Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Erupts!

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  Once, Aretha asked me if she could look at my copy of Scientific American when I was done reading it. She wanted to read an article about DNA.

  Later, when I asked her if she had understood it, she said she had understood about 25 percent.

  Which was 24 percent more than I had understood.

  Also, I have noticed that Aretha gets very excited when we start a new science unit. Her eyes sort of light up and she pops her pencil hard on her desk. It’s happy popping, like she’s ready for the show to get on the road.

  For some reason I’ve never felt allergic to Aretha. Maybe in an alternate universe we’d be friends, working together in a lab, wearing white lab coats with our names stitched across the front pocket.

  In this universe, though, we aren’t getting along too well.

  The second we finished saying the Pledge of Allegiance this morning, I felt Aretha’s pencil pop on my shoulder. When I turned around, it was like she’d never stopped glaring at me from the day before.

  “You are going to lose at the science fair big-time,” she told me. “I’m going to stomp you and Mac Two into the ground.”

  “His name is Ben,” I said. “And he’s not as bad as you think he is. He was just going through an obnoxious stage right when he moved here.”

  It felt good to stick up for Ben. That’s one of the coolest things about being friends with somebody. You stick up for them, they stick up for you. Like the time last year James Long accused Marcus of stealing his idea for a science report, and I dumped my lunch tray on his head. That felt really good, watching the sloppy-joe junk slide down his nose, especially since I got away with it. I am always dumping my lunch tray on somebody, only usually it is an accident.

  “Just because it turns out he can draw doesn’t mean he’s so great,” Aretha said. “I’m sad to see he’s got you fooled just like all the rest of them, though. Anyone can see that he’s just using you for your scientific knowledge. When it’s time for the science fair, he’s just going to pull you down. You’re going to lose for sure.”

  I tapped my fingers on my desk. I didn’t want Aretha to hate me just because she hated Ben. On the other hand, I didn’t think her behavior was very scientific, either. “Where is your evidence that he has me fooled? How do you know that you’re right and I’m wrong? What data have you collected? What experiments have you run?”

  Aretha shook her head. She popped her pencil sadly on her desk. She sighed and said, “I’ve got the evidence that’s in front of my own eyes. I’ve got three weeks of observed behavior. You’ve got a comic book.” She looked at her pencil for a minute, like maybe it would tell her why I’d made the huge mistake of becoming friends with Ben, then she stuck it behind her ear. “Well, I guess that’s just less competition for me at the science fair.”

  I turned back around. All the sudden I wished that Marcus was still there, so we could be doing the science fair together. Because Aretha was probably right; when you added me and Ben together, we didn’t make some great scientific team that you’d be reading about in books someday. What you got was a good scientist and a really good artist. Together that didn’t automatically add up to first place at the fourth-grade science fair.

  It had never occurred to me before that I might not win first place at the fourth-grade science fair.

  It was occurring to me now.

  But I was pretty sure Aretha was wrong about Ben. I didn’t think he was using me for my great scientific brain. I wanted to prove she was wrong, but I didn’t know how.

  I guessed that would have to be up to Ben.

  Getting our science fair project started would definitely be up to me. I rode my bike over to Ben’s apartment after school for a brainstorming session. It was hard to get him in a scientific mood, though. He had a notebook full of drawing orders placed by people in our class.

  “Are they paying you?” I asked him.

  Ben shook his head. “No. This is my plan for getting people to like me again.”

  “You mean to like you for the first time,” I said.

  “You could put it that way,” Ben said. “But I like the way I said it better.”

  I took out my science journal, ready to get down to business. If we were going to have a chance at winning first prize at the science fair, we didn’t have a minute to waste. “Okay, the way I see it, we need to plan the building of the volcano, the construction of the landscape around the volcano, the erupting of the volcano, and the use of any multimedia materials that the judges might give us extra points for. You definitely need to draw some cross sections of a volcano so people can understand what the inside looks like, before lava starts flowing and after it starts flowing.”

