In the summer that I was sixteen, Andrew's grandmother died in her sleep.

Imagine, for a moment, waking up next to the person you've spent your life with, starting your morning like any other day, and then an hour later they haven't woken up yet so you go to check on them and they won't respond to your voice, or your touch. You check their pulse, and feel nothing, and then you collapse at the side of the bed clutching their dead hands because that's it, that's fifty years of friendship and love, that's a fifty-year story that you weaved together and it ended while you were sleeping, no time for goodbyes, no memorable last words, and no chance for gradual acclimation to their imminent disappearance from your life. Imagine the heartbreak.

Andrew's grandpa went mad. In the days that followed, he cooked his wife's favorite meal - vegetable lasagna - and set the table for three, every night. He stayed awake in his armchair until the early hours of the morning, because his wife hadn't gone to bed yet and he didn't want her to get lonely watching the television by herself. And one day he pulled up in the driveway, in Andrew's car, having been to pick up a prescription for his wife at the pharmacy.

All the while, Andrew worked with his Aunt Kelly - who lived somewhere along the bible belt - over the phone to arrange a funeral. Kelly drove up to Oregon a few days later, just as she had done ten years before to mourn the joint death of her brother and her sister-in-law - Andrew's parents.

The boy had lived an unforgiving life. So when I heard about his grandma through Mabel, I decided that I couldn't just sit in my bedroom and do nothing. I walked straight to his grandparents' bungalow, recalling the route from the barbecue we were invited to last summer, crossed the gnome-ridden lawn, and knocked on the door. Andrew answered, and while at first he was shocked to see me, and very reserved, a couple of questions later he was talking fast, stumbling over his words, because he had bottled up a lot over a lonely few days, because he had had to remain composed and strong, because his grandpa still needed around-the-clock attention, and at the first chance of a break in that agonizing monotony, he was untethered, releasing all of those pent-up emotions from the sun-soaked front porch. I told him we should go for a walk, and we did, with his grandpa. At the top of a hill, at about five in the afternoon, with the sun blinding our eyes, Andrew turned to me and asked if I would go with him to the funeral, and I said I would.

I won't spin this story to make myself look like a saint - though my heart ached for Andrew, the second reason I reached out to him was a cloud of guilt that had been following me around since early in the spring. I'm not at all proud of what I did.

When the summers ended and I returned to school, that also meant returning to Tiffany and Alina, my childhood friends, who I spent most of my time outside of school avoiding. They didn't mind, I don't think, because our friendship had fizzled out a long time ago. We had all grown up, blossomed into different people, and we kept each other around for convenience; none of us wanted a lunch table to ourselves, broadcasting our incompatibility with other humans.

We still talked, of course, we just seemed to have fundamentally different outlooks on life, and clashing opinions on what were and weren't acceptable things to say. And I'll never know why she did it, perhaps because of her religious background, but we were huddled around her locker, which happened to be a close neighbor of Andrew's, and Tiffany said to us, deliberately loud enough for him to hear, "did you hear that kid's a faggot?"

He turned and focused on each of us for a few seconds, landing on Tiffany, his expression blank.

Tiffany said to him, "what? Are you trying to mentally undress us so you can be normal?"

Alina snickered. I stood there, flicking my attention between his eyes and the floor. After a few seconds, we all dispersed, Andrew still showing no emotion, Tiffany and Alina having switched to a new discussion entirely, as if this moment was already a distant blip in history.

I found Andrew at the end of the day, chased him up the sidewalk on the road leading out of school, and called out his name.

"Hey," I said to him. "I'm really sorry about earlier. I just want you know that we're not all like that, here. I mean we don't all think like that."

He stopped walking, and I saw a crack in the emotionless disguise, something in his eyes like pleading. "Then why didn't you say that in front of them?" he asked, and then he walked away, already aware that I had no answer.

I felt awful after that. I lost sleep over it. I had my morals but I wasn't brave enough to uphold them, and what did that make me? A mindless sheep, accepting the views of anyone around me, no matter how wrong I thought they were, following the path of least resistance, never questioning, never challenging.

