Trashed, p.1
Trashed!, page 1
For the Pearsall-Christman family:
Zach, Hamil, Arthur, and Simon—best neighbors ever
CHAPTER ONE
Ramona’s mouse died suddenly.
Friday night it had been scrabbling around the sawdust in its cage, whiskers twitching, eyes bright.
Saturday morning it was paws-up, eyes shut.
“Rigor mortis,” said Arthur. He had heard those words in a movie and wanted to test them out.
“Okay, and it’s a girl, and why did she die?” Ramona Popper was six. She didn’t know what “rigor mortis” meant, but she would never ask her brother. She figured he was showing off, which he was.
Arthur Popper was eleven. He and his sister mostly ignored each other. But Ramona had gone to him when she’d found her mouse. Now they were standing in Ramona’s bedroom, which was in the back of the family’s apartment. Through the window was a view of hills, the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. Arthur’s room was on the other side and looked out on the street, cars going by.
“Do you know if the mouse was old?” Arthur asked.
Ramona wiped her nose with the back of her hand and sniffled. They were standing by the mouse’s cage, which rested on a table by the window. The mouse didn’t look peaceful exactly. The poor thing looked uncomfortable.
Ramona and Arthur were still wearing their pajamas, Ramona’s blue with tiny red triangle trees, Arthur’s red with a big green Grinch on the shirt—Christmas pajamas in April. Like a lot of Arthur’s and Ramona’s clothes, the pajamas had come from the store, which always had a good supply of kids’ Christmas pajamas—worn once, outgrown by the next year.
Ramona didn’t know if her mouse had been old.
Arthur could think of things besides old age that might kill a mouse. Things like germs and viruses and cancer. But Ramona was only in first grade. She didn’t need to hear such bad stuff yet.
Arthur was not the best big brother, but he wasn’t totally heartless.
“Should we bury her?” Ramona asked.
“Yes,” Arthur said. “For a fact, I think we should have a funeral.”
Ramona widened her eyes. “I’ve never been to a funeral before,” she said.
Arthur hadn’t either, but he’d seen them in movies. Organizing a funeral couldn’t be that hard. Besides, Ramona wouldn’t know if he got it wrong.
“The service will be at one o’clock,” he announced. “After breakfast you can find a coffin—a box to bury the mouse in.”
“I know what a coffin is, Arthur,” Ramona said.
Arthur didn’t have to say where Ramona would find a coffin. They both knew there would be a box in the store. That was a good thing about having the store downstairs. When you needed something, you could usually find it.
Arthur and Ramona ate cereal for breakfast at the big table in the kitchen. Even though it was Saturday, their mom, a lawyer, had gone to work to catch up. She had to do that a lot. Arthur pictured being a lawyer as one big race, with their mom a few steps behind.
As for Dad, the store didn’t open till ten, but some rich Boulder citizen had died the week before, and Dad was downstairs sorting possessions the man’s family didn’t want. The next day, Sunday, Arthur and his best friend, Veda Lopez, would probably be assigned to help.
After she ate, Ramona went downstairs to find something she could use for a mouse coffin, and Arthur went back to his bedroom, where the cars outside—swoosh, swoosh, swoosh—made a soothing soundtrack.
CHAPTER TWO
The Popper family’s apartment was the same size as the store below, big for only four people. Mom had a room that she called her library, and Dad had a room for old guitars. There was a formal dining room they never used, and a living room used at Christmastime for the tree.
In Arthur’s room were a four-poster bed; a heavy wooden desk; two tall, mismatched bookcases; and a fat blue chair. Everything was from the store. Except for groceries, Arthur’s family rarely shopped anywhere else.
Now Arthur threw his pajamas onto the floor, pulled on shorts and a Broncos T-shirt, and sat down at his computer. Online he learned that some people thought the purpose of a funeral was to help “the survivors” get over their sadness, while others thought it was to help “the soul of the deceased” move on from this life to whatever was next.
Does a mouse have a soul? Arthur wondered, but he put the question away for later. Right now he had a funeral to plan.
