I don't know why I brush my hair. I don't know why I put on lipstick. I don't know why, at the last minute, I swap out my tattered long-sleeved tee for a collared shirt and a black sweater. It might be an innate reaction to a pretty girl's impending arrival on my doorstep. I dab at my lips with a sheet of toilet paper, so the lipstick doesn't look freshly applied, and frown at myself in the mirror. I suppose I just admitted that I still find Mabel pretty. I suppose I'm dressing up nice for a girl who is not only engaged to a man, but who is also demon spawn.

I grip the edge of the sink and groan. I run some hot water, scrub the lipstick off completely, and ruffle up my hair. Better. Alright, I'll brush my hair again. Just the hair. Everything else remains un-groomed.

The doorbell rings and my heart jumps. Again, instinctual reaction. If the doorbell rings and I'm over the sink it's usually because I'm about to go on a date, and I'm expected to act like a functional woman for a few hours.

I open the front door and there she is, in all of her beautiful awfulness. Her hair is tied back and her breath is minty and, wow, she's dressed for a date more than I am - denim jacket over a stripy red and white t-shirt, tight black pants. We're still wandering around the woods looking for treasure maps, right? Maybe by Scuttlebutt island she meant she was going to scuttle into my butt-

Jesus. Okay. No need to let thoughts like that run loose in my head.

"Hey," she says, peering over my shoulder and surveying the room. "Nice place."

She's not coming in, if that's what she's thinking. "My dad pays for it," I tell her.

She's silent to the bottom of the stairs, then she says, "that's nice of him."

I hesitate before I get in Mabel's car, because it feels like stepping into a younger version of myself as well. I hoist myself into the seat and as soon as I sit down, on the backdrop of my pitch black street, I can see the sun set over San Francisco, like it was only yesterday. Those days that I'll never forget, with the car and the girl that I thought I had lost forever.

Mabel physically makes me jump when she speaks; it really makes me worry sometimes how I can so easily drown in my own thoughts.

"I didn't bring the map itself," she says, "in case it rains. But I took a picture."

Her phone's screen lights up the interior of the Jeep as she holds it between us.

"This is the drawing I did of the solved puzzle... and this is what the lake looks like on Google Maps. See? They match up perfectly. The rectangles around the edges are just the docks."

"And you're sure you drew the X in the right place?"

"I think so," she breathes. "I tried to draw my map to scale with the jumbled up one. I used a ruler and everything." Hyperactive as a toddler, she dives her hands into the back seat. "I didn't know what to bring. I brought the shovels. And a crowbar," she says, holding up - yep, a crowbar, and nearly knocking me unconscious in the process.

"Bear mace?"

She grimaces. "Will there be bears?"

"I have pepper-spray in my purse. That'll do. I can also use it when I get sick of you."

"Who could get sick of me?" she quips, starting the engine and flashing me a grin.

And, shit, if seventeen-year-old me could see me smiling back, she would knock me out cold. Mabel swings the car around, out of my street. I relax into the seat, glance at the time, glowing orange on the dashboard - 10:09 P.M. I look up at the road ahead, under the headlights, and I'm still smiling because it feels like the start of an adventure. Maybe I'm just happy to be out of the house, like the forever-bored dog that I am.

When we reach the lake, the headlights bounce off of the water, right alongside the moon's reflection, until Mabel shuts off the engine. I frown. I must be braindead, because I hadn't considered the water being an obstacle to our destination until now. "Do you have a boat?" I ask Mabel.

"We're borrowing Soos' boat," she tells me. "Did you know he's afraid of water? A jellyfish stung him in Hawaii and now he doesn't trust it."

I nod, like that's pertinent information to me, and we gather up Mabel's treasure-hunting gear from the back seat, and head around the back of the fishing shop where all the boats are docked. Soos' speedboat is the biggest here, but it certainly doesn't look the flashiest. Or safe. At all. In fact, the wooden planks boarding up the centre of its exterior suggest that at one point it was two halves of a boat. But Mabel hops on board, dropping her shovel and crowbar on the floor, and the boat doesn't sink under the weight.

She notices my apprehension and holds out her hand. "Need a hand?"

