Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed!

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “My dad did,” Ben said. “He called last night. He thinks I should start building my résumé.”

  “Fourth graders don’t have résumés,” I said.

  Ben wagged his finger at me. “Fourth graders who aren’t thinking about the future don’t have résumés. My dad says it’s never too early to start thinking about the future.”

  I flopped down on the couch. Ben’s dad is a very tricky subject and not one you should tackle while you’re standing up.

  In my opinion, there are two not-so-great things about Ben’s dad. One, he lives all the way in Seattle, Washington, since he and Ben’s mom are divorced. Because he lives so far away, it is hard for him to come visit, and every once in a while Ben gets this dark, scowly look on his face, which means he is missing his dad and you better just leave him alone.

  The second not-so-great thing about Ben’s dad is that he is always trying to change who Ben is. He doesn’t think boys should be artists. He tells Ben that he is going to have to change his mind about spending the rest of his life drawing comic books.

  If you take comic-book drawing away from Ben, all you have is a person who sits there and watches TV in his pajamas.

  “You know, if you become class president, you’ll have to go to a lot of long, boring meetings with Principal Patino,” I said. “And somebody like Stacey Wind-ham will probably be vice president, and you’ll have to call her on the phone every day to discuss class business. You will spend your entire life talking about school and thinking about school. You’ll probably end up living at school.”

  Ben clicked off the TV and looked at me. His face was a very pale shade of green. “I’ve never heard of a kid having to live at school,” he said.

  “That’s what happened last year,” I told him. It was a big lie, but I was desperate. “You didn’t go to our school then, so you wouldn’t know about it, but all the class presidents ended up sleeping in the nurse’s office practically every night.”

  I could see Ben was beginning to have second thoughts about running for class president. I sank back into the couch and smiled. My work was done.

  Or maybe not.

  “I’ll just pass a law saying class presidents never have to stay after school, even if they get in trouble. It will be the big privilege of the class president to be able to leave school property whenever he wants to.” Ben smiled and clicked the TV back on.

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, like that’s a law Mrs. Patino will approve in two seconds flat.”

  Ben shrugged. “The president makes the rules, what can I say?”

  I could see this battle would not be won in an afternoon. I decided to turn my attention to mold.

  Scientifically speaking, there are few things in the world more interesting than mold. Here’s what I already knew, other than that mold is really gross in a cool kind of way:

  Mold is a fungus. A fungus is a single-celled organism that grows into colonies of cells that become molds, mushrooms, and other cool stuff. Even though mold grows, it is not a plant or an animal. One way you know this is that no one wants it for a pet, and nobody wants to grow it in their garden, either.

  Mold is everywhere. All you need is moisture, air, and stuff that mold likes to eat. If you look inside my fridge, you will see that mold really, really likes cheese. But it likes other stuff too, like oranges that have been sitting out in a bowl on the kitchen table for a long time, and an old shoe box that maybe you one time tried to make sail like a boat in your bathtub and then stuffed into the cabinet under the bathroom sink when you heard your mom coming upstairs. Mold likes wet stuff a lot.

  The way mold gets places is by sending out spores, which are kind of like seeds. If it is a dry kind of mold, the wind will blow its spores around for it. If it is a wet kind of mold, sometimes animals or insects will move it. Slime molds, some of nature’s most awesome organisms, move by sliming stuff. They just keep stretching along, eating anything in their path.

  If you look at mold under a microscope, it looks a lot like spaghetti. Don’t eat it!

  The mold that grows in your shower is called mildew. It is there because mold likes moisture.

  Ben’s shower is very, very moist.

  When I pulled back the shower curtain, it was like I was interrupting a mildew party. Mildew was creeping up and down the walls and the shower curtain, and it was hanging around the drain like it couldn’t wait for somebody to turn on some more water. The mildew was black and spotty and really, really cool looking.

  In fact, it was so cool looking it occurred to me that I didn’t actually want to get rid of it.

  This was a problem.

  “I guess we probably couldn’t talk your mom into learning to live with mold, could we?” I asked Ben.

  Ben shook his head. “No way. She hates it.”

  “If she really hated it, she’d get rid of it,” I pointed out.

  “She doesn’t have time. And whenever she decides she’s going to clean out the shower, it turns out she doesn’t have the right supplies. It’s a bad situation.”

  “But the mildew isn’t actually hurting anything,” I said. “Maybe if she tried to look at it in a more positive way, she wouldn’t mind it so much. Maybe she could try to think of it as a sort of plant or something.”

  “It’s slimy,” Ben said. “It’s gross and slimy, and you’re pretty crazy if you think you’re going to convince my mom to like it.”

  I knew Ben was right. But I also knew that deep down inside I wasn’t a mold killer. I like mold. I think it’s one of the most interesting things in the universe. If I start thinking about it, I come up with all sorts of fascinating questions, like is there mold in outer space? What is mold’s favorite food? Does it like chocolate pudding cups as much as I do?

  The more I thought about it, the more I knew I didn’t want to rid the world of mold. What I really wanted was more mold. I wanted other people to be as interested in mold as I was so I’d have someone to discuss mold with. Maybe I should start a mold appreciation society or a club for mold lovers. I could be the president, and Ben could be vice president, if I could ever get him to like mold too.

