Heartbreaker
(Winter 2009)
4. Whodunnit?
"I'm not used to writing these listy things," Mabel complained on Saturday.
Dipper was reading the manual about how to play Ghosts and Ghoulies, the new gaming cartridge that Dad and Mom had given him for the real Valentine's Day that morning. Mabel had received a Knit Kit, since she was learning the skill (she had already produced scarves for the whole family, which they would wear if they ever went to a circus in sub-freezing weather). She hoped to move on to sweaters next.
But she'd set the kit aside. Unlike Dipper, she wasn't a manual-reading type. Instead, she had a legal pad (borrowed from Mr. Pines) and was stretched out on her stomach on the den floor drawing kittens and unicorns and struggling with how to build a list of suspects.
"Huh," Dipper said. "'Some ghosts you will en-count-er may have the appearance of normal living humans. One in ten of these will be b-e-n-i-g-n . . .'."
"Begin," Mabel said without looking up.
"No, this is a different word. Just a minute." He hopped up, ran upstairs to his room, and came down with The American Heritage Dictionary for Boys and Girls, a relic of the 1950s that he had inherited from their grandfather Sherman.
"It's just one word, Brobro," Mabel said.
"But it's an important one. Benign, benign . . . 'Harmless. Gentle or kind.' " He turned back to the game manual. "'One in ten of these will be benign, while the others range from mischievous to ma—malev-o-lent.'"
"Bet that means not benign," Mabel murmured as she put a star on the tip of a unicorn horn.
"You're right," Dipper said. "Malevolent is 'hurtful, malicious, harmful.'"
"Just play the game and learn as you go," Mabel suggested.
"A good adventurer should be informed," Dipper told her. "Besides, this is the way I do things. And it keeps me from thinking about . . . other stuff."
As Mabel started to draw a unicorn with a cat riding on its back, she heard Dipper sniffle. She gave him a sideways glance. Though he lay on the floor, his chin propped on his elbows, the game manual open in front of him, he didn't seem to be looking at it. And then she saw the gleam of a tear on his cheek.
She scooted over to him and put a hand on his back. "Hey, hey," she said softly.
Dipper was really crying, but silently, not bawling. "If I'd just got one card," he muttered.
"Somebody's playing a trick on you," Mabel assured him. "I told you—I put a card in for you, a nice one with two cats dancing on the front and inside it said, "We're purr-fect for each other, brother." The last word was 'Valentine,' but I crossed that out and wrote in 'brother." It was a real cute card. And I know I dropped it in your bag, and I saw Susan put one in, too. Somebody stole your cards."
"That doesn't make sense," Dipper said, wiping his eyes with the heels of his hands. "They were just stupid cards. Red and pink cardboard."
"Somebody did it to hurt your feelings," Mabel said. "I bet it was Kurt. He only got like six cards, and he probably wanted somebody else to feel worse than he did. He's mean."
"It's not the cards, so much," Dipper insisted. "Mabel, everybody laughed at me and called me names."
"Just one name," Mabel said as if that made it better. "Dipstick. That's Kurt, though. He started that. When you showed you were upset, the others piled on."
Dipper remembered a nature show on TV that had horrified Mabel. The documentary was explaining "pecking order" and one segment showed a flock of white chickens. Then one received a red mark on its back from a marker. The others turned on it and attacked it until the crew rescued the marked chicken. The narrator said, "This chicken will be removed from the flock and raised separately until it molts and the red spot disappears. Chickens respond instinctively to a member of the flock that appears injured and will gang up to peck it to death."
"It was just, you know, instinct," Mabel said. "Somebody starts it, and then everybody just joins in without thinking. I bet some of the littler kids in class were scared that if they didn't point and name-call, Kurt would beat up on them."
"You wouldn't like it if people were making fun of you," Dipper said.
Mabel rolled onto her back. "I don't know. I'm pretty self-confident. I think I could laugh it off. Insults don't upset me, they just roll off like a duck falling off a log. Or whatever it is."
"We're not the same," he said. "I'd like to walk up and talk to strangers, but I'm always afraid they'll make fun of me or get mad. I'd like it if Susan had given me just one tiny little Valentine, even one of the cheap punch-out kind. But when Kurt called me out and started it—I had to run."
"Yeah, that's why I made you the comfort card," Mabel said.
"Thanks for trying," Dipper said, his smile sad. "How'd you even find me?"
"That's always where you hide," Mabel said. "Mr. Peavy never locks the janitor's closet. I think he lost the key. When you had a bloody nose last year you went there and hid, remember? I tracked you by the little drops of blood. I took you to see Nurse Balmer, remember?"
Right, that was in the springtime when they were out on the playground. Dipper and Mabel had just jumped off the swings when a soccer ball filled Dipper's field of vision and the next thing he knew, it had smacked him in the face and he was lying on the grass. When he rolled over, he saw blood dripping, and he pinched his nose and ran inside the school.
Mabel had found him and she gave him a wad of tissues—she tore them off one of the enormous rolls in the janitor's closet—and walked him to the nurse's office. Miss Balmer had him lean forward and pinch his nose until the bleeding stopped, then had told him it wasn't broken, but he was getting black eyes. She even found him red tee shirt that he could change into. It was baggy, but better than his blood-spotted light blue shirt.
