In the summer that I was seventeen, I had my heart broken.

I've never been compatible with many people. I could blame it on my upbringing, I think - rich girls with every conceivable wish granted for them have little need for people - but it went deeper than that. There have been times, in the past, that I have drawn pleasure from repelling people away from me, and I don't understand it. How could I understand why I do something like that, instinctively? I've speculated that it's to prove to myself that I'm stronger on my own, that I don't need anybody to support me. And then other times, I've wondered if I push people away because I want them to chase after me. Everyone wants to be wanted, right?

Some people slip through the cracks in my defense, and those are the people that I've written about in this story. Andrew Vermont, who lived through tragedies he did not deserve. Nina Ryder, who was the first to insist that I had a drinking problem. And of course, Mabel Pines, who changed the world around me as I knew it for the better, and then for the worse. These people being few and far between, I tend to drop all of my eggs into their baskets, and become too dependent on their friendship.

Out of those three, I only ever fell in love with one of them.

In fact, out of all of the people on the planet, I've only ever fallen in love with one of them.

When we had kissed with our first breaths of a new year, and when we had kissed in her car on the following afternoon, Mabel had charged me with hope. When she came back to my home town that summer and never said a word about what we had done, she stripped all of that hope away.

The reason that I still resented her by the time she appeared in Greasy's diner four years later, is because I let that happen to me twice.

The first thing that was different about the summer I was seventeen was our hug when she arrived. It was shorter, less like an emotional reunion and more like going through the motions. It was totally foreign for us to spend that first day apart, but Mabel kept yawning and complaining that the journey had been tiring, and by 4 P.M. she had retired to the Mystery Shack to sleep. I went to my own bedroom and tried to wipe my memory of New Year's at the Pines household, I tried to forget what Mabel had said, maybe when I'm up there for the summer, we could try it, because whatever had happened between us was clearly no longer sitting well with her.

I tried to be understanding, and forget about it, and still be her friend. That was my first mistake.

The summer from there on out was just a game with my emotions. We'd go from hot to cold so quickly; one moment she would be brushing my hair with her fingertips, the next she would be lost in her cell phone, pretending not to have heard whatever I had just said. We would come so close to the way we used to be. We would sit under a blanket on my couch watching our way through the lowest-rated movies on Netflix and clutching our stomachs in laughter, and then the laughter would fizzle out and we'd hold eye contact for a few seconds, and she would look away, and her smile would go flat, and it would be over, like this was all my fault.

But what the fuck was I supposed to do? I wanted to scream at her, Mabel, look at me, I wanted her to tell me the thoughts that were racing through her head, if they were about us, which they clearly were. But I was too scared to confront her, because whatever state we were in now, we would get through it, I thought, and that would be better than losing her for good.

A few weeks into summer vacation, Candy Chiu came back to town. She was one of Mabel's first friends in Gravity Falls, back before I even knew Mabel myself, but Candy had moved over to the east coast not long after they met. This was their first time seeing each other in four years.

We hung out together, all three of us, a few times. Then one day I was walking back from the grocery store and the two of them were parked in Mabel's jeep outside Yumberjacks. They didn't see me. I thought it was odd at first, that I hadn't been invited along, and since Candy had arrived in town I couldn't remember a single moment that Mabel and I had been alone without Candy around. As the days went on, my insecurities settled in.

I had been a bitch to Candy when we were younger, as I had been to a lot of girls and boys, but she didn't show any sign of resentment when we became reacquainted through Mabel. In fact, I thought we had been getting along well. On one of the first nights that she was here, I pulled her aside and apologized for how I had treated her in the past, and she had shushed me and said not to worry, that she could see I had changed, so I somewhat doubted that it was her who was excluding me.

I visited the Mystery Shack one day in late July, on a whim, and Dipper answered the door and told me that Mabel wasn't there - her and Candy had driven up to Eugene for the day, to go ice-skating, of all things. I didn't know what to say. I loved ice-skating. I wanted to call her and ask her what the hell was going on, ask her if she wanted to maybe be a little less obvious about shunning me, but I decided that out of the two of us, I could play the game of cold-shoulder way better than she could, so I ignored her texts and her calls for a week.

Well, I say a week - I ignored them for two days and then they stopped. Five days after that, I caved and turned up at the Mystery Shack again. Stan and Dipper and Wendy were all out front watching the sunset over the trees; I was greeted like family.

"Take a load off," Stan said, and tossed me a beer out of a cooler. I popped the cap on the metal arm of my chair.

