strange party — ii
Dipper blinks in astonishment, not at all prepared for what he's seeing.
It's his paper clones, the two who had stolen Robbie's bike and then fled into the woods when he confronted them after the party, fearing that he would melt them. He had assumed they'd long since been destroyed by inclement weather, if not simple humidity. Yet here they are. They're dirty and a bit crinkled beneath their voluminous ponchos, but intact.
"We have names, remember?" Three says. He points to himself. "I'm Tracey, and he's Quattro."
"That's… cool?" Dipper says uncertainly.
"Tyrone was already taken," Quattro says. "But that's not important now!"
"He's right. This is our chance!" Tracey declares.
Dipper is still trying to come to grips with the fact that he has surviving clones. "…Man," he says, looking down at them, "I was short."
"Paper doesn't grow, Dipper," Tracey says impatiently. "Look, we've finally got a second shot, and we've already devised a plan."
Dipper is extremely confused. "A plan for what?" he asks.
"What do you think? To get with Wendy!" Tracey pulls an enormous wad of folded paper out from somewhere in his waterproof gear. "We saw Grunkle Stan is throwing another party. With Robbie out of the way, this is the perfect opportunity to show Wendy just how much we've matured."
"We?"
"Fine, you." Tracey is still unfolding the plan, which looks to be about twice as big as the old list and includes several graphs. "Wendy is sixteen now, so that's, you know, a bit more ambitious, but we are almost fourteen and that's not even technically-a-teen, that's a hundred percent teenager. With the right plan, our odds have never been better."
Quattro nods eagerly. "Now, obviously the last plan was fatally flawed, but this time we've accounted for everything."
Dipper is seeing himself in a very unflattering light. Had he really sounded this crazy? "Except for the part where you haven't," he tells his doppelgangers. "Wendy already turned me down, man. It's over. And it doesn't matter anyway, because—"
"It doesn't matter?" Quattro gasps.
"Whoa, wait, she rejected us?" Tracey interjects, eyes wide with chagrin. "When? Why? Don't tell me you blew it!"
At one time, Dipper had been convinced he had, in fact, blown it. The farther he gets from it, though, the more he realizes he never had a chance with Wendy to begin with. And that isn't even a new thought; he'd come close to expressing just that to Tyrone after the disaster of the first party. He'd felt like he was losing the race when he hadn't been competing at all.
"I came clean and she was as cool about it as she could possibly be, but she was never into me like that," Dipper says bluntly.
The clones look like they've been told Christmas is cancelled.
"Guys, it's okay," Dipper hastens to add. "Really. Wendy is an awesome person and an awesome friend and that's what I really need from her, I was just… I was being unrealistic," he settles on saying. Over the past year he's done a lot of picking at the tangle of hormones and admiration that make up his confusing feelings for Wendy, and he knows which parts are the important ones.
"You bite your tongue!" Quattro hisses, appalled.
Tracey shakes his head in bafflement, or maybe in sheer denial. "What are you even saying? You're gone for a year and you just forget that Wendy is the love of our life? You're right, she is awesome; that's why we have to be with her!"
Dipper is literally looking at himself, twice, and he does not like what he sees. "Wow… I really was crazy," he mutters.
He hopes that these clones have degraded after a year spent subsisting in the woods and aren't fully representative of his last summer self. But if he's being honest, he suspects they're more accurate than he wants to admit. Turns out first crushes are brutal. He still doesn't understand why Mabel actively chases the feeling.
He makes an effort to reach Tracey and Quattro. "Guys: Last summer, I learned that you can't make someone love you. You can only try to be someone worthy of being loved," he says, figuring if that line worked on Gideon then maybe it will work on them. "Wendy was never going to be my girlfriend. And maybe I had to learn that the hard way; maybe that was the only way it was ever going to sink in." He shrugs self-deprecatingly. "But I did, and it's over, and it's okay. I've moved on."
"Moved on?" Tracey scoffs. "We just saw you hanging around with her!"
"As a friend," Dipper stresses. "Come on, we were working on party stuff! Besides, I have a girlfriend."
That stops Tracey and Quattro cold.
"We have a girlfriend?" Quattro says, jaw dropping.
Tracey, however, is suspicious. "Oh, yeah? Then who is it? Let me guess; she lives in Canada."
"Pacifica," Dipper tells them.
