A/N: Huge thanks to those of you who have reviewed/favorited/followed this so far. Your support is much appreciated. I tried to put a little love heart here but FAN FICTION DOT NET doesn't allow you to write a less-than symbol for whatever flipping reason :(
It also didn't allow me to type the name of the website! What kind of dictatorship is this?!
The sun was high in the sky, beaming down on the clearing that the Corduroy cabin sat in. It had been a dry month, and the dirt below Dipper's feet was cracked all the way along the driveway. Dan didn't notice Dipper until he stepped onto the yellowing lawn, and his glare was as cold and unflinching as ever, but Dipper couldn't let that deter him, because it had been two weeks.
Two weeks since his girlfriend had punched him. The bruise had healed quick, and had only hurt when he washed his face in the shower. He told Stan he had been in a fight at the Skull Fracture, which he assumed the old man would have shrugged off, but instead Stan sat him down on the couch and made him promise he was taking his medicine, asked him if he needed to return to psychotherapy, threatened to call his parents if it happened again. His uncle didn't appear to care for Dipper's well-being all too often, but when he did, he was persistent.
The morning after it happened, Wendy had come over and hugged him for an eternity, but she hadn't said anything, and that was the problem he was still faced with. Wendy walked and talked like she was the queen of Gravity Falls, like she was invincible, and now Dipper knew that that wasn't true – there was a chapter of her life that Dipper had never been aware of. Only once, since the night at Lookout Point, had he gently reminded her that she could tell him anything, but she had fallen silent for a moment, eyes fixed on the road, and said, "there's nothing to tell," in exactly the kind of way that told him there was something to tell.
And Dipper knew, of course, that it was a sensitive subject, and he would never hound his girlfriend for a story she wasn't willing to tell, but he also knew that he didn't fare well being kept in the dark, a trait that was obvious if you peered into his room at 3 A.M. and saw him lying on the wooden floor, his hands pressed to his temples, periodically reaching up and flicking on the lamp by the bed that was too hot to sleep in, jotting something down in his notebook, anything he could remember from the thousands of conversations he had had with Wendy that might hint at the missing piece of history, scrawls and scribbles he would look over in the morning and shake his head at and decide must have been the ramblings of a madman who had snuck into the attic in the middle of the night.
It was easier than admitting he was the madman.
Dan was in his chair on the porch, in a white tank top, patches of sweat under his arms. He didn't have a beer in his hand yet, just a pitcher of water balancing on the railing, so he might have been more open to talking than normal. Dipper walked right up the steps, and stood next to the open front door. "I know you hate my guts, but I need to talk to you about something."
He lowered his eyebrows, and beads of sweat trickled into the crease on his forehead. "Is that right?"
"It's about Wendy. Obviously."
"Go on."
Dipper looked out into the woods, squinted against the brightness, and searched for how best to phrase what he wanted to say. He hadn't planned on reaching this point in the conversation. "Has she been distant with you lately?"
"Distant?"
"Yeah, like, not talking as much. I know she's been spending more time in her room, does she talk to you at all?"
He scratched his beard. "I haven't noticed anything different. Why?"
"Well, she's been distant with me. And I know why, I'm pretty sure, but I don't know... why."
"Has anyone ever told you that you're bad at talking?"
"What?"
"You're bad at it. It's like everything you want to say, you don't have the confidence to say it. It's uncomfortable to watch."
Dipper was more astounded than angry. "Well, to be honest, Dan, you're not the easiest person to talk to yourself."
"Then why are you here?"
"I'm not here to chit-chat, I'm here because I'm worried about your daughter and you're the only person that might know more about her than I do."
He scratched his chin again and shrugged. "Alright. Go on."
"Look, I'm not gonna sugar coat it. We've been dating a while now. We've talked about taking things to... you know, we've been talking about... you know what I'm trying to say." He nearly gagged on the word, but he said, "sex. Except, when we, um, tried, she couldn't. And I kinda pieced together that someone must have... done something to hurt her. At some point in the past." Only when Dipper heard himself out loud did he begin to question the sanity behind asking a man why his daughter wouldn't have sex with him, but that was how his overly inquisitive mind worked. Shoot first, berate himself later. "Do you know anything about that?"
By the look on Dan's face, Dipper had overstepped, and for the fifth time since arriving he considered bolting into the woods, but Dan sighed and rubbed his forehead and said, "yeah, I know something about that." He stood up, the chair creaking below him, he towered over Dipper, stretched his back, and nodded at the front door. "Go on in. Have a seat."