  “No prob,” Ben said. He held up a picture of Michelle Lee’s dog. “They sort of look the same, don’t you think?”

  “Who looks the same?” I asked, looking up from my journal.

  “Michelle and her dog,” he said. “I mean that in a good way.”

  I held up my journal and waved it in the air. “Hello, are you planning on helping with this project or not?”

  “I’ll help, I’ll help, don’t get all stressazoid on me,” Ben said, scratching his ear with his pencil while he studied the picture of Michelle Lee’s dog. “I’ll take care of the whole volcano business. My mom got me a piece of plywood to build it on. All you have to do is draw me a diagram for the inside of the volcano. You can be in charge of all the big-brain stuff, like the writing part.”

  That sounded like the less fun part to me, if you want to know the truth. But Ben was an artistic genius and would build an amazing volcano. I can make a volcano with a soda bottle, but I can’t even make a paperweight out of clay.

  I opened my journal back up and started drawing volcano diagrams for Ben. “I’ll get my mom to buy us a plastic tube to put the vinegar and baking soda in, for the eruption,” I said. “You’ll need to build around that. What we’re trying to demonstrate here is that lava can overcome gravity and be pushed through the earth’s rock crust. Since we can’t actually use real lava, we kind of have to create a simulation, using the gas created by the baking soda and the vinegar….”

  Ben wasn’t paying attention to anything I said. He held up his drawing of Michelle’s dog. It looked exactly like the photo, except it had artistic style to it now.

  “That dog really does look like Michelle,” I said. “It’s sort of amazing.”

  Ben smiled. “Next I’m doing a drawing of Roland Forth’s Chihuahua. The two of them are practically twins.”

  Maybe that could be our science fair project next year, a study of why people look like their pets. My brain started getting very excited about that idea. Some of that excitement went right into my pencil, and I actually did some really good volcano drawings for Ben to use when he started to build the volcano. I was amazed by how good they were, if you want to know the truth.

  That’s the great thing about science, in my opinion. It will make you excited about everything in the world.

  chapter ten

  I thought the week before the science fair would be pretty ordinary. Ben and I would work on our project in the afternoons. I would do my other homework at night. My mother ould be irritated by 95 percent of the things that happened to her on a daily basis, and my stepdad would order take-out food three nights in a row, even though every week he and my mom say they are going to quit ordering takeout and do real cooking.

  But this has turned out to be one of the weirdest weeks I’ve had all year. Here is what happened.

  On Monday my nose started bleeding in math. There were big splotches of blood all over my desk. It looked really neat. Mrs. Tuttle sent me to the school nurse, who is a man named Joe Martinez. In kindergarten everybody was sort of scared that we had a man nurse, but now we’re all used to it.

  “Let me show you something, Mac,” Mr. Martinez said while I sat in his office with an ice pack on my nose. He typed something into his computer, and up came a picture of the inside of a nose.


  “What you’re looking at is a picture of the anterior septal blood vessels,” Mr. Martinez explained to me, pointing at the picture. “That means the blood vessels in the front part of your nose. This time of year your nose gets dried out; it’s not uncommon to have a nosebleed or two.”

  Then he swiveled around in his chair and looked straight at me. “When I was your age, I did a lot of nose picking. Kids around nine, ten, eleven, are notorious nose pickers. Just ask Mr. Reid.”

  Mr. Reid is our school’s janitor. “How does Mr. Reid know?” I asked.

  “Who do you think has to clean all those boogers off the bottoms of your desks at the end of the year?” Mr. Martinez asked. “If anybody knows anything about fourth-grade nose picking, it’s Mr. Reid.”

  “That’s a pretty cruddy job,” I said.

  Mr. Martinez nodded. “Yeah. But I know you’re not the kind of kid who’d put a booger under your desk, are you?”

  I shook my head. I am a completely private nose picker. No picking at school is pretty much a rule I live by.