Quattro's face goes slack. "…Pacifica?" he says weakly.
Tracey's reaction is a bit more lively. "Are you completely insane?!" he rasps, eyes wild. "Pacifica is the biggest, most vapid tool around!"
"She's the worst," Quattro adds emphatically
Dipper gets angry so quickly it surprises even him. He finds himself jabbing a finger in Quattro's face. "Hey, you don't know her!"
"Know her? What's there to know?" Tracey scoffs. "She's a self-centered rich brat who was a total jerk to Mabel for no reason."
But there were reasons. And now that Dipper knows them, he can't see Pacifica's behavior in the same light. She was a jerk, yeah, but she can't take it back. Instead, she's spent a year trying to make up for it. Dipper watched her do it; he helped her do it. She fought her way free of the quicksand of her former life and is only now learning to breathe.
He gets why Tracey and Quattro still see her the way they do; it's the way she first presented herself. But they weren't there for the last year and they don't know her like Dipper does. They don't know anything.
Dipper is done with this conversation. "Shut up. You don't know her, and you never did," he says tightly. "And, you know what? Wendy is all yours. That's one less Dipper to compete with. You're welcome."
Tracey tosses his hands up in exasperation. "Fine! You've obviously lost your mind, so our plan can only benefit with you out of the way. We just need you to photocopy yourself a couple more times."
"Yeah, that's not happening." Dipper turns away and walks back towards the porch. "You do it yourself. I'm going to dance with my girlfriend."
Two pairs of hands latch onto his arms yet again, holding him in place. "We've tried copying ourselves, it doesn't work. A copy of a copy is too degraded to function," Quattro says. "Besides, Wendy is expecting a thirteen-year-old Dipper."
Dipper angrily rips free of their grasp. "Too bad, I'm not making any more copies! You guys are enough crazy to deal with already. The last thing I need is more of me running around."
"That's right, I almost forgot: You'd rather melt us," Tracey snarls.
Dipper sighs and briefly closes his eyes. "I didn't mean to melt anyone. And Tyrone melted himself on accident. Okay? It was an accident." He turns back to them. "If you thought I was going to melt you, why even come back?"
"What else are we supposed to do? Sit around in the forest until something else melts us?" Tracey has a look in his eye that's almost feral, and it makes Dipper wonder if paper clones just aren't meant to live this long. "You left us here!"
"What else was I supposed to do? You ran off and disappeared!" Dipper argues. "You're a twelve-year-old paper clone of me! I don't even know if you're real, or just some kind of echo. It's not like I can take you back to Piedmont. In fact, I bet you anything you can't leave Gravity Falls. Either you won't be able to cross the Weirdness Magnetism barrier, or you'll die in the process, or it will just pull you right back in. This is the only place you can exist, and… I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry. I shouldn't have made you. It was selfish and dumb." He sighs and ducks his head for a moment. "Maybe I can get you a real tent, or… McGucket has a ton of extra rooms. He's a good guy, he'd probably let you stay there."
"Sure, but that's not important," Quattro says.
Dipper looks up at him in bafflement. "What?"
Tracey's arms are crossed and he's nodding emphatically. "He's right. What matters is the mission. We can't lose sight of the mission."
Dipper just stares at them helplessly. "Guys… Wendy is not into me that way."
"Of course she isn't," Tracey agrees. "You're not even trying anymore!"
It's now that Dipper realizes he made these clones for a single purpose, and that purpose is the only thing they know. He's not sure if it's built into them, a frame of mind that was copied and implanted along with everything else, or if a year spent subsisting in the forest has broken their grasp on whatever little paper sanity they possess. He suspects it's the former, but can't rule out the latter. Either way, he's got a sinking feeling that the night is going to end with some more melted clones.
He just can't bring himself to do it; not unless they force him to. Even if they aren't really alive, they seem like they are. And he doesn't know for sure.
He takes a deep breath. "Listen to me: I'm not going to help you. End of story. If you want to date Wendy, then do it yourself. I already told you, I'm taken."
He turns away and has almost reached the porch when the next thing he knows he's back on the ground with his arms wrenched behind him. "Wait, are you tying me up?!" he yelps in outrage right before the tape gets slapped over his mouth.
"This is for our own good," Quattro tells him.
He struggles mightily, making their job that much harder as they carry him into the Shack and through the hall to Stan's office. When they set him down on top of the copier he tries to roll himself off, but they hold him in place.
