Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed!

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

I sat down on the couch and put my head in my hands. Two years of worm collecting, down the drain.

  My mom must have realized how depressed I was. “I’ll call Goodwill tomorrow and see if they’ve found your worms,” she said. “I’m sure they would be more than happy to return them.”

  I decided to go to bed so that no more bad stuff could happen to me. Usually you’re pretty safe in bed.

  Except when you remember you have a book report that is due first thing in the morning.

  3. I had my pajamas on, my teeth brushed, the light turned off, and was chewing on a Fruit Roll-Up I’d found under my pillow, when I remembered. One page, front and back, every other line, whatever book I wanted. Plot summary and personal analysis.

  No copying off the book jacket.

  I sighed. Every time Mrs. Tuttle assigned us a book report, I always meant to do a really good job. I was going to read a book and write the report the minute I finished. It would be a book I had never read before, and I would make many interesting observations.

  It is a known fact that most scientists are excellent book report writers.

  Only, I never got around to reading a book I had never read before. This is because there are forty-three books in the Mysteries of Planet Zindar series, and I keep reading them over and over.

  I am obsessed with the planet Zindar.

  I leaned over and picked up book number twenty-four from the stack of Planet Zindars beside my bed. The Red Monster Returns. I started reading it, just to refresh my memory.

  And then I fell asleep.

  This morning when I woke up, The Red Monster Returns was on top of my face, making it sort of hard to breathe. My bedside lamp was still on. My book report had not been written. I was pretty sure I was starting the second bad day in a row.

  And then something awesome happened.

  It all started when I had to go to the bathroom.

  “At first I thought the frog in the toilet was dead,” I told everybody in Share and Stare later. Share and Stare is what Mrs. Tuttle has instead of Show and Tell. In Share and Stare you are only allowed to talk about stuff that has to do with what we’re studying in Mrs. Tuttle’s class. Like, if you found a Froot Loop in the shape of Alaska, and we were studying U.S. geography, you could bring that in. Or if your aunt sent you a postcard of a giraffe when we were studying vertebrates in science, that would be a good thing to share.

  You are not allowed to share your stuffed pig named Oinky just because you feel like it, which Roland Forth learned the hard way.

  “I knew it was a frog right away and not a toad,” I said, “because it had really long legs. You could tell it was a frog that had been a really good jumper. So that made me feel extra bad that it was dead. Only, it wasn’t dead at all, which I found out when my sister, Margaret, ran in and tried to flush it down the toilet.”

  You would not have believed how far that frog jumped.

  I mean, it went at least eight feet.

  Right on top of my mom’s head.

  Okay, it really landed right on top of her shoulder, but that doesn’t make as good of a picture as a frog landing on her head. Which it almost did, but it lost its balance at the last minute and plopped onto her shoulder instead.

  Have I mentioned that my mom does not like frogs?

  “Mac!” she screamed. “Get this monster off me! Now!”

  “It’s not a monster, Mom,” I explained. “It’s an amphibian. That means it lives part of its life in water and part of its life on land.”

  “I don’t care if it lives part of its life on Neptune,” my mom yelled. “Get it out of here!”

  By this time the frog had jumped off my mom’s shoulder and was hopping down the stairs.

  “Neptune’s too cold,” I told my mom as I ran down the stairs after the frog. “Besides, it’s a gaseous planet, so it’d be pretty hard to hop around on.”

  I always enjoy it when you can bring interesting scientific knowledge into everyday conversation.

  Right as the frog hit the landing, my stepdad came in through the front door with the morning paper. In came Lyle, out went the frog. In about three hops he was across our front yard and heading for the street. He hit the curb just as Markie Vollencraft was speeding by in his VW Bug with the window down.

  One last hop and that frog was in the VW Bug and headed straight for West Linnett High School.

  I am not making this up.

  Mrs. Tuttle gave me a look like she thought I was. “That must have been quite some hop, Mac,” she said.