Dipper had not misheard – Dan Corduroy had just invited him into his home. He even offered Dipper a drink, but Dipper said no. Dan sauntered into the kitchen adjoining the living room and took a beer out of the fridge, chugged what must have been half the can by the time he had sat down, in the armchair opposite the couch. For a moment, Dan stared at the coffee table between them, which was riddled with mail and magazines and left very little room for coffee. He set his beer atop a white envelope, and droplets of water descended the can and soaked into the paper. Dipper took the time to survey the room, a room he had never spent much time in or paid attention to over the years – it had purely acted as a passage to Wendy's bedroom. The most modern thing in the cabin was the plasma television beside Dan's armchair; other than that, the furniture was a mustard yellow with a brown floral pattern encompassing it, the dining set was made of wood, and lining one entire wall was a wooden cabinet with tessellated glass panes that reminded Dipper of a church window, without the color, and behind the glass was an array of white and blue porcelains, more plates and cups and bowls than any average family would ever need, all also adorned with floral patterns. He got the sense that the decor was all the work of Wendy's mom, though he knew very little about the woman, and that Dan and his family had preserved the cabin in her memory.
"She met a boy in college," Dan said. "Cameron... something-or-other. I forget the name. She came home at Thanksgiving – this was in her first semester – and she told us all about him. Clearly in love with the guy. They got together just before Christmas, and I was really happy for her. Wendy, she's always had trouble fitting in, god bless her, even if she never cared about it. As soon as she went away to college she fell out of contact with her friends from high school. I don't think she ever got along with them that well."
Dipper glanced down at his hands, stopped himself from biting a nail. He couldn't recall the last time he had spoken to his friends from back home. In fact, he realized he had missed a couple of birthday texts just in the last two months.
"So I was glad she was making friends down there. Glad she'd found a boyfriend." He paused, eyes glazed over, cast down at the floor. "Then one day – in March, I think – she comes home from Denver. Unannounced. Just pulls up in a taxi outside, uses her key to get in, and goes straight to her room and shuts the door. I was sitting right here at the time. I panicked, because something must have been wrong, so I get up and I go open her door. She's laying in her bed, facing away from me, and I go to put a hand on her shoulder but she flinches, and brings her knees up to her chest. So I went around to the other side of the bed. I was shouting at her, I think, to tell me what was wrong, which was the worst thing I could have done. The second time I tried to touch her shoulder she hit me–" He pointed to his cheek – "right here. After that I just sat at the end of her bed till she stopped crying, and after a few hours she sat up and told me what happened. This Cameron guy, he raped her. He came to her dorm room really early in the morning, drunk from the night before. Kept trying to get her to go to bed with him, but she wouldn't. So he forced himself on her. Soon as it was over, she took the first bus away from campus and spent all day traveling back here."
Dan's face twisted in disgust. He reached for his beer and drank the rest of the can, crushed it in his palm, and in a surprising display of manners, covered his mouth when he belched. Then, he spat on the floor. "Sorry," he said. "Every time I talk about this shit I want to go kill him."
"What did you do?" Dipper asked. "When she told you."
"Well, I went to go kill him. Didn't make it to my car, though. Wendy ran ahead of me and took my keys and I wasn't about to wrestle them off her."
"What did she do after that? Did she move back home?"
"She stayed here about a week. Then she came in here and told me she needed to get back to her classes, so I drove her back. You know Wendy. She's strong. She wasn't about to let one guy scare her away from her education."
"But she dropped out," Dipper said. "In her second year."
"That wasn't anything to do with him. At least as far as I know. In fact, he transferred to a different school after Wendy's freshman year."
"Wait, he didn't get arrested?"
"Not that I ever heard of."
"But you called the police, right?"
"Yeah, and I filed a report. Never heard of it going anywhere."
"What do you mean, 'going anywhere?' All they had to do was find the guy on campus and arrest him."
He stood up and cracked his neck. "Kid, now you're asking me things I couldn't ever know." He went to the fridge and got another drink, and puttered around in the kitchen.
Dipper picked at the skin on his lip and thought back to Doug Tanner and Cindy Bell, the year-long case of he said, she said, which, judging from his Facebook profile, had done no permanent damage to Doug's reputation – he was a quarterback at a university in Austin, Texas, and he had found a new group of people to worship him. The fact that any of these people could jump around the country, serially ruining lives while thriving in their own made Dipper sick to his stomach. "This is why you hate me," he said.