  “Here’s the thing, Mac. Keep the picking to a minimum. It really irritates your nose. This time of year it’s hard to keep your finger out of your nose. I’m sympathetic to that. But you don’t want to bleed to death for a bunch of mucus, now do you?”

  My face was a little red by the time I left Mr. Martinez’s office. But I haven’t picked my nose since.

  The second weird thing that happened was the art supply closet in Mrs. Tuttle’s room got haunted. We’ve been in school over a month now, and that closet hasn’t made a peep. But all the sudden, on Wednesday morning, a knock, knock, knock sound came from the back of the room.

  Everyone said, “Huh?” and turned around to look at the same time. All that’s back there is a sink, some cabinets, and the art supply closet.

  Knock, knock, knock, the sound came again. No doubt about it, it was coming from the art supply closet.

  “Open it up, Mason,” Mrs. Tuttle called from the front of the room. “Maybe Picasso got locked inside and is trying to get out.”

  “No way,” Mason said. “I’m not opening that thing.” He turned to Brandon Woo, who sits right next to him. “You open it.”

  Brandon shook his head no. All along the back row people were shaking their heads like, Don’t look at me.

  Finally Mrs. Tuttle walked over to open the door. The people in the back row leaned as far away from the art supply closet as they could. The door squeaked when Mrs. Tuttle tugged on it, then it flew open.

  A paintbrush fell out. About seven different people screamed.

  I couldn’t believe what I saw.

  Absolutely nothing.

  chapter eleven

  The art supply closet was completely empty.

  Normally you would have seen about two million things. Stacks of drawing paper, construction paper, tracing paper, and colored squares of felt. A whole shelf of paint and an army of paintbrushes. Pipe cleaners, Popsicle sticks, toothpicks, and a big plastic bag of clay that Mrs. Tuttle was always telling us not to let get dried out or else it would just be a big plastic bag of brick.

  And on the very bottom shelf of the art supply closet you would have seen a pink papier-mâché pig that nobody had any idea of how it got there. Not even Mrs. Tuttle.

  “What in the world?” Mrs. Tuttle said. “Where did all my art supplies go?”

  Brandon Woo picked something up off of the floor. “Here’s the paintbrush that fell out,” he said, handing it to Mrs. Tuttle.

  Mrs. Tuttle stared at the paintbrush, like if she looked at it hard enough, it might tell her what in the world was going on. After a minute she shook her head, closed the art supply closet door, and said, “Okay, sports fans, I’m going to make a quick check at the principal’s office to see if any other mysterious disappearing acts have been reported this morning. Talk quietly among yourselves until I get back. Absolutely no hanky-panky.”

  “It’s a ghost,” Stacey Windham said the second Mrs. Tuttle left the room. She sounded like she was the world’s biggest expert on supernatural happenings in art supply closets. “What else could it be? Besides, my sister was in this classroom last year, and she said that somebody died in here a long time ago.”

  “I heard that too,” said Mira Ligotta, who is Stacey’s second best friend, after Lori Birch. “It was, like, five years ago. My neighbor who’s in eighth grade told me about it once.”

  “How’d they die?” somebody asked. People all around the class were scootching their desks closer to Stacey and Mira.

  Lori Birch, who you could tell did not like Mira taking center stage next to Stacey, leaned into the circle of desks. “Their babysitter? She put poison in their tuna fish sandwich. Nobody knew what was going on. The class came back from lunch, and this kid just fell down and died.”

  “It wasn’t their babysitter,” Mira insisted. “It was their stepmom.”

  Lori rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

  I looked around the room. Some kids were definitely starting to look like they were having second thoughts about eating lunch that day. Then I saw Aretha. You could tell she didn’t believe a word of what was being said.

  “So if I go online and do a search about a poisoned kid dying at Woodbrook Elementary School, I’ll be able to find all the details?” she asked, sounding very doubtful.