"No," I say sternly. I opt to leap the foot-wide gap between the dock and the boat, and somehow I still catch my foot, and my body slams face-first into the cushioned seat. I sit up quickly, as if the person standing right next to me might not have seen or heard my stumblebum entrance.

There's a tiny, half-open cabin at the front of the boat with the wheel and the engine controls. Mabel rummages in a footlocker and pulls out a life jacket. "Can you still swim?" she asks.

"Yes, I can still swim."

"As well as you can board a boat?"

I scowl. "Throw me overboard and find out."

"I'll take your word for it." She stows away the life jacket and steps behind me to untie the boat from the dock. She moves back to the cabin and while she's starting the engine, I have a moment to jump back to shore, if I so wish. Now that I'm over the initial excitement, the reality sets in that I am bobbing on the water, sailing into the wilderness in the dead of night. But I realize I find that more enticing than lying awake in my lifeless apartment, so the boat starts to move and here I am again, blindly going along with whatever Mabel's excitable head comes up with, just like old times. I watch her ponytail sway to one side in the gentle wind. The part of me that finds her intriguing never died, it would appear. It was just lying dormant.

For a minute I gaze out over the water, my eyes searching for the abandoned fishing dock, but I can't pick it out in the darkness. I notice Mabel glancing in its direction, too, and hate that my heart rate picks up remembering the night we slept there. Neither of us say anything.

Then she's sitting at my side, clasping her hands in her lap, mimicking my position.

"Shouldn't you be steering the boat?"

"Cruise control," she says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

When she smiles, I start to realize how dangerous this is. I don't mean the boat, or the remote island. I mean spending time with her. It's like the closer she sits to me, the clearer I can see the moon in her chocolate eyes, the less those days after we cut ties seem to matter.

"So, how have you been?"

I laugh without meaning to. "You mean for the last four years?"

"Sure," she says. "Gotta start somewhere."

"I've been... terrible. Then terrible, again. Then a lot better. And now... somewhere between terrible and fine. You?"

She twists her mouth in thought. "I've been okay."

I nod, then shake my head. Can't work out if I care or not. "Glad we got that out of the way."

"How long have you been working at Greasy's?"

"A couple of years."

"You enjoy it?"

I shrug. "Yeah. Can't complain. It pays well, and I haven't figured out yet whether I have bigger ambitions than serving breakfast to people. You're still in college?"

"Uh-huh. My final year starts in September. I just finished my internship. I worked at a school down in Oakland for special needs kids. Which was great, but too great, and now I want to go back there instead of finishing college."

"Where'd you meet Jason?" Great, because that was the next logical point in the conversation. The hell is wrong with me? Hold fire, Pacifica. No need to start an argument and end the night with one of us on the bottom of the lake.

"He worked at this coffee shop me and my friends used to go to during lunch. In high school, I mean."

If there was any doubt that Jason was the boy Mabel cheated on on her seventeenth birthday, there isn't anymore. She looks a little abashed, but I let out another involuntary laugh, because I had Jason pegged as an independent coffee-house snob since the first moment I saw him.

Mabel looks up at me and half-grins, like she missed the joke. "What's so funny?"

"Nothing," I say, forcing a straight face.

She's about to speak but we both lurch forward, and I grab onto her arm to stop myself sliding off the seat. Mabel jumps up and switches the boat's engine off.

"What the hell was that?" I ask her, trying to remember if I can actually swim because the boat must be sinking.

"We're here," she proclaims, vaulting over the side of the boat and splashing into shallow water. I peer over and it's up to her ankles.

"Have you beached the boat?" I squint ahead but all I see is a black void - the thick forest under the sky. I can just about see the shore, either side of us, logs and rocks scattered along it. It's no wonder we crashed - to the human eye, this place barely exists at night.

"Yeah, but it's fine. The front of the boat is hardened. I've crashed it loads of times."

I take her calm tone at face value and stop worrying. I pass Mabel the tools and her backpack, then stare down at the water's surface. "My shoes aren't waterproof."

"Neither are mine," she chuckles.

"Yeah, but... mine are really expensive."