Dan sunk back into his chair. "I don't hate you. Wendy didn't date another guy the whole time she was in college. It was, what, two years till she got with you? She could have brought home Jesus Christ himself and I would have looked at him the same way I looked at you."
"Don't you think that's kind of insulting?" Dipper blurted out. "When have I ever given you the impression that I'd hurt your daughter?"
He shook his head. "It's like I said. I don't see whoever you are as a person, son, all I see is another man who might hurt my little girl."
Dipper shook Dan's hand and left the Corduroy residence unsatisfied with the newfound knowledge, but somewhere between there and Main Street, he realized that that was sort of the point. There was no satisfying ending to Wendy's story, certainly no just ending, because even if a rapist was behind bars, the damage had already been done. Wendy couldn't trust Dipper. Not fully, anyway. And it pained him to know that around the world, at this very minute, there were more people being robbed of their trust, their comfort, their bodies, and there wasn't a thing he could do about it. And as he thought about this, the hopelessness of it all, he switched over to autopilot, and all he knew was that he wanted to see his girlfriend, and to never again mention the things that ate her up inside, if that was what it would take to keep her happy.
He stopped by the flower shop and picked out a bouquet of tulips, wrapped them in red paper, and only offered non-committal responses to the chatty lady behind the counter. He walked down the street to the bowling alley, enveloped by the coolest AC in town as he pushed open the door, pop music loud over the speakers but unintelligible behind the sounds of falling pins. Wendy was in the middle of the ring-shaped counter between the bar and the arcade, her friend Kelsey sitting on it, beside the cash register, both of them in their red and blue polo shirts and black pants. Kelsey pointed at Dipper and Wendy turned around, a smile pushing at her cheeks. He passed her the flowers over the counter and she cocked her head.
"What did you do?" she said. "Did you break something?"
"No," Dipper said. "Unless you count the record I just broke for being the best boyfriend."
"I don't know about that. Maybe if you got your hair cut you'd be in the running." She took off his cap and ruffled his curls, then leaned forward and kissed him. "These are pretty. Thank you. But seriously, what did you do?"
"I didn't do anything. I've just been thinking about you a lot today and... thinking about all the things you deserve. Flowers being the least of those things."
She reached out and traced a zig-zag pattern along his arm with her finger. "You're sweet. I get off in fifteen minutes if you wanna hang out."
"Yeah, I thought we could go for a walk or something."
"Sounds good. Do you want some quarters for the arcade?"
"Yes please."
She rolled her eyes, grinned, and emptied her wallet of coins on the counter. Dipper scooped them up, changed the smaller denominations into quarters, spent a few minutes on the rigged crane game in the arcade, failed to win a Pikachu, and Wendy dragged him away and they stepped out into the sunshine and walked over to the lake, sweaty palms pressed together.
They sat on the sand at the far end of the beach and looked out over the water, shut their eyes against the sinking sun, resting their heads against one another. Dipper nearly fell asleep but Wendy squirmed and said she couldn't sit there any longer or her legs would bake, so they went back to the Shack and she dug around in the clothes she kept in Dipper's wardrobe, changed into denim shorts and a t-shirt, then fell asleep in his bed with the fan keeping her cool and making strands of her hair flutter upwards and tickle Dipper's arm. In his notebook, Dipper outlined a fantasy story about a girl who could turn her hair into flames, and reach up to her head then cast fireballs from her hands, a girl who, as a child, was molested by a prince, and the prince grew up to become an esteemed king, and the girl bands together with other characters from her village and plots to storm the king's castle to take revenge.
He glanced down at Wendy, lying on her back, her hands on her stomach, the peaceful complexion of her face, and he knew that if they had never become more than friends, never become intimate, then he would have lived his whole life without ever learning of the demons concealed within her. They would have never shown themselves if he hadn't provoked them.
For a few days, it seemed as if things had returned to normal. She didn't have that faraway look in her eyes when they were talking, she made jokes at his expense and punched him on the arm, never hard enough to hurt, although he knew now she certainly had the power to. But two nights running in mid-August, he called her in the afternoon and asked if she wanted to go out, and she said no. He asked her what she was doing, and she said she wasn't doing anything – only lying in bed, watching TV. They normally did that together, Dipper thought, but he didn't voice his concern, just told her he loved her and hung up the phone.
After the second rejection, he paced around his room for five minutes, called Mabel, and recited the story he had heard from Dan. He had wanted to tell her since the moment he stepped out of the Corduroys' cabin – it was a constant urge, bubbling under his skin, but he had pushed it aside; he appreciated his sister's wisdom, especially when it came to relationships, but he couldn't necessarily rely on her discretion.