  “Frogs can jump over twenty times their own length,” I told her. I’d taken the F-He volume of our old encyclopedia set with me to read on the bus, so I was filled with frog information. “That would be like you or me jumping a hundred feet. The longest recorded frog jump is thirty-three feet and five inches. Compared to that, my frog jumping into Markie Vollencraft’s VW Bug was nothing.”

  “So how’d the frog get in the toilet?” Brandon Woo asked.

  “That’s what I’m not sure about,” I said. “Maybe it came through the pipes. But I don’t know if a frog could do that or not.”

  “You should ask Mr. Reid,” Aretha said. “I bet he knows a lot about pipes.”

  Mr. Reid is our school janitor. He is famous for being able to fix anything, including the sinks in the boys’ bathrooms, which for some mysterious reason are always getting clogged up with soggy toilet paper, and the school’s field trip van, which breaks down at least once during every field trip. The teacher in charge always carries Mr. Reid’s cell phone number so she can call him from wherever the van has broken down and he can come and make it run long enough to get back to school.

  That’s how I ended up going down to the basement to talk to Mr. Reid at lunch. In fact, Mrs. Tuttle made me go, since by that time all anybody in my class could talk about was how that frog could have gotten into my toilet.

  “I’d say it’d be unusual for a frog to make it all the way up through the pipes,” Mr. Reid told me when I explained to him what had happened that morning. He stroked his chin, like he was giving the matter some serious thought. “Where would a frog get into the system and swim up? Did he swim through the sewage line? Not unless there was a broken place where he could’ve gotten in. But if you’ve got a broken place in the sewage line, you’ve got sewage coming out of the sewage line, if you dig what I’m saying.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t dig.

  “Sewage, son,” Mr. Reid said, “is what we flush down the toilet. Goes into the sewage pipes running underground, all the way to the treatment plant. Believe you me, sewage gets out through an open pipe, you’ll hear about it pronto. But you’ll smell it first.”

  Mr. Reid took a bite of his ham sandwich. I was wondering how he could eat during a conversation about sewage, but I guess if you’re a janitor, you probably get used to gross stuff. It might not affect you at all after a while.

  “My guess is that frog got into the house through the door, same way it got out,” Mr. Reid continued. “Maybe it hopped in on its own, maybe it was in a box or a bag.”

  Realizing that Mr. Reid didn’t seem at all bothered by sewage, I decided now would be a good time to bring up my mold museum idea. I’d already asked Mrs. Tuttle about making a mold museum in the science corner of our room, but she’d said she was pretty sure the state health department had rules about growing mold in classrooms.

  To be honest, she looked a little green when I told her my mold museum idea in the first place. It made me realize how much everyone, even teachers, needs to be educated about mold.

  “A basement is an ideal place for it,” I explained to Mr. Reid after I’d told him my basic plan, “since it’s naturally damp.”

  Mr. Reid nodded. “It’s the moisture from the earth seeping in through the walls,” he said. “The only problem is, there’s not much natural light in here. Some molds like a little light.”

  I stared at Mr. Reid. “You know about mold?” I asked. “I mean, real facts about mold?”r />
  Mr. Reid grinned. “Sure I know about mold. You ever heard of Alexander Fleming?”

  “He discovered penicillin,” I said. I was almost whispering, I was so surprised to be having a two-way scientific conversation about mold. This had never happened to me before.

  “That’s right,” Mr. Reid said. “He was growing bacteria in a petri dish, and some mold got in there.”

  “And the mold killed the bacteria!”

  Me and Mr. Reid slapped high fives.

  “You get Mrs. Patino’s permission, and you can have your museum down here,” Mr. Reid told me. “I think mold is pretty interesting stuff myself.”

  I shook my head. I had known Mr. Reid since kindergarten, and this was the first time I’d realized he was a scientific genius.

  It’s pretty cool that there are two of us in the same school.