The funeral was much like any of the other two funerals I had been to in my life. Began in a church. Moved outside to the graveyard, where I stood in a black dress and watched the coffin sink into the earth. It rained. Andrew held it together the whole time, didn't shed a tear, but when we got back to his house he collapsed into his aunt's arms and sobbed with no restraint. I took my cue to leave. His grandpa was sat out on the porch, absorbing the last hours of daylight, staring vacantly toward the houses opposite. I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed. He looked up at me, gray bags under his eyes, and smiled melancholy. The day had been closure for him, I think.

After that, the plan had been for Kelly to drive Andrew and his grandfather back to Louisiana, where they would live in her farmhouse with her and her husband, their twin daughters having recently flown the nest. But Andrew still had two weeks of school before summer vacation, which - due to some self-imposed obligation - he did not want to miss.

So I told him he could stay with me, and he slept on my floor for two weeks. I offered him the bed, even laid out his sheets, but when I slipped to the bathroom to brush my teeth he took them off and curled up in the corner of the room, on the carpet. My parents were reluctant at first that a boy would be sharing my room, which was a rare show of protectiveness, and when I told them he was gay, a fog of tension suffocated the kitchen. Or maybe that's just how I perceived it.

"What?" I said, my arms folded. "Is that a problem?"

My dad shook his head. "Your mother and I have always been very supportive of the gay community."

Looking back on it, hearing that out loud was a watershed moment for me. Like a final affirmation that it was okay to be... gay. Rhyming unintended.

Andrew's and my friendship was formed on our mutual adoration of a nerdy brunette who didn't stick around for long, and beyond that, we didn't have that much in common. In those two weeks that he stayed, we were most animated in our video calls with Mabel. I think we were both happy to simply provide each other quiet company.

There was one night, a couple of days before he left. I was rocking one of those headaches that snowballs all day and doesn't let you sleep. I knew he was awake because his breaths were inaudible, no matter how hard you listened, like he thought breathing was an intrusion on the atmosphere of my room.

I shut my eyes and asked him when he knew he was gay.

Nothing for a few seconds. Then, "I don't think there was one definite moment. If you mean when I started telling people, then it was when I was thirteen. But I knew before that, without really knowing. If that makes sense. Like, I had crushes on guys and stuff and I just figured everybody did."

"When was your first crush? On a guy."

"Um... fourth grade? Over at my old school in White City. He was called Sven. He had long black hair always covered up by a bobble hat. And he was always getting told off by the teachers for walking around with his iPod playing out the speakers. They kept confiscating it but he'd come in the next morning with it playing louder and louder. And when I caught his eye he'd grin at me, like it was our own private joke and I was the only one that noticed." Andrew laughed at the memory. "He moved back to Sweden at the end of the year. Never saw him again."

None of this was particularly helpful. "But was it like- how deep did the crushes go? Did you ever get the urge to do anything?"

"Like what?"

"Like... make a move. Or drop a hint that you liked them."

"When I was ten, no, but since then, sure. But I've never acted on those urges. It's too risky. I think if it was like, a friend that I'd grown attracted to, instead of just a random boy in the back of my class, it might be a bit different, because then I'd have a lot more time to interact with them. And figure them out. But that's never happened."

"What would be a sign that they felt the same way?"

"Well... then it's just the same as straight relationships, I guess. You read their body language. See if they're ever trying to get you away from a group, to spend time with you alone. Even then it's always gonna be a bit of a gamble. You've had boyfriends before, right?"

"Yeah. It's never been me making the first move, though."

"You got a guy you like?"

"No."

He was quiet for so long that I thought the conversation was over. "A girl?"

I swallowed, like a tennis ball had fallen from the ceiling and into my throat. "No."

"Alright," he chuckled. "I always like to check."

My Skype calls with Mabel would regularly drift into a limbo-like state where neither of us spoke, or even stayed at our computers. I became acquainted with the ambient sounds of her bedroom - her clearing her throat, or humming tunes, her mom walking in unannounced with clean laundry, a car driving by outside her open window.