"You can't tell anyone," Dipper said.
"Of course I won't," Mabel said. "Who would I even tell? Nobody here knows who she is."
Dipper sat on his bed and picked at a loose thread on his sock. "What should I do?"
"Well, it sounds like she needs some time to herself. She went through something traumatic and you did something to remind her of that trauma. Through no fault of your own, of course. I think you need to give her some space until she stops seeing you as... you know, a reminder of that other guy."
"But how will I know when that happens?"
"She'll reach out to you. You already said it's unlike her to not text or call. So wait for her to call."
He appreciated his sister's advice, but he didn't always conform to it. The following night he paced the room again, this time with his thumb hovering over Wendy's name on his phone, after twenty-four hours without contact. He hadn't realized until now how much he relied on Wendy's company to occupy his time, and how much he relied on her happiness to pacify his mind. Without her, his day felt like a string of tedious and ultimately meaningless tasks. Unpack this box, stock this shelf, paint this sign. He was confronted with the sobering realization that Wendy wasn't a reason to stay in Gravity Falls, she was the reason, and for the first time in a year, he felt a little homesick.
He stood still, and the attic was so quiet that he thought he could hear his own heart, pounding against his ribcage. He pressed her name, then Call.
She picked up on the third ring. "Hey."
"Hey," he said. "You okay?"
"Yeah. Are you?"
"I'm fine. I was just gonna ask if you wanted to do anything tonight, but you sound pretty tired already."
She hummed into the receiver. "I am. I'm sorry."
"It's okay, you don't have to apologize. I just, um–" he squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose – "did I do something wrong? I'm sorry, you probably don't want to answer that right now, but I gotta know. I'm driving myself crazy."
"No," she said, her voice wavering. "No, Dipper. You've only ever done everything right."
A few seconds of silence. "Okay, because I know you already said that what happened up at Lookout Point wasn't my fault, but I–" he heard his own voice go unsteady – "I'm so sorry if I hurt you, Wendy. I never meant–"
"God, no, Dipper, listen to me. None of that was your fault. None of anything is. It's me." She exhaled. "I had a bad experience. Once. With a guy."
"Your dad told me. I mean, I kinda figured that was the case, but you said there was 'nothing to tell,' and I know I was invading your privacy, but I had to know. So I went and talked to your dad. He told me what happened." He leaned his forehead against the one window in the attic, small raindrops tapping the glass on the other side, the sky a thick gray. "Wendy?"
Her voice was quieter. "What did he tell you?"
"He told me about Cameron. About the day you traveled home from college. And what Cameron did."
Again, silence, and then, "you said something the other day. Something like 'all the things I deserve.' Have you ever stopped to think about what you deserve? Because it's something more than me. I mean, I punched you in the face, Dipper, and here you are, calling me, trying to apologize because you thought you hurt me."
He frowned and shook his head. "That wasn't your fault. Why does that matter?"
"Because it isn't just that I hit you. I'm messed up, Dipper. There's so much going on in my head, and maybe I do a good job at hiding it, but there are things about me that you shouldn't have to deal with."
"Are you breaking up with me?"
"No. I'm advising you to break up with me."
"Well, I'm not gonna do that. Wendy, where is all this coming from?"
"Just something I've been thinking about." She sounded bored. "I don't know if I'm ever going to be the things you want. The things you see in me."
"You already are everything I want. Haven't I made that pretty clear already?" He waited. "Wendy?"
"Listen, I've gotta go. I'm really sorry. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?"
He scratched his head, trying to balance Mabel's advice with his impulse to keep digging. "Okay," he said.
"I love you, Dipper."
"Love you too."
The phone beeped twice; he held it to his ear for a few seconds, then set it down on his nightstand. His blood was pumping, head swimming, and he knew, somewhere in the back of his mind he knew, that he shouldn't have grabbed his keys, and he shouldn't have gone out to his car. He knew that he had felt like Wendy before – there had been days that he'd wanted nothing more than to shut out the world. In his mind's eye, he saw himself stepping off the porch and walking across the dirt to his green Fiesta, but he was powerless to stop himself.
There were a lot of things, that night, that he should not have done.
The engine growled to life, and before he took off, the porch light came on, and he shielded his eyes and looked over at the Shack, thinking that Stan must have heard his feet pounding down the stairs and was coming out to ask where he was going, but the door remained closed. The light was on a timer. 9 P.M. He pulled out onto the winding road into town, running a hand through his hair, sifting through the things he could say when Wendy answered the door, and then the things he could say if Dan answered the door.
