Oh no, Professor. You've killed it!
The whole house had to be present in the common room at eight this evening for a meeting. It was about the Whomping Willow. Apparently we aren’t supposed to go near it anymore or we’ll be expelled. I never went near it anyway, who would? Well, apart from Davey, and James, and Sirius.
After the meeting James and Sirius begin plotting their next prank which they are calling “Project Mouse-capade.” Remus is nowhere to be seen. I sit and listen, nodding and ‘mmhmming’ in all the right places. They plan to trap mice, house them, then stick them down the back of unsuspecting student’s robes. It sounds like a traumatic ordeal for the mice.
I think Remus is closed behind his curtains when we go upstairs. James tells Sirius not to bother him.
That week we, being James, Sirius, and I, capture fifteen mice. We find some empty boxes in a broom closet to repurpose as mouse homes. We have to change the newspaper at the bottom of each box every day because the mice chew it to shreds. Our room smells like rodent piss and at night the mice scurry around their enclosures, squeaking bloody murder. We each have a box under our bed.
On Friday morning, I open my box to check on my mice. One is dead. There’s blood soaked into the newsprint and it looks like it’s been chewed into. It has no tail, only a bloody stump. The other mice squeak when I tip a handful of dry cereal into the box. I don’t know what to do with the dead mouse but I don’t want to touch it. What if the other mice keep eating it? I shudder.
I go into the bathroom and pull out a bunch of toilet tissue. Wrapping my hand in the tissue I gently pick up the corpse. It’s small and light in my hand, face gnawed and dark with crusty blood. I wrap the mouse in more toilet tissue. I could drop it in our waste receptacle, but that feels inhumane. Should I bury it out on the grounds? We once had a cat who disappeared only to turn up two months later, dead in front of our house. Dad buried him in the back garden.
I think I’ll ask Remus what I should do. I tuck the mouse into a pocket of my book bag and hurry down to breakfast where I’m almost out of luck, but not quite. There are muffins on the table this morning and I cram two into my bag before the food vanishes.
Sirius and James also have a mouse with them—concealed in a shrunken box—and are planning to drop it down the robe of Sophia Edgecombe during Herbology.
Professor Sprout sets us the task of mixing compost. The fumes are so pungent my eyes continually water. I hope no one thinks I’m crying. I consider putting on a second pair of gloves because I’m so worried about getting dragon dung under my fingernails. Half-way through the lesson, Sirius and James casually walk by the Hufflepuff girls on the pretense of getting more soil to mix into our compost.
Suddenly a shrill shriek fills the greenhouse and Sophia is hopping on the spot, reaching back toward the hood of her robe. More girls start yelling and jumping around and I wonder if Sirius and James brought more than one mouse.
“What in the world is happening here?” Professor Sprout says loudly. Half the class is screaming and brushing at themselves like they are covered in spiders.
“There’s something in my hood. Get it out! Get it out!” cries Sophia.
“Calm down, you silly girl.” Professor Sprout grabs Sophia by the shoulder, peers into her hood, then reaches in and extracts a small squirming mouse. “It’s only a mouse.”
But the mouse bites her finger and she drops it.
“MOUSE!” several girls shrieked at the top of their lungs.
Pandemonium ensues.
I scramble up onto one of the gardening benches fast as lightning, knocking our bin of compost to the ground. I’m one of the first with this idea, but soon the entire class is off the ground. The greenhouse has quieted down but the poor mouse is squeaking, trying to escape. People are pointing and giggling.
Professor Sprout hits the mouse with a jet of red light and it moves no more.
“Oh no, Professor. You’ve killed it!”
“It is merely stunned.” Professor Sprout lifts the mouse and carries it outside. Then she gives us a stern talking to about messing about in her class.
Sirius and James go unpunished as no one knows where the mouse came from.
“I can’t believe you didn’t get caught,” I say as we walk back up to the castle.
Sirius is smug but Remus is mad. He wasn’t keen on the prank to begin with and refused to help capture or care for any mice.
“I don’t see why you have to pick on people,” Remus says.
“We are not picking on people! We’re having a laugh,” James says, looking scandalized.
Remus goes on to tell us about being bullied in primary school. I’m glad I never went to primary. It sounds miserable.
“Macha, we aren’t bullies. We aren’t saying nasty things to people or insulting them. It’s a laugh.” James holds up his hands in protest. Sirius hasn’t defended himself at all.
“So what you’re saying is you have a problem with us pranking people but you don’t have a problem with pranking in general,” Sirius finally says.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Remus replies.
Sirius and James agree to switch from pranking individuals to pranking the student body en masse.
“Except Snivellus,” says Sirius. “Because he really deserves it.”
I pull out a muffin to nibble before Transfiguration and am reminded about the dead mouse waiting for burial in my bag.
“Remus,” I say softly, pulling him aside as we enter Professor McGonagall’s classroom. “One of my mice died.”
Remus looks like he doesn’t know what to make of this.
“It’s in my bag.”
“What?”
“I thought I ought to bury it, you know, rather than drop it into the bin.”
Remus’ face softens and he nods. “We can bury it during lunch, before History of Magic.”
We eat faster than usual then go out onto the grounds together, just Remus and I. Sirius and James were deep in conversation trying to figure out how to utilize the remaining mice if they couldn’t drop them down people’s robes.
We head around the side of the castle, where fewer people will be. Neither of us have any tools to dig with. Remus finds a large, flat stone and scrapes dirt away from the base of a shrub. When he’s satisfied, I take the mouse out of my bag and set it in the hole. There is a little bit of red on the toilet tissue but most of the blood was dry by the time I picked it up this morning.
We both push the dirt over the white bundle and pat it down. I stand and look down at the spot where the mouse is buried. I feel bad it died in the box. Maybe it wasn’t attacked. Maybe it died peacefully in its sleep and the other mice started to cannibalize it for reasons only known to them.
Remus turns and walks away. I’m a few seconds behind but I jog several steps to catch up.