Apparition
(October 25-31, 2014)
3 Mission
As Dipper and Mabel stood outside the school, unsure of what to do next, another shock approached, in the form of a woman in medium-high heels, wearing heavy glasses and carrying a black leather satchel.
She wore a long gray wool coat, touched off at the neck by a lavender scarf, a matching gray cloche hat, and gloves. Her expression was serious, verging on severe. But despite her clothing and her age—somewhere in the thirties—and despite the glasses, Dipper gasped. "P-Pacifica?"
The woman stopped, glanced nervously around at the groups of kids walking up to and into the school, and then moved them to one side, near a black wrought-iron fence guarding the school's front lawn and murmured softly, "It's good to see you again, Dipper! Hello, Mabel. But listen: I'm undercover. For the time being, I'm Mrs. Maude Staycomb—" she made her yechh face—"I didn't pick the name! And I'm supposed to be working with the state Children's Bureau here in Greentown. You two are orphans and we're temporarily placing you with Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Flannigan, supposedly just until we find a permanent foster family or Monday, whichever comes first. You have until midnight tonight to persuade their daughter Angelique not to do what she originally did tonight after the dance. A suitcase with your party clothes is already at their house. They'll take it from here. Don't let them know!"
"Know what?" Mabel asked.
"Anything!"
"That'll be easy," Dipper said. "We don't know anything!"
"Like how did we become orphans?"
"Nobody knows!" Pacifica said. "Look, we deliberately didn't develop a backstory because those can be checked. If you're asked, just say—"
"It's too sad to talk about," Dipper put in.
Pacifica gave him an oddly sad smile and nodded. "You always were quick to pick up on things. Come with me," she said. "We have to stop at the principal's office, and then I'll see you to Angelique's classroom. Treat her as a friend—but she's rebellious, I should warn you. Be careful not to reveal anything about time traveling! And don't teach her to high-five, Mabel! Don't say anything about the future, not one word—what is it?"
Mabel said, "Just wanted to say you grew up beautiful. I knew you would."
When Pacifica smiled again, for the first time Dipper noticed the stress lines around her eyes and mouth. "It hasn't been easy for me. I—Oh, Dipper!" She hugged him suddenly and said, "You be careful! Take care of yourself and your sister!" Then she raised her eyeglasses—just plain glass lenses, Dipper could tell, not prescription ones—dabbed at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief, and picked up her satchel. Officiously and more loudly, she said, "Children, come with me!"
She led them down the walkway and then up eight concrete steps and into the school building—it smelled strange, like pine oil and a trace of alcohol—and to an office with a frosted-glass window in the doorway stenciled in gold: "Mr. A. Willowby, Principal." As she opened the door, Pacifica whispered fiercely, "Let me do all the talking. You're shy and traumatized!"
An elderly woman with a face like a prune looked up from her desk. Pacifica explained why they were there, and the woman nodded and sent them back to an office where a thick-set dark-haired man in a three-piece suit rose from behind a desk, bare except for a green blotter and an old-fashioned black candlestick telephone. "Mrs., uh, Staycomb," he said in a rumbly voice. His smile was like a bulldog's friendly welcome. "So, these are our temporary students."
"Children," Pacifica said, "This is Mr. Adrian Willowby. He's principal here at Bradbury High School. Mr. Willowby, this is Mabel and Martin Pines, from Oakland, California. I have their paperwork in order. One moment." She rummaged in the satchel and produced a manila folder, which she handed to the principal.
"Thank you," he said, opening it and glancing at what to Dipper looked like faintly typed sheets of paper. Carbon copies, he supposed, which he'd heard and read about although he'd never seen one. "Mm, yes, your father came from Waukegan, I see. Tragic story. I'm sorry about your parents, children."
"Thank you," Mabel whispered, and Pacifica nudged her sharply.
Mr. Willowby nodded and dropped the folder onto his desk. "Well, Mr. and Mrs. Flannigan are a kind couple, and their daughter is just about your age. You'll spend the day with her—Angelique is her name—and maybe you can even come to the school dance tonight. If your permanent foster family is in our district, we'll be happy to welcome you to our school."
Trying to look sorrowful but grateful, Dipper nodded.