  This afternoon, after school, I rode the bus home with Ben. I needed his artistic-genius help with my mold museum presentation for Mrs. Patino. In return I promised I’d help him work on his campaign strategy.

  The best strategy I could come up with was that Ben should drop out of the race. Immediately.

  “Can’t do it,” Ben said. We were sitting on the floor of his bedroom. Ben was working on a new comic book, and I was drawing mold samples in my notebook, using colored pencils. “My dad said if I win, he’ll come visit and stay for the whole weekend, all the way till Monday morning. We’ll stay at a hotel and watch pay-per-view and eat pizza.”

  “He could do that even if you didn’t run for class president,” I pointed out.

  “No, because he has to take off work to come visit, so it’s easier for me to go see him. Him coming here is special.”

  Ben held up his sketch pad so I could see how the story was coming along. In the comic-book series he’s doing, his main guy, Derek the Destroyer, races around the globe saving the world from evil. In this story Derek was thwarting an amazon girls’ volleyball team in their attempt to take over the White House and force everyone in the country to play volleyball twenty-four hours a day.

  Volleyball, in case you were wondering, is not exactly Ben’s favorite sport.

  “That’s cool about your dad coming here,” I said. “But you’ve got to be realistic about the election. Why would somebody vote for you instead of Chester or Stacey?”

  Ben chewed on his pencil. “Because I’m a good artist?”

  “That’s all you’ve got?” I asked. “Why should anybody vote for you just because you’re an artist?”

  “I’m a creative guy,” Ben said. “Creative people are creative problem solvers, Mrs. Tuttle said so.”

  “So, what problems are you going to solve?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Ben said. “Have you ever noticed that around ten thirty everybody’s stomachs start growling? But there’s still an hour until lunch, and you can’t concentrate on anything because you’re, like, totally starvazoid.”

  “Starvazoid” is one of Ben’s made-up words. He practically has his own dictionary of Ben words that sound like they just jumped out of a stack of comic books.

  “So, what’s your idea?” I asked. “Mandatory snack time?”

  “Exactly!” Ben exclaimed. “It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. I’m thinking doughnuts and milk, maybe, or candy bars.”

  I thought about this for a few seconds. “It’s got to be nutritious,” I told him. “Definitely no candy. But overall it’s not a bad idea. You could be onto something here.”

  Ben grinned. “Okay, then, check out this cool-a-bomb idea. Two words, buddy: mucho, mucho longer recess.”

  “That’s four words.”

  “Two words, four words, same dif,” Ben said. “My point is, we get fifteen lousy minutes on the playground after lunch. By the time you choose up teams for kickball, you have, like, three minutes to play the game.”

  “But you hate playing kickball,” I said. “Today you spent recess trying to build a T. rex out of broken Popsicle sticks.”

  “It’s not about me,” Ben said. “It’s about the people.”

  I had to admit, the people would definitely vote for more recess.

  “Those are good ideas,” I told him. “But you’ve still got a problem. Chester and Stacey are really popular. You’re, well, less popular.”

  “I know,” Ben said. “I still haven’t figured how to creatively solve that problem.”

  We decided to work on my mold presentation. Sometimes if you stop thinking about something for a while, you get an awesome idea without even trying. It’s like all the neurons in your brain just keep popping away all by themselves until they hit on the exact right thing.

  The brain, in case you were wondering, is an incredible machine.

  I showed Ben this killer mold book I’d checked out of the library. “I figured I could write down a lot of interesting facts about mold, and then you could copy them over on a poster and draw some good pictures. I mean, pictures that make the mold look really amazing. Like art, practically.”

  Ben nodded. “I could do that,” he said. “In the close-up pictures mold isn’t nearly half so gross looking as it looks in real life. You could probably fool Mrs. Patino into thinking that mold is something really cool. Like something she might want to give someone for Christmas.”

  That was probably taking things too far. Nobody likes mold more than I do, but I still don’t want to find it in my stocking on Christmas morning.