  Then we’d both have something to put on our résumés.

  My new and improved Fourth-Grade Goal List:

  To make everyone like mold as much as I do

  To convince Ben not to run for class president

  To be the best fourth-grade scientist ever

  I knew that to get everybody else to like mold as much as I did, I would have to come up with some good mold publicity.

  Scientifically speaking, Aretha Timmons was just the person to help me.

  Normally, I am allergic to girls. I am allergic to thirteen things altogether, including nuts, cats, cottage cheese, grape jelly, and anything purple. Also kisses that come with lipstick attached, especially the kind my aunt Tiffany wears, which is not quite purple but close enough to make me break out in hives just thinking about it.

  Aretha Timmons is the only girl I know that I am not 100 percent allergic to. I think it’s because she is a fellow scientist and almost never wears purple. If we had to dissect a frog for fourth-grade science, Aretha would be the first person in line. She would not squeal or scream or cry because the frog was cute. She would get right down to business.

  It’s hard to be allergic to a girl like Aretha Timmons.

  “Mold is a tough sell, Mac,” she told me on the jungle gym at recess. “Number one, it’s gross and slimy. Number two, nobody is ever excited to see mold.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “Yeah, Mac, but you’re not like everyone else. Listen, last year in Ms. Perry’s class, when we were cleaning out our desks for Spring Cleaning Day, Justin Fenner found a bologna sandwich in his desk that he’d forgotten about. It’d been in there for two months, and by Spring Cleaning Day it was just one big square of green mold. Do you think anyone said, ‘Hey, pass that over here so I can see’? Do you think anyone asked to take it home to give to their mom for a present?”r />
  “Well, no,” I said. “But if Ms. Perry would have put the sandwich under a microscope and let everyone look at it, they would have seen how fascinating it was.”

  Aretha shook her head. “Ms. Perry screamed and ran to get Mr. Reid to come take Justin’s desk out of the room. Ms. Perry was more grossed out than anybody.”

  “People like that should not be allowed to teach,” I said, pulling myself to the top of the jungle gym.

  “It’s true, we never did any interesting experiments in her class,” Aretha said. “When it came to science, mostly we collected leaves.”

  “You know what would be cool?” I asked, dropping down to the ground. “A mold museum. It would be this place where all kinds of different molds were growing, like slime molds and mildew, and you could have information about everything so people would understand just how great mold really is.”

  Aretha nodded. “That’s what you should do, then. You could ask Mrs. Tuttle if there’s a shelf or something in her classroom. Or else ask Mr. Reid if there’s someplace in the basement you could use. I’ll help you get set up. Mold doesn’t bother me a bit.”

  Somehow I knew it wouldn’t.

  Mrs. Tuttle blew the whistle to let everyone know that recess was over. As I got closer to the building, I saw Ben standing on the steps, smiling a big, goofy fake smile and shaking hands with everybody in our class as they were about to walk through the door.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him when I got to the front of the line.

  “Running for president, just like I said I would,” Ben said, shaking my hand. His hand was all sweaty. Who would vote for a kid with sweaty hands for president?

  I mean, okay, I would, but only because he’s my best friend.

  “You’ve got to get over this idea,” I said. “It won’t work in a million years.”

  Ben flashed his fake grin at me. “Move along, move along, I’ve got more hands to shake.”

  I walked to Mrs. Tuttle’s room. I was trying to feel excited about the mold museum idea, but instead I was feeling worried about Ben’s running for president. The only thing Ben had ever won in his life was honorable mention for the fourth-grade science fair. He still had that dumb ribbon pinned to his backpack like it was the Nobel Prize in Physics, which is a very important award that the most genius scientists of all win.

  If Ben lost the election—make that when Ben lost the election—he would probably be dark and scowly all the time, and then it wouldn’t be fun to be best friends with him anymore. Only, I’d have to stay best friends with him, because otherwise it would seem like I’d stopped being best friends with him because he lost the election.

  I was starting to feel sorry I lived in a democracy.

  “I see the campaign for class president has already begun,” Mrs. Tuttle said after everyone was back in their seats from recess. “Since Ben has gotten the ball rolling, let me see a show of hands from everyone who plans to run.”

  I looked around the classroom. Ben’s hand was stretched a mile into the sky. Three seats behind him, Stacey Windham fluttered her hand in the air like a queen waving to all the little people. On the other side of the room, Chester Oliphant stuck his hand in the air, and so did Roland Forth, the only kid less likely to win than Ben.

  Aretha popped her pencil on the back of my head. When I turned around, she nodded toward Ben. “That’s not your idea, is it?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Do I look that dumb to you?”

  “No, you don’t,” Aretha said. “Even Ben doesn’t look that dumb to me. So why is he doing it?”

  “It’s his dad’s idea.”

  Aretha rolled her eyes. She has a bossy dad too. “Well, his dad needs to wake up and smell the coffee, because Mr. Superhero Comic Book Man over there has a zero percent chance of winning this election.”

