Neighbors

(September 7-9, 2015)

5

Wendy was sympathetic but cautious. "You watch that kid, Dip. If he's got Cipher inside him, he's gonna be evil."

"I have a little of Cipher inside me," Dipper reminded her. It was late on Sunday night, but they were talking on the phone anyway, Dipper in his room, uncomfortable, with a blanket tented over his head to muffle his voice. Mom and Dad slept downstairs, but Mabel had ears like a Vulcan, and no hesitation about eavesdropping.

"That wouldn't stop Bill Cipher," Wendy said, her voice hard-edged. During Weirdmageddon, Cipher had done terrible things to her, and—this for Wendy was even worse—to her family and friends. She admitted to Dipper, "I have a real hard time forgiving him. And I'll never forget."

"I know," Dipper said. He sighed. "I wish we could be together right now. Just so I could touch you."

"Yeah, I'm having Pines pains right now from withdrawal," Wendy whispered sadly. "You just better get your butt up here for Thanksgiving."

"Gonna try my best. Mom and Dad are thinking it over. Dad's willing. Mom's the stubborn one. She says we owe our Grunkles a Thanksgiving here this year."

"Oh, man!" Just from the way Wendy said that, he could picture her flopping back on her bed, rolling her eyes. "Dip, let's you and me never ever get into that dumb notion of owing people visits. Let's just do whatever we think is best, whether it's going to their house or having them come to ours every single freakin' year. It doesn't matter as long as the family's together! This debt-and-payback biz sucks all the joy out of get-togethers."

"I'm with you," Dipper said. "And Grunkle Stan is trying to persuade Mom. I'd say we have a good chance of coming up Thanksgiving week. Better than fifty-fifty, anyhow. Mabel and I are out of school for the whole week, so we could come up on the Friday night or Saturday morning before Thanksgiving, and then Mom and Dad could come up on the Wednesday before."

"You guys gonna drive up?"

"Can't, without somebody 25 in the car. Not until we turn seventeen. But we could fly up if somebody could meet us in Portland. I've got more than enough money saved for two one-way economy tickets. Know if anybody would be available to give us a lift?" He was grinning.

Her voice sounded sly: "Mm, let me think . . . yeah, I think I know a girl. Minute you know what flight you'll be on, you give me a call, OK?"

"You know I will."

They went on to discuss other things, trivial little subjects like love and commitment and yearning for each other. Before they ended the call, Wendy said seriously, "Dipper, I gotta ask: What does Ford think?"

"He doesn't trust Billy Sheaffer," Dipper said. "But what would you expect? Cipher treated Grunkle Ford like crap. Even when Grunkle Ford was lost in the dimensions, trying hard to find his way back home, he obsessed over the fear that Bill was going to possess him again. You know, more than once he actually allowed Bill to take over his body when he thought Bill was his Muse."

"Yeah, you told me. And I know how Bill glommed onto your body when Mabel did that puppet show."

"Right. After that experience, I can get Grunkle Ford's paranoia. Being jerked out of your own body, becoming, like, a ghost—it's horrible. Oh, I told you that Grunkle Ford had insulated his brain from Bill by having a metal plate put in his head. Did I also tell you he did that in Dimension 52? The Oracle's dimension?"

"No. She do it for him?"

"I'm not clear on that. Maybe there are doctors in that dimension."

"Whoever did it, getting a head implant sounds extreme."

"Yeah." Dipper listened intently. "It's not funny. Are you giggling?"

"Sorry, man." Wendy did chuckle a little. "It's not about Ford. I was just thinking back to the puppet show. For most of it you were sitting right beside me in the audience—but I guess that was Bill, not you, huh?"

"Yes, it was Bill," Dipper said, feeling mad all over again. "Bill in my body. Or as Mabel called him—"

"Bipper," Wendy said, giggling again. "Sorry for laughing. You know he hit on me when we were in Soos's truck on the way to the theater, don't you?"

"No," Dipper said, clenching his teeth. "Did he touch you?"

She laughed again. "No, dude! Well, we were shoulder-to-shoulder, you know Soos's truck, but not the kind of touching you mean. He just tried a few lame pickup lines on me. I thought it was you fooling around."

"Wasn't me," Dipper said. "Don't tell me about it, I don't want to know. Maybe when I see you again, you can send me mental images, but right now—I really don't need to hear it."

"I thought you were just being funny. I remember he called me 'Red,'" Wendy said. "Cute the first time, but that got old in like, five seconds!"

