2-Dimensionless
"Where are we?" Pac—no, Dipper reminded himself, Elise, Elise—asked, leaning forward and hugging her knees as they sat on the log. "I—I don't really like being in the woods. I got lost somewhere out here yesterday."
"Uh, they—we call this the bonfire clearing. You can't get lost, there's the trail right there, and it leads to the Shack." Dipper picked up a bare, crooked branch and used it to stir the black and gray ashes in the firepit. "We, uh, I mean Mabel and I, sometimes we come here and roast marshmallows or hot dogs."
"Like a picnic," Elise said. "My family took me on picnics. But not to the woods. Dad would rent a state park so we wouldn't be bothered by common people. I—I miss my family. Can you tell me what happened?"
"Somebody would have to tell me that first," Dipper said. "Do you feel better now?"
"I'm not as hungry." She gave him a weak smile. "I guess I should thank you."
"When did you find out you're not home?" Dipper asked. When she bit her lower lip and looked miserable, he offered, "For me it was this morning. I mean, I woke up in my own bed and I looked like this. I'm twelve years old!"
"No, you're not."
"No, I look eighteen, but, um—inside I feel twelve. But I keep getting these memories of things that haven't even happened yet, but they have to me. To whoever usually is in this eighteen-year-old body, I mean."
"I don't understand."
Dipper shrugged. "Me, either. Let's talk about what we each know. When did the, um, weirdness start for you?"
"What day is this?"
"To me, Thursday."
She looked at him, puzzlement pinching her brows together. "What? That's not a day!"
"It is where I come from," Dipper said. "Sunday, Monday, Tuesday Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. What do you call the days of the week?"
"You're not making fun of me?"
"Absolutely not. Come on, I won't laugh."
"Um, Sunsdy, Moonsdy, Toosdy, Wensdy, Tursdy, Friddy, Saddy."
"OK, but wherever we are, it's Durbsday." When she stared at him, he said, "I think that's what I'd call Thursday and you'd call Tursdy."
"I don't understand."
How do you even start to explain something you don't understand? Dipper said, "I think it's . . . I think maybe we're from different dimensions."
Her eyes gleamed with unshed tears, and she shook her head miserably. "I'm so dumb."
"No, you're not," Dipper said. "I'll explain, or at least I'll try, but first tell me what happened to you. How did you get here?"
"I was born here. My family's the richest one in Gravity Falls. They were. I, um, I woke up . . . this is Tursdy. It must have been Sunsdy morning. I woke up just lying on the sofa in my family's entertainment room, but it was . . . different. The sound system was where the TV should be, and the TV was on the adjoining wall, but really that wall has, should have, the door in it, but the door was behind the sofa, and we—we don't have that kind of sofa. But I was asleep on it, and then the maid came in and asked, 'What are you doing in here?' She told me the family was at breakfast, so I went to the dining room, and, and she was there and she looked at me and said, 'Who are you?'"
Just from the intonation, Dipper guessed, "That was Pacifica. I mean, that was the family's daughter and she looked just like you."
"Her hair was blonder than mine," Elise said. "Like it was bleached? Anyway, Father, or her father, anyway, ordered the servants to throw me out. And they tossed me out and locked the gate, and I—I didn't know where to go, and the town looked different. All I had on were the clothes I'd been wearing the evening before and not—not even shoes, because I think I fell asleep at home, my real home—"
"Don't cry, please," Dipper said. "We'll fix things. Wow. You've been on your own for like four days?"
Elise nodded. "I tried finding my friends, but the streets are different, and nobody knew who I was. I went to the diner and asked for food that afternoon and they told me I'd have to pay—I've never had to pay—and I didn't have any mo-money." She gulped back a sob.
"Where have you been staying?" Dipper asked.
"That night I slept on somebody's back porch. And I got so hungry—" she really began to cry.
"It's OK," he said.
"The next night after YumboSnacks closed, I—I went through the dumpster and found a hamburger someone had thrown away after only one bite—I'm so ashamed!"
She had wandered, lost in her own home town and then wandering in the woods, for days, with almost nothing to eat and nowhere to stay. She thought she would freeze when the June, or Jurn, or whatever nights got cold. The previous night she had just walked aimlessly and had wound up in the woods near Circle Park, where the briars had scratched her feet and legs cruelly.
"I—I remembered where the Mysterious Shack was, only now the signs are different, and I remembered making fun of Mabel when she first came into town, and I thought—so I came to beg for some—oh, what's happened?"
He reached out and took her hand. She gripped his hard, and he could feel her shaking with weariness and the kind of fear that has morphed into pure dread. "I think both of us belong in a different reality," he said. "I don't really know a lot about this, but . . . I've read in a Jour—I mean a book—about the theory that there are a lot of, um, dimensions and some are so similar they . . . overlap, I guess?"