Mabel rolls her eyes and walks further up the shore. "Climb up onto the bow here," she instructs me, and I do, then I accept her proffered hand and she helps me down onto the sand.

She wades back into the water and leans into the boat to grab her backpack and the shovels. She tosses one to me, but instead of catching it I flinch and step out of the way. Then she's charging up the beach like we're invading Normandy, dual-wielding shovel and crowbar, and I shake my head and follow along behind her. No turning back now.

I catch up to her at the edge of the woods, which may as well be the edge of the world without any light on it. Mabel drums her fingers on her phone and huffs. "I don't have any signal," she says. "Do you?"

I pull my phone from my pocket. "Nope."

"Dammit. I was going to use the GPS on my phone to guide us to the X on the map."

"Well, that's a shame. Back on the boat?" My feet have gone cold, staring into the blackness that is the woods. There could be anything in there. Probably trees and bushes, but still. There could be anything.

"Oh! I've got a bar," Mabel shouts, her voice echoing from a thousand directions at once. An owl hoots somewhere up ahead; shut up, nobody cares! "Okay, so we are... here," she says, showing me the map on her phone. "And we need to get to here. So we need to go... that way."

She could be right, she could be wrong, but it's not my job to decide. This is her treasure trail. I'm here to keep my brain occupied and to keep her from getting mauled by a bear. Mainly the first thing, though.

We set out into the woods, a flashlight each, and we don't walk very far at all before her phone's GPS claims that we're standing right over the X, but we soon figure out that it isn't entirely accurate, so we have to stand still in places and reload the map until we have a better idea of where we are. Ford's map isn't specific at all about what we're looking for, so we also decide that hiding whatever it is underground would have been cruel - every square foot of dirt and leaves is indistinguishable from the next. Instead we inspect the tree trunks. Ford liked hiding things in trees, Mabel says.

I give up on things really easily - it's the same reason I've relapsed so many times since joining AA - so about an hour in I'm growing flustered, and our whole plan feels futile. If I spin my flashlight around 360 degrees I'm going to see the same thing - tree, tree, tree. Another tree. And we haven't been keeping track of the ones we've already checked.

I pull my sweater over my head and tie it around my waist, but it must have caught on my shirt, because Mabel says, "is that a belly-button piercing?"

"Uh, yeah," I say, my cheeks flaring up for no obvious reason.

"Can I see?"

Can she see my bare skin? I don't even consider it. The hem of my shirt just flies upwards, with my hands attached. I start to wonder how many things I've done for Mabel throughout my life simply because she's an attractive woman; if she wasn't an attractive woman, I'd be tucked up in bed right now.

Mabel shines her flashlight on my stomach, and I watch her fingers reach out and prod at the skin around the piercing, but all she's looking at is a tiny silver ball, so I'm not sure I understand her fascination. My brain can't decide whether I want to slap her hand away or pull her closer. I do neither.

"So cool," she breathes, like I'm showing her the moon through a telescope. She backs away and I start breathing again.

"It's just a stud," I tell her.

"I want to get one either side of my nose, here and here. Maybe one in my tongue, too. But my mom won't let me."

"Your mom won't- what? You're twenty years old."

"Yeah, but she has really strong opinions about that kind of thing. Tattoos and piercings. She says people should 'preserve their bodies.'"

"Wow."

"You should have seen her when Dipper brought his girlfriend round for dinner. She has a sleeve tattoo and Mom saw it poking out of her sweater. My dad thought it was cool, because he's a reasonable man, so we were all sat around studying this girl's tattoo while my mom was at the end of the table slowly sipping her wine. Ridiculous."

"Dipper has a girlfriend?"

"Yeah. Her name's Marie. They've been together for about a year now."

I smirk. "Red hair?"

"No," Mabel laughs. "Black hair. I think his preference for redheads was a phase."

We walk side by side, going nowhere, now, hoping we'll miraculously stumble upon anything significant. I frown at the ground and say, "you said Dipper was here, in Gravity Falls, back at Christmas. He was here doing... this, right? Following Ford's trail."

"Mhmm. He had a different set of clues, but yeah."