We stayed connected for hours upon hours, peaking at fourteen hours on a Saturday that a band of rain hit both of our states, and there was absolutely nothing else to do. My dad had concerns about the internet bill, and I had to keep telling him that we had unlimited data, which meant we could use the internet as much as we damn well pleased, but he always frowned at me like that was an impossible concept.

A couple of days after Andrew left for Louisiana, I was lost browsing a message board that appeared to be for angry moms, when Mabel said, "I think it was really sweet, you know. What you did for Andrew."

I switched to the Skype window so I could see her. She was brushing her hair, sitting cross-legged on her bed. I didn't know what to say; our praise of one another usually never extended beyond I love what you've done with your hair today or you're really pretty in that dress. We knew we thought highly of each other and we knew we loved each other.

"It's the least I could do. Especially after I treated him like shit in school."

"You didn't do anything wrong. That was all your friends."

"I still let it happen. Sometimes that's just as bad."

"Well, anyway. He told me all about how you held his hand at the funeral, and how you kept bringing food up to your room when he didn't want to move." She lay on her stomach in front of the laptop, her face filling up my screen. "You're an angel, and you don't give yourself enough credit."

Behind my laptop's camera, I clamped my legs together, a warmth rushing to my thighs. I think I shrugged.

"Is this you not being able to take a compliment?" she said, a grin stretching her cheeks.

"Kinda." I wanted to tell her that she was, by definition, the angel. That my life without her would be a bottomless pit of gloom. I said nothing.

"Just say 'thank you, Mabel. You are right as always.'"

"Thank you."

Three days later Mabel stepped off a bus in the center of town in a red sweater, her thick ponytail bouncing around as she charged up the sidewalk to smother me in hugs.

We quickly fell into our old routine, hanging around town, bowling and playing miniature golf until we'd used up all our money, then heading out into the forest to enjoy the gratuity of nature, soaking up the sun on our fishing dock that, to our knowledge, nobody in the world remembered or knew about in the first place. We stole a couple of lawn chairs out of my dad's shed and left them on the dock. We even - in a stroke of genius to rival Einstein - took a stop sign from the side of the road, one that had been knocked over years ago, replaced, and then left there. We took turns carrying it all the way through town, through the woods, racking up a plethora of quizzical looks from the community, including one disgruntled - but ultimately lazy - police officer. Mabel waded out into the water and jammed the post into the lake bed, then strung a hammock she had found in her uncle's storage room across to one of the posts on the dock.

It didn't hold for long. I looked up from my chair later that day just in time to see the signpost slowly fall over, and Mabel slide down the netting of the hammock and into the water, soaking her clothes and ruining the book she was reading. I don't think I'd ever laughed so hard in my life.

While all of that was fun, we were also getting older, and getting to that age when the insatiable desire to explore outside of our comfort zones overshadowed our interest in exploring the bounds of the forest. Rumor had it that summer in Gravity Falls laid claim to a host of wild, anything-goes parties sprinkled about in abandoned buildings far beyond the limits of town, the kind of thing you overheard a high school kid mention at the bowling alley before his buddy told him to shut the fuck up because there could be cops listening, man.

Lucky for us, we had an in - a feral redhead called Wendy Corduroy, who only ever seemed to pause partying when she stumbled into the Mystery Shack for work, popped an aspirin, and fell into the chair behind the counter. She was teaching me how to play poker one night towards the end of July, at the Pines' dining table. I was good at it, apparently; I had a natural poker face - which was a polite way of pointing out that I looked bored all the time.

"I should bring you to my next game with the Sharks," she said. "You could be earning some serious cash."

I pictured her in scuba gear sitting at a poker table on the floor of the ocean, surrounded by sharks that had trouble fitting into the chairs. "Sharks?"

"The Sherville Sharks. They're a biker gang, sorta. The friendliest gang you'd ever meet, but they hang out at this old factory deep in the woods. It's usually liveliest on Saturday nights. I should bring you along some time."

Mabel, who had been appearing at the table periodically just to pluck potato chips from the bowl in the center, heard the last sentence and piped up. "What's on Saturday night?"

