Minktales

Issue 10

"The Telltale Yearbook"

Part 1 of 2

For once, there was peace in both the woods and the city surrounding the little pond out in the forest, right next to the log house of Minerva Mink. Normally, people or animals might go wild at the sight of her, whistling, sweating, fainting, or flying into exaggerated wild takes, but on that day, nothing of the sort had happened, and there was a very good reason for that. Minerva Mink had been inside all day.

She wasn't alone, of course. Her best friend Trudy was in her log house with her, helping Minerva to go through some old junk she'd found in the closets and back rooms of her home. As Minerva had expected, none of it belonged to her parents, but she was sure she'd have to throw much of it out anyway, because of how old and useless it was. Most of the things were old toys, books or games she'd used as a child, and the few things she might have found useful were in disrepair.

As Trudy sifted through a box of old, tattered drapes, she spoke to Minerva (who was sifting through another box) from across the room.

"I don't think I've ever seen drapes this old, except at my grandmother's place. When did you buy them?"

"Right after mother moved away." Minerva replied, dumping large parts of her box in one of many garbage cans lining the side of the room, and picking up another box from the stacks nearby, "Most of this stuff is from around that time. I think the youngest thing in these boxes is probably five years old."

"Did your mother ever clean up like this?" Trudy asked, curiously, "Or do you remember?"

Minerva gave her a short, thoughtless glance, but replied, "Mother never did much cleaning... No, wait." at that, Minerva stopped what she was doing, taking a moment to call up an old memory, "She did clean house once, just the week before father left."

"Why do you think she only cleaned the house once?" Trudy asked, curious on that point, "I clean my place every week."

"Well, mother never liked cleaning." Minerva replied, sitting down and opening the box she'd just retrieved, "She sort of thought a little dust made things look presentable. She had the biggest collection of antique pots and jars from all different countries I've ever seen, and they always had dust all over them. It was disgusting. Metal ones, glass ones, ceramic ones, and all of them dusty and ugly-looking. I'm glad she took them all with her when she left."

"But why would she clean them if she didn't want them clean?" Trudy asked, "I have a cousin who's a collector like that, and he'd never dust any of his trophies."

"Well, that's sort of my fault." Minerva said with a short smile, "It'd been my sixteenth birthday the night before, and I'd spent the whole time complaining about how we had the ugliest house in town. I guess she just got tired of it."

The two girls chuckled over that for a moment as Trudy pushed aside more ancient drapes and found something distinctly non-drape-like at the bottom of the box. Slowly, she removed it, and pushing aside the drapes that had covered it, found it to be, to her surprise, a yearbook.

"Found a yearbook." Trudy muttered, tossing it aside.

"College." Minerva said with a smile, "The first time I can remember having real, solid fun. That was when they made me a college football cheerleader. You know, some of those football games; the ones my team; the muskrats played, are still on record as some of the longest football games ever played by over an hour."

"No, this one's a high school yearbook." Trudy replied, only half paying attention. However, Minerva was at attention at once, her every hair standing on end as she dropped all the items she'd been sifting through, and rushed to grab the book from the floor next to Trudy, then clutched it carefully to her chest, with a look of suspicious fear in her eyes.

"Don't look at it!" Minerva exclaimed in alarm, causing Trudy to snap to attention as well, and piquing her curiosity.

"Huh?" Trudy asked, "Why not? I let you look at my high school year books."

"I said NO!" Minerva exclaimed back, but then she seemed to relax just a little, as she carefully put the book in one of the garbage cans, and continued, "I didn't know you back then, and... well, let's just say that not everyone was as pretty in high school as they are now, alright?"

Then, as if to finish matters, Minerva clamped the garbage can lid down over the yearbook, and went back to sifting through her box.

"It's alright, Minerva." Trudy replied, sitting back down to her own box, "I won't look."

It was hours of work, taking well into the evening, but at last, Trudy and Minerva finished sifting through the boxes, and put about a dozen trash barrels outside to be picked up later by the garbage men. Minerva thanked Trudy cordially as they were about to part ways.

"Do you ever think about your mother?" Trudy asked. Clearly, the question was an unwelcome one to Minerva, however.

"No." she said, "I always try not to think about my folks. They were both so selfish and unsympathetic to my problems. Things really picked up when they moved away."

"What about when your mother cleaned the house just because you wanted her to?" Trudy asked, "Wasn't that nice?"

"She always knew I wanted her to." Minerva muttered, "But she never took me seriously when I was younger. Look, my mother only cared about her jar collection, and that's that. I'd rather not talk about it anymore."

That, Trudy realized, really was that. Soon, the two wished each other good night, and Trudy started for home, but just as she did, she heard a clanking sound from the garbage cans, and spun around to see a raccoon racing for the woods. Trudy contemplated breaking her word at that moment, but instead, turned and headed for home again. However, she hadn't gone more than five feet, when a huge wind kicked up around her, and she heard the clattering of one of the garbage cans on the ground. In the kind of luck that could only happen in a cartoon, one thing fell out of the garbage can at her very feet. It was the yearbook she'd been warned not to look at.