"Do you think this will still work with the ropes and everything?" Quattro asks before he hits the button.
"If the new clone comes out tied up, we'll just untie him," Tracey says reasonably.
The machine shudders to life and the green scanning bar slides underneath Dipper's struggling form. He can't see what's happening above his head, though he can hear the paper slide out of the machine and into the tray.
"Oh, no, not another one," he groans into the tape over his mouth, turning his head to the side to watch the paper wiggle on the floor and a new clone come to sudden life.
The new clone rises up, towering over the old ones. This is a clone of thirteen-pushing-fourteen-year-old Dipper and it shows. Dipper immediately thinks of him as Tyrone-Two.
Tyrone-Two points to where Dipper is still lying bound on top of the copier. "Is that really necessary?" he asks with concern.
"Extreme measures, I know. But we are so close to getting Wendy to date us, so it's justified," Tracey says. "It's not our fault he's gone crazy."
"Original Dipper is crazy?"
"You have no idea," Quattro tells him. "He's dating Pacifica Northwest."
"Huh," Tyrone-Two says noncommittally.
"We'll deal with that later," Tracey says. He starts unfolding his and Quattro's master plan again. "Now that we have you, we can enact our plan to dance with Wendy and then date and eventually marry her. Anyway, the first step is to get you downstairs and ask Wendy to dance before someone else does. We don't have enough time to go over the whole plan right now so let's get that done and go from there."
"Pacifica is down there too," Tyrone-Two says thoughtfully.
Quattro slaps a hand to his forehead. "That's right! And she's probably expecting Dipper!"
"She could ruin everything!" Tracey fumes. "Okay, new plan: We have to get rid of Pacifica first. Big Dipper, you go downstairs and get her alone and break up with her. Just make her go away as fast as you can. Tell her she's the worst."
Tyrone-Two leans against Grunkle Stan's desk. "I don't know, man. I got a problem with this plan."
Tracey sighs impatiently. "I know it's not perfect, but we're really on the clock. What's your problem with it?"
"Well, the thing is," Tyrone-Two says, bringing a half-full water bottle out from behind his back, "Pacifica is actually the best."
With a sweep of his arm, he splatters the contents of the bottle across Tyrone and Quattro.
"Traitor!" Tracey gasps, his chest and left arm beginning to bubble away. "What are you doing?! You've ruined everything!"
"Sorry, man. But you guys are out of line," Tyrone-Two tells him.
"Us? Us?! He's dating PACIFICA. Do you hear me?!" Tracey is now almost entirely muck, nothing left but his head and part of his right shoulder. "He gave up on Wendy to date Gravity Fall's biggest b—…" Whatever he's going to say dissolves into gurgling.
Tyrone-Two and Dipper both look at Quattro, who's melting a bit slower. The second clone looks back at them and shrugs as his torso spreads against the floor.
"I'm actually okay with this," Quattro says calmly.
A few seconds later and there's nothing left of Dipper's original clones but two sodden lumps of disintegrated paper.
Tyrone-Two sets the bottle back on Grunkle Stan's desk and helps Dipper down from the copier, undoing the knots of the rope until Dipper can wriggle his way free.
"Thanks," Dipper breathes, rubbing his stinging lips once the tape is ripped away. "But, why?"
"I'm not a clone of them," Tyrone-Two says, gesturing to the puddles. "I'm a clone of you."
Dipper slowly nods his understanding. "And everything that comes with it. Just a year."
"But what a year," Tyrone-Two says with a smile. "Speaking of, isn't Pacifica expecting you?"
"Oh, crud." Dipper checks his watch, but he's not sure when his clones accosted him. "I hope it hasn't been that long." He looks back to Tyrone-Two. "Wait, what about you?"
"I figured I'd go to the kitchen and try some of that expired stuff Grunkle Stan keeps in the top cabinet that he thinks we don't know about," Tyrone-Two says. "Melt in style, you know?"
Dipper's heart sinks. "Oh. Geez, man, I don't… I didn't want to make any more clones because you—… I don't want you to have to die…"
Tyrone-Two gives him an odd look, then punches him gently in the shoulder. "I'm not dying, Dipper. I'm you."
He doesn't know what to say to that.