  Stacey shook her head. “They kept it a big secret so that the school wouldn’t get sued.”

  “Why would the school get sued if somebody’s babysitter poisoned a student?” I asked. “It’s not the school’s fault.”

  “I’m sorry, Mac,” Stacey said sweetly. “I didn’t know you were a lawyer with all sorts of legal facts in your brain.”

  Aretha snorted. “Mac is just using logic, which is more than I can say for you people.”

  Just then Mrs. Tuttle burst back into the room. “Mystery solved! Well, almost solved, anyway.” She walked to the front of the class. “It turns out that when Mr. Reid was cleaning the room last night, he noticed paint dripping from the closet. When he opened the doors, sure enough, several paint jars had been overturned and had spilled—which means some of you aren’t putting the lids back on tightly enough, by the way. So anyway, he took everything out to clean the closet, and then he took the stuff downstairs to get the paint off.”

  “How did the paint get spilled in the first place?” I asked. I was an expert at spilling stuff, but I couldn’t figure what could have knocked the paint jars over while they were still in the closet.

  “Hmmm,” Mrs. Tuttle said. “I’m not sure. Maybe someone was playing back there and bumped into the shelves?”

  Everyone turned and looked. The shelves looked pretty sturdy. It would take more than a kid bumping into them to shake them.

  “The ghost did it,” Stacey said in a loud whisper. “How obvious can it be?”

  “What’s obvious is that you have peanut butter for brains,” Aretha said, then turned to Mrs. Tuttle. “There must be some logical explanation. Something in that closet spilled that paint, and something is making that thumping noise.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Mrs. Tuttle said, taking a yellow frog out of the frog jar and pulling on its leg. “I will give extra credit to the person who can solve this mystery. Plus this frog.”

  “We’ll need to see the stuff from the art supply closet,” Aretha said. “That might give us some clues.”

  “You’ll only make the ghost mad,” Stacey said. “He’ll probably come over to your house to haunt you.”

  Aretha ignored her. Mrs. Tuttle said that anyone who was interested in solving the mystery could go to Mr. Reid’s room at lunchtime and examine the evidence. We could also spend as much time as we wanted looking inside the art supply closet.

  When lunchtime rolled around, me, Aretha, and a few other kids went to Mr. Reid’s room in the school basement. He was in there eating a turkey sandwich and reading the sports page. We told him why we were there, and he led us to a table with all of Mrs. Tuttle’s
art supplies.

  “I wasn’t able to save all the paper,” he told us. “But everything else is cleaned up. In fact, when you’re done examining it, you can take it back to Mrs. Tuttle’s classroom.”

  I picked up a paint jar and looked at it carefully. Could gases have built up inside it and caused it to explode all over the closet?

  But what would explain the noises in the closet even after all the art supplies had been moved out of it?

  “Mr. Reid? Do you still have the paper you couldn’t save?” Aretha asked. Mr. Reid led her to a big trash can in the corner of the basement.

  You know how sometimes people talk about a light going off in their head? I’ve never actually had that happen to me, but sometimes I get this feeling that’s almost like electricity. This happens when a big idea practically knocks me over.

  I knew exactly why Aretha wanted to look at that paper.

  chapter twelve

  “Teeth marks,” I said as Aretha pulled the paper out of the trash. “Look for teeth marks.”

  She nodded. “And ripped-up paper. For a nest. I bet if we look hard enough, we can find a nest, or at least the beginnings of a nest.”

  We dug through the trash together. It was kind of a mess down there, since a lot of the paper had paint on it. I checked my shirt. It was a halfway-nice, almost-new striped T-shirt. I predicted five minutes of yelling from my mom if I got paint on it.

  For my mom five minutes of yelling really isn’t that much.

  I kept digging.

  Aretha was the one who pulled out a sheet of red construction paper that had been gnawed on. A few seconds later I pulled out what looked like green and yellow confetti.