  Still, I was glad Ben was finally on Team Fungus.

  Ben started sketching out pictures of mold on a piece of poster board, while I wrote down fascinating mold facts, such as:

  We eat mold! Lots of cheeses are naturally moldy — Camembert and blue cheese get their flavor from molds, Penicillium camemberti and P. roqueforti, to be exact.

  Slime molds move! It’s how they get their food—they sort of creep over rotten stuff, like old logs or leaves, then surround it and eat the bacteria that’s growing there.

  A bunch of slime molds are named after foods, including tapioca slime, pretzel slime, scrambled-egg slime, raspberry slime, and cotton-candy slime.

  It only took an hour to come up with an amazing poster presentation. Ben drew four of the most beautiful molds known to humankind: Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa, otherwise known as white coral slime; Pulcherricium caeruleum, which is blue and sort of velvety; Licea sambucina, a slime mold made up of really tiny orange balls; and another slime mold, Lamproderma granulosum, that looks like greenish soap bubbles.

  There’s probably nothing more beautiful on the whole planet Earth than a colorful slime mold.

  Mrs. Robbins, Ben’s mom, stuck her head in the doorway. She manages the apartment complex where she and Ben live, and when she’s working, she always calls from the office or comes by every thirty minutes or so to check on Ben and make sure he isn’t getting into trouble.

  About 85 percent of the time he is.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to Ben’s mold pictures. “It’s really beautiful. Like flowers, almost, but not quite. Undersea plants, maybe?”

  “It’s mold,” Ben said, coloring in some P. caeruleum with a blue Magic Marker.

  Ben’s mom put her hand over her mouth like Ben had just told her he was drawing dog poop. “No way!”

  “Yep!” Ben grinned. “It’s for Mac’s big science project.”

  I could tell he was starting to enjoy the way that just talking about mold could freak some people out.

  Ben’s mom shook her head. “Comic books and mold. You boys make quite a team.”

  After his mom left, Ben got quiet for a minute. Ben is always quiet when he’s drawing, but when he’s not drawing, usually he’s talking. In fact, it’s pretty hard to shut him up. So when he’s quiet and not drawing, watch out.

  When he suddenly jumped on his bed and started dancing around, I knew I was in serious trouble.

  “I just came up with a fantastatomic plan!” he yelled, like I was in Alaska instead of sitting five feet away fr
om him. “Why don’t you run for vice president on my presidential ticket? You could pick out the snacks every day if you wanted to, and you could be in charge of punishing the people who rebel against our administration!”

  I thought about this plan for approximately three seconds. To be honest, I didn’t actually need three seconds to know the answer was no. I am a scientist, not a politician.

  But right as I was about to open my mouth and deliver the bad news, I had one of my famous Big Mac attacks. I could not believe my own personal geniosity at that very moment.

  My brain had come through, just like I knew it would.

  “I’m not the one you need to run as your vice president,” I told Ben. “But I know who is.”

  “Forget it.”

  Aretha popped her pencil on her desk about ten times, like she wanted us to understand how serious she was about saying no.

  “Number one,” she said, “I have no interest in politics. Number two, I am much too busy with extracurricular activities, such as trombone lessons, Girl Scouts, and soccer. And number three, I am not the vice presidential type.”

  Aretha had a point. She is not exactly the sort of person who takes orders from other people.

  Especially other people like Ben.

  “I’ll trade you something for it,” Ben said, leaning over from his desk. “I could do an awesome drawing of you. A vice presidential portrait. They could hang it in the principal’s office. Or you could give it to your mom for Christmas.”

  For a minute it looked like Aretha was considering this. Having a good drawer offer to draw a picture of you is hard to turn down. Also, it’s a bonus not to have to figure out what to give your mom for Christmas. A couple of years ago, for example, I couldn’t think of anything to give my mom. I ended up buying her a big jar of red wiggler worms so she could compost all of our trash in a bucket under the kitchen sink.