"Don't do it." her conscience warned her, "Minerva's your best friend. She trusts you."

"But if you don't look now," chided the little devil on her other shoulder, "You'll never get to find out what she looked like in high school. Aren't you curious?"

Trudy debated silently with herself for several seconds, but then, another gust of wind started to blow the yearbook further away, and Trudy grabbed it in the same impulse that had aided her in a hundred scourings of the local shopping malls, and with the book in her hand, she couldn't resist any longer. She had to know.

Quickly, Trudy opened the yearbook to one of the last pages, and there, she found a picture of Minerva standing next to her bright red convertible; having become the youngest person in town to own a car. There was a brief blurb about how she'd visited the mayor, the dealerships and the district of motor vehicles, to "convince" them that it was not only alright for her to legally own property of that sort at age sixteen, but also to petition for several other rights for sixteen-year-olds, none of which, however, went through, probably because Minerva had lost interest in them, Trudy thought. In her experience, Minerva's captivating beauty usually got her something if she wanted it badly enough. However, she was very surprised by the picture, because Minerva was... She was...

She was absolutely beautiful, just as always. In fact, even after years, Minerva didn't look a day older than she had in that high school picture. The end of the blurb about Minerva included a quote intended to express her feelings about owning a car.

"My mother used to tell me that things change really quick when you get to be a teenager. Thanks for the tip, mom!"

Trudy was sure she was missing part of the puzzle. If Minerva had been so beautiful in high school, why had she insisted on keeping the yearbook a secret? Why had she thrown it away? Trudy was about to put it back in the garbage, when another gust of wind blew more pages back, to reveal the class photo pages in black and white, and after wrestling with herself for a brief time, Trudy decided to find Minerva's picture there.

However, Trudy skimmed through the pages for several minutes, sitting down on a nearby rock as she did so, with no real results. Minerva's picture wasn't in the book, as if she'd never been a student at Muskrat Hill High.

By then, though, Trudy knew there was a mystery somewhere in the pages of that old book, and finding it irresistible, she went back over each and every photo, reading the names under the photographs, and it was a good thing she did, because that was how she found the photograph labeled "Minerva Mink," and she gasped in shock and horror at the picture above that name, and the brief vital statistic information included about her height, weight and fur color. Trudy would never have imagined it was possible.

Minerva Mink had just turned sixteen that morning. It was her birthday, and she recalled with great clarity the fight she'd had with her mother the night before. Every word still echoed in her mind.

"You'll never be satisfied with anything!" Her mother had exclaimed.

"Why should I be satisfied?" Minerva had yelled back, "I have the ugliest house in town, the ugliest old jar collection in my living room, the ugliest life, and you know what? It fits, because I'm the ugliest girl in school, so I'm sorry for being unhappy, mother! I really am. I just wish, just once, something about my life could be really, really beautiful. If I had that, then you could come down on me for being unsatisfied!"

Minerva Mink was four feet, six inches tall, had an inky blackish-brown fur coat, with patches of white, and weighed about two hundred and forty-five pounds. Her cheeks puffed out like a squirrel's, and her face was covered in freckles. She was exaggerating a bit to say that she was the ugliest girl in school, but it didn't feel that way when she got up and looked in the mirror on the morning after her birthday. Ugly wasn't something she measured in degrees.

Still, Minerva Mink did have one advantage at school, and while it didn't keep the other girls in Muskrat Hill High from picking on her, it did at least ensure that they got what was coming to them. Minerva Mink was savvy and very, very bright. She could see through a lie in a second flat, and a plan to embarrass her right away, and every time she used her savvy thinking to outwit a potential attacker on the schoolyard, she'd take it in stride, enjoying the appreciation by all the other very young or ugly kids in sight, even as she reveled, on some level, in the frustration of the beautiful girls.

In her heart, though, Minerva Mink had only one longing, and that was to become one of them. Not just one of them, however; the best of them. Minerva wanted to be a girl so beautiful she could make almost any man fall instantly in love with her at a moment's notice. It was a dream she had, and even though she knew it could never come true, she still found the dream to be comforting in her deepest moments of self-consciousness.

To be Continued...

Well, if you think that's a shocker, stay tuned for the next Minktales. Minerva's big secret is only starting to unfold, and I'm sure she doesn't want you to know about it.

P.S. To celebrate this being the tenth consecutive issue of Minktales, I've changed the paragraph format of all the chapters. Enjoy. I also thought I'd mention that, in case you hadn't figured it out already, the title of this fanfic is a sort of parody/homage to Ducktales; the Disney cartoon specializing in overall adventure in just about any scenario, place or time imaginable, which I dearly loved as a kid. Peace and love, all!