacks him with her sweater sleeves, thwapping mightily at his face.
"Hey, it worked!" he laughs, right before he catches a sleeve full across the mouth. "Ow. Ow! Mabel!"
"Kill the necromancer!" she howls, continuing her assault as he covers his head with his arms.
He recovers long enough to shove her back onto her bed, which surprises Mabel, as she's accustomed to overpowering him. "Hah! I forgot I'm taller than you now," he says.
"Puberty is unfair and should be banned," Mabel declares.
"Al-pha twin! Al-pha twin!" Dipper chants.
Mabel groans and rolls back over to pretend to be dead, letting him have his moment. She always sort of knew that her time as the taller twin had an expiration date—especially after Grunkle Stan subjected her to that awful facts-of-life book. According to that Book-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named, her growth rate already peaked. But compared to a lot of the girls at school, it seems like she's a bit of a late bloomer. So, if Mom is any indication, Mabel might end up a little taller than average. But Dipper is just hitting his growing stride, a stage that could easily last into the second half of his teens.
That doesn't mean he can get complacent, though.
"Fine, take a ten-minute break," he says.
As soon as he turns around to leave, she leaps off the bed and onto his back. "DEATH FROM ABOVE!"
She wraps her arms around his face so he can't see and tightens her legs around his thighs until he stumbles to the floor, the impact rattling the knickknacks on her shelves.
"Kids!" their mother calls up the stairs. "You're supposed to be doing homework, not roughhousing!"
"It can be two things!" Mabel yells back.
"Help! Dipper down!" Dipper says, his voice muffled by carpet.
"Dipper, is your sister playing too rough?" Mom says wryly.
"…No!" he denies.
"You two cut it out before you break something. And that math better be done by bedtime," she says, voice fading as she returns to the living room.
"I think I have rug burn on my chin," Dipper says pathetically.
"That's what you get," Mabel tells him, poking him in the back of the head.
"Got it. I can never let my guard down ever again, for the rest of my life."
"It's lonely at the top, bro-bro."
"This doesn't feel like the top," he says, Mabel still kneeling on his back. "I feel like I'd probably be able to breathe at the top."
He surprises her again when he pushes himself up despite her position, dislodging her weight. Puberty really is unfair. She tumbles to the side and stays there, unwilling to rise because there's nothing waiting for her up above but math homework. Truly, the worst and nerdiest of homeworks. So of course, Dipper is awesome at it.
Dipper wisely faces her as he backs out of the room. "I'm going to get a drink. You want anything?"
"I want Pitt Cola," Mabel whines, raising her arms and clenching her hands like a needy toddler.
"I know!" Dipper exclaims with keen empathy. "Agh, what do they put in that stuff? I… I need it."
At school the next day, Mabel is politely listening to her friends have a lively debate over which &ndra song is the best and which is merely the greatest. She opens her mouth to settle the issue by describing how 'Taking Over Midnight' destroyed a zombie horde and it's not like any song can top that. Then, for some reason, she turns to look over her shoulder to where she knows Dipper usually sits with his friends. He's there, scribbling in a notebook while everyone around him trades Tragiccards. It's not Journal A, though. It's just a regular old spiral-bound notebook.
She realizes that he never brings Journal A to school with him. She supposes she already knew that, but she's never really thought about what it means.
It means he knows no one is going to take what's in that journal seriously. It means that Mabel's friends will, at best, think she's great at making up stories and, at worst, think she's being a weird liar for attention. It means the letter she wrote to her parents about Grunkle Ford coming through the portal, the letter she never got a chance to send in the whirlwind of events that followed, would have been dismissed as fantasy (and maybe she'd be seeing a therapist now).
Slowly, Mabel closes her mouth and picks at her food. The girls at this lunch table will never really be her best friends ever again, will they. She can't share the things that are most important to her anymore. Is that how school will be from now on, forever? She can never truly be herself again? She is a lot of what she used to be, but she is also a whole lot more. It's unfair that so much of her is locked in Gravity Falls, that she cannot openly be the person she's become.
How does Dipper stand it?
She floats through the rest of the day in a daze. On the bus ride home, she sits next to Dipper and hugs her backpack, waiting to get home so she can disappear into Sweatertown.
Dipper notices. He nudges her gently with his elbow. "Hey, what happened?"
"I don't know," she sighs. "Just realizing some stuff, I guess."
"Tell me about it."
She looks at him gratefully. "Remember all those zombies we exploded with the power of Love Patrol Alpha?"
"I never agreed to that name," he says immediately. "But, yeah."
"My friends were talking about &ndra and I was going to tell them that 'Taking Over Midnight' is the ultimate weapon, and I realized I couldn't." She frowns. "One of the greatest moments ever and I can't tell my friends about it. What kind of friend does that make me?"
"Mabel…" Dipper pauses, looking like he's searching hard for the right words. "When I was having a hard time after we got back, you helped me snap out of it. You were right when you wouldn't let me just stop trying. I didn't know how to be in Piedmont again, but we still have to be here, and that's not the worst thing ever. …But, at the same time, I think we have to let go a little bit. Because when you know what we know, and nobody here does, it's like… how normal are we ever really going to be?"
Mabel shrinks into herself, the bottom half of her face disappearing into her sweater. "Not helping, Dippingsauce."
"No, Mabel, it doesn't have to be a bad thing," he tries to explain. "I mean, is it terrible that we belong in Gravity Falls? People spend their whole lives looking for some place to belong. We're only thirteen and we already found a special place that we're a part of. Don't you think that's valuable? Right?"
Slowly, she begins to emerge from her sweater.
"I'm not saying that Piedmont and Mom and Dad aren't important, I'm just saying that's not… the whole thing anymore. I don't know about you, but… I feel like I have a duty in Gravity Falls. I really think I belong there, Mabel. I want to go back and fill Journal A with notes, and if I have to go to school here and then college wherever to learn what I need to know to do that, then… well, that's what I have to do." He puts a hand on her shoulder. "You helped me see that. You were right. We shouldn't just give up in between summers."
Mabel doesn't see her future that clearly. She doesn't know what she's going to do when she grows up. But she knows that Dipper will be there, and now she's certain that Gravity Falls will be, too.
"And we aren't alone," he continues. "We have Grunkle Stan and Great-Uncle Ford, and Soos and Wendy, and Candy and Grenda and Pacifica and, heck, I bet even McGucket would want to talk if we called him. They know what we know, and maybe just knowing that helps, if that makes sense." He looks at her, mouth raising in a half-smile. "And we always have each other."
Mabel throws her arms around him and squeezes until he makes a strangled noise of protest, and she doesn't care one bit if the other kids on the bus are watching.
"And we have Waddles!" she reminds him, cheek pressed to his as she grins.
He laughs awkwardly, arms pinned to his sides. "Yeah, can't forget about Waddles."
(Mabel still feels the faint pull of guilt when she thinks about her parents. She loves Mom and Dad, and she wants them to be a part of her new life facet, but at the same time she doesn't know how well they'd take the pretty dangerous facts. It's something she and Dipper need to discuss, but she's in no hurry to do so.)
When they arrive at their bus stop, she steps off the vehicle feeling so much lighter than she had when she got on. Dipper is really good at the whole reassurance thing, which would probably surprise anyone else, but not her. She has too many memories of him going out of his way to make her feel better. And while his pep talk definitely had a darker edge and no easy solutions, it had hope for the future. Besides, he's right. They have friends who know the truth, and they have each other.