I wavered for a while, then went into the girls’ bathroom. I carefully pulled off two paper towels and made a makeshift shroud of them. I gently tucked the dead mouse into my coat pocket. I wouldn’t go back to class, I decided. I would just walk home. I washed my swollen, reddened face and scrubbed my hands, and left the bathroom.
The janitor was standing in the hallway outside.
“What are you doing out of class so long?” he asked.
“Our mouse died,” I said, “Mrs. Hobbs asked me to get rid of it.” Not a lie, really, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I hadn’t finished my assignment.
“Better not have plugged up the toilet,” he growled, then seeing my face, gently added, “Sorry about the mouse. They don’t live very long anyway. Go on back to class now, it’ll be okay.”
I couldn’t talk, let alone tell him that I was just about to ditch school for the first time in my life. Under his watchful gaze, I walked back to the classroom. I decided I would go home for lunch, and bury the mouse then.
Mrs. Hobbs might have felt bad about yelling, because she didn’t say anything when I came back into the class. She didn’t call on me, or even ask why I was still wearing my coat. Maybe she didn’t even look at me; I couldn’t say for sure, because I was just staring at the top of my desk, not saying anything to anyone, just wishing for two things: that it would be lunch time and that my hair would miraculously grow longer again so that I could hide behind the curtain of it.
But I hadn’t been back in the class for an hour before the kid sitting next to me complained that something smelled bad. I knew what he was smelling, even though I couldn’t smell it myself.
Mrs. Hobbs demanded an explanation. When I started to tell her that I wanted to take the mouse home and give it a funeral, she looked like she wished corporal punishment would be immediately reinstated. I looked helplessly to Doreen, who had officiated at some of the backyard ceremonies. She was silent. Mrs. Hobbs wasn’t. Apparently, pets in Mrs. Hobbs’s household were not given funerals. She told me to go back out, and this time, do as I was told.
I left the classroom hearing laughter. It seemed to start near where Lindy was sitting.
I didn’t go to the trash bin. I went home.
My mother was sleeping. She had been awake earlier, but I knew that since she had gone to the hospital, she slept whenever she could manage an hour or two away from me and my younger siblings. I took a big spoon out of a kitchen drawer, gathered up a box of toothpicks, a rosary, a St. Francis holy card, and some sewing thread. I quietly went out to the backyard cemetery and buried the mouse between the bodies of a hamster and a sparrow I had found not long before. I gave him the traditional gravemarker: a cross made with two toothpicks, on which the crossbeam is held in place by wrapping the thread around the intersection of the toothpicks. I put the rosary around my neck, recited the Prayer of St. Francis, and moved my right hand in benediction over the grave.
I could hear a bell tolling; the telephone. I ran inside. I wanted to catch the phone before it woke my mother. But I was too late; she stood in her robe in the kitchen, looking at me as I stood with dirt caked on me, spoon in hand, rosary around my neck. She had the phone to her ear, but I don’t think she was listening too closely.
She knew.
She knew I had been caught with a dead mouse in my pocket. But her face wasn’t angry like Mrs. Hobbs’s.
“Yes, she’s here,” I heard her say. There was a long pause, then she said, “No. I think I’ll keep her home today.”
She hung up the phone. I thought she might be angry about my ditching school, but she just told me that maybe I should get out of my priest’s clothes and wash up, maybe put on some pajamas instead. I nodded, then hurriedly followed her advice. By the time I was in my pajamas, she was lying down again. I tiptoed into her room, thinking she might have fallen back to sleep, but she was awake. She patted the bed next to her, and I crawled in beside her. She held me as if I were much smaller, close to where she had once had breasts. I had not ever been allowed to see her chest after the surgery, a radical double mastectomy, but I imagined that day that I could hear her heart better.
“Did you say the Prayer of St. Francis for the mouse?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then he had a very nice funeral,” she said, and fell asleep.
EVENTUALLY, I WENT BACK TO SCHOOL. I DON’T REMEMBER NOW how long I stayed out; it seems to me I might have been allowed an extra day at home with my mother. No one mentioned the mouse to me. Doreen asked me if I wanted to walk to catechism with her. I said yes. We didn’t talk on the way there or the way home, though, and we never did anything together again after that. But she stopped hanging around Lindy.
The cancer moved to my mother’s liver. I said the Prayer of St. Francis one hundred times, but God didn’t accept it as a trade. She died the summer I turned twelve.
I started seventh grade the next fall at a new school, a junior high. All the kids from my school went to it, but kids from two other schools went there, too. I was making new friends and was feeling pretty good about the fact that I hadn’t cried at school, not even when other girls complained about their mothers.
One day, one of the new friends, Barbara, stopped me in the hall outside of geography class. She seemed uneasy about something, and asked me to walk away from the other kids who were waiting for the teacher to arrive. We moved a few feet away, closer to the lockers. “I have to ask you something,” she said. “Lindy has been going around saying that you used to walk around school with dead mice in your pockets. Is it true?”
“No,” I said quietly. “It”s not true.” I hesitated, wondering if anyone would believe the truth if I told it. Was every other kid from Mrs. Hobbs’s class saying the same thing?
But before I could make up my mind about what I would reveal, a locker closed behind us. I turned to see Doreen. She must have heard every word.
Doreen had changed a lot since fifth grade; we had even less in common. She had grown much taller and had really big breasts now, and I was still short and flat as a griddle. Doreen had beautiful long hair, and was popular. My hair was cut even shorter after my mother died, and my circle of friends was much smaller than Doreen’s.
She looked from me to Barbara, then her face set in a frown. I was expecting the worst. “Barbara,” she said, shaking her head. “Use your brain.”
She walked off. Barbara smiled at me and said, “Yeah, now that I think about it, that was a pretty stupid story Lindy was telling.”
But every now and then, throughout the school year, I was asked about dead mice.
I moved to a neighboring town the next year, when my father remarried. I grew my hair long again and, after a couple of years, I even got breasts and grew taller. No one at my new school knew about what happened when I was in fifth grade, or even that my father’s new wife was not my birth mother. By then, I knew how to keep a secret. And my stepmother defied the fairy tale image, loving her stepchildren so well that I decided God had not, after all, abandoned us.
Until the day before my college graduation, I never saw anyone from elementary school. That day, I had gone into a department store to buy some new underwear. As I approached the counter, I recognized the saleswoman. Lindy.
My first impulse was to run from her, my second to think up something cruel to say. Or maybe something snotty. (“Lindy, I’m giving the commencement address tomorrow. Why don’t you come on down and heckle me-you know, mention the mouse thing from fifth grade.”)
Instead, I just bought underwear. She didn’t seem to recognize or remember me.
In the car in the shopping mall parking lot, I held on to the steering wheel and screamed behind my teeth. As much as I wanted to, I knew I would never forget Lindy, or fail to recognize her.