Apparition
(October 25-31, 2014)
4 Meeting
The seat in front of Dipper—and next to Mabel—remained unoccupied after the warning bell sounded. And then the class bell (a real bell, or two of them, rather, atop a gray rectangular box on the hall-side wall of the room) clanged, and only when it had stopped did a curly-haired blonde girl saunter in.
Looking confused, she paused for just an instant when she spotted Dipper, but then she realized there was an extra chair and desk in that row, and she came back and took her seat just as Mrs. Forrester began to read from the roll book: "Peter. Amanda. Cynthia—" and so on.
Each student answered, "Present."
Dipper and Mabel weren't in alphabetical order, but were tacked on at the end: "Mabel Pines. Martin Pines."
Both of them answered—and Mabel even said, "Present," instead of "Yo!" or "Absent!" Dipper felt relieved. The teacher put away the roll book and said, "I do like to see perfect attendance! Class, we have visitors today. Mabel, Martin, please stand. This is Mabel Pines and Martin Pines, for those of you who didn't get introduced as you came in. Let's make them feel welcome."
Mabel had tucked the box with Angelique's dress on the shelf beneath her chair, and she started to reach for it, but Dipper caught her eye and shook his head. He mouthed the word, "Later!" and she seemed to understand. Anyway, she straightened up in her desk just as Mrs. Forrester said, "Let us stand for the pledge."
Everyone faced the flag—which hung at the corner of the blackboard, from a wooden staff held up by a wall bracket—and repeated the words, except they left out the words "under God," which had not been part of the Pledge of Allegiance until the 1950s. Then, much to Dipper's surprise, Mrs. Forrester said, "Michael will lead the class devotion today. Michael, please come forward."
A burly kid got up and took a book that Mrs. Forrester offered him. "It's the 23rd Psalm," he said in a voice that was cracking from treble to baritone. He read the words out loud, with not quite the emotion that a computer-generated voice might have put into it. Then he sat down and they started with English.
The routine—except for the pledge and the scripture reading—began to remind Dipper of elementary school. At Piedmont, he and Mabel were used to changing classes each period, going to classes taught by teachers who specialized in their subjects. Evidently here, and in 1927, Mrs. Forrester was going to cover everything.
The first period was devoted to English, and twenty minutes of it was devoted to diagramming sentences, a skill Dipper lacked. Students went one by one to the board to draw lines and connect them in various ways: Abraham Lincoln became the sixteenth President of the United States, and the Civil War broke out afterwards became a stick-figure of a sentence, with Abraham Lincoln, became, and President all on a straight line, while the other phrases of the sentence dangled from it on slanting lines and platforms of their own.
To Dipper's relief, Mrs. Forrester did not call on him or Mabel. He would have been lost. At one point, Mabel passed Angelique a note, and the surprised girl read it, glanced at Mabel, and then shrugged and nodded. Mrs. Forrester said, "Let's keep our attention on the board, class!" even though she had her back to the classroom, correcting some errant lines in the latest sentence diagram.
The forenoon passed: English, mathematics, geography, and Latin (Mabel was looking terminally bored, Dipper interested but puzzled—he knew only a smattering of Latin that he had picked up himself, mainly for biology). Finally, the bell rang for lunch, and Mrs. Forrester said, "It's a nice warm day, so you may use the picnic tables. Listen for the warning bell, everyone!" She definitely gave Angelique a meaningful look.
Angelique had brought in a paper bag, like every other student except for Mabel and Dipper. She got up and took it from her desk shelf and said to Mabel, "Let's eat together. Bring it."
"We don't—" Mabel began.
But Dipper cut her off: "Here's our lunches, Sis," he said. The two paper bags had sort of appeared on his desk, and he'd guessed Time Squad. One of them, maybe even Blendin himself, had popped into existence for a nanosecond and left the two bag lunches, he supposed. They all walked downstairs, passed through a tiny dining room and picked up little bottles—actual, chilly glass bottles—of milk at a counter before going into a fenced-in schoolyard. Another class was just leaving six long picnic benches.
Mabel had brought the cardboard box. When they sat down, she said, "Our, um, social worker took this from a delivery boy when we first got to school, because he asked what class you were in and she told him we'd be in the same one. It's your dress. The seamstress made some alterations and sent it over."
"I was wondering when it would come," Angelique said. She opened the box and took the dress out long enough to admire it. "I'd wear this to the dance if I could get away with it. I might hide it somewhere and change into it after I get here tonight. My mother makes me wear such dreary rags!"
Dipper had opened his lunch and discovered that he had a sandwich, an apple, and a smaller bag of nuts. The sandwich seemed to be bologna with lettuce and tomato. He took the tomato off because he didn't like the taste of them, though that lingered on the bread and meat.
Mabel had already torn through her own sandwich, but she reached over and snagged his tomato slice. "So, have you lived here all your life?" she asked Angelique, who was eating celery sticks, carrots, and raisins.
"Yes. It's so boring," she said. She glanced around. "Want to go sneak a smoke?"
"Sneak a what in the which now?" Mabel asked.
Angelique raised her skirt. She wore stockings, but the tops were rolled down, and tucked in the fold she had a pack of Camel cigarettes. "I've got ten left," she said, dropping the skirt back down. "You and your brother can have one."
"We don't smoke," Dipper said quickly.
"I just started this week," Angelique murmured. She looked around. "Keep it quiet. The kids here would fink me out to the teacher."
"Yeah, I hate it when somebody finks out," Mabel said, her tone telling Dipper she had no idea what the words meant. "Um. Well, hi, I'm Mabel. This is my brother Dipper."
"What?" Angelique asked, looking like she was going to erupt in laughter.