Tyrone-Two waves a hand towards the door. "Better hurry, man, she's waiting. You know how well she waits."
Dipper is well aware that patience is not one of Pacifica's stronger virtues. He can imagine her hovering around the edges of the dance floor, waiting for him to show up. "She's gonna kill me."
"Just go down right away and ask her to dance," Tyrone-Two advises.
"You're right." Dipper straightens his clothing and takes a deep breath. "Wish me luck."
"Remember what Melody taught us!" Tyrone-Two calls after Dipper as he hurries out the door. "Sway and step! Sway and step!"
"Sway and step," Dipper repeats, muttering to himself as he hurries through the hall. "Sway, then step."
The party is in full swing when he arrives in the hallway just outside the short staircase above the dancefloor. He can't see the whole place from where he's standing, but it looks like at least twice as many people are in attendance as last time. Grunkle Stan must be ecstatic; Mabel certainly is. Dipper can see her gyrating wildly to the beat with Candy and Grenda, a small crowd cheering them on.
He steps inside and the pounding bass washes over him; he's momentarily dazzled by the spinning lights, bright and dark alternating in wild, fevered patterns. He blinks a couple times until his eyes adjust.
"Give it up party peeeeeeeeeeeeeps!" Soos exhorts into his microphone, and the crowd roars in reply. He's clearly in high-energy heaven. He spots Dipper and pumps one joyous fist into the air. "Dipper! Get in there, dude! I'm settin' this thing off!"
Dipper waves distractedly in reply, more concerned with finding Pacifica than joining the bouncing mob. Finally, he spots her on the far edge of the room, near the door. She seems to be making good on her agreement with Stan, greeting latecomers with a perfect, brilliant smile and just the right amount of elegant energy. She promises a first-rate experience by her presence alone, the Party Queen of Gravity Falls welcoming her subjects. It's only when the entering group moves on that her shoulders slump and she starts scanning the room, clearly hoping to see someone else.
Dipper girds himself and makes his way over to her.
Her eyes light up when he emerges from the crowd. "There you are!"
"Sorry," he apologizes, smoothing his shirt with his hands. "I got caught up with… party stuff."
She takes a step back and looks him over, blue eyes as sharp and discerning as any fashion photographer. She straightens out his shirt, brushing off some loose rope fibers (he's glad it's too dark for her to see what they are and ask any questions). She pulls his hat off his head and tosses it over the crowd towards Soos, who deftly plucks it out of the air and hangs it on his mic stand. Dipper remains still while she arranges his hair to her liking, every strand and curl carefully attended to.
"There," she says with satisfaction.
The current dance song comes to a pulsing close and a slow, sappy song takes its place. It's so on cue that Dipper wonders if Pacifica planned it.
"Here's a little somethin' to groove on," Soos says into the mic. "Guys, gals—you know what to do."
Pacifica takes Dipper's hand and leads him out onto the floor where the crowd of dancers is milling around, making their way to the snack table or looking for a partner. Soon it's just Dipper, Pacifica, and a handful of other couples. Mabel brushes by, face flushed and hair escaping her headband; she gives them an exaggerated wink.
Dipper just concentrates on his feet. Sway, then step with the beat. Rinse and repeat. After a moment or two he gets comfortable enough to look Pacifica in the eye. She seems to be enjoying herself. He is, too, if only because he gets to be so close to her.
"Where'd you go earlier?" she asks as they move together.
"Uh, it's a long story," he replies. Eager to change the subject, he says, "Looks like you're still the Party Queen of Gravity Falls."
"They know a good thing when they see it," she says loftily.
"Modest as ever," he jibes with a smile.
"Mabel helped," Pacifica admits. "Once people saw we're friends, I didn't get so many weird looks. We sang a duet and totally killed it."
"Sorry I missed it," he tells her, not at all sorry he missed it because karaoke is not his thing.
"We'll do another song later, all of us," she says decisively, and Dipper starts thinking of ways to disappear before then.
But the urge to slip out vanishes when she hugs him closer and puts her head against him as they dance, releasing his hand to drape her arms around his shoulders. His hands find their way to her hips and it's the first time he understands why people like to dance together. She is small and delicate in his arms, and even though he's smack in the middle of a party with who knows how many eyes on him, he feels like they are alone, together, in this moment.
Sway, then step.
Strange Party by The Bitterlife Typecast (Not On Label, 2012)