"Now you," Wendy said, chuckling, "you are way too innocent to be within a mile of the Sherville factory."

"That's no fair," Mabel said. "I can... handle things."

"How old are you again?"

"Sixteen."

"In a month," I said. "You're sixteen in a month."

"You are only four months older than me, missy," Mabel said, pulling at my sleeve.

Wendy continued to describe the place, how it was rumored that the factory had shut down after a worker got ground to chunks in one of the machines, how when the parties die down if you listen really carefully you can still hear him scream. Nowadays, she said, people use it for casino games, dancing (or moshing), and live music, but we would have to leave before midnight because that was when things really got out of hand, and we didn't have enough bleach in the house to cleanse the eyes of two youngsters like us if we stuck around to witness it. I watched Mabel's eyes go wide as she slowly chewed on a chip. Wendy had a habit of spinning bullshit horror stories out of thin air.

"Sounds cool," I said. "I'll go."

And because we spent our summers as conjoined twins, Mabel said she would go too.

So that Saturday, once darkness had wrapped up the town for the night, the three of us plus Dipper piled into Wendy's Volkswagen hippie van (it's not a fucking hippie van, she kept saying, but I continue to call it that to the present day just to get on her nerves), and set off into uncharted territory, down an unmarked dirt road through the forest at the opposite end of town. I was wearing a black leather jacket I had received for my birthday, because it felt like the most appropriate opportunity I would ever get to wear it in my life. Beside me in the back seat, Mabel wore a black hoodie with CHEER printed on the front. She turned to me and smiled, nonchalant.

Thirty minutes later, Wendy stopped the van by the side of the trail, in a spot that could only be described as the center of nowhere. I thought we had broken down, but she and Dipper swung open their doors and jumped out, suggesting that we were, somehow, in the right place. Just before the headlights shut off, I noticed that there were in fact a couple of cars parked further up the road.

It took about a minute to hack our way through the forest before we came to a clearing, and far behind a high chain-link fence, there stood the old factory, three stories tall, two giant industrial chimneys pointing to the stars. White light spilled out of the top row of windows, red light from the bottom row, and darkness in between. I could just about make out the Sherville Automobile lettering above the third floor, faintly lit at the bottom and facing the expansive yard that we were just outside of. It was pretty, in its own way. But definitely haunting. It wasn't cold out but I shivered.

The fence had been cut, and Wendy peeled it back to let us all through. Dipper, who had been trailing the girl around on these sorts of excursions for years now, ducked through without a second thought. Mabel and I shared a glance, both of us now questioning the legality of what we were doing. We had both seen the No Trespassing signs. But we came here to have fun, not abide by the law, so I kept my mouth shut and crossed the barrier into my new life as a felon.

We cut through thick, overgrown grass, but a path had already been trampled down for us, so I assumed that the indistinct panel of fence we had come through was somehow the official entry point of the hideout. I grabbed Mabel's arm and said into her ear, "memorize this route. If things get too intense we can come back and chill in the van."

Wendy then led us through a wooden door at the side of the building, into some sort of storage closet, and then we were in pitch darkness for a few seconds before she opened a door on the other side, and I thought, surely this wasn't necessary, this was just something someone had set up to make the building feel like a top-secret clubhouse. All it was missing was a man-child in a cloak demanding a password.

The inside of the factory reminded me of the sort of building you see in a zombie movie, post-outbreak. The bottom floor was one open space, a bar set up to our right, a dozen round tables scattered about in front of us. At the far end of the room, there was a small lounge area adjacent to a dance floor, white strobe lights attached haphazardly to the ceiling, an epileptic's nightmare. At the far back was a stage kitted out with drums and amplifiers, not in use. A barrel right in the center was being used as a fire pit, and other than that, the room was dimly lit by red LED lamps mounted on the walls. There was a shopping cart beside the bar loaded with junk - on closer inspection, rusted machinery parts that had presumably been swept up and dumped there to clear the floor. I supposed it also doubled up as a convenient weapon dispenser, should a bar fight have broken out.

The place was impossibly packed. Oddly, my first thought walking in was, where are all these people parked? I did not believe that we were within walking distance of anywhere.