"Sir, I should take them to class now," Pacifica said.
"Oh, certainly, certainly, Mrs. Staycomb. That will be Mrs. Forrester's room, up on the next floor, room 212. The stairs are down the hall and to the left."
Primly, Pacifica said, "Thank you, Mr. Willowby. Come, Mabel, Martin."
The hallway thronged with students, but the stairway was clear. "Huh. Nobody here," Mabel said.
"We're in a very temporary time-out," Pacifica said. "Any final questions? We have maybe a minute, no more."
Dipper immediately said, "Martin? I'd prefer Tyrone!"
"Not a good name in this time line," Pacifica said in a firm voice. "Remember, you're Martin."
"Marty," Mabel suggested.
"That will be OK," Pacifica said. "All right, quick final instructions: get to know Angelique, see if you can find out what's troubling her, and stick with her at the dance! Watch out for a boy named Butch! She must not leave with him! And remember, you can't save everyone!"
"Butch?" Dipper asked nervously. "What—"
"Time's up, let's go!" They had climbed to the second floor, and Pacifica opened the door into a hall where students stood unmoving. "Time starts again in three, two, one—"
And the buzz of talk and the shuffling began again. Dipper noticed that he didn't stand out at all—at least half the boys wore the same kind of outfit he did, baggy trousers about knee-length or a little lower, with long socks, shirt, jacket, most with bow ties, though a few daring souls had open collars.
They drew some interested glances, and one girl, dark-eyed and with bobbed black hair, tilted her head and smiled warmly at Dipper as they passed. Mabel noticed and elbowed him. "Mind on your business, Marty!"
They found Room 212 halfway down the hall, a rectangular, high-ceilinged schoolroom with tall, wide windows looking out on the front lawn and the street. An old-fashioned chalk blackboard covered the front wall, and above it portraits George Washington and Abraham Lincoln looked out from heavy wood frames.
As they came in, Dipper noticed the electric fixtures, which strongly brought back memories of the Westminster Mystery House in San Jose: instead of switches, the wall plates had round buttons that clicked in and out to turn the lights on or off. The lights themselves shone in two rows, each with six incandescent bulbs, hanging on chains from the ceiling and concealed inside mushroom-shaped glass shades. The light from them seemed warm and yellow, but oddly dim.
A gray-haired lady stood at the chalkboard, writing "Today's Lessons" in white chalk on black slate, the chalk clacking each time it touched the board. She put the chalk down in the eraser tray, turned and smiled. She wore that odd kind of spectacles called pince-nez, without temples or earpieces, that clipped onto the bridge of her nose and were secured to her dress lapel by a thin black ribbon. "Ah, these are our new students," she said.
Pacifica introduced them and said, "Since they'll be staying temporarily with the Flannigan family, I thought you might be so kind as to introduce them to Angelique."
"Certainly," the woman said. "I'm Mrs. Abigail Forrester, children. And you are Mabel and Martin, correct?"
"Yeah—I mean, yes," Mabel said.
Dipper had taken off his cloth cap. "Yes, Ma'am," he said. It's a good thing that the cheap-movie channel in Gravity Falls has so many 1930's films, he thought. He'd seen the black-and-white adventures of school-aged Mickey Rooney and Jackie Cooper and had some grasp of how to ingratiate himself with an old-timey teacher.
"Well, Angelique sits in the last desk back on the second aisle," Mrs. Forrester said, extending a long-fingered hand to indicate the spot. "Mabel, you may take the seat next to her in the first row. I'll move Bobby from that one to the other side of the room today. Martin, you may borrow the last desk from the row there next to the windows and move it—you can just squeeze it in behind Angelique's, I think. Go on and take your seats now, and as we begin our lessons, I'll lend you books."
"Thank you, Mrs. Forrester," Pacifica said. To Mabel and Dipper, she said quietly but firmly, "Remember, people are always willing to offer help. I'll check in with you tomorrow."
"Is there any way to get in touch with you if we need you?" Mabel asked.
"No, I'm sorry. You're on your own, but I believe in you."
"Thank you," Dipper said.
Mabel took her seat and he moved the borrowed desk and chair over while Pacifica had a hushed conference with the teacher. Then she left the room and Mrs. Forrester began to write instructions about a lesson in geography.
