One More Spring
(April 2017)
4: Senior Prom and LAX
Wendy and Teek flew down the evening before Piedmont's Senior Prom, and Dipper and Wendy picked them up. The twins' mom had worked out the arrangements: Wendy would have the guest room, Teek could sleep in Dipper's room, and Dipper would take the foldout bed in the basement. He didn't really mind that, because it was a huge finished basement that served as the family library, he had a compact bathroom down there, and if he couldn't sleep, he had hundreds of books to choose from.
He did wonder, though, about Teek. Teek, in Dipper's room, would be just down the hall past the mixed-used music and craft room from Mabel's. Heck, Mabel had slipped down the hall to wake up Dipper many times in the middle of the night. However, prior to the weekend, Dipper had made Mabel, while showing both her hands and both bare feet, promise that she wouldn't sneak into Teek's room, or vice-versa, or even bring up the subject, and if Teek should mention it, she would say no.
"I promise," Mabel said. "Why'd you want me to take off my shoes?"
"Because I know you," Dipper said. "I wanted to make sure you weren't crossing your fingers or your toes."
"OK, give you that one," Mabel had told him.
Teek had managed to get a half-day off from school—he, like Dipper and Mabel, was a Senior, and seniors had their privileges—so the plane landed in Oakland at a little past four-thirty that afternoon. Dipper drove Helen Wheels back from the airport—Teek and Mabel were in the back seat, making up for missed kissportunities, and Wendy rode shotgun, relatively quiet. Her prom dress and Teek's tux were both safely stored in the trunk.
"What's the news from Gravity Falls?" Dipper asked Wendy as they pulled out of the airport lot on their way to the Pines's house.
"Oh, 'bout the same as always," Wendy said. "Abuelita came back middle of the week. Soos is sprucing up—some paint, stuff like that. We're opening the Shack next Tuesday. Um, any mysteries? Crop circles! We've had a few of 'em. Of course, nothing much is growing yet, but in some fallow cornfields a few circles have showed up, dry cornstalks flattened out, you know, and there was one in the tall grass near the Lonely Man. Dr. Pines came and investigated."
"And the results were inconclusive," Dipper said.
"Yeah, he tell you?"
Dipper shook his head. "No, but if he'd found anything, he would have let me know. Are these circles complex ones, or—"
"Just perfectly round flattened-out vegetation," Wendy said. "No suspicious signs or symbols. Soos is looking for new merch—"
"Prints!" Mabel yelled from the back seat.
"Ow, my ear!" Teek said.
"What was that?" Wendy asked.
Dipper began, "Mabel did this great painting—"
"In oils!"
"—in oil paints," Dipper continued, "of the Mystery Shack. Mr. Stottard—he's the art teacher—arranged to have a hundred color prints made from it—"
"Two hundred!" Mabel said.
"Mabel, you tell it," Dipper said.
"No, I'm too modest. You do it, Dipper!"
"OK, but don't interrupt. He was going to do a hundred, but Dad gave him the money to make it two hundred instead. Mabel's giving one to every teacher she ever had in high school, and there's still a hundred and seventy left over, so—"
"Soos can sell 'em at twenty bucks apiece and make tons of money!" Mabel said. "And I'll split it with him fifty-fifty!"
Wendy gave Dipper a sideways glance. Posters and such weren't always big sellers. "I'll tell him," she said.
"Yeah, and I'm gonna sign and number these—start with a hundred, and call 'em limited editions, personally numbered and signed by the artist. He should clean up!"
"I'll tell him," Wendy repeated. She reached to caress Dipper's neck. I know Soos will go for it. Is it a good picture?
—It's fantastic, Wendy. You'll see it as soon as we get home—Dad had it framed, and it's hanging in the entryway.
OK. I hope Mabes won't be disappointed if they don't all sell out on the first day!
Sure enough, at the house Alex Pines showed the painting off first thing. Despite her earlier misgivings, Wendy was impressed, and Teek just squeezed Mabel's hand as if he couldn't believe his girl had such artistic talent. "Yeah, I think prints are a great idea," Wendy said just as Wanda Pines came in.
Wanda welcomed them and said, "Dinner is ready! I know it's early, but I thought you might be hungry."
Mrs. Pines had outdone herself with a big roast-turkey dinner with all the trimmings—as though she were making up for the subdued Thanksgiving the family had observed the previous fall, when they were still mourning the death of Alex's mother, Monica. She hugged Wendy, asked her about the flight down, and hugged Teek not quite so tightly.
First Mabel and Dipper hauled in Wendy's and Teek's baggage and hung their prom clothes, and then everyone gathered in the dining room for dinner. "Welcome to the house," Alex Pines said. "Did you like the painting-?"
