favorite clothes
It's raining again. Past the awning of the elevated back porch, low clouds hover and weep into the sea. Pacifica watches from the kitchen table as fine, almost invisible drops gather on the glass of the sliding door.
"What did you get for number five?" a timid voice asks.
Pacifica blinks, returning her attention to her homework and the girl sitting next to her. She checks her sheet. "C," she says.
"That's what I have," April says.
April is a small girl with mousy brown hair and blue eyes made huge by her thick glasses. She is shy and unassuming, with no apparent strong opinions, obsessions, or eccentricities. This makes her not even slightly reminiscent of the twins, which is why Pacifica spends time with her.
April is also too kind, or at least too unassuming, to engage in the social games that are so prevalent at their school, games that Pacifica once excelled at and now finds hollow and cruel. She doesn't care where she sits on the ladder anymore; she doesn't want to be on it at all. She wants to be at a different school entirely with completely different people and she doesn't care what the kids in her old circles think of her, or her disintegrating family and diminished fortune.
Most days, it's hard to care about anything at all.
This hasn't endeared her to the upper echelons of the student body, but, again, she just doesn't care. She sits with April and a handful of other outcasts at lunch and spends the rest of the day ignoring everyone around her. Her grades are slipping, she knows. She does assignments on autopilot, giving them the same bare minimum of effort she gives everything else.
She's only alive when she talks to Dipper and Mabel. Perversely, this makes talking to them difficult, because it makes the hurt come flooding back. The detachment of all her other hours is easier. Still, she would never give up her long-distance connection with them. Knowing she can see Dipper after school is the only reason she gets out of bed most days.
She has to behave just well enough that Mother doesn't try to take away her phone or laptop. If she can do that, she'll survive.
April moves on to the next question. Pacifica listens with half an ear, her attention already returning to the sea.
Later that day, after April has been picked up by one of her parents, Pacifica lies on her bed and stares at the ceiling, one of her recurring pastimes. Dipper won't be available to talk until after he finishes dinner and homework; same with Mabel. Not that there's anything to talk about, unless they have something to offer. Pacifica greedily accepts every mundane tidbit of their lives in Piedmont and offers next to nothing in return, her days an endless cycle of things she pays as little attention to as possible. What day even is it? She rolls over just enough to eyeball the calendar on her wall. Right, it's Friday, towards the end of a dreary November. No school tomorrow. Which means no anything tomorrow.
She has things to do: books she could read, games she could play. But she never wants to play anything unless it's with the twins, and even her usual retreat in literature feels unsatisfying. There's nothing she wants to do. She exists in a static state of bored malaise. Nothing feels good.
She just wants to go home.
She reaches under her pillow and pulls out a shirt; it's the tie-dye one she wore to the festival. It usually has a place of honor along with the rest of her summer clothes in the back of her closet, hidden at the end of the long pole where all her school shirts and blouses hang. She's not sure why she keeps all her favorites sequestered away, save for the vague notion they're for a different life than this. She wears them as often as she can, usually on weekends. She'll wear them until they're nothing but tatters, and keep those, too.
She presses the shirt to her nose. Maybe she's imagining it, but she thinks she can still smell a hint of pine.
The doorbell rings, startling her from her ruminations. It's up to her to answer, because Mother refuses to do it on the rare occasion when there's someone at the door. This seems to be her way of protesting the current lack of a butler. She's useless without the help, a pathetic state of being that Pacifica is determined not to emulate. She rejects that high class helplessness along with everything else from her old life, and every passing day makes the rift between who she was and who she is that much wider. She hopes she's past the point of no return; that even if Mother and Father got back together and got all their money back and bought the manor from McGucket and everything went back to how it used to be, Pacifica still wouldn't.
She reluctantly rolls off her bed and walks down the long hall to the front door, the soft slap of her bare feet echoing slightly from the hardwood floor and the empty walls. She hates this house. After three months in the Shack, it feels like a model home, like it's still waiting for someone to move in.
She opens the door and is greeted by a green wall. It takes her a moment to realize that the wall is breathing; she looks up.
It's Soos.
"'Sup, girl-dude?" Soos says amiably. He grins down at her.
She gapes at him. "Um… hi?"
Mother's voice filters through the empty rooms behind her. "Pacifica, who is it?"
Pacifica grips the knob of the door. "No one!" she shouts back into the house, and then steps outside and closes the door behind her.
Soos scratches the back of his head. "I'm not getting you in trouble, right?"
"No! How are you here? Did you come from Piedmont?" she asks eagerly.
"Yeah, sorta. I swung by for an hour or so on the way down. I actually just came back from San Bernadino, there's a dude there who sold me a whole truck worth of taxidermy on the cheap. Gotta get it back to the Shack before the weekend rush; things have been picking up lately, heh!" He points a finger gun at Pacifica. "Brought you a care package, though. Heard you been, like, mad deprived down here."