Then Mabel came outside, in a tank top and the shortest denim shorts I had ever seen her wearing, said "hey," squeezed my knee, and sank into the chair next to me, like the past week hadn't existed in time.

So it was like I said - hot to cold, cold to hot, hot to cold, the seasons of our undefinable relationship.

It was a cloudy night in mid-August that Wendy gathered us all - myself, Mabel, Dipper, Candy - on the roof of the Shack, claiming to have an announcement in store. She stood so close to the edge that a gust of wind could have toppled her over, but nobody seemed anxious about that except me. Anyway, she didn't fall off, so it's not really relevant. We had one electric lantern between us at our feet, all of our faces lit from the bottom like a campfire huddle.

"So for the last year my dad has been restoring an old weathered lake house out in the forest, about an hour away from here, and I'm excited to say that he has finished in time for us to spend our last week of summer out there," she said.

Nobody made a sound.

"It's a thirty-second walk from the lake, it has a diving platform, the house itself is all newly renovated, all modern furniture, there's a hot tub out on the front porch."

Mabel's hand shot up. "Will there be beefcakes provided in said hot tub?"

"You will have to provide your own beefcakes," Wendy said flatly, as I focused on a particularly green tree and swallowed my pain. "Come on, what's wrong with you guys? I thought you'd be more excited. We're gonna be totally parent-free, we can have parties up there every single night. And every day. One long party. It never has to end. It's gonna be nuts, guys."

It wasn't nuts. It was fun, and definitely relaxing, but it wasn't nuts.

We gathered at Wendy's house at lunchtime a couple of days later. Her dad made us all sandwiches, with beef cut as thick as a fillet steak. Candy, being vegetarian, slipped her slice to Mabel, who wolfed it down while Candy covertly chewed on her bread and butter. Our bellies full, we piled into Wendy's hippie van, our bags in the back, and hit the road. Then about an hour after hitting the road, we hit the bumpy dirt trail that would take us to her dad's lake house. It stretched for three miles, probably, growing narrower and narrower the closer we got. Riding shotgun, I flinched every time Wendy drove full speed at an upturned rock in the road, but somehow she never rolled the van or even popped a tire.

The house was beautiful. Smaller than I was expecting, but beautiful. Wendy pulled the van into a tiny driveway at the side of the building and we all jumped out and walked around to the front. There was about ten feet of lawn between the water and the wooden steps leading up to the porch, which had a set of wooden chairs, and the hot tub in the corner. The decking wrapped around one side of the house and I could see a barbecue at the very end - there was another set of stairs on this side that lowered into dirt and leaves, the very edge of the woods. Behind us, on a little wooden platform extending over the water, was a long wooden table with eight chairs, and tied to a post next to that, bobbing in the water, was a tiny rowing boat that I imagined was just for aesthetics; it looked like it would crumble to pieces if any of us stepped into it.

Wendy ascended the steps to the door, key in hand, and Mabel and Candy obediently followed, but I turned around and stared out at the lake. It was early afternoon, the sun was out, and I had to shield my eyes from the light reflecting off the ripples. I could see three other houses, on the opposite side, could even make out ant-sized humans laid out on deck chairs, kids running around with water guns. In the center of the lake was the diving platform that Wendy had mentioned. Dipper said from beside me, "it's beautiful," and I hummed in agreement, and I felt so warm inside in that moment, just happy to be there, grateful to be part of a tight-knit group of friends, regardless of wherever Mabel and I currently stood.

There were three bedrooms. I made sure to set my bags down in the master bedroom, alongside Wendy's, then I noticed that Mabel and Candy were already unpacking in the other double bedroom. As I walked past their door, Mabel looked up at me and straight back to her suitcase, in that hurried passing glance I had come to hate, like if she looked at me for too long she would catch something. There was a single bedroom downstairs, which Dipper took, adjoining a bathroom, and the rest of the lower floor was one open space - a lounge, with a corner couch and a couple of arm chairs facing a TV, and between that and the kitchen, a dining table.

We ate burgers off the barbecue that evening, out on the table set down by the water. Wendy devised a hilarious prank where she would channel her lumberjack strength and lift up our chairs with us still in them, and then swing us over the water like she was going to throw us in. By the end of the night Dipper was so tired of it that he waited until Wendy went off for a cigarette, looking over the lake, and then he crept up behind her and pushed her into the water. It was shallower than we expected, and I think he was worried that he had actually hurt her, until she clambered up onto the grass, laughing, and I went inside with the other girls while the two of them wrestled on the lawn.