And then he pulled up at a stop sign. A pair of headlights approached from his left. And as the vehicle passed through his own lights, he saw the unmistakable red flannel paint job of the Escape Van and his stomach sank. He gripped the wheel so hard that his knuckles turned white, debated what to do for a second, before realizing that obviously he was going to follow her. He slammed his foot on the accelerator and joined the main road, picked up his speed, chased the two red lights, but she was speeding herself, and when they came up to the bend just before the turning to her house, she had trouble keeping on the right side of the road. If there wasn't a gallon of adrenaline coursing through his veins, he might have thought back to their phone call, and pictured her taking it outside the bar, and only hanging up on him so she could go back inside and get another drink.
She didn't use her turn signal – just swung into the dirt road leading to her driveway. Dipper didn't follow. He pulled over on the grass, in exactly the same spot he had parked the van when he brought it to Wendy – the tire tracks were still there. He got out and scampered through the woods, out onto the dirt road, crouching, though he was under the cover of darkness. About a hundred feet away, just visible in the light from the porch, the van's driver side door swung open and Dan Corduroy stumbled out. He slammed it behind him and staggered to the porch, stopped to rest against one of the wooden posts for a second, then climbed the steps in one quick motion, as if afraid he would collapse if he took it any slower. He let himself inside. Nobody else got out of the van.
Dipper let out a breath he must have been holding for the last five minutes. Off to the side of the house, he could see yellow light shining on the trunks of the pine trees, so he knew Wendy was in her room, but a father who was drunk enough to drive like a blind man on steroids was an obstacle he had not accounted for. He forced his premonitions aside and went up to the front door. But before he knocked, he heard Dan's booming voice call out Wendy's name, and then a second time. He could even hear Dan's shoes thumping on the floorboards, heading toward Wendy's room.
The porch creaked when Dipper backed away, down the steps. He ran along the wall of the house, around the corner, and ducked just below Wendy's window. Slowly, he raised his head and peered inside, but Dan was standing in the doorway, and Dipper flung himself to the side and sat back against the wall. He watched the projected square of light against the trees, expecting Dan to come to the window and cast a hulking shadow, but he didn't. Dipper looked down and watched his own chest rise and fall, swallowed a metallic taste, pressed two fingers to his temples. Only now did he become aware that spying was undermining their foundation of trust, but he couldn't leave without knowing she was okay. All he needed was to see her smile, even a little bit, and he would leave.
When he next looked, Dan was sitting on the end of Wendy's bed, crying. Dipper struggled to make sense of the scene – Wendy wasn't hurt, like he had initially thought, she was sat against the headboard, watching her dad with a look that was somewhere between sympathy and exasperation. Then, she crawled forward on her knees and put a hand on his shoulder. Dan wiped his eyes.
Though he didn't know it at the time, what followed was an image that Dipper would wish to scrub from his memory for the rest of his life.
Dan turned around and kissed his daughter on the cheek. She clenched her eyes shut. He laid one meaty palm on her shoulder, and she jumped up and moved to leave her room, but Dan was even faster than she was, and he grabbed her arm and pinned her against the wall. Dipper felt every last drop of blood drain from his face.
When he was thirteen, Dipper had accidentally come across a dark corner of the internet, and before he could comprehend where he was, he was watching a video of a man being shot on CCTV, in a convenience store. The sinking feeling in his gut when he powered off his computer was akin to the feeling he had now – a combination of something that should never, ever happen, and something that nobody should ever have to watch.
Dan cupped Wendy's face in his hands, ran strands of her hair through his fingers. He kissed her, on the lips, kept kissing her, and Wendy's eyes were shut tight and Dipper could see the tears rolling down her cheeks. She kept thrusting her arms out to push him away, but he snapped them back against the wall until she gave up, and stopped resisting. He squeezed her breast through her shirt.
Dipper's mind flashed back to New Year's Eve, Dan's arm around Wendy by the bonfire. The things Wendy told Dipper. He's been getting worse. He sees so much of Mom in me.
He felt his legs give way underneath him, and he fell to the dirt like a rag doll, then pushed himself back to his feet and staggered to the nearest tree, leaned against it and vomited into a pile of leaves. It was loud, and he covered his mouth but the memory was still there, etching itself into his brain, and that was enough to make him throw up again. He breathed heavily, his throat stinging, and when he caught the sour smell in his nostrils he walked away, back around to the front of the house. He spat on the lawn, twice, three times, and he wanted to run back to his car and wash out his mouth with the bottle of water in the cupholder but he couldn't leave her in there a second longer, so he clambered up the steps and rapped on the front door. He checked his shirt and his shoes but they were clean; he took a step back from the door so they wouldn't smell sick on his breath.