He turns and lumbers over to his truck, which is parked in the driveway. Pacifica can see a lumpy tarp covering the back and can only imagine what jumble of taxidermy horrors lies beneath it. Soos comes back a moment later with two cases of Pitt in his arms, over which is draped a Mystery Shack t-shirt in a vibrant shade of pink. It's her size.
He sets the Pitt down and hands her the shirt. "Thought you might want this. You can rock the brand until you come back."
He sounds absolutely certain that she'll return to the valley. She takes that certainty and pulls it into herself and wraps it around her heart. Hot tears press against her eyelids, and she fights them, feeling her lower lip begin to tremble uncontrollably, feeling the welling up of all that missingness, missing everyone, Dipper and Mabel, Wendy, Candy and Grenda, even Ford, even Stan—
She takes a deep, shaky breath. She tries to push all of it down and bring back the numbness, the sudden influx of emotion stinging inside her like a wound with the bandage suddenly ripped off. Not feeling anything is easier.
She can't. Soos smiles gently at her, and the tears come, running down her cheeks in burning trails, her mouth quivering like one of the autumn leaves barely clinging to their branches. Unthinking, she steps forward and hugs him, pressing her face to his shirt and failing to stifle a sob that wells up from the core of her, deep and strong and unstoppable.
Soos squeezes her shoulder. "It'll be alright, dude," he tells her.
He's not there for much longer. He helps her bring the Pitt into the kitchen and promises to send her the latest chapter of his and Mabel's collaborative Duck-tective fanfiction. Then he's gone, heading north until nightfall. He'll sleep in his truck at a rest stop and be back in Gravity Falls by tomorrow afternoon.
And she's still here, alone.
At least the twins aren't going back without her. She couldn't stand that.
In the kitchen, she pops open a can of Pitt with a quiet hiss and drinks it warm, the faux-peach soda bubbling in her mouth. She doesn't really like Pitt that much, especially not since the little weird golf ball people kidnapped her and she came to associate it with that less than pleasant memory. Not that it was ever her favorite (she didn't have the heart to tell Soos after he went through all this trouble to bring it to her). But when the flavor of it hits her tongue, it's so irresistibly nostalgic that she finds herself beginning to cry again. Blinking back the tears, she puts the soda in the refrigerator along with several others.
She'll make them last as long as she can.
December arrives. Nothing changes.
More school, more homework sessions with April, more long internet conversations with Dipper and Mabel. Pacifica contemplates picking up an extracurricular activity or two, just to spend as little time at home as possible. But that would mean spending more time with her classmates, most of whom she avoids as much as she can. School activities wouldn't really be an improvement; a lateral move, at best.
All these people around her, and never anyone she wants to see.
Robert comes and goes. Pacifica isn't told what's going on, but she can tell that Mother isn't getting what she wants. The days that Robert stops by are bad days; the days that Mother leaves to meet with Father for arbitration are the worst days, full of shouting and sometimes broken glass. For all that was lost with Weirdmageddon, Preston Northwest still has the family lawyers in his corner for as long as he can afford them. Pacifica isn't sure what they cost, but she knows it's a lot, and whatever Father manages to keep from Mother's claws in the divorce is likely going to end up lining the pockets of those lawyers anyway. It makes Pacifica happy to think about that—maybe her parents will both end up with nothing.
Pacifica doesn't care. She'll go to public school and when she's eighteen, she's gone.
Of course, it might be hard to go to college without any money, but she figures she's probably going to have to score a scholarship regardless, because even if Mother keeps a chunk of whatever's left of the Northwest fortune, by the time Pacifica is ready to go to a university she'll be well and truly estranged from her parents. It feels inevitable. She's already pulling away as hard as she can, and they aren't doing anything to make her change her mind.
She didn't miss her parents at all last summer. Not once, not for a single second. She thinks that probably makes her a bad person, because she knows that Dipper and Mabel miss their own parents a lot when they're in Gravity Falls, even if they're usually too busy to show it.
Pacifica doesn't want to think about the twins right now. It's yet another quiet day after school; bored, she leaves her room and goes to the kitchen, opening the fridge to find it almost bare, as usual. She takes out a yogurt and wanders into the living room while eating it, wondering if what's left of the furniture will be sold with the house. There's still a lot of stuff in storage in the basement too (whatever the Boss-Lobster didn't eat, anyway). Probably too much to take to a smaller house.
There's a handful of pictures on the mantle over the fake fireplace. In the absence of any butlers, they've started to gather dust. One of them is from her parents' wedding, colored in that particular way that old film photos usually are (Dipper would probably know what makes them different from digital pictures, and it hurts that he isn't here to ask). Her parents look like two completely different people, standing side by side during what looks like their reception, with blurry figures in the background. They're smiling.
You wouldn't be smiling if you knew how it ends, she thinks.
"Pacifica?" her mother calls out.
"Yes?" she yells back.