For a few days after that, everything was just fine. With Mabel in sight at all times, and her affectionate smiles my way, it was easy to believe that by the time she came back next summer, everything would have reset, and those nights over New Years' would have become a distant, forgettable memory. And I was never alone with my self-destructive thoughts up at the lake house - surrounded by people more energetic than puppies, even when I was lying back with my eyes shut, there was always something going on, something to listen to. Always distracted.

Then halfway through our vacation, we set off on a morning hike into the heart of the woods, and with Wendy's horrible navigational skills and our collective inattentiveness, we took a left when we should have taken a right, and that morning hike turned into a full-day expedition. We hadn't packed enough food or water to last into the afternoon, so everybody grew irritable with each other. We drank out of our hands, from a stream. We didn't have a map and, far from any civilization, our cell phones had no service. As the sun was beginning to set, occasionally blinding us through gaps in the canopy of trees, by pure chance, completely disoriented, we found ourselves at the side of the lake we were staying at. All of us looked between one another, silent, awestruck; we could see the little house we had locked up eight hours ago, just to the left of the lake. When the others started walking towards it, I knew I wasn't hallucinating.

As soon as we were back inside, we ravaged the kitchen for anything immediately edible, drank liter upon liter of water, and crashed out in the lounge, each of us sprawled out on the furniture in a different position, our eyes wide open. Anyone passing by the window might have thought we were dead.

"We could have died," I said, the silence growing too eerie.

Dipper cleared his throat, coughed, and said, "who would we have eaten first?"

"Wendy," I said. "She's got the most meat on her."

"Yeah right," Wendy said. "Like you scrawny little fucks could take me down."

Before long, we were all laughing again, and I don't remember whose idea it was, but a while later we were all laughing with beer bottles in our hands, a cooler open on the coffee table. Even Candy indulged; not a week ago I had heard her describe alcohol as "poison for the mind."

You were right about that, Candy.

We found that the hot tub was an effective cure for our aching legs. Wendy turned the heat and the bubbles right up until that was all we could feel, and it was so soothing that I just leaned back with my elbows on the edge of the tub and slipped in and out of consciousness. I listened to the splashes of water when people climbed in or out, but I wasn't keeping track of who remained, and when I eventually opened my eyes, only Mabel was with me, sitting on the opposite bench.

She smiled lazily. "Hey, sleepyhead."

I grinned and stretched my arms. "What time is it?"

"I don't know. I'm not a clock."

"Oh, okay, sassy," I said, and flicked water at her.

"My feet are so sore," she groaned.

"Your feet are sore? You spent two hours riding on people's backs. Get over yourself."

"Well I'm sorry, we don't all have freakish warrior feet like you do. Look," she said, holding her foot up above the water, her toe almost whacking my nose. "Look how tiny it is. It's pathetic."

When her foot disappeared below the surface again, I took a swig of my beer and said, "give me your foot."

Mabel tilted her head, but lifted her foot up anyway, and when I took it in both hands she giggled and yanked it away. "That tickles!"

"Grow up, Mabel. You're seventeen in two days."

"Ugh, fine."

I squeezed her foot a little harder, so she wouldn't squirm, and began to knead the muscles. I had only ever tried this with my own feet, after running, but Mabel only took a second to lean back and shut her eyes, with a hum of appreciation.

"Is that good?"

"Yes," she sighed. "Please keep doing that forever."

I tried to remember the last time we had been so intimate, but couldn't. What can I say? I was a seventeen-year-old closeted lesbian, with virtually no sexual experience and a through-the-roof sex drive. And I was in a hot tub with my girl-crush, and she was wearing a swimsuit, and I was tipsy, and her foot was in my hand and she was enjoying it so much that I got carried away, and my hands drifted to her ankle, then her shin, then her knee.

Her eyes flickered open, but she didn't move, so I kept going. I stepped over to her side of the tub, dropped one hand from her leg, and moved the other to her thigh. I was beginning to question how consensual this was when she lifted her wet palm to my face, and swept my hair behind my ear, and that was all the invitation I needed to kiss her but I didn't, because I was spellbound by her eyes, boring into mine, and then we heard the front door open and we fell apart quicker than the little rowing boat that Mabel had tried to sit in the night before.

Candy's head peered around the doorframe. She sang, "girls," and then, frowning, "what are you two doing?"

It wasn't accusatory at all, just curious, but Mabel let out a sharp, "nothing," and I very nearly slapped my palm to my face.

"Okay," Candy said, slightly taken aback. "We have pizza inside if you're hungry." She hovered in the doorway for a while longer, as if keeping an eye on us, and then shut the door.

Mabel's eyes met mine for half a second, then she stood up out of the water and said, "we should, um," gesturing to the house.

