You Dirty Rat

Connie Kendall is having a rough morning. While Whit is away on a missions trip, she is in charge of Whit's End, but her roommate Jillian has accidentally walked off with her coat and her car keys, so Connie has to hitch a ride to work in Wooton's mail truck. Before they leave, Wooton drops off some real estate listings, explaining that since Connie mentioned wanting to redecorate, the houses might give her ideas. At the shop, things get worse: a rat runs right over Connie's foot. Connie despises rats, and she has already found evidence of this one before, since a homemade trap she rigged out of a bowl, a string, and some cheese was robbed clean. She swears Jay to secrecy, determined that Whit will not come home to a sign reading "closed due to rat infestation." Jay, on the other hand, is delighted, because he has always wanted a pet rat.

Connie buys real spring-loaded traps and sets them overnight, but the next morning the traps are tripped, the cheese is gone, and there is no rat. Meanwhile, back at home, Jillian has spotted the real estate listings on the table and jumped to a worried conclusion: Connie must be planning to move, or worse, to kick her out.

Suddenly Jillian's attitude about the rat changes completely. She pleads with Connie to show it mercy, insisting, "All God's creatures have to live somewhere," and pointing out that rats get screamed at and chased away everywhere they go. Jay agrees, since he still wants the rat alive, and Wooton cheerfully agrees with everyone in turn. Connie reminds them all that rats spread the bubonic plague, and she heads out for more traps. That evening she comes home to find her house spotless and a dinner of grilled cheese and soup waiting. Jillian announces that this is a sign of things to come, because she plans to be a better roommate.

The rat keeps winning. Connie's dozens of sticky traps turn up stacked like pancakes, and Wooton, who has been reading up on rats in a magazine, suggests they may be dealing with a highly trainable super rat. Fed up, Connie visits the Hardware Emporium, where Gary the trap enthusiast sells her his best gear, including a fake loaf of bread that snaps shut and a giant four-by-eight-foot "vortex of traps" he built himself. With Whit due back the next day, Connie decides to spend the night at Whit's End on a stakeout, and Jillian, who happens to have real secret-agent training and night vision goggles, insists on doing it properly with her.

Hiding in the dark, the roommates finally talk. Connie admits Jillian was one of her suspects, since somebody had clearly been helping the rat. Then she gently reveals what she has figured out: Jillian saw herself as the rat, a creature about to be thrown out of its home, which explains the sudden sympathy, the cleaning, and the dinner. Connie confesses she let the misunderstanding continue a bit because she enjoyed coming home to a clean house and a hot meal, then assures Jillian that she loves living with her and would never kick her out over borrowed scarves and lost keys. Friends, she says, can see past the small stuff, and when they can't, they talk about it.

Just then a crash echoes through the shop. Something big is caught in the vortex of traps, and when they close in, they find Jay stuck fast. He finally confesses everything: the rat is a highly trained lab rat from school named Kraken. Jay borrowed him to delay a class project he had not prepared for, but Kraken escaped when Jay stopped for a soda, and Jay has been sneaking into Whit's End every night to spring the traps and keep him safe, which explains Jay's bandaged hand. Threatening legal action the whole time, Jay directs the girls to clear the remaining traps, and they savor his predicament by going off to make milkshakes first.

The next day Jay reports that his teacher is making him clean the classroom animal cages for a month, but Kraken is still on the loose with Whit due back that afternoon. Then Wooton's rat magazine pays off: Jay simply calls "Kraken!" and the trained rat comes right out to him, cute little feet and all. They pop a box over him, and after days of elaborate trap warfare, the capture is annoyingly easy and completely anticlimactic. Kraken is carried away, and Whit's End is once again a normal, ratless ice cream shop, which, as Wooton would say, everyone agrees with completely.