"He never got in touch with me and Wendy."

"Yeah," Mabel sighs. "I think he wanted to. But around the time that Ford died... well, Dipper has these sort of... episodes. He can get in his own head a lot. Gets stressed very easily. He has told me next to nothing about the weeks he spent up here in winter break, but I can imagine that he wanted to spend every minute of it on Ford, and he saw anything else as a distraction from what mattered the most to him. I bet he would have loved to see you, otherwise. But even I can't talk to him when he's like that - he gets very abrupt and shoos me away. Then he forgets what he said the next day."

"Oh," I say, almost inaudibly. Back when we were friends, I knew Dipper, and I didn't know him at all. I feel guilty now. I was so obsessed with his sister that I rarely stopped to ask how he was doing.

"It's a twin thing. I go through phases of telling myself everything's happy and wonderful even when it isn't, and he goes through phases of telling himself that everything's awful and the world is against him, even when he's doing just fine." Mabel exhales and plops herself down on a tree stump. "We're never going to find this X, are we?"

I shake my head. "Maybe not in the dark. We could come back tomorrow. I'm not doing anything."

She smiles up at me. "That'd be great."

I invite her to sleep in my apartment. Don't ask me how that happened.

Okay, it happened like this: She pulled up outside my apartment, yawned, and I blurted out, "you could stay here if you like. I mean, because it's late." I pointed at the clock on the dashboard, in case I needed proof. 1:14 A.M. "We could go out on the lake again first thing in the morning."

Her face lit up, and now I'm rifling through my closet for that spare set of sheets I could have sworn I own. Aha - they're right at the bottom, underneath several shoe boxes. They've got an obnoxiously bright pink floral pattern on them that I thought was a good idea when I first moved away from home. And when I pick them up, a bottle of red wine rolls out and clunks on the carpet. My heart thumps. Holy shit. A hiding place that Nina didn't find and that I forgot about. I drop the sheets and pick up the bottle - full, unopened. I stand in place for a full minute and weigh up my options - I could take it to the kitchen and dispose of it right away, but that would warrant an explanation for the girl sitting on my couch. Or... there is no other option. I can't leave it in here. It's got danger written all over it. (Not literally - literally, it has Merlot written all over it.)

I set the bottle down in the bottom of the closet, promising out loud that I'll be back to deal with it later. I carry my garish pink sheets through to the living room, and when I hand them to Mabel she says, without a trace of irony, "ooh, those are nice."

"I was thinking - you could sleep in Nina's old room. There's a proper bed in there. You can use the couch cushions for a pillow."

"Sure, if that's okay with you."

I wander over to the closed door and my hand lingers on the handle for a moment, like if I open it my emotional floodgates will burst. I don't know how long I planned on cordoning off this part of the apartment - forever? This is Nina's space. She never liked me disturbing her space. I open the door and in my mind she's there, hunched over her little desk in the corner, and I'm trying to creep up behind her to peek at what she's writing. In reality, the room is empty and lifeless.

She's not dead, I tell myself. Stop trying to make misery out of nothing.

"How long did she live here?" Mabel asks, setting the sheets down on the bed.

"Couple of years," I say, my voice miles away. "Um. Bathroom is just outside on the right, there's a spare toothbrush in the cup by the sink - the red one." The one crawling with germs from the last three women I slept with. "And help yourself to water out of the fridge."

When I'm in my own bed, with the lights out, I come to realize that it doesn't matter who is on the other side of the paper-thin wall bordering the bedrooms. Just hearing somebody stirring, clearing their throat, plugging their phone into the wall outlet; the sliver of light under my door when somebody is in the kitchen, all of that is enough. It makes me feel protected, chips away at my loneliness.

I wait until the apartment is silent, then I sneak into the kitchen in the dark and pour thirteen dollars of wine into the sink.

I'll have to confront that loneliness eventually, and unless I convince Mabel to move in with me, I'll have to confront that loneliness tomorrow night. But for now, I can sleep, and I sleep soundly.

And I awake to a deep male voice, coming from my living room. I sit up in bed and hug the sheets to my chest; I sleep braless during the warmer months and if a man has broken into my apartment, the flimsy wooden door separating him and my breasts isn't going to protect them much.