"This," Mabel whispered to him, "is scary."
"Yeah, it is," Dipper agreed.
The students began to come in one by one, each one saying, "Good morning, Mrs. Forrester." She greeted each one by name: Belinda, Kirby, Walter, Susanna, and so on. She also introduced each one to Mabel and Martin, and eventually there were little pockets of kids whispering and darting glances toward the twins.
They waited for Angelique to show up and wondered how much trouble they'd landed in.
And, really, the day had not yet even begun.
Pacifica held it together all the way outside and as she walked three blocks down the street, and even as she turned into the narrow alley between Kubelksy Tailoring and the Sunny Day Delicatessen. Then, away from the street and alone, she started to weep.
The owner of the Sunny Day would have been astonished to learn that his establishment had a back room. True, it was very small—just about eight feet square—and it had no visible window or door. You got into it by walking beside a brimming, rusted steel garbage can and straight through an apparently solid brick wall, an idea borrowed from a Scottish architectural firm that specialized in not-quite-real educational structures.
In the unfurnished room, which had no light fixtures at all but was illuminated none the less with the sourceless glow of a cloudy-bright day borrowed from one morning in the the month before the dinosaurs began to go extinct, Mabel waited, leaning against a wall, arms crossed, chin down. She was still dressed in her Time Anomaly Prevention Squad uniform, but without the helmet. Also, she had peeled the duct tape from the green letters PINES. Pacifica hugged her and cried a little. "He looked so young," she wailed, stepping back and dabbing her eyes. She took off the round hat and unpinned the bun that held her hair up. It came down to her shoulders, shorter than she had worn it as a teen. "Dipper looked so—so—he—oh, Mabel!"
Mabel sniffled. "I miss him, too," she said hoarsely. "At least he lived in the other time line we borrowed this version of him from. And now there's a chance."
"Do you think we can—you know—pull it off?"
"I don't know," Mabel admitted softly. "I hope so. He and me together—if anybody can fix it, the Mystery Twins can." She grinned in a sad way. "That's what we called ourselves. The Mystery Twins. But even if they do—"
"I know," Pacifica said. "Everything changes, and if we're caught, we're in for it. But if we can save our Dipper's life, I'll live with the consequences."
"Yeah. I'm sorry, Paz. You deserve so much better."
"It took me a long time to learn that sometimes you do things not to help yourself or make yourself feel better, but just because they're right. Well, it's all in their hands now. If Angelique doesn't die in the car crash, then in our time line Stanford Pines will eventually get the government grant that lets him—well, you know it all already."
"Yeah." Mabel sighed. "I wonder if Time Baby will evaporate us for this? He's bound to will have had find out eventually."
"It's a rogue operation," Pacifica said. "But maybe he won't. You've made him a little more friendly. And Blendin told me that he's tracked all the future permutations and saving Angelique won't have any paradoxical results here and will eliminate the ghost in the other time line, which does fix a few dozen developing paradoxes there. Final analysis, it just means that our Dipper will live past the age of twenty. But then he, well, you know, even if he does, there's Wendy, and . . . well. Nothing else changes for me. I mean—he and I don't even get together if he does live. And then I suppose you and I wouldn't join the TPAES. So—in a way—none of this happens."
"Which is kinda what we want," Mabel said softly. "But, man, I'll miss this, even if I don't will be to have remembered or even been aware of it. Ready to face the future?"
"No," Pacifica admitted. Then she took a deep breath. "But let's do it. What?"
"Nothing," Mabel said, smiling. "Except I think I've rubbed off on you over the last ten years. Paz, whatever happens, and even if it turns out we don't even remember what we're doing now—it's been an honor serving with you."
"Thanks," Pacifica said. "Same here. In whatever time line we wind up in, let's still be friends."
"I guarantee it," Mabel told her. She had taken out her illegal time-travel device and was tapping numbers into it. "Take my hand, and let's go."
They held hands. Mabel poised her thumb over the GO button. "Good luck, Brobro," she whispered.
And then she pushed the button, and the two women—and the secret TPAES room behind the deli—vanished from the present and passed into the Everywhen.