Scarlett hit the alarm at six a.m. the following morning, bleary eyed from staying up past midnight with her homework and trying to get over the idea that she had a talking mouse for a pet. She quickly got out of bed in her red, knee-length nightshirt, turned on the light in her closet, padded over to the mouse cage in sock feet (phew—she’d forgotten that mice did tend to stink after a while), and peered inside. The cage appeared empty at first glance, and she was afraid for a moment that it had escaped. It was a smart mouse, for sure. Where could it have gone?
Her fears were laid to rest when she spotted the mouse inside the gray plastic hutch, near a back wall. However, the mouse lay on its back without moving, its eyes closed and tiny feet in the air. Her breath again caught in her throat. Was it dead already? It must have been in worse shape than she’d thought when she’d gotten it, and it had finally succumbed to its injuries.
Oblivious to her dread, the mouse suddenly scratched its nose with a forepaw. It then snuggled down into the wood shavings, still on its back, with its head turned to one side and mouth open a bit. Scarlett leaned closer and heard the mouse softly snore. Not dead—just dead tired. She sat down on the floor, weak-kneed with relief.
Had it all been a dream, then, that the mouse had talked to her? It didn’t seem like it, which was incredibly exciting, up to a point. If the mouse could talk, other fantastic things were possible—practically anything was possible, in fact, which was the frightening part. It was a grave threat to her life, the world, and the cosmos, not that that was a bad thing. Normality was boring. She had the idea that anyone else would have screamed and run out of the room when the mouse spoke, but that was so lame. Doing what other people did was not Scarlett’s idea of a good time.
If not a dream, then, was the talking mouse a practical joke? Was a microphone hidden in its fur? Was it a robot? Hiding a microphone on a mouse seemed like a stupid thing to do, even as an elaborate prank. The way the mouse acted as it spoke eliminated the possibility of it being a robot; a special effect that good appeared only in the movies and cost loads of money, more than any joke was worth. The talking mouse was the real thing, then.
Other things bugged her. Sleeping mice always curled up on their stomachs or sides, and did not stretch out on their backs with their feet off the ground—and they never snored. This mouse must also have a marvelous set of lungs and vocal cords to make itself heard so clearly in relatively normal vocal registers. How could that be?
The weirdness ran deep, and part of Scarlett’s sleep-fogged mind had trouble accepting what had happened. She drew up her legs and wrapped her arms around them, resting her chin on her knees to consider the situation. It really was a talking mouse, but given the way it spoke and acted, and how it reacted to her last question, it had likely not always been a mouse. It had strong “guy” overtones in voice and behavior, and its knowledge was the sort only a human would have. The conclusion was obvious.
But how could a thing like that happen? Magic seemed as reasonable as any other cause. Could the mouse be bewitched, like in fairy tales, or had it been genetically engineered to be super-smart, like in science-fiction movies? Had it escaped from a lab, like the mice and rats in that movie about NIMH? It knew about Flowers for Algernon and other mouse-related books, so it was well read on talking mice and brainy mice. Curiouser and curiouser.
With school starting at eight, there was little time for further musings. Scarlett would have faked an illness and stayed home if a major test hadn’t been scheduled for ten o’clock in English the following day. She grabbed clean clothing and headed out of her room for the hall bathroom, which was hers in the apartment as her aunt’s bedroom had its own attached bathroom. She briefly considered showering and then changing in her room, as she usually did, but the mouse . . . if it had a guy mind, it would probably stare at her with its little pink eyes if she changed in front of it, which would be just too weird, sorry. Anyway, she didn’t need to give it something to blab about to everyone else. Certain trust issues had to be resolved, and soon.
She got ready for school, grabbed a handful of granola bars and threw them into her gray hiker’s backpack, then peeked in on her aunt, who was still sleeping. Must be nice to have a job where you could work from home, she thought. She also checked on the mouse, but it was out cold. After quietly refilling its food dish and water bottle, she locked the door to her room, checked the thermostat, and headed for the door.
And stopped. She hurried back to her room, unlocked the door, and quietly went inside. Finding a blank index card on her computer desk, she got a pen and wrote out a message.
—SCARLETT
After a moment, she added:
She leaned the index card against the side of the cage, the words facing inward. That done, she fled.
School dragged on for far too long. Scarlett guessed she had checked the clocks and her watch over six thousand times before lunch, amazed at how slow time could go when you desperately wanted to be somewhere else. On her way into the huge, brightly lit cafeteria, she saw Lawndale High’s most gothic Goth student, Andrea, eating lunch by herself. Scarlett gave a little wave and smile, deciding not to tell Andrea or anyone else about the mouse, at least for now.
Andrea saw Scarlett and waved her over, calling “C’mere!” with some urgency.
“What’s up?” Scarlett said.