But then I hear Mabel's gentle voice, and it takes me a second to fight through morning haze and recall that she slept here overnight. From there I determine that the man talking back to her is Jason. Except now they're not talking, they're yelling, and I'm usually grumpy in the morning without a domestic dispute pounding in my eardrums, so I throw on some clothes and get ready to intervene.

Their eyes are wide when I step out of my bedroom, as if they both forgot entirely that they were in somebody else's home.

"I'm sorry, Pacifica, I didn't want him to come in but he pushed past me," Mabel says.

"That's a woman," Jason says, incredulous. "You didn't tell me it was a woman."

"I told you this is my friend's apartment. What did you think I was doing?"

"I don't know, you stay out until 10 A.M. without texting me, what the hell am I supposed to think?"

"You probably shouldn't jump straight to 'she must be sleeping around.' How low do you think I am?"

My eyes widen on their own accord. There are layers to that question. First, that it would be "low" to sleep with me, and, oh yeah, she has slept with me before, while she was with Jason.

"Whatever," Jason says, flinging his hands up in the air, almost knocking over my lamp. "I'm sorry, Pacifica," he adds over his shoulder as he opens the front door, "but sometimes my girlfriend is out of line."

"I'm your fiancée! And I'm out of line?" she yells, but the door slams shut and I'm left with a ringing in my ears.

"Good morning," I say, my voice hoarse from sleep.

"I'm so sorry. That was so embarrassing. I told him we'd talk later but he barged inside, I didn't-"

"It's fine." I yawn and traipse to the kitchen counter. "Still drink coffee?"

"Yeah. Please." She stands in the corner of my living room, same shirt and pants as yesterday, her hair hanging low and frizzy, eyes cast down like a kid on the naughty step.

"I'm not mad at you," I tell her. "Really."

She comes up to the counter and sits on one of the high stools.

"You didn't tell him you were staying here?"

"He goes out with his friends and doesn't come home until morning." She shrugs. "I wanted him to know how it feels. I didn't expect him to go on a psycho rampage looking for my car."

I nod. I'm no expert on relationships, in case you haven't picked up on that yet, so I know better than to offer her hollow advice. I also know firsthand how much it hurts to receive radio silence from Mabel, but hopefully this is the last time I ever empathize with her horrible fiancé.

We eat breakfast in silence - two bowls of the least flavorsome corn-based cereal on the market, to keep my weight in check - and take turns in the shower. Then on our way back to the lake, I explain to Mabel my plan for how we'll find her uncle's treasure, or whatever the fuck we're looking for, but I don't think she fully understands it, so I decide I'll explain it as we go along.

The lake is, as expected, much busier during the daytime. We have to park along the road because the parking lot is full, and we walk along the beach to the docks with our shovels and our backpacks, while kids paddle in the water and build shoddy sandcastles. The sun's on full-power, so I rub in sunscreen as we go along and then pass it to Mabel.

Right at the end of the dock, I hop into Soos' speedboat, with confidence this time. A rather elderly gentleman in the neighboring wooden dinghy is blatantly staring at us while we board. He has a scraggly gray-brown beard, wrinkly elbows, and a bright red nose; a brown flat cap and an olive green fisherman's jacket with his hands stuffed in the pockets.

"Morning Mabel," he says in a gruff but oddly cheerful voice, and I frown up at the girl untying the boat.

"Morning Joe," she sings.

"Spot of fishing today?"

"Not today, no. Heading out to Scuttlebutt Island for a picnic."

"Supposed to rain this afternoon. Be careful out there."

"We will."

"I could come with ya, if you like. Steer the boat, keep ya both warm."

"We're good, thanks Joe."

Once the engine is started and we're twenty feet from the dock, Mabel turns to me and says, "Joe's nice, if you look past the fact that he's a huge pervert."

I grin. "Imagine if Jason found you in his apartment."