"We need to talk."
A hard pit of dread forms in her stomach. It's balanced out by a numb feeling that's like a terrible kind of relief. Maybe something will finally change, even if it's not for the better.
She leaves her yogurt in the kitchen and steps into the main hall, going straight instead of turning left towards her room. This corridor leads to the master bedroom, where Mother spends the majority of her time. Pacifica isn't sure what her mom does in there, besides drink and watch television, but she doesn't really care.
Mother is sitting in an easy chair by her deck window, a wide stretch of glass that overlooks the beach and the sea. She's angled so that her chair almost touches the window, and her reflection is folded out from her like the second page of a book. Every time Pacifica sees her, she looks more bitter; and more brittle, as if the champagne glass she's always holding is spreading out and taking her over.
Pacifica wishes she'd stopped by her room and taken the tie-die shirt from under her pillow. Maybe it would help.
"What?" she says.
Mother would have once lambasted her for such a rude greeting. Now, she just says wearily, "That was Robert on the phone. We'll be finalizing things on Friday. You will be staying with me, like we discussed. Your father," she spits out the word like it's something sour, "doesn't want you."
That's true, though not in the way that Mother means it. Maybe Father really said that, maybe he didn't, but Pacifica knows what the reality is: neither of them want her (and she doesn't want them). Like she said before, they aren't a family. Not anymore. She's seen real families and she's not sure they ever were, not even on the best days when she loved them and felt loved, because she can see that love was always conditional.
If it wasn't, things wouldn't be like this now.
She could say all of this; it's on the tip of her tongue. But she doesn't feel like fighting; she just wants the conversation to end.
"Fine," Pacifica says.
Her lack of emotion gives Mother pause. "Is that all you have to say?"
"Just so long as it's over," Pacifica says, and turns to leave.
"Pacifica Elise!" Mother snaps, halting Pacifica's retreat. "I know this has been difficult, but that's no excuse for your horrid attitude lately, or your grades. If you think a B average is acceptable—"
Pacifica rolls her eyes and interjects, "Whatever. Stop pretending like you still want to be my mom."
"I am your mother!" Mother snaps.
"Like Dad is my father? Like that?" Pacifica's carefully maintained distance is disintegrating. She can feel all the sadness and hurt and fury welling up inside her chest. "You only liked me when I was your dumb little doll that did whatever you wanted. You both gave up on me the second I wanted to be better! You don't know who I am anymore, and you don't care anyway!"
Her voice is rising with every sentence. She's losing control. Pacifica grits her teeth and viciously tamps down the next surge of vitriol that bubbles just below her throat. Again, she turns to leave.
But when Mother speaks again, the tone of her voice gives Pacifica pause. She sounds genuinely hurt.
"What if I still want to be your mother? Why can't I?" she demands.
Pacifica shakes her head. "You'll just change your mind."
The hurt disappears, replaced once more by self-righteousness. "I will always be your mother, Pacifica. You can't change that."
"I'm not the one who changed it."
"Oh, please," Mother sighs, knocking back the rest of her glass in a single, impressive swallow. "Do you really believe you're the innocent victim after all the tantrums, the running away, the constant disobedience and disrespect—three months, and I had to call you! The second you thought you had a better deal you couldn't wait to forget all about me and have your wonderful new family."
"It wasn't a deal. They didn't make any deals. That's what you can't understand," Pacifica says tightly.
"Call it what you like, dear. Whatever it was, you are still a Northwest, and I am still your mother."
Pacifica glowers at this, her small fingers knotting into fists. "Really? Because it sounds like neither one of us is a Northwest now."
Mother flinches, which Pacifica considers a victory. "God, don't remind me," Mother mutters.
She raises her glass to her lips before remembering it's empty; she graces it with a disappointed scowl.
Then, as if nothing up to this point was ever said, she continues, "Robert had some ideas as to what might be best for both of us. Given my need to downsize," she says with a disgusted curl of her lip, "he thought living somewhere more… affordable would be ideal in the long term."
In other words, Mother can't buy a really expensive house with really expensive property taxes if she also wants to keep the help. And Pacifica just can't see Priscilla Northwest living without a butler and a maid or two. Or else she might have to do her own laundry, or cook her own meals, or do other, utterly mundane things that she's completely unprepared and unwilling to do. It's not like Pacifica doesn't understand at all; she was once disinclined to do the same things. But she's changed (not because she had to, but because she wanted to), and Mother is still here, almost exactly the same—just drunker, and more bitter.
If she wants to live somewhere she can afford to stay in champagne and Pacifica can stay away from her, that's fine with Pacifica.
"As I literally can't afford to be picky," Mother sighs with the air of this being a great tragedy, "Robert said I might ask what you want."
"There's only one thing I want," Pacifica says.
and you start wearing holes through your favorite clothes
they're familiar, they smell like, not being alone
swordfish — favorite clothes