"Yeah," I said, but I stayed in the water long enough to watch the back of her thighs as she walked to her towel, escaping my grip. I didn't write Christmas cards, but if I did, Candy wouldn't be getting one that year.

The following night, Mabel and I slept in a tent. She disappeared sometime in the afternoon, and when I went to look for her I found her rummaging in the shed behind the house. The door was open, but she was barricaded in by a lawnmower, which she kicked out of the way with no regard for its wellbeing.

"Look what I found," she said, waving around a slim green canvas bag, blowing hair out of her face. "It's a tent!"

"How long have you been back here?" I asked her, realizing I hadn't seen her since lunch.

"I'm not sure. An hour? There's all kinds of cool stuff in there."

I peered into the shed and saw an old barbecue, a rake, a broom, a couple of foldout chairs. Pretty standard for a shed, I thought. "I worry about you sometimes," I told Mabel.

"It fits two people," she said, reading the back of the bag. "We should sleep in it. Tonight. Do you want to?"

I wasn't even thinking about the possible implications of that; she was just in her childlike state, excited by the mundane. "I guess," I said.

"Yay," she squeaked, hugging the bag to her chest. She pointed at me and said, "this girl. That's why you're my favorite."

If I could reach back in time and slap that stupid grin off my face, I would.

We set up the tent about a hundred yards into the woods. It was smaller than I ever imagined a two-person tent being, and it was fortunate that we were both short, otherwise our legs would have been jutting out of the entrance all night. I made a passing comment about this being bear country, and when I came out of the lake house later that evening Mabel had moved the tent to the foot of the steps around the side of the porch.

She was hammering in the last peg. "So we have an escape route," she told me, out of breath. "From the bears."

When darkness fully consumed the lakeside, Mabel was both determined to light a fire, and shit at lighting fires, which was a dangerous combination. I sat on the grass, gazing wistfully at our pile of sticks and leaves, while she bashed two rocks together. Wendy leaned out of one of the lounge's windows and offered us her lighter, but Mabel shut her down.

"I don't think it's working," I said, about ten minutes in to the hopeless exercise.

"Yeah," she sighed, and threw the rocks over her shoulder. They made a plop-plop in the lake.

We lay on our backs in the tent and ate marshmallows out of the bag. We didn't have any sleeping bags, so we sandwiched ourselves between two comforters that we'd found in a closet along with a couple of pillows. It was strange that we had things to catch up on, though neither of us directly acknowledged that we had put distance between each other all summer.

"It's so peaceful out here," Mabel said, after a particularly long silence.

"Mhmm."

Then, quickly, as if she had been bottling it up, she said, "do you ever think there's more to life than doing what everyone tells you to?"

I turned my head; I rarely saw her look so solemn. "What do you mean?"

"Like... I'm supposed to apply to colleges soon. I'm supposed to, because my parents always said I would, and because I haven't thought up any alternative. But I don't even know what I'm gonna major in. I'm supposed to go to college, for three or four years, I'm supposed to move out of my home, and then what? I'm supposed to get a job and work until I die." She tilted her head toward me. "There must be more to life than that, right?"

"Well... sure," I said, trying to hide my shock. Mental breakdowns were supposed to be my thing. "Your life isn't defined by what job you have or what you major in. Think about your hobbies, your friends. Your relationships."

"What if I don't even want to go to college? What if it's just been ingrained in my mind by my parents and my... what if I'm only applying because it's what's expected of me?"

"Then don't go," I said, leaning on my elbow and looking down at her. "I'm not. And it's not like this is now or never, either. You can wait a year, or two, or three, do whatever you want. It's not-" I stopped. "Can you hear that?"

I thought I heard shouting, coming from inside the house, and I strained my ears, worrying that someone was hurt, but then I heard a very feminine moan, followed by a shhh, and I looked back at Mabel, whose eyes widened in horror as she sat up.

I fell back to my pillow, bursting into laughter. "Your brother's getting laid," I told her.

We fell silent again, to listen, and heard a distinct grunt from the upstairs window, closest to us, the room that I would have been sleeping in tonight and was now very hesitant about sleeping in ever again.

"This isn't funny," she said, shaking my arm.

"Oh, I think it is."

"It's not! Is that Wendy or Candy?"

"Wendy. Candy wouldn't be that loud."

"Oh my god. Oh my god, I have to stop them," she said, reaching for the tent's zipper.

"What?!" I tugged her arm, and she landed with half of her body on top of me.

"She's too crazy for him," Mabel whispered harshly. "She'll break his heart."

