Leaving the House Where We Grew Up

Overcome

A yawn rolled lazily off Dipper's jaw and onto the cafeteria tray below. Mingling amongst the overcooked green beans and syrupy peaches, it died without celebration or notice. There would be others like it, especially considering the young man's sleeping schedule or lack thereof.

"Man, I had no clue what I was getting into signing up for Ms. Spellman's class. I honestly thought I had a chance to rack up some college credit, but the way she grades: no partial credit?! Come on," Marcus railed for about the fifth time since they escaped that day's episode of AP Calculus.

"It probably would go easier if you paid attention instead of picking your goddamn nose," Alec shot back, bringing up that unfortunate moment on the first day of class that year when Marcus had gone after a particularly bothersome nasal occupant at the same moment that Ms. Spellman called upon him to answer a question.

"One time. One freaking time!" he replied in exasperation. "Never gonna live that shit down, right, Dip?"

Dipper was craning his neck to the right, looking around the cavernous canteen, bustling with students of every type: jocks, nerds, drama geeks. Off in the far corner, he even spotted a few band students who had chosen to wear their uniforms to the mid-day fare.

'Is there a game tonight?' he wondered.

It was a pointless question; he never attended them, regardless. The consideration was meant to distract himself from the sadness he felt from not spotting the person he wanted to.

About a week before classes began, both Pines children received their schedules. Most of the courses were unsurprising and typical. One difference, though, stemmed from their offset lunch times. Even though in prior years, lunch periods were broken out based on the class a student was in — be it freshman, sophomore, or what have you — due to the school's attendance numbers rising by a few dozen, some complex changes had to be made. As a result of said shuffling, Mabel now took the lunch period that came prior to Dipper's. It was the first time in their school careers they weren't able to break the heavily subsidized bread together, something that made the yearning for contact only grow more desperate.

After the dramatic heart-to-heart at the pool, the tail end of summer had passed uneventfully. The twins' routines didn't really change: wake up, goof off, spend a bit of time helping Grunkle Stan, eat dinner, go to bed. A modification, though, came via wireless connection.

Every day, usually late in the evening, Wendy would send Dipper a text to check on him. There were never any probing inquiries on behalf of the redhead; she knew better than to press an issue fraught with tension and anguish. Instead, the conversations were left open-ended and convivial. Wendy simply wanted to act as his pressure release valve, whether it meant discussing a particular exchange he had with his sister that day or something revolting they noticed floating in the lake.

It was a small, but meaningful bit of easy conversation he could count on. While Mabel had always been his source for wisdom, his guide when he had no answers to the questions of life, once a line of questioning came up that absolutely could not be posed to her, he needed an alternative. Having finally found that other option, it helped to take the edge off, even if only to a small degree.

As was his nature, though, Dipper worried how Mabel was taking the rekindling of friendship between the two. Since most of the time in his text conversations with Wendy he couldn't bring himself to discuss his feelings for Mabel, it was the kind of idle chit-chat that he took no issue with Mabel knowing about, risking little in what was being shared across the communication frontier. For that reason, he texted in the open, making it plain as day that his intentions with Wendy were nothing but friendly.

The glaring incongruence, though, was found not in the content of the discourse he may have been sharing, but rather, simply, in how it existed. One didn't need a PhD to see that Wendy was frequently catching up with Dipper and not Mabel, leaving her the third wheel. She wasn't convinced that suddenly Dipper and Wendy were an item, but they were bonding and she was left on the outside looking in.