"Anyway," Dipper said, forcing his attention back to the conversation he'd had with Ford, "Grunkle Ford figures I'd better do as the Oracle has asked. He says she's only relaying Axolotl's advice, and Axolotl's this super-intelligent force, being, whatever it is. He did tell me to keep an eye on Mabel and not let her get too involved. We're supposed to be super careful. Bill's the most manipulative bast—uh, being he's ever run across, Ford says. He could easily trick my sister into doing something bad."

"I don't really think so," Wendy said. "Mabel outran Bill at the puppet play, and then pinned him down and tickled him until you could take back your own body again. What got me laughing earlier, I kind of wish I'd seen you as a sock puppet. Mabel told me about it and described the whole scene, and it sounded hilarious. And honestly cute, not Bipper-"Red"-cute. Sorry, Dip. I know the whole thing bothers you."

"It does," he agreed. "But you know how it is. Like when Bill turned you into a banner."

"Man, that was awful," Wendy muttered. "Like being dead but still aware! I could see and hear, but I couldn't move or even breathe! Inside, I was silently screaming the whole time. I see what you mean, Dipper. Sorry, man, my bad. I wasn't making fun of you, it's just the way Mabel tells the story—"

"Yeah, when you're a sock, you look funny when you try to look mad," Dipper said. "OK, about Billy, one last thing: Ford says that whatever Mabel and I have to do to help him, it won't be a quick fix. It'll be a long haul and stretch over years, he figures. So . . . looks like this is my hobby now. But one thing I swear to you: Mabel and I definitely will never invite Billy to come up to Gravity Falls with us."

"That," Wendy said, "is fine with me."

Monday came, and the first day of school. This year Dipper and Mabel had only two classes and lunch period together—their interests were drifting in different directions. On the plus side, their shared classes were first- and last-period, so they'd see each other at the beginning and end of every school day.

Most days, Mabel planned to go home alone—on the bus. Because she had her license, she wanted to drive to school. And she did, every morning, while Dipper took the bus. There were no exceptions to the rule about teens driving with teens in the car, not even for twins. And then in the afternoons, they reversed, and Mabel bussed home while Dipper drove Helen Wheels, mainly because Dipper stayed after school just about every day for track practice.

It was a wee bit irritating to Dipper that every time he drove the car, Mabel insisted on examining it for dents, dings, and scratches when he parked it. So unfair. After all, he wasn't the one who hit the white-and-orange striped traffic barrel. Fortunately, it was plastic and it had been just a glancing blow, no harm done, but even so, Mabel furiously claimed, "It jumped right in front of me!"

At lunch on that first day of school, he learned that Mabel had become his informal publicist. A big, slouchy guy he didn't know came up to the table where he, Mabel, and some of their friends were feasting on turkey slices, carrots, and salad and poked him in the shoulder. "You her brother?" the guy asked, nudging Dipper's shoulder and pointing at an uncomfortable-looking Mabel.

"Yeah, I'm Dipper Pines," Dipper said, wondering what in the world he'd done to attract a bully so early in the game.

"She says you wrote a song or some deal for the Tombstones?" The burly guy's tone made it a question.

"I wrote the music for 'Cold Creek,'" Dipper said. "It's in the liner notes for their album, or you can look it up online."

"Yeah? Well, I just gotta tell you, I like that band's music. But that one cut sucks ass!" The guy snarled out a laugh and walked away.

Mabel looked mortified. "Sorry, Dip," she said. "He's wrong."

"Everybody has different tastes in music," Dipper said. "It doesn't bother me."

But it did. After school, the memory followed him out on the track and messed with his first track practice on the Varsity team. He'd grown a lot since the age of twelve, but even so—he was the second shortest member of the boys' team. And a third of the girls' team were taller than he was, too. Nobody was snide toward him, though—everyone knew he'd had an amazing freshman year and, despite a bad sprain that sidelined him for weeks, a respectable second year on the JV. And some of his old teammates were now on the Varsity squad with him.

Still—he began to wonder whether track would be much fun this year.

The Varsity track coach, Mr. Jorgenson, was tall, balding, blond, pale, and florid-faced. He was built a lot like Mr. Poolcheck, and that fact alone intimidated Dipper. Then, too, Jorgenson's approach wasn't like the JV coach's idea of leading a team. Coach Dinson had always been quick with criticism, but quick with praise, too. He reassured runners—it didn't matter if they lost a race if they tried their best, and he was always encouraging: "You'll do better next time."