Miss Balmer even walked them back to the third-grade classroom and explained to the teacher what had happened. The class had just come back inside, and Dipper thought that no one, not their teacher or the other students, had even noticed that he had not returned with them.
That evening Mom had Dipper and Mabel go through the story twice to make sure that Dipper had not been fighting. It took a week for the black eyes to fade to purple and then green. During that time Dipper got permission to wear sunglasses even inside.
They didn't make him feel cool. They made him feel like a chicken with a red spot on its back.
But Mr. Peavy was at least not a grump. He was, well, the word might be benign. He always greeted Dipper and Mabel, though he was at the age when all nine-year-olds looked pretty much alike, so his bushy gray mustache would twitch up and he would say, "Hi, kid. How's it going today?" He usually called Mabel "Pony Girl," because she wore her hair in a ponytail and her clothes often had pictures of ponies or unicorns on them. "Having a good day, Pony Girl?"
Once when Dipper had been sent to the office for something he totally didn't do—some kid had left one of those firecracker poppers on the floor and when he'd stepped on it, it exploded and scared him badly. Mr. Peavy, mopping up a place in the hall where a first-grader had thrown up, had asked him, "What's wrong, kid?"
Dipper had explained. Mr. Peavy knelt near him and said, "Happened to me once. Somebody jammed a fountain pen in the pencil sharpener, and when I tried to sharpen my pencil, the teacher blamed me and sent me to the principal. Buck up, kid. Just tell the lady the truth and hold your head up."
Dipper had managed to do that. "I didn't have any firecrackers," he said, though he was white and shaking with dread. "I'm scared of them."
The principal had sent him back with a note. "Coming to see me was punishment enough." His teacher had let it go.
Well, anyway.
Mabel asked, "Would you have just stayed in there if I hadn't found you?"
"I thought I'd come out when I heard other kids going to be picked up. Join some line and then find Mom's car."
"Dipper, please don't let them get to you. When they see they upset you, that just makes them worse."
"I just feel so—so alone."
"Hey," Mabel said. "You're never alone. I'm there, me, Mabel. I've got your back. Now come on, let's see who played this rotten trick on you."
They settled down, Mabel turned to a fresh page in the pad and said, "How do you spell 'suspects?'"
"Don't start with that," Dipper said. "Start with what happened."
Mabel began:
Everybody was suppose to bring Valentines for everybody else.
The decorated bags were set up on top of the book cases on 3 sides of the room.
3 times different groups went round puting card in the bags.
Everybody but Dipper got some cards.
Dipper's bag was empty except for a little torn piece of paper.
But we know that Mabel and Susan both put a card in Dipper's bag.
Maybe more people did to. We should find out.
"All right," Dipper said, getting into the process despite the fact that he still felt hurt. "So put this down. The mystery is that two people put cards in, but when I—put down Dipper—looked, there were no cards. That means that somebody must have taken them out."
"Took them out," Mabel said.
"No, with have you need taken."
Mabel muttered, "Have you took your bath? Have you taken your bath? You're right, Dipper, that's what mom says. 'That means . . . that . . . some body . . . must have . . . taken . . . a bath—wait, that's not right." She crossed out "a bath" and replaced it with "Dipper's cards."
"Where did the cards go?" Dipper asked.
"Um . . . maybe somebody grabbed them and stuffed them in their own bags."
"Did you see anybody with like fifty cards?" he asked.
"No. I don't think anybody really got twenty-six cards. I got twenty, and that's counting the one from you. Thanks, Brobro. It was a cute unicorn card!"
"I thought you might like it," he said.
"So some people didn't bring cards, 'cause they forgot, and others just brought like four to give to their bffs. But anyhow, nobody had a huge haul, or they would have bragged."
"Maybe, I don't know, they just threw them in the trash?" Dipper said.
"Let's make Mom take us to school early on Monday," Mabel said. "We could ask Mr. Peavy if he noticed."
"I don't know if I want to do that," Dipper said.
"Why? It'd be one way to find out you did get some cards."
Dipper shrugged. "Yeah, but that would just show that some kid in our class is just incredibly mean. I don't like to think of people being so . . . you know."
"So evil," Mabel said. "But look at it this way. If we find out who it was, we can cut off this reign of terror before it becomes a thunderstorm of crime."
Dipper looked at her. "I know those words, but they don't go together."
"Whatever. It pretty much has to be a kid in our class, right? Mrs. Wright was the only grown-up, and she wouldn't do something like that. She likes you. You're her star math pupil."
Even that praise from Mabel made Dipper feel uneasy. He knew he wasn't always confident in solving math problems. It was true that Mrs. Wright had written praises for his ability in his grade reports, but they made him feel like a fake, as if he had just been lucky and would be caught out next time.
"I guess it must be a kid," he said at last.
"And if we can find out who, we can rescue him from a life of crime!"
"Or her."
Mabel said quietly, "Yeah, or her." She bit her lip. "If it was one of the girls—that would just about crush you, wouldn't it?"
"It would be pretty bad," Dipper said.
On her pad, Mabel printed: "MONDAY. INTERRORGATE MR PEAVY."
She frowned at the sentence. Something was off—but close enough for Mabel work. She told Dipper, "We'll think about it on Monday. Show me how to chase the spooks in your new game."
"Start the console and put in the cartridge. I've got to finish reading the manual."
"You be you, Brobro," Mabel said in her most comforting voice. "You be you."
