Chapter Thirty-Four - Dreaming Big

Trinity was lucky she had so many ears, it meant that she could listen to TV and her sisters and Big Sis at the same time.

Two of her were sitting on the couch in the living room, while her last self was sitting next to Big Sister in the kitchen.

"I can't believe we got away with it," Teddy muttered.

"Shush," Athena said. "We won't get away with anything if you keep talking about it."

Trinity chuckled, and at the dining room table, Big Sister looked up from her work, one eyebrow raised. "Athena said something funny," Trinity explained.

"Oh," Emily said. She looked back down at her work. Trinity didn't know exactly what it was, but she was helping anyway! Her big sister had sorted out all of her different subjects' handouts on the dining table and Trinity was placing all of the papers away into their respective binders. She was adding little colour-coded stickers on the top of the header pages and added little doodles on the spines of the binders to make them nicer.

Big Sister had pirated some of her textbooks and printed them all out, which Trinity thought was a perfectly villainous thing to do. Plus Trinity got to help!

In the living room, Trinity paid less and less attention as Teddy and Athena bickered. The argument was silly, and anyway, the commercials were ending.

She was leaning back on the couch where a new show started. It was some sort of documentary on climate change or something like that. She didn't really care too much, but Big Sister Emily didn't want them watching loud cartoons while she was doing work, and Teddy liked documentaries a lot.

Trinity was ready to just mindlessly watch the show when it switched to a panning shot of a place she'd never seen before.

Trinity sat up and squirmed forwards until she was on the edge of the couch, all three mouths agape. She almost ran the body in the kitchen over so that she could see the TV with all of her eyes.

It was beautiful.

A kaleidoscope of discarded treasures, towering mounds of shimmering, sparkling steel and plastic and crushed aluminium. Trinity had never seen so much trash all in one place before. She absently reached up and wiped her lower lips free of drool. She could only imagine the smell.

"Landfills--a monument to human consumption and a near-permanent reminder of the consequences of our modern throw-away society. These behemoths of refuse contain a cocktail of hazardous waste leaking into the earth."

Trinity nodded at the voice of the narrator. He didn't have to sell her on the idea, she was in love already, but his smooth Ritish voice continued.

"The skies above these mounds of trash fare no better. It's not just the smell which is noxious, but its impact. Decomposition releases a steady stream of greenhouse gases, notably methane, which contributes substantially to climate change."

The show moved on to talk about some recycling thing and about how landfills were bad, but it wasn't showing the landfills anymore.

Trinity pouted, increasingly frustrated at not seeing the pretty trash heaps full of treasure. There were a few more shots, showing some lucky gulls picking away at the junk, but that was it.

She had never been so in love with something on the TV before. Balling her fists, Trinity gave herself a triple nod of determination. She'd visit one of those landfills, if it was the last thing she did.

She just needed to figure out how.

"Boss?" Trinity asked at the dining table.

"Hmm?" Emily said.

"Can we go to the landfill?" Trinity asked.

"No," Emily said.

Trinity pouted harder. Plan A was a bust already, and she hadn't even started planning it!

"Boss?" Trinity asked from her self that was nearest the kitchen.

"Yeah?" Emily asked.

"Can I use your laptop?"

Her big sister looked up. "Hmm? I guess? What is it for?"

"I want to look at garbage trucks," Trinity said.

"Oh... uh... okay? As long as you do it from here." Her big sister leaned to the side and grabbed her laptop out of her school bag which was laying on the floor next to her. She placed it next to the binders Trinity had been working on.

Trinity smiled and sat on her knees on one of the chairs so that she'd be tall enough. The laptop took a while to boot up, and when it did, it asked for a password. Emily entered it, fingers moving too quick for Trinity to catch onto what she wrote, then Emily turned the laptop around and Trinity had access to the internet.

It took a while because she had to type things carefully and ask how to type 'garbage' but eventually she found lots of pictures of garbage trucks and an Ikipedia page about them.

Some skimming later she had confirmed it, garbage trucks did go to landfills! Perfect! It wasn't hard from there to discover the Eauclaire garbage schedule, and fortunately the trucks went around picking up trash five days a week across different parts of the city.

"Thanks, Boss," Trinity said as she found a cool video to look at. It was garbage trucks with big mechanical claw arms on their sides that could pick up entire dumpsters, and it was definitely one of the coolest things ever.

"You're welcome," her big sister said. She was still mostly focused on her schoolwork.

The Trinity on the couch jumped up and walked out of the bunker. She didn't try to be sneaky, because she wasn't going to do anything sneaky. Most of her wasn't even leaving the house!

Once a third of her was outside, she started down the sidewalk, keeping off the road because she couldn't cross without someone's hand to hold. Her mission was to find a garbage can that hadn't been picked up yet, which she figured would be easy. After all, the longer trash stayed out, the more enticing it smelled.

Unfortunately, the first ripe dumpster she found was too tall and had a big latch keeping its cover down. With only one of her bodies, she wouldn't be able to get in there.

After she had walked for a while, though, Trinity noticed someone walking in an alleyway next to a fastfood place with two large trashbags in hand.

All three of her mouths grinned as she spotted it. Unfortunately, it was on the other side of the road. Fortunately, there was a big stranger passing by. "Mister," she said.

The man paused and blinked, then looked behind him. "Yes?" he asked.

Trinity pointed across the street. "I need to go over there," she said.

"Uh... okay?"

"I can't cross the street without holding hands."

"Where's your mom?" he asked.

She was about to tell him that she didn't have one, when she realized that it would be silly. "Over there," she said, pointing across the street to the fastfood place.

"Then how did you get here?" he asked.

"Accident," she lied again.

The man looked around some more. "I don't know," he said. "I don't wanna look like a weirdo."

"If I don't hold hands, a car will hit me," she said. This time it wasn't a lie.

The man said some words under his breath, then looked both ways. "Fine," he said.

"Your fingers are fat," she said as she held onto him. It didn't take long to cross the road, and Trinity waved at the man as she ran off. "Thank you, mister!"

The guy said something, but Trinity was already in the alleyway and moving towards a large dumpster at the back. It was even open!

With a hup, Trinity jumped and grabbed onto the side of the dumpster, then she scrambled up and into it, falling back-first onto a pile of bags that cushioned her fall.

Now all she had to do was wait!

It didn't take long for the person with the bags to come back. He didn't even look in the dumpster before flinging in a few more bags. One of them ripped apart, spraying Trinity in squished burger buns.

She'd get to wait with a snack! This was the best non-plan ever! She stuffed her pockets full of bread, then sent some to the hers back at home.

It didn't take long for Big Sister to notice her pulling out a squished lump of bread to chew on it while she was looking at more garbage truck pictures. "Hey, don't eat over the laptop... Wait, where did you get that?"

"The trash!" Trinity said.

Emily sighed and got up. "Trinity, stop eating stuff from the trash, I swear. Is that mould? If you were hungry you should have just told me."

Trinity gave away one of her buns without protest. There was a whole sackful of them, after all, and if Big Sister wanted some, she was more than happy to share!

Soon she'd be at the landfill and would have more trash than she could hope for!

***