It was Dan who answered. His eyes were puffy and he had to clear his throat after he said, "hey, Dipper."
Dipper barely heard him. His ears were ringing. He could suddenly hear his own blood pumping – it felt more like he was sailing along a blood vessel than standing on a porch, in reality. Every instinct he had to lunge at the man and beat him to death, he smothered. "Hey, Dan. How's your evening going?"
"Not so bad. You here to see Wendy?"
"Yes, please. If she's home."
Dan called out her name again; he wandered away toward the kitchen and then Wendy was there, in the doorway. She looked relieved. "Dipper," she said, stepping out on the porch and hugging him. Suddenly he felt wrong holding her, like he didn't have the right, like she belonged to somebody else, which he supposed was the notion that Dan had been trying to instill in him for the last eight months. Wendy held Dipper at arm's length and looked him up and down. "You okay?"
"Yeah."
"What are you doing here?"
"Wondered if you wanted to go for a drive."
"Sure," she said, which made things a lot easier. She stepped back inside and took her coat from the rack and called out, "Dad. I'm going out."
They stepped down onto the driveway and Wendy exhaled into the night. "Wait, where's your car?"
"I parked out on the road." He tried to walk straight, but the dirt didn't feel even below his feet.
"Sure you're okay, dude?"
"Yeah."
When they got to the car, he sunk into the seat, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and chugged the water in the cupholder. He could see Wendy watching him, out of the corner of his eye, but he kept facing forward. Started the engine. Hit the road.
"Where are we going?" she asked, and Dipper realized that he didn't know where they were going. He had turned onto the road that went south out of Gravity Falls and they were cruising along at fifty, but Dipper couldn't remember making a conscious decision about either of those things.
He turned his head and looked in her eyes. "I can take you away from here," he said, and snapped his eyes back to the road. "I can take you anywhere. Anywhere that isn't here."
She was silent for a moment. "What are you talking about?"
"We'll move to the other side of the country. We don't have to tell anyone our address."
He looked over again and her mouth was open; she knew that he knew. She swallowed, set her eyes forward. "You saw. You were spying on me. That's messed up, Dipper."
"That's messed up? Spying on you was messed up?"
"Yes!" she screamed. "You weren't ever supposed to know. I tried to tell you, didn't I? I tried to tell you I was screwed up. And you had to go and fucking dig around for clues, like you always do. And now you've ruined this. You've ruined us. You'll never be able to look at me the same way again."
"Jesus, Wendy, will you forget about me for a second and focus on what's important, here? We have to get you out of that house. We have to call the police."
"We're not going to the police."
"What?"
"We are not going to the police."
"Wendy, he's abusing you."
"If we go to the police then he'll go to prison and I still need him. He's still my dad."
He opened his mouth but couldn't find anything to say. With tears in his eyes, the road was a blur, but it was straight and they hadn't seen another car since they left her house.
"I'd like you to take me home now," she said.
"Wendy, you can't be serious," he pleaded.
"I want to go home, Dipper."
"I'm not taking you back there. I can't."
"He won't do it again. He always regrets it afterward. He'll wait on the couch all night for me to come home so he can tell me he's sorry."
"That doesn't make it okay, Wendy!"
"I know! I know it doesn't, but god dammit, I'm not losing him too." She started to sob. "I already lost my mom and I'm not losing him too."
He listened to her crying, carried on at the same speed, chewed on the skin on his lips until they bled. Thoughts were a clutter in his head; he was compiling a list of all the places they could flee to, while weighing up the risk of staying in Gravity Falls until they had the means to do so. He needed a concrete plan, but he needed time to build it, and unfortunately that would also give his girlfriend time to be traumatized by her own father.
Again, not totally aware of what he was doing, he swung the car around, tires screeching, and headed back the way they had come from.
She sniffled. "Are you taking me home?"
"Yep." And because the drive would be about five minutes, he had some time to get to know her dad a little better. "How long has he been doing this?"
"Um... I don't know. I think it started about a year ago."
"How often?"
"Maybe... once a month?" She stared at him. "Are you on the phone to the police?"
"No."
"Give me your phone."
As if he was the one she couldn't trust. He pulled his phone from his pocket and passed it to her. She lit up the screen, tapped a couple of buttons, realized he wasn't lying.