"Okay, how bad do you think Wendy is? If you go up there right now and interrupt them Dipper will never speak to you again." I added, "they've been friends for years, she's not gonna hurt him," and then thought for a second how that could easily apply to what we were going through, and suddenly I wasn't so sure that Wendy wouldn't hurt him, inadvertently.

I think Mabel, still hovering above me, noticed the crack in my smile, and she said, "what?"

"Nothing," I lied. Then I smirked. "Just imagine what she's doing to him."

Mabel groaned and slumped back into her own side of the bed, covering her ears with the pillow.

I said, "she must be giving him the time of his life," and a short while after we had stopped laughing, I fell asleep.

The next day, I ruined the surprise party.

Is that too vague? Okay, let me be a little more transparent:

It was about 8 P.M., on our penultimate day at the lake house, and I was crouched behind an armchair, thirty-odd people around me. Candy had taken the twins off to the nearest town for their birthday dinner, and Wendy and I had faked food poisoning all day to avoid it. We used the time wisely to direct invited guests - mostly friends and acquaintances from the Sherville Factory, and a handful of friends from California that were able to make the drive - to a makeshift parking lot we had set up further into the woods. We didn't want anybody parking on the road leading up to the house, so we played Tetris with people's cars, slotting them in between trees. It was an impressive feat - only one person lost a wing mirror.

So I was behind this armchair - we had received the two-minute warning from Candy - and all the lights were off; we could still just barely see in the pale moonlight. And I shit you not, the most horrifying monstrosity of a spider was chilling out on the wooden floor, inches away from me, inches away from a guy crouching below a window. I think I broke into a sweat when I spotted it, but I was fine, really, it was fucking huge, but I was fine. Dipper was pulling up in Wendy's van right then - two beams of light shot through the windows and onto the opposite wall. But of course, spiders can't fully comprehend the nature of surprise parties, and this particular eight-legged terrorist decided to run at my foot and crawl up onto it.

Well, I was wearing sandals, and I didn't care whose party it was, I wasn't going to let that thing have its way with my toes, so I screamed, stood up, and started flinging my foot around. The lights went up - god knows what everybody was thinking, but at the time I didn't care. I looked down and its fuzzy mass was still sitting on my foot, treating the whole thing as a fairground ride, so I started kicking the back of the chair, over and over and over, until all that was left was a wreckage of guts and limbs, and that was still pretty gross, but at least it wasn't gross and alive.

I'm sure you've felt it before - all eyes on you, and you'd rather be anywhere else. It was almost funny, if only I had been able to overcome the crippling embarrassment. Candy, Mabel and Dipper had opened the front door at some irrelevant point of my outburst. There were a couple of half-hearted shouts of surprise! but the first person to move was Wendy, who dragged a hand across her face and slumped against the wall.

"Spider," I explained to the room.

I had to hit the drink hard if I wanted any chance at enjoying myself for the rest of the evening. A half hour into the party, I was already pouring my third rum and Coke, and although I eventually slowed down, when it comes to my capability to make sensible decisions, any amount of alcohol is too much. So, I'll forgo a long description of the party - I caught up with people from the Factory, I played some drinking games - and I'll get to that part of the story now, the part I've been building up to, the part where my life began to self-destruct.

Roughly a third of our guests had taken off already. I think it was nearing midnight. I had just come out of the bathroom, having reapplied my lipstick, but I was pretty drunk, and no length of time in front of the mirror would have helped me determine whether I had been able to paint within the lines or not. Mabel had just come inside through the back door in the kitchen. I smiled at her friends as they passed - the ones from back home, Naomi and Elise, though I couldn't remember which was which - and Mabel stepped towards me and pushed me against the side of the staircase, a glass in her hand, drunker than I had ever seen her.

"Hey," she said, smiling warmly. Innocently, even. I noticed that her fingers were playing with the necklace I had given her that morning - a silver dolphin, with a tiny cut of faux sapphire for an eye.

"Hey yourself." I took the swaying glass from her hand and placed it on the sideboard next to the stairs. "I'm just going to set that down here," I told her, and she didn't argue.

"I haven't had a chance to thank you," she said, oddly coherent, and gestured to the living room. "For all of this."

I shrugged. "Wasn't just me. Wendy put together most of it."

"Yeah, but... you're always planning things for my birthdays. And I feel so bad because I'm never here for yours."

"That's okay. I like our little Skype parties, anyway."

She gasped. "Oh my gosh! Don't move. There's a spider in your hair."

"Funny."