What did you do at a funeral anyway? The websites said you should pray and say nice things about the deceased, but some funerals had parades and even dancing!
Arthur went to find Ramona. By this time she was back in her own room, sitting on the floor, decorating a small box using markers, paint, and glitter.
She held the box up with her fingertips, trying not to smudge everything. “Do you think it’s too gaudy?” she asked.
Arthur thought she must be trying out a new word too. “Was she a gaudy kind of mouse?” he asked.
Ramona thought for a second. “I guess,” she said.
“So that’s good, then,” Arthur said. “And what kind of music did she like?”
Ramona’s face was thin-lipped and serious, her dark eyebrows as bushy as caterpillars. “Frozen,” she said finally.
Arthur wrote this down. “After the coffin is ready,” he said, “you should wrap up the body in a napkin or something, and then put it in.”
“Okay,” Ramona said.
“Will it creep you out to touch her?”
“I’ll wash my hands after,” Ramona said.
Arthur nodded. “One more thing. What was her name?”
Ramona blinked. “You don’t know?”
“I’m sorry,” Arthur said. “I won’t forget after today.”
“Mouse 4,” Ramona said.
Arthur’s bangs were long, so when his eyebrows rose, Ramona couldn’t see. “Seriously?”
Ramona looked down at the box. “I know it’s a bad name, but it’s what the pet store called her, and I was going to give her a better one, but there are so many names you can name a mouse. And then I got used to ‘Mouse 4.’ ”
Arthur thought it would be mean to criticize at a time like this. So instead he asked other questions. What activities did Mouse 4 enjoy? Was she generous? Did she have a big heart? He had looked online at obituaries and noticed these things were often said. Sometimes the dead person had been well known for telling jokes and stories, but Mouse 4 couldn’t talk, so Arthur didn’t ask about that.
At a few minutes before one, Arthur went outside to a spot where he and his grandmother had recently planted flowers—petunias, alyssum, lobelia. The ground was soft; it took only a few minutes to dig the grave.
CHAPTER THREE
At one o’clock exactly Ramona met Arthur by the store’s back door, and the funeral began. First came the procession, with Ramona going first, carrying Mouse 4 in the gaudy, slightly smudged coffin. The summer before, Ramona had been a flower girl at a cousin’s wedding, and now she did the flower-girl walk—right foot, step together, left foot, step together. Arthur hadn’t told her to do this. She had thought of it on her own.
Arthur was carrying four cookies on a plate and Ramona’s iPad, which was playing “Let It Go.” The cookies were the special-occasion ones that his parents kept on a high kitchen shelf. A funeral, Arthur decided, was a special occasion.
It was late April, the sun bright and warm, the sky blue except for some white clouds that looked painted on.
At flower-girl pace, it took a while to get to the grave site. That seemed right to Arthur. You shouldn’t hurry a funeral. When at last they arrived, Arthur turned off the music, Ramona placed the coffin into the hole, and they looked down at the mouse, wrapped in a piece of shiny rainbow-printed cloth.
“Should I put the lid on?” Ramona asked.
“Not yet,” Arthur said. “First I have to talk.”
Ramona said, “Okay.” She looked like she was enjoying herself.
“Dearly beloved,” Arthur began, using words he had gotten from a YouTube clip. “We are gathered here today to say goodbye to Mouse 4 and to wish her a happy life in heaven, or wherever nice place her soul is going.”
(Arthur still hadn’t decided whether rodents had souls, but he thought these words would comfort the survivor.)
“Mouse 4 was a good mouse,” Arthur continued. “She enjoyed running on her wheel and eating her pellets. She looked cute when she wiggled her whiskers, and she had a very pink tail. Mouse 4 didn’t mind when Ramona took her out of her cage and petted her. She only ran away a couple of times, and she always ran under the same dresser, so she was easy to find.”
“She got kind of dusty, though,” Ramona added.
“Did she mean to get dusty?” Arthur asked.
“I don’t think so,” Ramona said.
“So that’s okay, then,” Arthur said. “Mouse 4 was kind and generous, we think. She may have known jokes and stories, but she didn’t share them. Would you like to say a few words, Ramona?”