“Did you get a mouse from Ms. Barch yesterday?” Andrea asked. “A sick mouse?”
Scarlett felt her throat go dry. Uh-oh. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s kind of sick, yeah.”
“Brittany was asking about it last period,” Andrea said. “I think she wants to get it back from you.”
Scarlett had heard through the rumor mill that Brittany Taylor, one of the high school’s cheerleaders, was the girl who had kidnapped the mouse, then given it to her sadistic little brother. “Why?” she gasped.
“I dunno. Thought you should know before she sees you.”
“Okay. Um . . . thanks.” Andrea waved and went back to her lunch as Scarlett left.
Being on a different class schedule, Scarlett had little contact with many of the other sophomores. However, she did have the same general math class that Brittany and the Art Chick shared, and that class was next period. She did not eat much of her lunch, wondering what she would say to Brittany on the matter. The cheerleaders could be intimidating, but there was no sense in running from trouble. She got rid of her tray, went to her locker, got her things, and headed for math.
Brittany was waiting for her at the door. A cheery natural blonde with pigtails and a stunning pair of breasts that caused boys to run into walls and doors instead of watching where they were going, Brittany always wore a too-tight Lawndale cheerleader’s uniform, “to give the school more spirit.”
“Hey!” Brittany called, seeing Scarlett approach. “I forgot your name, but can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” said Scarlett, swallowing.
“See,” said Brittany, “my little brother had this mouse that I sort of like borrowed from another student in science, you know? I had to give it back in exchange for my boyfriend—it’s kind of a long story—but now my brother’s all mad and he wants to buy the mouse back from anyone who has it, and he said he’d give me five dollars if I got it back for him, and he’d pay almost as much to whoever I got it from. Do you have the mouse? I was going to make him pay me twenty for it if you did. I could use the money for new pom-poms, ‘cause mine are sort of worn out.”
Scarlett took a deep breath. “That mouse is very sick,” she said. “I . . . I don’t think it has long to live, and I just want to make it comfortable before it . . . goes.” This was technically true. Nothing on earth lived for very long, relatively speaking, and she did want to make it comfortable.
“Oh, no!” squealed Brittany. “That’s terrible! On the other hand, it did bite me once, so . . . oh, well! Are you sure you don’t want to sell it if it’s going to die anyway?”
“If it’s sick,” said Scarlett, “it might make you sick, too, if you touched it or breathed the air around it.”
“Oh, that’s right! Forget it then. Or you can give it right to my little brother so he can get sick instead. That’s okay with me.” Brittany turned to go back inside the classroom.
“Wait,” said Scarlett, hoping it wasn’t a mistake to ask. “Why did your brother want that mouse in particular, and not another one?”
“What? Oh, I don’t know. He said he really needed it for a special experiment. Kids, huh?”
A special experiment? Well, he could forget setting eyes on that mouse again, Scarlett decided as she made a face. The crisis averted, she went into class and got her homework ready for review—and discovered she’d done the wrong page in her confusion the night before, after the mouse went to sleep.
She ran almost the whole way home after school, unable to find a ride with anyone. Coming in the apartment door, she slammed and locked the door behind her, dumped her backpack on the floor by the kitchen table, and staggered down the hall to her room, huffing and sweating like a fountain.
“Hi, sweetie,” called her aunt from the bathroom. “How was school today?”
“Sucked!” Scarlett called, fumbling with the keys to her door.
“That’s nice,” said her aunt. “I might make a big sale tonight. Want to order out Chinese? There’s a place in town that delivers.”
“Yeah, sure!” She got into her room, locked the door behind her, and went to the mouse’s cage.
The mouse was crawling through one of the colorful plastic tubes leading out of the main cage. She saw it stop and eye her for a moment, then continue walking through the tube as if nothing was wrong. When it came out into the cage again, it washed its face.
“How was your day?” Scarlett asked.
The mouse ignored her, acting exactly like a normal mouse.
“Did you get enough sleep?” she said.
Same response.
“Is the food and water okay? You want some granola? We have muffins and I think crackers, too. Did you see my note? I hurried back from school so we could talk.”
The mouse yawned.
She began to worry that she had perhaps hallucinated or dreamed the whole thing after all. “Would you like to go for a swim?” she said, playing hardball. “We have a lovely toilet, and I can make the water go round and round and round, and I can even make a little high dive for you and—”
“All right, all right!” cried the mouse, looking panicked. “Stop it! Don’t even joke about that!”
Scarlett took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. “Okay,” she said, “so I wasn’t on drugs or anything last night. Good.”
“I wish I were on drugs,” said the mouse. “At least I wouldn’t be so bored, plus I ache all over, thanks to that damn kid. Pardon my French. Nice place you got here, though. Uh, you don’t have a cat or dog, do you? I can smell them around.”