"Dad!" Mabel said, her eyes on the drumstick he was carving. "Don't bore Teek and Wendy by bragging about my painting. They saw it and they liked it. Let's talk about something interesting, like how I designed my own prom dress!"
Dad didn't take the subtle hint, but he did change the subject: "Wendy, have you made any improvements to the Dart?"
They finished their meal, Teek and Wendy offered to help with clean-up, and Mom firmly refused. "You're our guests! Mabel and Dipper can help, though."
It took a while—Wanda had gone overboard with the side dishes, and since there was more than a dishwasher load, Dipper wound up washing a sink full of pots and pains while Mabel dried and stored. They heard occasional bursts of laughter from the living room as Teek and Wendy chatted with their parents. Dipper also heard the occasional grinding of Mabel's teeth.
At about ten, the parents tactfully went off to bed, and Dipper and Mabel had a chance to catch up. In addition to crop circles, there had been sightings in Gravity Falls of a possible leprechaun—a little guy somewhat larger than Gnomes, wearing green. "The Gnomes won't talk about him," Wendy said. "But they say he's bad luck. So far nothing's happened—somebody saw it run across their lawn one night, somebody else said it scooted across the road while they were driving and they glimpsed it just for a second in the headlights, stuff like that. Nothing much to go on. I figure you'll want to investigate if people are still seeing it this summer," Wendy told Dipper.
"My dad says that leprechauns aren't like the American stories at all," said Teek, whose father had been born to parents who had been born and raised in Ireland before emigrating to the USA. "He heard tales from my grandpa about them. He says they can be dangerous."
"We'll put that on our list for investigating," Dipper said.
They talked a little bit about this and that—everybody was doing fine at school, Teek's admission to his film-arts college out in Georgia, south of Atlanta, had been confirmed, and he even had a dorm room all to himself—
"Waugh!" Mabel said. "No fair. I'm gonna be crammed in with three divas—"
"You don't know they'll be divas," Dipper pointed out.
"Trust me, they will be!" Mabel insisted. "But I'll bet it's gonna cost you an arm and a leg, Teek, private dorm room!"
"They're all private," Teek murmured. "And, um, it's paid for by my scholarship."
"WAUGH!" Mabel repeated, with more emphasis.
Not much point in describing Dipper's and Teek's tuxedos. They were pretty standard, black tuxes, black ties, a touch of color in the red cummerbunds, that's about it. The girls, though, looked gorgeous. Both had their hair done Saturday morning, and when in the late afternoon they came downstairs, they were visions. Mabel's off-the-shoulder pink prom dress, accented in white, made her look shapely and alluring, and Teek's fingers trembled as he pinned on her corsage of matching pink roses.
Wendy's dress was apple-green, satin, showing not quite as much décolletage as Mabel's. Her long hair was done up in a beautiful coif, and she wore a string of pearls at her throat. This time—unlike at her own senior prom, which had been the previous year—Wendy's corsage, white dendrobium orchids, was not intended for wear on the wrist. Dipper proudly pinned it on.
Next came the obligatory photos in front of the stairwell, and then Dad re-hung Mabel's painting to be in the background and more photos, and finally the limo showed up, and Mom hugged everybody, sniffled a little, and said, "All right, Prom Night, I know. So we're not setting a curfew, but you behave yourselves. And call us when you're ready to come home, and Alex will come and pick you up."
"Not paying for the limo for all night long!" Alex explained, momentarily sounding like his uncle Stan.
At the Prom they didn't attract the most attention—though Mabel might have been in the running for Prom Queen early on, when everything shook out, Cathy Harrison, probably the prettiest and most popular girl in the class, won the title, and Chug Chagall, football quarterback, was named King of the Prom. Dipper had not remotely been up for consideration, mainly because he had very few friends except for the track team and he was the quiet type of guy that people just didn't think about.
No matter. The pressure was off, and the four had a great time. A lot of guys wanted to dance with Mabel, though Teek got his full share of dances. Lots of people came up to be introduced to Dipper's date, but—and this secretly pleased Dipper—she looked so beautiful and so poised that she intimidated the guys, and they didn't have the nerve to ask her for a dance. So he had her in his arms all night long, except for the fast dances.
He did get some comments now and then after a slow dance. A girl he recognized but whose name he did not know said, "Dipper! You're a great dancer!"
Ah, if she'd only known it was because of Wendy's and Dipper's telepathic link!