"It's a nickname," Dipper said. "You can call me Marty."
"Are you really one?" Angelique asked.
"Uh—one what?"
"A dipper!" she said. "You know, a pickpocket!"
"No," Dipper said. "It's because of something else."
"You sound like a real killjoy," Angelique said in a bored tone. "So, you two are coming to the dance?"
"Boy howdy!" Mabel said. When Angelique looked at her as if she'd taken leave of her senses, Mabel said, "Uh—that's what we say out there in Oakland! Which is where we're from. In California. Uh, our parents got eaten by sharks a lot."
"What?" Angelique asked, sliding away from Mabel on the bench.
"That's, uh, not true," Dipper said. "But, you know, it was a shock and that's how my sister deals with, uh, shocks."
"Oh," Angelique crunched a celery stick. "Must be nice not having the parents around to boss you. Not that I'm not sorry. I wouldn't want my parents to die, but if they wanted to go off on a long vacation and leave me on my lonesome, that would be Jake with me." She asked, "So do you dance?"
"Uh, yeah!" Mabel said. "Looking forward to it. Any hunks go stag to your dances?"
"I . . . don't know what that means!" Angelique told her.
Dipper interpreted: "Mabel wants to know if any boys turn up alone at your dances."
"Oh, sure," Angelique said. "You'll have your pick. A bunch of them are heelers, though."
"Excuse me?" Mabel asked. "Healers? You mean doctors?"
"Heelers!" Angelique insisted. "Bad dancers, you know!"
"Where we come from," Dipper said hurriedly, "a bad dancer's a doctor."
"Oakland must have funny words," Angelique decided. "Anyhow, I'm going on my own, so, yeah, you two can tag along. Only I've got a meet-up with a guy named Butch, so I'll probably ditch the dance and go off with him for a little petting party in his jalopy."
"Uh-huh," Mabel said.
"Yeah, he's got a—shoot, there goes the bell," Angelique said, and they had to file back inside the school. They didn't get another chance to speak to her until school ended that afternoon. Then Angelique said, "You two are supposed to stay in our guest rooms, so follow me." She grabbed her schoolbooks—they were cinched together with a sort of belt—and picked up her dress box.
"I'll carry your books," Dipper offered.
"Prince Charming," Angelique said, sounding bored, but she let him take them, since he had nothing else to carry.
They walked nearly half a mile to her house, a big two-story Victorian-style three-story affair with a central tower that went up another floor above the roof. They went up ten steps to the porch, Angelique opened the door, and a woman in a maid's uniform said, "You wipe your feet, now!"
With short spiteful movements, Angelique scrubbed her shoes on the doormat. Mabel and Dipper imitated her. "Are these your guests?" the maid, a thin, fussy-looking woman asked.
"No, they're Kewpie dolls," Angelique said. "I won them in a ring-toss game."
"Hi," Mabel said. "I'm Mabel, and this is my brother Marty. Thank you for inviting us into your home."
The maid rolled her eyes. "It's none of mine! I just work here. You and your brother come on, I'll show you where you'll be sleeping. A delivery man brought your suitcase this morning. Miss Angelique, you change out of your good school clothes!"
"All right, Bertie!"
She went with them as far as the second floor, but the maid, Bertie, led Dipper and Mabel up another flight of steps. "This used to be the servants' quarters when the family had a butler, a live-in cook, and three maids in all," she told them. She pushed open a door. "One of you in here and one across the hall. Suitcase is here, so divide up your clothes. Bathroom's down at the end of the hall. If you come downstairs, you can go out in the back yard. Mr. and Mrs. Flannigan don't like Angelique's guests hanging around in the parlors."
She sort of stood guard while Dipper opened the suitcase on the bed. He seemed to have two more shirts and two more pairs of pants, one long, the other plus-fours like the ones he was wearing. He found underwear, too, and socks. "Guess this is it," he said. "So, across the hall?"
The maid gave him her first smile. "Is that all the clothes you have?"
"Yes Ma'am," Dipper said.
"Don't Ma'am me. Call me Bertie. You poor things. What happened to your folks? House fire?"
"Shar—" Mabel began.
But Dipper cut her off before the sharks struck again: "Sort of. You know, California. Earthquakes and fires and all We didn't come out of it with much. We, uh, the state, I mean, sent us here because we, our grandparents used to live here, but we found out they're dead, so—I guess we're on our own."
"Wards of the state," Bertie said. "Poor little lambs."
"Ooh!" Mabel said. "Marty knows a dance—"
"She means I'm not a good dancer," Dipper said. "You know, just a, uh, a heeler. But we'll try to have fun with Angelique tonight."
Bertie sniffed. "You ask me, Angelique tries to have too much fun. Well, come on and I'll put you in your room. Then you can go downstairs. Miss Angelique's probably changed by now. I guess you and your sister will have to make do with your school clothes."
She led Dipper a few steps across the hall and unlocked the door of a bedroom about a third the size of his back in Piedmont: room for a single narrow bed, a narrow table, and one straight chair. In lieu of a closet, it had a small niche with a shelf and a clothes rod. The small window looked out into a fenced back yard. "This is nice," he told Bertie.
"Nice to have a young person appreciate something. For a change," Bertie said. "I've got to go. Remember, if you come downstairs, go out in the yard. Mrs. Flannigan is resting, and her husband won't be home from the bank for another hour."
When she had shut the door, Dipper hung up his clothes as best he could and then sat on the foot of the bed, looking out the window. From that position, all he could see was the tops of some trees. "Pacifica?" he asked out loud. "Grown-up Mabel? Are you monitoring us?"
No response.
He sighed, and even though they couldn't possibly hear him, he asked them anyway: "What the heck have you got us into?"