"He'll stop," she said. "I promise you. I'm gonna tell him that you know. That I told you. And that if he does it again, you and me will go to the police together."
"Okay." His breaths were getting lighter and he had stopped trembling. It seemed that with every second that passed, it became clearer to him that everything was going to be okay. "There was no guy in college, right? He made that up."
"Yeah."
"And when I mentioned the guy from college you went along with it."
"Because it was infinitely less fucked up than the truth."
Dipper suppressed a violent grimace. To think he had looked the devil in the eyes and shaken his hand. "Are you okay?" he said.
"What?"
"Did he hurt you?"
She rolled her shoulders. "A little."
A thick silence came over them. He noticed that Wendy kept looking across at him, but she didn't speak until they were near to the turning for her house. "Promise me you won't call the police," she said.
"Why don't you stay at the Shack tonight? Then you can make sure I don't."
"I can't. He isn't a monster, Dipper, he's sick. You have no idea what Mom's death did to him. He'll be waiting up for me, and I'll tell him that you know about him now, so he'll have to stop."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Yeah. And what if he kills me, Wendy?"
She hesitated. "What?"
"You said he was sick, right? If you tell him I know his darkest secret, that I know enough to send him to prison, what if he kills me? If he's sick enough to molest his own daughter, killing me would be easy. He already hates me."
"He doesn't hate you."
"Yeah?" He switched on his turn signal for the dirt road and looked his girlfriend in the eyes. "I guarantee you, when I turn this corner, he'll be waiting at the end of the driveway. And when you get out of the car he'll stare me down because he hates me, because he can't stand that he has to share you with me. Just watch."
Dipper kept the high beams on and turned into the road and sure enough, there he was, beside the stack of firewood at the side of the cabin, his arms folded. Dipper laughed. "There he is! I told you."
"Okay, you're scaring me now."
"I'm scaring you." He chuckled again. "Okay, I'll stop."
As the car trundled along the driveway, Dipper took a deep, satisfying breath, and smiled. It was still true – women were being sexually assaulted all over the globe, and men were getting away with it, and there wasn't a whole lot he could do. But he could make the world a marginally better place, in this very moment.
Everything was going to be okay.
He didn't slow the car to a stop – he put his foot down. He was pressed back against his seat as the car surged forward, and Wendy screamed at him, asked what he was doing.
And here's the thing about Dan Corduroy – yes, he was tough, but he was a brute. He wasn't intelligent. In the last few seconds of his life, it was entirely possible that he thought, yeah, I can survive this. I can survive anything. A fraction of a second before the impact, before the thump, he uncrossed his arms and met his daughter's eyes with a look of sheer terror, his eyes flew open, almost to a comical degree. Then his face hit the windshield – it would later become a vivid memory for Dipper, though if he'd blinked he would have missed it – his body rolled over the roof, and landed in the dirt. Dipper slammed his foot on the brake pedal as the dirt road gave way to the woods. They rumbled over twigs, rocks, pine cones, and hit a tree head-on, but they were far enough away from the cabin that the car had time to decelerate, and though Dipper and Wendy both lurched forward, neither of them hit anything. In the seconds of quiet, as they caught their breath, Dipper's only thought was that Bud Gleeful had ripped him off – this car didn't have any airbags.
Wendy shrieked, and threw open the door. She got out and Dipper stayed seated. The tree they had hit was inches from his face, and he could see the patterns in the bark. The headlights were still on and smoke rose from the hood. What captured Dipper's attention, though, was the crack in his windshield that Dan's head had made. It was like a spiderweb, or a snowflake, only less symmetrical. Crimson blood ran in a little stream from the roof, down the windshield, and slowly filled in every crack with red. It was beautiful and horrific.
And then he woke up – not literally, but everything clicked at once in his head, the rage subsided, and he realized that he had just committed a crime, and that the consequences of that crime would be significantly worse if the man he had hit was dead. "Oh, fuck," he murmured. "Oh, fuck."
He got out of the car and ran back through the brief stretch of woods, slipped on a slick patch of mud that the tires had made, but stayed upright. Dan was lying face-up on the driveway, motionless, his head caked in blood, one leg bent in the wrong direction. Wendy was pacing up and down next to him, her face in her hands.
"Wendy, I'm sorry," Dipper said. "I didn't mean to." Like they were on the playground and he'd broken one of her dolls.
She rushed over to him, and he didn't throw up his hands to brace himself because he deserved whatever pain she wanted to inflict on him. But she gripped his arms and asked him if he was okay, which was mystifying.