She grinned. "I thought it was pretty funny. Where have you been all night? You haven't been hiding from my friends, have you?"

"I've been hiding from you," I said, and I think I meant it as a joke, but it didn't quite come out that way. It felt only natural that intoxication would quickly lead to confrontation.

Mabel frowned. "Why have you been hiding from me?"

"Because that's what we do now, isn't it? We hide from each other."

Mabel gazed off to the side, into the party, and looked back at me, the smile wiped from her face. "I don't want it to be that way."

"Really? Because it feels like you've been doing most of the hiding."

It was pretty clear, then, that she didn't have anything to respond with.

"I'm gonna go upstairs," I said. "I think I need to lie down. I think I've had too much to drink," and it wasn't until I was halfway up the stairs that I realized I was now the one hiding.

And I think I remember feeling like I didn't want to see her ever again. It didn't matter how much time we had spent apart that summer, I still got that awful, wonderful, sinking, fluttering feeling in my stomach whenever I saw her, and time only intensified it to the point that it was unbearable. And yet when I slipped inside the bedroom that Wendy and I had been sharing, I left the door ajar, because I wanted Mabel to follow me. It's like I said, everyone wants to be wanted.

I didn't switch the lights on; there was enough moonlight to guide me to the window. I looked out into the dense woods, then down at the tent we had spent the night in. I listened to bassy music pump through the floorboards, and to normal people that were actually capable of enjoying themselves at a time like this, and tears began to stream down my cheeks.

I could see the slat of light through the crack in the door, reflected in the window, so I saw it expand, and a shadow fill its width. I turned around and there she was, stepping into the room, shutting the door behind her, unknowingly fueling my bewitching behavior. She walked half of the room toward me and stopped, the moonlight illuminating her rosy cheeks and her wide eyes, taunting me, really, by highlighting how beautiful she was.

"Why are you crying?"

I folded my arms and leaned back against the window. "That's a stupid question, don't you think?"

"Okay," she sighed, taking another step. She looked irritated, now. "Let me say it again: I don't want things to be like this."

"And I have been trying to keep myself together and make sure things aren't like this. But I can't do it anymore."

"Can't do what anymore?"

"Why do you have to act so naive?" I snapped, advancing on her. "You said we would talk about this. About us. You said we could try it, try to be more than friends, and from the moment you got here you led us in the totally opposite direction. I would have been fine, eventually, if you had told me outright that it wasn't going to happen, ever. I could have gotten over that. But instead we've spent all of our summer coming close to how things were over Christmas, and then you've turned around and looked at me like I was something nasty on the bottom of your shoe."

"Really?" she said, crossing her arms. "That's how you think I've been treating you?"

"What do you mean? That's not what I think, it's what you've been doing. It's a fact."

"Then kiss me," she said, her eyes fierce.

"What?"

"What, you think I'm gonna freak out? You think I'm gonna run out of the room with my arms flailing? Kiss me."

I felt my cheeks flare up. I didn't move, obviously - the whole thing suddenly felt like a fever dream.

"Here, I'll make it easier for you," Mabel said, her voice low, and she closed the distance between us, threw her arms around my neck, and we started to mix our shades of lipstick.

Looking at the girl, you wouldn't have pictured her capable of such ferocity, but she started to claw at my shirt like she had a personal vendetta against Forever 21, and after I paused to take it off, her nails were harsh against my bare back.

Even as it was happening, I knew that this wasn't our great big romantic breakthrough. Her lips felt colder. She wasn't as gentle. We were acting on impulse, lust more than love, and the whole moment felt darker than it had done on New Years' Eve, like we weren't as close and we knew we would never be. But when fantasy stares you in the face, you don't say hold on a minute, you don't search beyond it for the negative consequences.

We started at the foot of the bed, and by the time we had wriggled our way up to the pillows, every last item of our clothing was somewhere on the floor. When our lips broke apart our breaths were so heavy that I might have been hyperventilating. She was leaning over me, our bodies tangled up like a game of Twister, and beads of sweat glued a few strands of hair to her forehead. I never knew what her eyes meant, never knew what was on her mind, but she began a trail of kisses down my abdomen, making a rest stop at my breasts, and when she reached the spot between my legs I leaned back, let the pillow envelop my head.

I remember watching her for some time, focusing on the top of her head, buried there in the nook between my thighs, and then I tried not to watch, and focused all of my willpower on making this last as long as I could. I gripped the sheets, fastened my eyes shut, tensed all of my muscles, but it must have been less than a minute before my body shuddered and I knew it was over. She re-emerged and kissed me, and we rolled over and I returned the favor.