Anyway, Wendy dragged me to a nearby table occupied by five men in their twenties or thirties, and initiated a different handshake with each of them. Only one of them wore the look I was expecting of a typical biker - bald head, red beard. His leather jacket had slits in, which were either a fashion choice or the result of a string of knife fights - you can never really tell these days. I glanced over my shoulder to see if the twins were still with us, but Dipper was leading Mabel to a group of younger looking guys that he apparently knew.

I was introduced to the table, told that this was standard Texas hold 'em, and then I neatly laid out the fifty dollars Wendy had told me to bring in front of me.

An hour later, that fifty was two-hundred. I was flying, looking down on all of the peasants I had just taken money from, dollar signs careening in my vision, thinking about all the useless shit I was going to buy, maybe I'd get it all changed into pennies and bathe in it, but probably not, because that would be filthy.

And then an hour after that, I had forty bucks. I was slumped over in my chair, drinking my whiskey in double time, feeling an alien urge to declare out loud that lady luck was a cruel mistress, like I was suddenly a fifty-year-old gambling addict at a slot machine in Vegas. Wendy was doing okay; she was up by a hundred, and when I decided to quit she patted my shoulder and whispered that I'd get 'em next time, but I didn't think I would come back. I wasn't emotionally stable enough to ride that rollercoaster.

Mabel was dancing by herself to an alt-rock song I recognized from the radio but couldn't name, thrusting her shoulders and thrashing her arms, her hair whipping about in a brunette blaze. It was a miracle she wasn't hitting anybody. She was either blurry, or I was drunk on two glasses of whiskey. Nevertheless, she triggered that irritating flutter in my stomach that always came at the worst times and made my muscles seize up, like when she asked me to rub sunscreen into her back a few days before.

She spotted me teetering on the edge of the dance floor and waggled her eyebrows, motioned me over with her finger. I tended to be self-conscious dancing around other people, but not when Mabel was with me. She was... an unconventional dancer, but a social chameleon, effortlessly blending into any environment, and when she took my hands and danced with me I was too spellbound to care that we looked like a duo of stroke victims.

Her palms were sweaty, but my body still thrummed in appreciation at the touch. The space was densely packed, so I tried to stick close to her, and over the speakers we were directly under, she yelled, "how'd your poker game go? Are we rich?"

"I lost ten dollars."

"Well that's not so bad. I was expecting you to lose at least a hundred."

"Hey, screw you. I don't see you out there trying to put bread on the table."

"Nope, but I have been putting something else on the table," she said, dancing with her eyebrows again.

"What?"

"I've been talking to a pair of lovely boys," she purred, very pleased with herself.

"Oh, god."

"Zane and Kieran, they were called."

"And let me guess, you couldn't decide which one to ask out so you asked them both."

Mabel had a rather aggressive approach to dating. One time, she was shopping at the mall with her brother, a fresh box of french fries in her hand, when she spotted a cute boy with glasses. Her pupils dilated, primal instincts kicked in, and she zipped through a herd of bodies just to barge into him and purposely spill her food all over the floor. He was profusely apologetic, offered to buy her another box, but she said she'd forget all about it if he gave her his number. That night, the boy texted her that he was flattered, but also very, very gay. The boy's name was Andrew. A year later, he and I would become close friends, and he would sleep on the floor of my bedroom for two weeks.

"No," Mabel said. "Zane asked me out. And then I pointed out to Kieran that I have a gorgeous, single, blonde best friend, so... we have a double date."

I don't know if you've ever received troubling news on a dance floor, but for me, it was quite a strange moment. I didn't stop moving, I just swayed around at half-speed, like I was at a preteen disco and I wasn't that into it. "What?" I whined. "Why'd you have to get me involved?"

"What?" She couldn't hear me, because we had somehow moved even closer to the speakers pumping bass into our ears.

I dropped one of her hands and dragged her outside, through the wide open front door of the factory that wasn't accessed via a closet. There were a couple of smokers on the corner of the building, but other than that, it was us and the crickets. "Why would you assume I wanted to spend an evening with a guy that you just met?"