The Prom lasted until midnight. Then Mabel called their dad, and he drove Helen Wheels to the school gym to pick them up, and Mabel drove them back to the house and let him out, and the kids spent the early morning hours visiting the clubs that were open to teens on Prom Night and seeing some of the sights, and they wound up at dawn parked on Grizzly Peak, overlooking the Bay and gazing at the lights way off in San Francisco and the traffic on the distant Golden Gate Bridge.
And finally, sleepy but happy, they settled in for a post-Prom breakfast at the Alta, an upscale restaurant with a great view of the city. Wendy took the wheel on the way back to the house. Teek and Mabel had conked out in the back seat, and Dipper leaned against Wendy, exhausted but elated. For him the high point of the whole dance had come around eleven, when a girl named Teal, a friend of Mabel's that he knew casually, had been standing talking to them as they all had a cup of punch and had suddenly gasped, staring at Wendy's left hand—and her ring.
"Wait a minute!" she's said. "You—you're engaged! Uh, not to, I mean to, to—?"
"Yup," Wendy said. She kissed Dipper's cheek. "To my fiancé here."
Two track meets later—and in the second one, Dipper eked out another first-place, just barely edging out one of the tall guys who'd beaten him before—after having cleared it all with Mom and Dad and after having arranged things at school (it wasn't hard; even the teachers were getting casual about the soon-to-depart Senior class), Dipper and Mabel drove to the airport at nine o'clock on Friday morning, boarded an airplane for the ninety-minute flight to LAX, and settled back, Dipper to read the airline magazine and Mabel to throw up.
She'd sort of learned to control it, but on this occasion she didn't want to u pre-dose herself with Dramamine because it made her sleepy. Fortunately, she had the window seat, with Dipper between her and a shocked-looking middle-aged woman, and Mabel used only one airsickness bag. "That's out of the way!" she said brightly, wiping her mouth with a tissue and ringing for the attendant to come and remove the bag.
The rest of the trip was uneventful and short. They were to meet Teek and Wendy near a coffee shop outside the security checkpoint of Terminal Five, so they walked, wheeling their carry-on bags behind them, a long way until they got there—and they saw Wendy jump up from a table and wave. "You beat us here!" Mabel said after the obligatory hug. "Where's Teek?"
"Men's room," Wendy said. "He'll be back in a minute. Want some coffee, Dip?"
"What I want is this," he said, kissing her.
"Aw, get a room!" Mabel said, but that didn't stop her from snapping a photo. A scrapbookprotunity was a scrapbookprotunity, after all.
"What's the plan?" Dipper asked as they sat around a small table.
"Soon as Teek gets back, we go to pick-up. As we start out, I'll call the contact number and they'll send a limo for us."
"Ooh-la-la!" exclaimed Mabel. "Two limo rides in one month! I could get used to this!"
Teek returned, he and Mabel embraced and—Dipper was glad to see—did not entwine themselves quite as much as they often did while completing the exercise. Then they all hiked to the lower-level passenger pick-up zone as Wendy made the call.
"Four of us," Dipper heard her tell someone. "Two ladies, two gentlemen." She winked at Mabel. "OK, one of the girls has real long red hair, and she's wearing a green lightweight sweater and dark-green slacks and a blue-and-white baseball cap. The other girl has brown hair and she's wearing a deep pink sweater with an embroidery of a ghost and the word "BOO" on the front and a brushed-denim skirt. The guys both have dark hair and are wearing sports jackets, one dark blue, one tan, and no ties." She swiveled her phone and asked, "Where's your headgear, Dip?"
He fished in his backpack and pulled it out. "One of the guys," Wendy said, "is bareheaded—black hair—and the other is wearing a brown Ushanka. Ushanka. It's a hat! A fur hat, you know—yeah, a trapper's cap! Right, we're on the way."
As they found the place, she said, "Didn't know what a Ushanka was!"
"So many people!" Mabel exclaimed. "Hey, anybody see any movie stars?" She craned her neck, but no actors appeared. Still, she was Mabel. "Hello, friends!" she called to passers-by. "We're here to tape a big-name TV show!"
Nobody stopped for her autograph, though.
"I think that's our ride, guys!" Wendy said, waving. A black Lincoln with the red-and-white Webflix logo stenciled on the door glided to the curb, and an athletic-looking young uniformed driver hopped out and hustled over. "Corduroy party?" he asked.
"That's us, cutie!" Mabel said.
The driver opened a rear door. "I'll store your luggage," he said. "Help yourself to anything from the fridge."
They sat facing each other—though Dipper made Mabel change seats. "You do not want to be with Mabel riding in a vehicle where she's facing backwards," he told Teek. So Dipper and Wendy took the backward-facing ones, and Teek and Mabel rode across from them. Mabel took the driver at his word, passing around water and then stuffing snacks into her pockets.