“The people who had the apartment before us had cats.” Scarlett pulled the chair from her computer desk over and sat by the cage. “There’s a little dog in the apartment below us, but it never goes out. We don’t have anything.”
“Are we still in Lawndale? I meant to ask the other night, but—”
“Lawndale, the north side. I thought you said you weren’t from around here.”
“Not originally, no. Thanks for the note, by the way. You know, a granola bar or muffin might hit the spot. These oblong green pellets are pretty bland.”
“Sure. Don’t go away, I’ll be right back.”
“Where the hell am I going to go?” called the mouse. “Excuse my French.”
“Hell is not French,” Scarlett retorted. “And neither is damn.”
“Okay, okay, whatever. Granola bar?”
When Scarlett returned, the mouse was standing on its hind feet, its face pressed against the bars of the cage. “I can’t read the titles of those books over there,” it said, squinting. “I love to read, but mouse eyes aren’t made for long distance vision. Guess contacts are out of the question.”
“Here,” she said, dropping some crumbled bits of granola bar into the cage. The mouse went over, sniffed, and picked up on, nibbling away rapidly. “Do you mind a little conversation?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair.
The mouse shrugged. She was positive it was a shrug, given the way its arms and shoulders rose and fell as it ate.
“Okay,” she said, “so, like, do you talk to anyone else besides me?”
The mouse shook its head, chewing away with its cheeks bulging with granola.
“Do you speak any other languages, like hamster, rat, rabbit, anything like that?”
The mouse looked up at her with a tilted head, still eating, then swallowed its food and cleared its throat. “No, I’m afraid not. A little French—ha, ha—but that’s about it. I’m terrible with languages, even English. Can we have some yes-no questions, so I don’t have to open my mouth? I’m really getting into this nut bar here. Tasty.”
Scarlett nodded, rocking in her seat. “Did you talk to that girl that had you for her maze experiment? Auburn hair, glasses, kind of sarcastic?”
A shake of the head no.
“You just pretended you were a mouse, and she never caught on?”
The mouse nodded, then cleared its throat again. “I am a mouse,” it said stiffly.
“But you weren’t always a mouse, right?”
The chewing stopped for a moment. When the mouse resumed eating, it turned away to look at something besides Scarlett.
“I didn’t get a yes-no on that one.”
The mouse ignored her.
“You used to be human, but you’re really upset about being a mouse now?”
Putting down the lump of granola it was eating, the mouse sat back in a despondent posture. “Do we really have to talk about this? Are you going to throw me down the toilet if I don’t answer?”
“Of course not! How can you say such a thing?”
“Because people do that!” the mouse yelled—not in a terribly loud voice, but loud enough. He subsided and waved a forepaw around. “Because I saw a kid do that once, a long time ago! I keep thinking about it.”
“Was the kid who did that you?”
The mouse lowered his head. “No, but I didn’t stop him. Can we talk about anything else at all, please?”
“Uh, sure. Why is it you’ll talk to me, but not to anyone else? Or am I assuming too much there?”
“No, just to you,” said the mouse with a sigh. “I wasn’t going to talk to anyone at all, if I could help it. I had the mouse thing down cold until you caught me off-guard the other night. Now . . . well, you know what I am, you haven’t done anything horrible to me—yet—and frankly it’s been so long since I talked to anyone, it’s sort of a relief. I was kind of going crazy. Maybe talking is better.”
“How did you get to be a mouse anyway? Were you cursed? Are you an alien or a robot? Are you from the future? Or is it sort of complicated?”
“It’s . . . look, if we talk about now, can I go back to eating granola afterward? I mean, I still want to talk, but that topic sort of disturbs me.”
“Hmm. I guess. So, once upon a time, you were a guy. An older guy, I’d guess.”
The mouse looked at her with wide eyes. “How’d you know that?” it fairly shouted.
“It made sense.” Scarlett gave herself a secret high five. Right again! “So, start at the beginning. Who are you, and how’d you get to be a mouse?”
The mouse looked around its cage, then picked up a crumb of granola and ate it. It wiped its paws on its fur and settled back again, sitting upright with its forepaws at its sides.
“Well,” it began, “to tell the truth, I don’t know why I’m a mouse. I was human, yeah, and I was a lot older than you. You’re what, fifteen, sixteen?”
“Sixteen.”
“Yeah. I was three times older than you, almost.”
“Three times older than me.” She guessed around fifty. “Before what happened?”
“I was a skydiving instructor.” The mouse became increasingly uneasy as it continued. “I worked at a little county airport west of here, near Leeville. One day about a year ago, I was on a jump with a few buddies, and—” The mouse hugged itself with its forearms and shivered “—something went wrong.”
“Went wrong?” repeated Scarlett, but she immediately knew what the mouse meant.