  I knew she was right. Everybody in the world knew she was right.

  Everybody, that is, except for Ben.

  And I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be able to convince him that he was wrong.

  Here is a scientific observation I have made about my life: For every good thing that happens, there is usually an aqually bad thing that happens. For instance, this year I got Mrs. Tuttle for my teacher. That’s a good thing. Then my mom hired Sarah Fortemeyer, Teenage Girl Space Alien, “to be our babysitter. That’s bad.

  Very bad.

  Sometimes it’s the other way around, though. At the beginning of the school year my best friend, Marcus, moved away, which was bad, but a little while later I got a new best friend, Ben, which was good.

  At the end of every day you can add everything up to see how your life is going so far. If I graphed it, I think the graph would show that most days everything sort of evens out—not great, not terrible. At first I thought yesterday would be that kind of day. The mold museum idea was great, Ben running for president was not so great. It was kind of even steven. But then three things happened to make me change my mind:

  1. At dinner my mom told me that she and my stepdad are going away this weekend. On Friday they are going to a dinner theater that’s two hours away, and coming home Saturday afternoon. At first I thought this was a great thing, because then maybe my dad could come and take care of me and Margaret, even if Margaret is my half-sister and not even related to him. My dad treats Margaret like she’s a regular person. He doesn’t even mind that she only says about seventeen words and is obsessed with this doll she has named Trudy, whose nose she has completely chewed off.

  My dad just acts like Trudy is a regular person too.

  “I’m sorry, but your father can’t come this weekend,” my mom told me when I asked if Dad would take care of us. “He’s coaching the Mathletes again this year, and they’ve got a meet on Saturday.”

  “We could go there,” I suggested. I love watching the Mathletes. My dad is a high school math teacher, and the Mathletes are his best students. My dad is a great teacher, so whenever I’m around his students, they treat me like I’m the world’s most incredibly important person.

  You could get used to being treated that way, in case you were wondering.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie, but driving you to Dad’s would take us three hours out of our way.” My mom wiped her mouth with a Pete’s Pizza Express napkin and smiled at me. “But I’ve got very exciting news. Guess who’s going to take care of you while we’re gone?”

  “Grammy?”

  I wouldn’t mind if my grandmother took care of us. She’s the only adult in captivity who actually believes watching TV is good for children.

  “Even better! Sarah’s going to babysit!” My mother’s smile stretched two miles wide, like she’d just told me she was giving me my own chemistry lab for Christmas.

  I panicked. “Couldn’t I stay at Ben’s this weekend?” I asked.

  “And miss the fun here? No way, mister!”

  Sometimes when my mom is trying to convince you that something she wants you to do is a good idea, she gets this cheerful tone to her voice that is almost scary.

  You would think that finding out Sarah the Teenage Girl Space Alien was staying at your house for an entire twenty-four-hour stretch, possibly longer, would be bad enough. You would not need one more negative thing in your life to make your day totally rotten. In fact, you would probably feel like another bad thing was entirely impossible.

  You would be wrong.

  2. After finding out about Sarah, I needed time to recover from the bad news and come up with a plan for keeping her away. So I went to my room to count my worms.

  Counting worms is an excellent way to get your brain rolling.

  I collect dried-up earthworms. So far I have 147, which I keep in a shoe box in my closet. The longest dried-up worm I have is four inches. My goal is to find one that is at least four feet. This will be hard to do because worms shrink up when they dry. Also, I will have to move to Australia to do this, since they have the longest worms.

  I asked my mom if we could move to Australia, but
she said no.

  I asked my stepdad, Lyle, if we could move to Australia, and he said maybe, and if we didn’t move there, maybe we could take a vacation there someday.

  If you have to have a stepdad, Lyle is the kind to get.

  When I got up to my room, I couldn’t find the shoe box. Usually if something gets lost in my closet, it’s because it’s gotten mixed up with a bunch of my shirts and pants, which I’m supposed to hang up, only I never do. In case you’re wondering, if you pile stuff up just right, it hardly wrinkles at all.

  I went to look for the shoe box under a pile of clothes, but all of a sudden I realized that there wasn’t a pile of clothes. All my clothes were hanging from hangers.

  All my shoes were lined up in a row on the closet floor.

  All my games and LEGOs and Lincoln Logs were stacked up neatly.

  Sarah the Teenage Girl Space Alien had cleaned my closet.

  “Mom!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Sarah threw out my worms!”

  I ran to check the outside garbage cans. No shoe box. I checked the recycling bin. No shoe box.

  “Sarah probably dropped it off at Goodwill,” my mom said when I came back into the house. “I asked her to pull out all the clothes in your closet that didn’t fit anymore. She probably just looked at the size printed on the shoe box and thought there were too-small shoes in there.”

  “She should have looked in the box! Who takes a shoe box to Goodwill without even looking to see what’s inside? It could have been a box full of tarantulas!”

  “She would have heard tarantulas scurrying around inside the box,” my mom pointed out.

  I should mention that my mom is not the world’s biggest fan of my dried-worm collection. Which probably explains why she didn’t sound too upset about the missing shoe box.