Jorgenson, well, he tended to yell a lot, his face turning crimson as he made his criticism clear not only to a runner but also to everyone within earshot: "Were you asleep? You started half a second after everyone else was running! Stay alert, Willben! Curtis, get your rhythm! You're running like a wino after a two-day drunk! Pines! Pace yourself so you have enough to run full-out for that last ten yards! Slowing down ain't gonna win races!"

And when they did well—and partly spurred by his anger at the burly guy's rudeness, Dipper broke his personal best record during the first practice on Monday afternoon—Jorgenson just frowned and grunted, "Pines, I want to see you do better!"

Hey, Coach, I just set a record. How's that not better?

Dipper began to have second thoughts about track on that very day.

He drove home about an hour after Mabel had arrived there by bus. This year his guitar lessons would be two evenings a week, Mondays and Thursdays at 8:00. He also realized he'd have to cut down on practice, because between school and his evening writing sessions, there just weren't enough hours in a day. He'd have to get by on half an hour of guitar practice a day, he decided.

It was shaping up to be a rough year. And it had only begun.

After school on Tuesday, Dipper learned that Mabel had invited Mina and Mira Sheaffer to their house for dinner—which she threatened to cook. Billy would also tag along.

Having been the guinea pig for some of Mabel's culinary experiments, Dipper thought that the Sheaffer kids might never want to see them again after a Mabel meal.

"I'll help," he said, which was why their meal that evening—oven-fried chicken, green beans with baby potatoes, and corn on the cob (the veggies courtesy of Mabel's visit to the Farmers' Market) turned out to be edible. Left on her own, Mabel had an irresistible impulse to experiment with spices and condiments. There might conceivably be a place for cinnamon, ginger, and candy sprinkles in some chicken dish somewhere, but the world was not yet ready for it.

Mom, who thought that Mabel had done the lion's share of the cooking, was impressed at how well everything turned out. The Sheaffer kids dug in and apparently liked the food. Afterward, Mom sent them "off to play"—she still seemed to think of Mabel and Dipper as toddlers sometimes—and she and Dad did the clean-up.

Mabel and the Sheaffer twins went up to her room for—Dipper was sure—makeovers. In the long, lingering September daylight, Dipper talked Billy into a game of catch. "It's hard for me," Billy said. "No depth perception."

"That's the reason to practice it," Dipper told him. "You can get better at anything as long as you don't give up."

Billy put on the fielder's glove that Dipper had used once when Grunkle Ford had forced him onto a Little Guy's League team. Dipper tossed and caught bare-handed.

They started out only about twenty feet apart, and Dipper lobbed some easy ones, none of which Billy could catch. The blond boy flinched from the first few tosses, missing them cleanly. "I won't hurt you," Dipper promised. He showed Billy how to poise the glove, how to trap the ball in the pocket. "If you get the ball in there," he told the younger boy, "the leather will protect your hand. Even if it's a hard line drive, it won't hurt. Well, not much, not enough to break your hand or anything, just a kind of sting, something you can ignore."

Then after a few absurdly short tosses so Billy could practice positioning the glove, Dipper moved gradually back. At last, Billy was catching every pitch.

Returning the ball was harder for him, though. He had almost no sense of force or aim, and Dipper had to chase after his wild throws. Sometimes he made it, sometimes he didn't. "I'm not any good," Billy said after one wild throw landed in the pool.

Fortunately, the ball floated, and Dipper retrieved it with the pool skimmer. "That just means you've got room for improvement," he said with a smile. "Hang on, we'll let this one dry, and I've got another one in my room."

With Dipper's encouragement and about fifty tries, finally Billy got the hang of throwing the ball roughly in his direction. Most of the time, anyway. Dipper caught ten in a row without much trouble. "Sun's going," he said. "Guess we ought to call it quits. You like the glove?"

"It's OK," Billy said, handing it back to Dipper.

"You can have it if you want. I don't ever play baseball."

Billy grinned shyly. "No, thanks. Nobody wants to play with me. I'd rather leave it here so sometimes you and me can practice. Is that OK?"

"OK with me," Dipper said. They went in and had some lemonade. At the kitchen table, Dipper asked, "How was your first day of school?"

"Terrible," Billy said. "Whole new class, nobody even knows me, and they're already picking on me."

"Fifth grade's tough, man," Dipper said. "Not everybody picked on you, though. Right?"

"No. But this one big mean guy is calling me Cyclops. Already. First day."

"Shrug it off," Dipper said. "Don't show him it bothers you, and he'll forget it. Bullies just want to get a reaction."

"There's one girl who told him to stop," Billy said. "Her name's Esther."

"Do you like her?"

Billy shrugged. "Dunno. She at least talked to me. Didn't ask what happened to my eye. I liked that."