For a second Mabel says nothing and I think I've crossed a line, but then she turns around and I see that she's keeling over in laughter. "Don't say things like that," she says, clutching her stomach and dropping into the seat next to me. It only takes her a few seconds to forget the joke, and her face falls serious. She gazes out over the stern of the boat, at the waves we're making. "What am I going to do about him? I never know what to say to make things better."

"Well, I think he's a dick. I'd break up with him."

"You'd say that if I was dating Gandhi. You have a bias against men."

"That's not true," I say, though I don't mean it to sound so defensive. "I know plenty of... decent men."

"Like who?"

"Your brother, for one."

"Would you date him if you were straight?"

"Yeah," I say. "I think I would. Not sure I'm his type, though."

"Because you're not Wendy?"

"Exactly."

She grins and goes silent for a moment. "Do you have a girlfriend? Can't believe I haven't asked you that yet."

"Nope. No, my love life is pretty... non-existent right now." My mind flashes back to Zoey, in the purple blouse. Possibly the most I've felt for one girl in one night, ever. And it's all your fault, I think, looking in Mabel's eyes.

"Well, don't get engaged, is all I'll say. It's overrated." She sighs. "That's mean, I didn't mean that. Jason is the sweetest guy in the world when we're not fighting. But he does such stupid things, and I... I say a lot of stupid things, so we fight a lot. That might be why you haven't seen the good side of us, yet."

Our stupidly complicated history embedded in the back of my mind tells me not to get mixed up in her relationship problems, so I keep quiet. I managed to stay out of them when they were forced upon my living room, so, I think I'm okay.

The plan I came up with over breakfast was to walk the length of the island, one end to the other, and count how many steps it takes us, and then do the same for the width. We can then measure the island on her picture of the map, and with some simple arithmetic, calculate how many steps we would need to take from one end of the island to reach the X on her map. I convey this to Mabel again before we enter the woods, and again, she looks at me like I'm talking in Morse code, but she's happy to go along with it anyway.

So we walk the island in silence; I'm very clear that Mabel shouldn't talk or do anything to distract me from counting in my head, but she still somehow forgets and attempts to start a conversation twice, cutting herself off with a hushed, "oops, sorry." The crickets are loud and the air is so humid that I feel like a jungle explorer, wading through bushes and ferns and... god, I'm sweating a lot. Or maybe we're pirates, on the hunt for buried treasure. I smile at the thought. It's so innocent. Like we're kids again. Like starting over.

From east to west, the island is 371 steps wide. From north to south, the island is 715 steps long. On the southern point, while Mabel befriends a crab, I whip out my ruler and begin to measure the island on the map.

Crazy how she trusted me with her unlocked phone. I glance up at her, crouching down beside the water, poking something with a stick. I could do all kinds of diabolical shit. Delete her Facebook. I could read her messages to Jason, or compose one of my own. I've been meaning to tell you something. That girl you saw this morning? The one I work with at the diner? I slept with her once. While we were together.

I don't do any of that, of course. But the bitter part of me likes that I could.

"Four-hundred and twenty-six steps north, Mabel," I call out to her. "And one-hundred and eighty-eight steps from east to west."

She strides over to me and wipes her sandy hands on her shorts. "And then we'll find it?"

"If the map was drawn super-accurately, and if you've re-drawn it properly, sure. At the least, we'll have a better idea of where to look."

"Are you sure you weren't related to Ford in some way?"

I shrug. "Maybe. My mom was a bit of a slut back in her heyday."

The X - and get ready, because this is a little anticlimactic - turns out to be right on top of the tree stump that Mabel sat on last night, just as we gave up searching. It's hard to recognize it, now in the full light of day, but I think Mabel does too, because I hear her say, "ah, shit," right beside me. The stump has a rectangular groove in it, a bit like a pizza paddle, and a handle with a finger-sized hole in which Mabel uses to lift the wooden cover. I flinch, like I'm expecting a poison dart to rocket out and strike her between the eyes. Too many movies.

Mabel pulls a single sheet of paper out of the tree stump. I bend over the stump to get a better look at the hollowed-out compartment, and that is all there was, a single, pristine piece of paper with what I assume is her uncle's handwriting. The compartment itself is perfectly rectangular and cut immaculately - I'm not sure exactly how he did it. I remember always hearing tools whirring away in the basement of the Shack and decide that Ford was something of a woodworker.