And the whole time, not a word was said. Our ferocity burned out. We cleaned up what we could and pulled the comforter over us. Downstairs, Mabel's friends would be leaving, and looking for her to say goodbye, blissfully unaware that she was dozing off behind a locked door tangled up in another girl's arms. I suppose all of the warning signs that she would run from me in the morning had been thrust in my face, but I chose to cling onto hope while we fell asleep, our naked bodies cuddled together.

When the sun woke me, I was alone. I sat up fast, which was a mistake. My head felt like a local demolition crew had used it in place of a wrecking ball overnight. I looked to the floor and her clothes were gone, the door was closed. There was no evidence of anyone having spent the night with me. I dug around in my suitcase for the last clean set of clothes I had packed, then tiptoed downstairs.

It was eerily quiet. I did a sweep of the bottom floor, but all I found was Candy, passed out on the corner couch with lopsided glasses and a frizzy hairdo. The door to Dipper's room was wide open, and I spotted the same green bra that Wendy had been leaving all over my possessions all week, resting on the bed. She had spent the night here, clearly, with or without realizing that her own room was otherwise occupied. Upstairs, I peered into Mabel and Candy's room, and my heart stopped, because I couldn't see any of Mabel's clothes, or her bags, I couldn't see that stuffed tiger she carted around everywhere, or her perfumes, or her deodorants. Two toothbrushes were missing from the bathroom. My foot slipped on another of Wendy's damn bras as I scrabbled back into the hallway and hurried back downstairs.

No, I thought. She wouldn't. But she had - they both had. On second inspection, now that I was fully awake, none of Dipper's belongings were left in his room either.

I paced about the lounge, dialing Mabel's number, dialing Wendy's number, and neither of them picked up. I called Dipper, he answered, and while I was panicking I was somehow considerate enough to keep my voice low so that Candy could continue her snoring.

"Where are you guys?"

"We're at the Shack," he said. "Just starting to pack up. Is everything okay?"

Agony gripped my forehead; I keeled over and pressed my hand against it. "I didn't think you were leaving until tomorrow."

"We're going back early with Elise and Naomi - Mabel's friends. I thought Mabel told you?"

She didn't tell me shit. "You didn't say goodbye."

"Mabel told me you were fast asleep. I'm sorry," he said gently, "I didn't want to wake you up."

"She didn't say goodbye either."

"She told me she said goodbye last night. Are you feeling okay?"

"Yes, Dipper, I'm fine. Ask your sister if she's okay, but don't expect an honest answer," I spat, and I regretted it as soon as I hung up. It wasn't his fault.

Perfectly on cue, I heard the van pull up outside, and I darted out the front door. Wendy was walking up to the porch and, irritatingly casually, she said, "and then there were three."

I threw up on the lawn, then, which was a horribly impolite way to thank Wendy and her dad for letting us stay in their pristine lake house all week, and instead of acknowledging the pond of vomit, I spewed forth most of what had happened, omitting the part where Mabel and I had slept together, and Wendy told me that she, too, was under the assumption that Mabel had told me about her early departure.

"I have to talk to her," I said. "I can't let her leave yet. Can you drive me back into town?"

"What about Candy?" she said, glancing uncertainly at the house.

"She's asleep. I'll text her from the car. Please, Wendy. I'll never ask anything of you ever again."

So we sped down the I-5, back towards Gravity Falls. I hurled spearmint gum into my mouth because I hadn't brushed my teeth before we left, and when I got around to screaming in Mabel's face I would need her to take me seriously. All the way there my foot tapped restlessly on the floor, thump-thump-thump-thump-thump, and we didn't turn the radio on to drown it out. There was a swelling pain in my gut and I came close to tears at least three times. I noticed Wendy glancing at me from time to time, and I didn't know if she had figured it all out, the extent of my turmoil. A couple of years from that moment I would tell Wendy the full story - all the way back to that night on my balcony, with the fireworks, and the grapes, and how I think I fell in love with Mabel's laugh then and there - and Wendy would not react with an ounce of surprise.

Right on the outskirts of town - so close - half of the road was fenced off, for construction, and we pulled up at one of those traffic lights that really, really take the cake. We sat there at the light, in the ass-end of nowhere, for a good two minutes, while a stream of cars passed us going in the direction that was, to this traffic light, far more important than wherever the hell we were going.

I bit my nails and gazed out into the forest, over and over, considering it. I knew that somewhere, not even that far into the woods, the Mystery Shack would be welcoming the morning's round of tourists, and my one night stand would be packing her bags to skip town. I took one last look at that merciless red light, swung open the door, shouted to Wendy that I'd call her, and I sprinted into the woods. To the cars behind, it probably looked like I was escaping my kidnapper.