"Tell me about her."

Billy leaned his elbow on the table and his cheek on his fist. "Well . . . she's got sort of browny-reddy hair, if you know what I mean."

"Auburn," Dipper said. "That's the brown-red color."

"And freckles," Billy said, smiling. "A whole patch right across her nose and cheeks."

"Freckled girls can be awfully cute," Dipper said.

"And . . . she told the guy not to call me Cyclops. And we sat together at lunch. She lives on the other side of the park from us. Uh. Her mom's a teacher's aide, but not at our school. Her dad works for the city. And, um, her favorite food is chocolate cake."

"She sounds real nice," Dipper said. Geeze, when I was ten years old were my crushes this obvious?

"She kinda reminds me of your sister Mabel," Billy said, drinking the last of his lemonade. "I mean, she likes to laugh, and she makes goofy jokes and all."

"Sounds like she likes you," Dipper said. "There, you've already made one friend at school. You'll find others."

"Yeah, I hope so." Billy took his and Dipper's glasses to the sink and rinsed them. "Wash up?"

"Don't worry about it. I'll put them in the dishwasher later."

They went into the back yard and sat in the lawn chairs, watching the clouds turn orange and then purple, the sky darken, and the stars come out. "Looking up makes me feel funny," Billy said. "Like I might fall off the earth."

That was such a weird thing to say that Dipper had no ready answer. Instead, he fell back on a generality: "Lot of fears don't make much sense. They're irrational. Phobias, they call them."

"Yeah, I've heard of them. Like being scared to stay in room 13 of a hotel. But I have this nightmare. Well, I have a lot of different ones, but anyway. In this one, though, I'm all alone somewhere way out in space, not even close to a star. It's all black and cold. And I'm stuck there forever. And I can't even die."

"Bad dream," Dipper said.

"Uh-huh. Hey, you can go to PG-13 movies."

"Yeah, I can," Dipper said, feeling caught off-base by the change of subject. "Don't go to very many, though. Too busy with school and track and stuff." And nobody to go with. Seeing even a bad movie with Wendy beside me is one thing. Sitting all by myself, or with Mabel—who has a fifty-fifty chance of getting us kicked out if she overreacts to the movie—that's not as much fun. "Why?"

"Oh, nothing. It's just that the theater in the mall is showing Hitler's Zombie Army, and I'd like to see it. But it's PG-13. It's about World War II and stuff. I like war history. That's why I'd like to see it."

Dipper smiled. "Billy, let me tell you, with a title like that it's not going to teach you any real history. It's a horror movie, more than anything, a zombie film. Probably it'd be a lot like The Walking Dead, if the dead happened to walk through a recruiting center. Most of the time, that kind of movie is only worth laughing at. My girlfriend and me like to watch these awful old horror movies on TV, just to laugh at how dumb they are. Real zombies—well, I mean, if they were real, they wouldn't act like the ones in movies."

Billy asked, "Are there real zombies?"

Whoa! Dangerous subject. Carefully, Dipper asked, "Have you ever seen any real zombies? Ever heard of anybody who saw one?"

Billy shook his head. Dipper shrugged. "There you go. I'd say your odds of ever finding a real zombie in Piedmont are exactly zero."

"My favorite war movie is End of the Beginning," Billy said. "No zombies or anything, though. It's about the battle of El Alamein. Have you ever seen it?"

"No, I don't think so," Dipper said.

"Yeah, it's an old movie. Dad bought a DVD of it. I really like it. I've watched it over and over. It's British, I think. The best thing is the DVD cover."

That's a weird thing to like about a movie. Dipper thought it but didn't say it.

That evening after Billy and his two sisters—now looking like edgy nineteen-year-old Goth girls in the makeup Mabel had troweled on during their make-over session in her room—went home, Dipper opened his laptop and looked up the movie that Billy had mentioned on the IMDB. He found it: a British film from 1987. According to the blurb, "The fact-based story of Rommel's bid to capture the Suez Canal and the British army that held him off." It only got three stars in the two user reviews, though.

The article did include a picture of the DVD, and looking at it, Dipper nodded. Yeah. It figured. Now he understood.

The cover photo featured Hugh Bastable, the actor playing the German General Rommel, facing off against Edmund Westfiggle, a grizzled, mustached actor playing the British General Montgomery.

In the background, but towering over their profiles, loomed one of the Egyptian pyramids.

In a garish bright yellow.

Dipper switched off the laptop.

Oh, man.

He had a feeling it was going to be a long, hard school year.

The End

(But we'll see more of Billy.)