Ramona looked down at the coffin she had decorated. It had turned out pretty well, and she was feeling bad that it was about to be covered in dirt. But she wasn’t going to say so. “Mouse 4 was my best mouse,” she said. “Goodbye, Mouse 4.”
“Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust,” Arthur said, which had been on the YouTube clip too. “Amen. Now you say ‘Amen’ too, Ramona.”
Ramona did.
“And now you put the lid on the box.”
Ramona did. The lid had pink glitter-glue stripes and flower stickers. In the middl
“You’re going to put dirt on it, aren’t you?” Ramona said.
“Yes,” Arthur said.
Ramona took a breath and let it out. “Okay.”
“You can make a cross or something to mark the grave too,” Arthur pointed out. “Like with Popsicle sticks? Or you could decorate a rock. That won’t get buried.”
“Maybe I will,” Ramona said. “Is it time for cookies?”
* * *
Until that day, Arthur had never thought much about Ramona’s mouse. He had probably only held it a couple of times, felt the four little prickle paws tickling his palm, admired the long pink hairless tail. Ramona had touched the mouse’s nose to hers sometimes. Arthur had seen her. Arthur had never done anything like that. The mouse was a rodent. How cozy did a person want to be with a rodent?
After the funeral, Arthur thought he was done forever with Mouse 4.
Which is why he was so surprised when, late that same night, he realized Mouse 4 was haunting him.
CHAPTER FOUR
The family store was called Universal Trash, established by Byron and Linda Baer in 1980. Byron and Linda Baer were Arthur and Ramona’s grandparents, their mother’s parents. In the beginning the store had been a small place located next to a convenience store in a strip mall on Valmont Road, its secondhand merchandise laid out on folding tables. The store never sold anything that wasn’t clean, and if there were multiple pieces, like for a blender or a vacuum cleaner, all the pieces were there, nothing chipped or cracked.
The store became popular quickly and moved to its current much larger location, a renovated warehouse on Broadway in North Boulder. At first the second floor of the building was storage space. Later, when houses in Boulder got crazy-expensive, it was remodeled into an apartment for Arthur’s mom and her family.
Arthur’s grandparents had never bothered with advertising. Arthur’s grandfather, who did not like to spend money, had called advertising a needless expense. But when Arthur’s dad had taken over, he’d had his own ideas, and one had been a slogan, “Trashy is classy!” that had appeared in ads in the local newspaper, on signs at the store, sometimes even on banners on the sides of buses. Now that slogan was a decade old, and Dad had been thinking about an update with an environmental theme.
At dinner one night about a month before Mouse 4 died, the family brainstormed ideas.
“The problem,” Ramona announced after a while, “is that nothing rhymes with ‘earth.’ ”
“ ‘Dearth,’ ” Arthur said.
“That is not a word,” Ramona said.
“Yeah, it is,” Arthur said.
“If it’s a word, what does it mean?” Ramona scrunched her caterpillar brows.
“No idea,” Arthur said.
“It means, uh… like ‘lack.’ Like ‘not enough,’ ” Dad said. “ ‘There’s a dearth of money in my piggy bank.’ ”
Ramona stopped chewing and looked at her dad. “I didn’t know you had a piggy bank.”
“Neither did I,” Mom said.
“I don’t. It was an example,” Dad said. “Like—there’s a dearth of air in the football. There’s a dearth of spaghetti on my plate. There’s a dearth of—”
“—brains in Arthur’s brain!” Ramona piped up.
“That’s not funny,” Arthur said. “And it doesn’t even make sense.”
Ordinarily Mom would have told them to simmer down, but she seemed to be busy thinking. At last she said, “How about this? ‘Shop the Universe, don’t trash it!’ ”
Dad said, “Too confusing. No one’s talking about the environment of the whole universe, dear, only the environment of one planet.”
Mom sniffed and wiped her mouth. “Fine,” she said. “I guess I should stick to law.”
“I thought it was good, Mom,” Arthur said.
“Thank you,” Mom said.