She shrugged and folded her arms. "It doesn't have to be a whole evening."

"That's obviously not the point."

"I thought it'd be fun. You know, being each other's wingman. Wing-woman."

"Yeah, you do that a lot. Something sounds fun to you, so you drag other people into it because you assume it'll be fun for them as well."

She looked down and kicked a pebble. "Alright, I'll just go with Zane, then."

I considered this for a moment. I didn't know anything about Zane. Mabel had had some terrible taste in guys before. And that wasn't even the jealousy talking - some of them were objectively terrible. She dated a boy called Trey who used to sneeze into his sleeve and then lick it. "Well... no, if you still want to go, then I'll go too."

"You just said you didn't want to!"

"I don't, but I don't want you to go alone, either."

She grumbled and took two steps away from me. "Don't start with this again."

"Don't start with what?"

"Don't start treating me like I'm your little sister and you need to chaperone me around everywhere. I'm fifteen, not five, I can go out and meet a boy by myself. You're worse than Dipper."

"Look around you, Mabel. This is a sleazy, smokey bar full of bikers and thugs and alcoholics. There was somebody doing coke, right over there, in the corner. And you're gonna blindly trust somebody you met within two hours to take you out for the night?"

"There are a handful of people like that here, at worst. If you actually take a moment to talk to somebody you might find that they're really nice, like Zane and Kieran."

"Are they nice, or deceptively nice because they want to get in your pants?"

She shook her head and glowered. "I get so tired of your negativity sometimes. Lighten up," and then she stormed back into the factory, and I didn't particularly feel like following her, so I trudged back to the hole in the fence and sat up against it, picking grass and slamming it into the dirt, until Wendy emerged half an hour later, with the keys to the van and the twins in tow.

We never stayed angry at each other for long. Although we were silent in the back of Wendy's van, when she dropped Mabel off I got out and gave her a hug, and then we texted apologies back and forth for an hour until I fell asleep.

In the end, I agreed to go along with the double date. The disaster I was expecting after a night at an abandoned factory was that one of us would be murdered, not that I would wind up in a romcom-esque double-date-but-I'm-attracted-to-my-friend type of situation. It would be painful to sit through, I knew, but behind my hopefully-temporary crush, I still loved Mabel unconditionally and valued her happiness over a lot of things. Plus, I was holding out hope that Kieran would be a realization of my dreams and put me back on the straight path.

And he was, seriously, the hottest son of a bitch that I had ever sat opposite in a restaurant. He was Chinese-American, with slick black hair parted to one side. He wore a burgundy button-up shirt that struggled to contain his biceps. When he smiled, he oozed confidence, but not arrogance; it was the kind of confidence that made you think, damn, that guy's got his life in order.

But, if you're this far into the story, it won't come as any surprise that Kieran and I never got married and pumped out a handful of immaculate children for the world to enjoy. I felt nothing for him. In fact, while we sat through Jurassic World at the theater, I slouched back in my seat and gave up, gave into the whole thing. I was gay. The actress on screen, I didn't know her name, was far more enticing to me than Chris Pratt, and Chris Pratt one-upped Kieran as the epitome of manliness, and if I wasn't into either of them, then no penis on the planet was ever going to win me over.

I don't remember if we planned it out explicitly, but the date was supposed to end once we were out the doors of the theater. I figured that Zane and Kieran would each head out in their cars and Mabel and I would make the five minute walk back to my house. And in fact, when Zane proclaimed that the night was young and invited us back to his place in Eagle Point because his folks were out of town, I thought for sure that Mabel would have had the sense to say no. But she must have really, really liked the guy, because she held his hand and hunched her shoulders at me as if to say, why not?

I could think of a dozen reasons why not, and I knew I should have said something, but what she told me outside the factory about my helicopter parenting had really stuck with me, so I let her go. I told them I was tired, I would head home, but they should go on ahead, and Kieran got into his own car and left, sharing my quiet sentiment that this was the amicable end to our brief storyline. Then I had to watch my best friend get into a stranger's car, dressed up all pretty, and disappear around the corner, away from my protection. Walking home in the dark, I tried to tell myself that I didn't own her, that she could handle herself, and I was also kind of angry how quickly she jumped to the senseless decision to travel way out of town with an older guy that she barely knew, to his empty house, after 9 P.M., so by the time I got home, my thoughts were more along the lines of I'll let her make her own mistakes.