"It's a letter," Mabel breathes, holding the paper to her chest and looking in my eyes. "Oh gosh. I don't know if I'm ready for a letter."

I rock on the balls of my feet, staring right back at her, until I know from the fear in her eyes that we could stand here for hours and she would never read it herself. "Want me to read it?"

She nods frantically and passes the paper to me.

I clear my throat. "Dear shithead-"

She slaps my arm and I stifle a cackle.

"Mabel...

"You know me. I'm not a man of material possessions. Before I die, I'm taking the time to emerge from my solitude and walk the backroads of Gravity Falls, retracing my family's memories, including yours. Memories, I believe, possess far more value than any material object. I hope you agree. If you're reading this, that means you have decided to join me. And if you've made it this far, you will have already ventured further than anybody could expect of the average human being. I know you will, because you twins have always been extraordinary.

"Continue to follow my trail, and at its end, I'll share with you a memory of my own. I apologize in advance for the puzzles, Mabel, I understand that you've never been a fan. But what fun would it be if I merely pointed you in the right direction?

"You once sat cross-legged on the floor of the basement and regaled me with the legend of the Gobblewonker, and if I remember correctly, it all began here, on Scuttlebutt Island. A preposterous name for a plot of land, by the way - are you to tell me that the man to discover these woods was called Scuttlebutt? How unfortunate. You told me that you and Dipper entered a photography contest, to snap the supernatural? You took a remarkable photo of this creature - you described it to resemble the Loch Ness monster - but you misplaced the camera and the photo was never seen again.

"I found that rather amusing. You kids caught me up on all the technology I've missed over the decades, and yet you carry around disposable cameras! You could have snapped your Gobblewonker on a cell phone and had it uploaded to the cloud within minutes, could you not?

"I digress. I've just walked the perimeter of this island, twice, and have not been fortunate enough to see the beast myself. I'll just have to take your word for it, sweetheart.

"When you are ready to continue the trail, please turn this page over."

I go to do just that, admittedly gripped by the dead man's narrative myself, but Mabel says, "no. Not yet."

I look up at her and she's crying, smearing tears across her cheeks, staring at my feet.

"Sorry. I don't think I'm ready for more. Thank you. For reading that."

I fold the piece of paper and slip it into my pocket. The few caring instincts I possess urge for me to reach out and console her, but I don't. I let her take the moment into her own hands.

"God, I didn't think it would be that hard to listen to," she says, and sniffles loudly. "It's like... that's him, on that page. It's like listening to his self-written eulogy. We never had a funeral so my brain's never been dedicated to thinking about it until just now."

I nod, a soft spot somewhere within me severely wounded. "I can imagine."

The last of her tears dry up, and she flashes me one of those dazzling Mabel Pines smiles, the ones I always considered such a treat. "He was right here. On this same dirt. Not even that long ago."

Can't take my eyes off of her, which is worrying. But I don't think I'd be able to tear my eyes away from anyone in her position. It's such an intimate moment to be witnessing - grief and joy and nostalgia, bundled into one fragile smile. I feel kind of special to be a part of it.

She meets my eyes, her lips go straight, and she tells me earnestly that she's so glad she came back.

"I'm glad you came back too," I say, and then she reaches in to hug me, in the eighty-degree heat, well beyond the limits of a town that lies in the middle of nowhere. And it isn't like our awkward hello hug at that party a few weeks back, this is more like a where have you been for the last four years kind of hug. And I tell myself that we must still be friends, we must have always been friends, even after everything that happened, because why else would we be out here, by ourselves, so far from humanity?

Mabel pulls back, wipes a fresh tear from her eyes, and stands up straight, a new air of determination about her. She holds out her hand. "Can I read the next part?"

Without a word I pull the paper from my pocket and press it into her palm. She unfolds it, and parts her lips, then shuts her mouth, repeat, repeat, until I'm sure she's going to break down in tears again. But then she finds her voice, surprisingly steady:

"For this next one, you're going to have to take a page out of my brother's book. We're breaking in."