Dad set down his fork. “Actually, I have an idea too: ‘Sustain the earth, sustain your cash, shop at Universal Trash!’ ”
“Too confusing,” Mom said.
“I like it,” Arthur said.
“What does ‘sustain’ even mean?” Ramona asked.
“ ‘Save,’ more or less,” Mom said.
“Say ‘save,’ then,” Ramona said.
Arthur wasn’t paying that much attention, but Mom and Dad were. They stopped chewing, looked at each other, looked at Ramona.
“You’re a genius,” Dad told her.
Ramona smiled one of her rare smiles. “I know.”
“Save the earth and save your cash…,” Dad said, and then Mom and even Arthur—who had swallowed by this time—chimed in: “Shop at Universal Trash!”
* * *
All those years, Grandpa was wrong about advertising. It works. From the moment the new slogan showed up in the windows, on the website, and in the newspaper, all kinds of new customers began coming in, and the store got busier and busier.
CHAPTER FIVE
Arthur Popper was good at planning funerals but not at basketball.
Good at spelling but shaky on ice skates.
Good at customer service—talking to people in the store and being helpful—but not brave. Not at all.
So when Mouse 4’s ghost appeared, Arthur was startled, scared almost. Nothing like this had ever happened to him.
“Good evening, Arthur,” the mouse said in a small, pleasant voice, “and thank you for the funeral, even if the coffin was gaudy. You’d be surprised how many mice die and don’t get a funeral at all.”
Arthur sat up fast and tugged the covers to his neck. The speaker was sitting on her haunches on the bedpost nearest Arthur’s right foot. She was more transparent than she had been in life and more luminous, but otherwise she looked the same. “Y-y-you’re welcome?” Arthur said, blinking. To his embarrassment, his own voice squeaked.
“Your room is nice,” Mouse 4 said, looking around. “I don’t think I was ever in it before.”
Arthur took a breath to slow his heart. “Thank you,” he said, and then, “What are you doing here?”
“I’m not sure myself,” Mouse 4 said. “I’m here to be helpful in some way, I expect.”
“Do I need help?” Arthur asked.
“We all need help, Arthur,” Mouse 4 said. “Even heroes and smart kids.”
Arthur thought this was probably true.
“Anyway, don’t mind me,” Mouse 4 continued. “Feel free to go on back to sleep. Good night.”
Arthur didn’t think he’d be able to sleep but settled into his pillow. “Mouse 4?” he said, eyes closed.
“Yes?” the pleasant voice responded.
“Are you… uh? I mean, do you…”
“Spit it out, Arthur.”
“Do you really like your name?”
Mouse 4’s laugh was less a squeak than a chitter. “Not especially.”
Arthur opened his eyes again, saw the mouse still perched on the bedpost. “If you’re going to be around for a while, would you mind if I called you ‘Watson’?”
Mouse 4 flicked her tail. “After Sherlock Holmes’s friend?”
“You know about Sherlock Holmes?” Arthur said.
“Mice pay attention,” Mouse 4 said. “It’s a survival strategy.”
Arthur said, “That makes sense. And yes. Sherlock Holmes is who I was thinking of. Watson helped him, after all. And I like detective stories. If you want, though, since you’re a girl, we could change it to ‘Wanda’ or something.”
Mouse 4 considered. “I think ‘Watson’ will do.”
Arthur smiled. “Good night, Watson. See you tomorrow.”
“Good night, Arthur,” Watson said.
To Arthur’s surprise, he fell right to sleep. And if Watson made noise scrabbling around the room, inspecting stuff, getting dusty, Arthur never even heard.
CHAPTER SIX
Watson wasn’t around when Arthur woke up, and Arthur thought maybe he’d dreamed the whole thing.
He got dressed—same Broncos T-shirt and shorts—went into the bathroom, splashed water onto his face, looked at himself in the mirror. Grandpa B liked to say the family was Colorado royalty because his great-great-great-(Arthur wasn’t sure how many greats)-grandfather, also named Arthur, had come to the territory before the Civil War, made a fortune mining silver, lost the fortune, then made another one raising sheep.