"Expecting a famine?" Dipper asked her.
"You never know, Brobro!" she responded.
The trunk and front door slammed and a moment later, the driver's voice came over a speaker: "Everybody fasten your seatbelts. We're heading for the Webflix Studios in Burbank. We're driving north on 405 and then we'll turn east on the Ventura Freeway. If there's not a crash, we should arrive at the studio around eleven forty-five, and you guys are invited for lunch with the stars. The recording starts at two this afternoon and runs until five. If you want, I can talk about the sights, or if you want privacy, just hit the mute button—that's the blue one."
"Talk away, sweetie!" Mabel said. "Tell us when we can see the Hollywood sign!"
The driver chuckled. "Well, in Burbank we'll be sort of behind it. But tomorrow the recording session starts at ten a.m. and ends around one. When are you guys returning home?"
"Sunday morning," Wendy said. "We're staying at the—"
"Lawernce in Burbank, I know," the driver told her. "Just around the corner from the studio. OK, tomorrow I'm off-duty after noon, but if you'd like, I can take you on a sight-seeing trip starting around two. After the taping, you guys have some lunch and I'll meet you at your hotel if you want to trip. Three hours, a hundred and fifty dollars."
"Done!" Mabel said. "You are a real sweetheart! What's your name?"
"Leon Yansen, with a 'Y.'"
Dipper asked, "Are you trying to find a producer for a screenplay?"
"I'm working on one! How'd you know?" Leon asked.
"Just a hunch," Dipper said. "Yeah, the tour would be great. Glad to support a writer!"
To Mabel's disappointment, the trip to Burbank didn't show them very much—a few fleeting vistas, but, let's face it, the view from a freeway is mainly of things that spring up around a freeway. They reached the studio, Leon pulled into a slot, and he got out and opened the door for them. "Here you go," he said, handing them cardboard tags with strings, the kind you get when you check a bag in an airport. "Everybody write your full names here, and I'll drop these off at the hotel for you. I'll run you over there after the taping ends this afternoon at four, and you can pick up your luggage at the desk when you check in. Keep anything you'll need."
"I've got my backpack," Dipper said. The other three stuffed various things in there, and Mabel carried—unusually for someone so talented at Hammerspace—a purse. Leon tied the tags to the bags, and the four followed his directions into a spacious reception area.
Wendy told the lady at the big semi-circular desk who they were, and the woman brightened up immediately. "We're expecting you!" she said. "I'll ring for a page and we'll get you all set."
Mabel roamed the reception room, gawking at photos on the walls. She recognized most of the actors—"Brandon! Leeva—I love her! Ooh, Cliff and Creighton! So cute!" and so on.
"Ready for lunch?" someone asked.
Dipper whirled around. "Jasyn Torque!" he exclaimed.
"Yeah, hi, man," said the lean, sort-of young guy, grinning. He was dressed casually, rumpled white shirt, khakis, white sneakers. He gave Wendy a peck on the cheek and said, "Wendy! Good to see you again. Yeah, I'm Jasyn Torque, a Ghost Harasser, guys."
Wendy introduced them—Mabel insisted that they have their photos taken then and there, so the receptionist obliged. Then Jasyn led them to a small commissary, where crew members went through a cafeteria line and then sat at round tables. "Uh, where is Craig, Mr. Torque?" Dipper asked timidly.
"He's already in hair and make-up," Jasyn said. "He's an old guy, takes him a lot longer to look presentable. Hey, we'll have to get you guys back there too, because you'll be on-stage with us—"
"We will?" Dipper asked, his voice sounding like a boy soprano's striving for a high C.
"Yep, for the interview, and by the way, everybody calls me Jace. Except on the air. Then we're Jasyn and Craig, but he likes it if you call him 'Buttface.'"
"I am so gonna—" Mabel started.
"Nuh-uh," Dipper told her.
They got their sandwiches and drinks and sat with one of Dipper's idols, mostly talking about the Shack and Gravity Falls—Jasyn said the guys had enjoyed their trip up there, and the whole place was so weird it was cool—and Dipper kept forgetting to swallow. Jasyn said, "Our only disappointment was that we didn't get any ghostly activity on camera."
Dipper gulped and started to say something that came out garbled. He started again: "In the attic bedroom there's sort of a haunted closet. I can probably get you some footage of something we call the Invisible Wizard."
"Before July first?" Jasyn asked, sounding interested.
"Pretty sure, yeah."
"Let's talk later, then, Dipper," Jasyn said.
"Sure thing—Jace," Dipper said, without stopping to wonder if he had just stepped into trouble.