"I'm fine," he said, looking over her shoulder. "Is he–"
"Yeah," she said, her voice steady and strangely soothing. "Yeah, he's dead."
He reached for his phone, but she hadn't given it back to him in the car. "My phone. I'll call the police."
"No. No, no, no. You need to get out of here. You need to get out of here and get as far away as possible."
"Wendy, I can't–" he heard the front door of the cabin creak open and froze. Wendy inched closer, held on to him, and when she looked over her shoulder, her brother, Kevin, came around the corner of the cabin. Dipper's face fell. Had he been home the whole time?
"What's going on?" Kevin said, looking between them and his father's corpse, eyes wide. "Dad?" He knelt at his side, put a hand on his chest.
"You need to go," Wendy said to Dipper. "Now."
Tears sprung to his eyes. "I can't just leave you here."
In the background, Kevin sobbed and begged his sister to tell him what had happened.
She ignored him. "You either leave now or you stay here and spend the rest of your life in jail. You're leaving me either way."
He breathed deep – hyperventilated, more like – and stared into her beautiful, grief-stricken eyes. He looked over his shoulder and noticed, for the first time, that their color matched the green of his wrecked car.
"Take the van," she said, and thrust the keys into his palm, along with his phone. By now, Kevin had wandered into the woods, followed the tire tracks, and turned, his jaw unhinged. "Go," Wendy shouted, hitting Dipper's chest.
He didn't hesitate – he ran for the van and clambered into the driver seat. As he started the engine, he saw Wendy restraining Kevin by the arms. He was kicking his legs and screaming at her to let him go, screaming at Dipper that if he ever saw him again, he'd kill him.
Dipper took one last look at his girlfriend, one last mental snapshot, before – it dawned on him – he had to live the rest of his life without her. He took off along the driveway, and because he had to veer around the man he had just murdered, he drove up on the perfectly trimmed lawn he was always afraid of ruining. Maybe he'd knock over their mailbox, too, just to really fuck their lives up.
Before joining the main road, he sat gripping the wheel, tears streaming down his cheeks, grinding his teeth together. He wanted to turn left, go home, go to his bed in the attic and wake up in the morning and forget that this ever happened. He would work double shifts, every day, including weekends, and grow old and inherit the Shack and become the next Stan Pines. If this was a nightmare, then it should have been over, by now, but he waited a few seconds longer, held out hope, clenched his eyes shut, but when he opened them again he was still staring into the woods on the other side of the road, and he still only had one option.
He turned right. He drove at sixty-five. The night was still, no wind, no clouds. The gas tank was nearly full. In his head, he brought up the list of places to flee to that he had brainstormed earlier, when he thought Wendy would be coming with him. The major decision, when he hit the Interstate at the end of the hilly straight, would be to go north or south, and he was thinking of somewhere cold. Remote. Like Alaska, but he didn't quite know how to get there. Could you just drive through Canada? He would have to stop and ask someone. And get some aspirin – his head was pounding. In fact, there might have been some in the back, with all the junk Wendy kept back there. He glanced behind him, between the gap in the seats, and saw that the bed was still there, and although that particular mattress only jogged painful memories, at least he would have somewhere comfortable to sleep, once he was far enough out of Oregon.
And in the exact moment he became hopeful that there was still a life ahead of him, he started to hear it. So faint at first that he could have easily been imagining it, but then a flash of light in the wing mirror caught his attention, and he saw the red and blue lights crest the hill behind him, and the delusion came crumbling down. Of course he couldn't have escaped. He was driving the only vehicle in the country with a flannel pattern on it, for fuck's sake.
He picked up his speed, seventy, seventy-five, eighty. Suddenly he resented the mattress in the back instead of treasuring it. The sirens didn't get any louder, and the lights didn't come any closer – in fact, he might have been outrunning them. He tried to judge the distance, staring in the wing mirror, and then the next time he looked up, there were two new pairs of lights, parked sideways across the road.
And all the adrenaline drained out of his body at once. He loosened his grip on the wheel, sat back against the seat, and the van rolled to a stop some fifty feet before the roadblock. In one last-ditch attempt to hide, he shut off his headlights, cloaking himself in the night. In the silence, he noticed for the first time that the radio was on, playing Rocket Man, and he shut his eyes against the flashlights shining through his windshield, tried to relax.
Then the door opened, he was dragged out of the vehicle, and Sheriff Blubbs yelled at him to stand up and put his hands behind his head.