I still couldn't sleep, of course. Not without knowing she was still breathing. I lay in my bed, watching the ceiling hang in place like it usually did. Sometimes I'd get lost there, thinking about Mabel, and sometimes I would picture her in her own bed, gazing up, thinking the same things about me, like if I imagined it hard enough it would actually be happening. Tonight was no different.

And then tonight was very different, because at 11 P.M. I received a text that suggested she was lying in her bed thinking about me:

didn't go with zane in the end. he's sweet but his house is very far away so i just asked him to drop me back at the shack. i'm sorry i dragged you out tonight, i'll think next time before i agree to something like that :P and thank you for coming with me even tho you didn't want to. i know you only worry because you care about me. Anyway, i'm beat, and crashing from the one and a half sundaes i shouldn't have eaten. goodnight, love you xx

In the following days, I would reread that message fourteen times.

At the end of my first day as a high school junior, there was a letter addressed to me on the dining room table. An actual, handwritten letter, from Oak Grove, Louisiana. I didn't even realize the postal system still existed.

It read:

Hey Pacifica,

First things first, I'm sorry I haven't been Skyping with you and Mabel over summer. Things have been crazy busy down here. I spend a lot of my time now thinking up new ways to not die of heat exhaustion. I've got two desk fans set up and an open window, but I apologize in advance if this letter produces a sweaty mist when you open it.

I don't think I ever properly thanked you for everything you did for me, after my grandma passed away. I think back to those few weeks every once in a while, and I find that it's all hazy. I can't quite remember what I did or the things that I said. It's weird. I guess I was too young to feel that the first time around, with my Mom and Dad. What I do remember is that you listened to me on countless occasions, and told me things I needed to hear, and kept me sane. A lot of other stuff. I owe you so much and I have so little to give. Hopefully this letter is a start.

My grandpa's doing just fine. You were right about the funeral, he hasn't denied grandma's death since then. The view from our porch here is much more scenic than what we had back in Gravity Falls, which is great. He likes to help Kelly milk the cows, too. Oh! The other day he asked me what happened to the nice blonde girl that used to stop by, so you must have made a good impression. He said you'd have to come over and try his lasagna some time - apparently you expressed great interest in it before? Not sure if he made that up.

Things for me are going pretty great. It feels weird to have just written that. But it's true! I'm not sure if you know, but down here in the south, folks aren't famous for their tolerance of homosexuals. And I have no idea how I'm going to handle school, when that starts. Maybe I'll lie low for a while, maybe I'll strut in on my first day in a rainbow scarf and high heels. Haven't decided yet. I'm attending church now, because Kelly's really into it, and the pastor is gay-friendly, which has given me a lot of hope. He preaches equality a lot in his sermons. I don't want to get ahead of myself too much, but I've also met a boy through church, and I'm 87% sure he's gay and 43% sure he's into me. I'll keep you posted, if you want. His name is Steven and he has four sisters. Four!

I have a lot more to say, but I'll get back online soon instead of wasting paper and your time. This summer, on a friggin' farm, has been exactly what I needed. I've had so much time to think, and recover. I hope that you and Mabel have had a fantastic summer up in Oregon, and I promise I will make my way up there soon to visit, because it's already been too long. I hope that you are well and I would love to hear from you.

Andrew

P.S. I don't have anything to put here. I started writing P.S., then realized I had nothing to say, but I've gone this whole letter without crossing anything out, so I wasn't gonna start here. Alright. Bye.

P.P.S. Just kidding. Bye.

I laughed, and two tears fell from my eyes, on to the page. I dabbed at them with the hem of my shirt. I had to tell him that the letter was the perfect cure for a lonely day, so I pulled out my phone, and nearly dialed his number.

Instead, I tore some lined paper out of my notebook, sat down at my desk, and began to write.