Dipper closed his eyes. "I'm really twelve, I'm just in an older me's body," he murmured so softly that she probably didn't hear him. "Um. So somehow you and I have come from two different dimensions that are real similar to this one but not quite the same. I . . . think in my case my mind is in an eighteen-year-old version of me, but in my own dimension, I'm twelve." He blinked. "In fact, that dimension's you came to the Mystery Shack last night. You, uh, won a party contest."
Elise looked surprised. "Did I act all, um? Did I brag?"
"Little bit, yeah."
She bit her lip. I've been thinking maybe what happened to me is punishment because I've been such a bad person. If I hadn't been so selfish—"
"I don't think that has anything to do with it," Dipper said.
"I was the worst," she muttered.
Well, yeah, Dipper thought, remembering how she had deliberately insulted Mabel the previous night. Wait a minute, though. Yesterday had been . . . the fifteenth of June for him, a Friday. Friday, not Wednesday. Today should be Saturday, not Thursday. Or, no, wait, was that right?
It seemed to Dipper that he had another set of memories overlaying those thoughts. In that one, the day before he and Mabel and Wendy had celebrated Stan's and . . . Ford's, of course, Ford's birthdays, and that party had been on a Friday, too. Ford Pines. Looked like his twin, Stan, but—memories were cloudy—
"The author of the Journals!" Dipper exclaimed. "Of course he is. Was. Will be."
"What are you even talking about?" Elise asked.
"I think that in the dimension where I'm really a twelve-year-old, there are things that I haven't yet learned about. Somehow the part of me that's eighteen kind of knows about those things. But they couldn't have happened yet, because Grunkle Ford won't return until August, unless—I'm all confused!""
"Mr. Pines—"
"Dipper. Just call me Dipper. Please."
Elise swallowed audibly. "Dipper, uh, can I live in the Mysterious Shack? I'd work or anything. I don't know how to do anything really, but I could wash dishes and vacuum and things like that. My parents are—used to be—rich, and I've never done much, but I can learn."
He looked at her and remembered how at first Pacifica had been so haughty, so hard on Mabel. But this version of her, Elise, was pathetic, with her hacked-off hair, her scratched legs, and her fragility. "I'll see if I can help you," he said.
To his utter shock, she raised his hand to her lips and kissed it. "I have nowhere else to go," she murmured.
"Come on, then. Let's see what we can—why is your hair so short?"
Tears started to leak down her cheeks again. "I did that. It was awful, trying to sleep outside. I got this sticky tree sap and twigs stuck in it, and, um, I slipped into somone's house while they weren't home and used their scissors, and—it's a terrible mess."
"It'll grow back. Let's go back."
As they walked to the clinic or whatever Stan had turned it into, Dipper heard gobbling. And in the yard, Mabel was tossing a stick in the evident hope that the turkey would understand and fetch it. It didn't. "Aw, c'mon!" Mabel said as she stooped to pick up the stick and throw it again. "You're making me do all the work—Dipper! Uh—why is that Elise girl wearing my clothes?"
In what he hoped was a firm big-brother tone, Dipper said, "Because her own clothes got torn and dirty. She was lost in the woods, and she was starving, and she had to wear something! She's just borrowing them. Come on, Mabel, you're the generous one!"
Mabel didn't look abashed. In fact, if anything she grew more bashed than ever as she grumbled, "Yeah, I'm generous, but you should've asked me first!"
"Is it OK, little sister?" he asked pointedly. Pacif—Elise—huddled close to him.
"Oh, sure," Mabel said. "She'd look cute in that if—what did you do to your hair?"
"She got stuff tangled in it out in the woods!" Dipper said. "Come on, don't be like that. She feels bad enough already. In fact, why don't you take her upstairs and help her do something with her hair?"
"I love makeovers! Yes!" Mabel said. She turned to the turkey. "OK, Wattles, lessons are over for today. Most I can give you is a D. Do better tomorrow!"
The turkey gobbled and wandered around to the side.
To Dipper's surprise, half a dozen cars stood in the lot. He, Mabel, and Else went around back and in through the family door, as Dipper and Mabel had always called it, and Mabel led Elise up the stairs. In the gift—no, the waiting room—two women, one with a sniffling kid, and two middle-aged men sat and chatted or leafed through the magazines. A third woman stood at the counter and Wendy was speaking to her: "All right, Mrs. Llewellen, that's thirty dollars. Let me make your next appointment. Dr. Pines wants to see you again in a month. Will, let me see, the seventh of Jully work for you?"
"Morning, please," the lady said.
"Nine o'clock?"