I turned slightly to the right, then ran straight, bringing up a map of the town in my head. If I was lucky, I would land on Pines property. If I was unlucky, I would end up at the town's lake, and I didn't possess the same kind of determination as Forrest Gump - I was more likely to throw myself in the lake than turn back and keep on running.

I was lucky. After a minute the trees were spaced further apart, and I caught a glimpse of the gabled roof. Then I was standing in the parking lot out the front of the building, catching my breath. I turned to my right and Mabel's jeep was still there, and there was a smaller, cream-colored car parked behind it. I noticed there were people in those cars, staring at me. Naomi in the passenger seat of the Jeep, Elise in the driver seat of the car behind. Or maybe it was Elise in the Jeep and Naomi in the car behind. I ran a hand through my hair, like that would fix whatever running against the wind had done to it, and I thought, fucking hell, how has my life come to this? I used to be a fucking princess. I used to be town royalty, turning heads wherever I went because of my beauty and my clothes and my wealth, and now I was chasing after girls, sweaty and unbathed, just another town kook.

I ignored the girls in the cars and ran for the front door, and halfway there, Mabel stepped outside, lugging a suitcase behind her. She saw me and dropped the case at her side, nearly crushing her toes. I stopped at the foot of the stairs to the porch. She looked as messy and exhausted as I did; I knew that for her, leaving the Shack as fast as possible was just as important of a mission as it had been for me to get here. And still I wasn't angry, yet. I was hanging on to hope that this was a misunderstanding, and that she would come down the steps and kiss me, and that... what? Then what would happen?

She picked up her bag and heaved it down the steps, dropped it in the dirt. At eye-level now, she said, "I need to apologize."

Like we were co-workers, or something, and we'd drunkenly kissed under the mistletoe at the Christmas party. Hope: Robbed. "But you weren't going to," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "You were going to get in the car and leave."

She looked at the ground, and back up at me. "I don't know if there's anything I can say that will make this better, Paz. I think it's better if I just leave," she said, and she tried to slip past me, fumbling with the suitcase, but I grabbed her arm and stopped her.

"Why? I don't understand."

"Because I've been awful to you," she said, her voice cracking. "So, so awful."

"It's okay," I told her, shaking my head. "We have feelings for each other, that's fine, but we have to talk about it. You can't keep kissing me and running away afterwards."

"I do have feelings for you, but I-"

"Then look at me." I was practically begging. My hands had found their way into hers.

She looked up, tears obscuring her eyes, and there was this thick, unnerving silence, totally uncharacteristic of the woods - there was always the wind lashing at the trees, or a bird chirping, or a woodpecker. And Mabel said, "I have a boyfriend," and the silence was replaced by a high-pitched whining in my ears. I think my face must have drained of blood. She kept talking - her boyfriend was back in California, she would see him tonight, she was so, so sorry, and the morning caught up to me. I hadn't eaten, I had expelled the contents of my guts as soon as I got up, I had run through the woods to hear something I had never wanted to know, and my heart had beaten as much in two hours as it normally would in a week. I wanted to lie down in the grass and go to sleep.

I drew back my hand and slapped her, as hard as I could. She recoiled, used the suitcase to keep her balance. Her eyes were wide and her hand covered the red mark on her cheek. I heard footsteps pounding on the gravel, somewhere behind me.

"I'm sorry," was the last thing Mabel Pines said to me. She walked out of my view, and for a while I couldn't turn around. The last of my energy had been sapped out of me. When I did turn around, Naomi-or-Elise was helping Mabel to the Jeep, carrying the suitcase, and giving me a dirty look over her shoulder that seemed a little audacious given that she didn't know the first thing about our situation. Or maybe she did. Maybe Mabel had told her. It wasn't like I knew anything about my best friend anymore.

At some point between the moment that Mabel started the engine to her Jeep, and the moment that she pulled out onto the road into town, my feet propelled me forward. I ran after her, the other Naomi-or-Elise stood alert beside her own car, and maybe she called after me but I wasn't sure because the wind was howling in my ears again.

All I wanted to do was return a fraction of the damage Mabel had done to me. The road was dead straight; I had a pretty clear shot. As the cherry-red car sank further into the horizon, the perfect, cloudless blue sky, I picked up a rock from the side of the road and hurled it, and it landed in the road twenty feet in front of me, with a pathetic, distant thunk. I fell to my knees on the hot tarmac, and punched the road until my knuckles bled.