“The chutes were sabotaged, all three of them. Someone got into them and cut through the straps that make the chutes come open.” The mouse’s gaze drifted and it looked into the distance, still hugging itself. “I was tumbling, I remember that. There was a pasture below me, and some cows, and then—” It shivered again and rubbed its eyes “—then I woke up, and I was like this. Reincarnation or something, I guess. I don’t know what happened to my buddies. I saw some newspapers later, and I know we were all supposed to have been, you know, killed in the accident, but I don’t know if they came back like I did, or what. I just don’t know.”
Scarlett remembered to close her mouth. Reincarnation was a possibility she had not even considered, which surprised her as she often thought about what would happen to her in the afterlife, and she had wanted to come back as some kind of bird. “So, you died,” she said.
“Uh, I don’t know. In a way, maybe, but in a way not, obviously. I’ve been thinking about this for a year now, getting into the library here and trying to research anything at all that might tell me what happened. I was able to read some books and use the computers until the library people figured someone was using the system at night, so I sneaked over to the high school to use the computers there. They knew someone was using them, but I learned the passwords the principal uses, and her computer use doesn’t show up on the system. She’s got something going on in that school, for sure, but I don’t know what.” The mouse’s voice hardened. “Then, two weeks ago, I got careless, and this dumb jock who was making out with his cheerleader girlfriend after school caught me in a box and put me in with the other lab mice in the science classroom. I thought I was a goner then, but the girl who got me for research was pretty good. I was going to escape, but then that bimbo cheerleader got me. I bit her, but it didn’t help. She gave me to—” The mouse took a nervous breath and finished in a rush “—her demonic kid brother, and I don’t remember too much about what happened after that, until you came along.”
Scarlett mulled the story over. “You have no idea why you came back as a mouse,” she said.
“None. Not a clue.”
“But someone murd—uh, fixed your parachute so it wouldn’t open, right?”
A nod. “Yeah,” it said in a low voice. “Did a professional job of it, too. I think whoever it was knew exactly what to do. The newspapers said it was an accident, that we’d accidentally used parachutes that were supposed to be sent out for repairs. That doesn’t make any sense to me. We each packed our own parachutes, I know that for a fact, and there was nothing wrong with them. We hardly left them alone for a moment. This city must have the most incompetent detectives in the world. I don’t know.”
“Do you think you came back because you want revenge on the person who, uh, did all that to you with the parachute?”
“What?” The mouse shook its head. “As mad as I get thinking about it, I really haven’t thought too much about revenge, at least not right now. I’ve been pretty busy just trying to stay alive. Being a mouse is the pits. And why would I come back as a mouse if I wanted revenge? Man, I’d come back as a B-52 bomber, atom-bomb that son of a bitch. Pardon my French.”
“Bitch isn’t French, either.”
“Kid, look, it’s just a saying, all right?” The mouse looked down at the granola crumbs around it. “Are we done here?”
“I have one more question. Two more, actually. If you came down in a cow pasture over in Leeville, which is sort of a long drive from here, how’d you get to Lawndale?”
The mouse was reaching for a granola crumb but stopped. “That part, I don’t know. When I came to, I was already here in town, under a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant. I have no clue how that came about, no clue at all. I ran around like a madman for days, being chased by damn kids on their bikes and dogs and cats and God knows what, even an owl, just every evil thing in the world before I sorted out what to do and got into the library. That was a trick, I’ll tell you.” It sighed again. “One more question?”
“Okay. I need to start my homework, anyway, if you don’t mind me working on the desk next to you.”
“Hey, it’s your room.” The mouse looked uneasy again. “You know, I was going to say, I don’t know what to tell you about your changing clothes in here, you know? I mean, you’re a kid and this is your room, and I’m a mouse, yeah, but I—”
“Already taken care of. I’ll change in the bathroom from now on. Last question: What can I call you? ‘Mouse’ is a little simpleminded.”
“Ah. You can call me Roger. No point in mentioning any last names, I guess. I’m not big enough for one, ha ha.” The mouse coughed. “We done for now? Granola time?”
“Sure.” Feeling like she was having an out-of-body experience, Scarlett got up from her chair to get her backpack from the kitchen.
“Oh, hey, kid?” called the mouse.
“Scarlett,” said Scarlett.
“Scarlett, right. Sorry. By any chance, do you know anyone named Barksdale from Leeville?”
“Uh, no, I don’t.”
“Rats.” The mouse winced. “I hate saying that. Just curious. I was dating this hot babe named Rita who lived over there. Kinda curious how she was doing, if she was still around, you know?”
“What? You want to see her?”
“No, no. She hates mice.” The mouse shook its head, looking sad. “This is one messed-up life, let me tell you.”
Scarlett nodded and left. She had a feeling that having this mouse around was going to make her life quite messed up as well.
Last updated 12/23/06