"That's fine."
Wendy entered something on a suspiciously old-looking computer. "And confirmed. I'll print your receipt and your appointment info out for you." A printer behind the counter hummed, and Wendy gave the lady the sheet. As the woman left, Wendy called, "Mrs. Breen, Dr. Pines will see Jody now."
The woman with the kid went back past the counter—huh, there was the vending machine that part of Dipper remembered hid the stairs down to the basement—and through the side door that once led to the museum.
No one was paying attention. Dipper said, "Hey, Wendy, got a second?"
"Sure," she said with her old grin. "We're booked for the next couple hours anyhow. What's up, dude?"
"OK, this is going to sound crazy," Dipper quietly told her. "But I'm not supposed to be eighteen."
"You lost me," Wendy said, still smiling. "Hey, there's a dance this weekend at the teen center. I'd love to go."
"Uh—"
The little imaginary Dipper devil that sometimes stood on his left shoulder said, "Come on, man! This is the chance that you've been wanting ever since the convenience store deal! She wants you to ask her for a date!"
And the little imaginary Dipper angel on the other side said, "She's too young for you! She's fifteen, you're eighteen—wait, what? How did you get to be eighteen?"
Dipper heard himself saying, "Sounds like fun."
"Great!" Wendy said. "But if you want, it's just, you know, hanging. It doesn't have to be a date or anything."
"That's fine, that's fine," Dipper said. His shoulder angel poked him. "Don't forget you're looking for answers, dummy!"
"Uh," Dipper said. "When, um, when is your lunch break?"
She gave him a quizzical look. "Noon to one, dude. You know that!"
About a ten-minute walk into town, ten minutes back, forty minutes left to eat—
"Want to, I don't know, go into town with me for a burger?"
Her green eyes lit up. "I'd love that!"
"OK, fine. Um. See you a couple of minutes before noon."
Slightly dazed, Dipper left the waiting room. He could hear Mabel and Elise talking up in the attic. He went out to the back porch to sit and think.
And saw Soos tinkering with the riding mower.
Wait, they had a riding mower?
"Oh, hey, Dipper," Soos said.
"Hi, Soos."
The big guy chuckled. "People always say that wrong. Listen carefully, man. It's Zeus, OK? Like Greek or some deal. Not my fault my dad or whoever named me that."
"Zeus," Dipper said. "Sorry, man. Got a ton of things on my mind. Uh—how long have you worked for Stan now?"
"How long have I?" he asked, as if surprised. "Let me see. Wait, I remember! It was on the fifteenth of Jully. I remember that because, uh, I just remember it! Boom! Right in my head! So next month it'll be ten whole years! I've worked here since I was like twelve, dude!" He grinned his buck-toothed best. "Dipper, if you don't mind, could you come over here and help me with this belt?"
Dipper hadn't even known that riding mowers had drive belts. He helped by easing a tension arm while Soos—make that Zeus—slipped on the new belt. "Perfect! Thanks, man! OK, we got our hands dirty, so let me show you a product I found that takes the oil right off and junk!"
They washed their hands under the hose, using a thick pink gritty liquid hand soap. "Zeus, what's a good—" Dipper felt in his pockets. Oh, boy. "What's a good cheap place to eat in town?"
Zeus dried his hands on his cargo shorts. "Let me see. There's Herman Hermano's, that's kinda Tex-Mex. And Grizzly's Pizza in the Mall, you can get it by the slice. And YumboSnacks, burgers are good, but word of warning, don't try the hatchet fish sandwich!"
"Thanks, man."
"Don't mention it! Hey, excuse me for asking, but are you like OK for cash? I mean, I don't want to pry, but payday's not until tomorrow. And are you like gonna eat alone?"
"I was taking Wendy—"
"Hah! I knew it, dude, I knew it!" Zeus looked around—no one was on the lawn but the turkey, and it didn't seem to be listening, but Zeus whispered anyway: "I think she's got a crush on you, man! Good for you."
"I may have to cancel," Dipper said. "I, you know, forgot about payday."
Zeus immediately took his wallet out. "Here you go. I'll spot you a twenty, and you can pay me back tomorrow. Hey, want to borrow the pickup? It's kind a rattly, but it's got like half a tank of gas, and it'll get you there and back!"
"That's incredibly nice of you, Zeus," Dipper said. "You're a good guy in any dimension."
"Here you go," Zeus said cheerfully, handing over a twenty-dollar bill with some unfamiliar president's picture on it, plus his jingling key ring.
I wonder if I can drive a truck! Well—I have driven the golf cart. How different can it be?
Maybe it was the shoulder devil talking, but he said, "Thanks, man. I'll try not to hit any pedestrians!"