Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed!

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  Scientifically speaking, this explains the humongous population of red wiggler worms that now live in the dirt out by our swing set.

  But Aretha turned Ben’s offer down. “Can’t do it,” she said. “The election is at the end of next week. There’s no way you could get enough support to win by then, even if I was on your ticket.”

  Ben chewed on his pencil. He got a very sad expression on his face.

  It was his fake sad expression, but Aretha didn’t know that.

  “Fine,” Ben said. “I guess I’ll just drop out of the race, then. I can’t win without somebody like you, a person that everybody likes and respects and admires, on my ticket.” He sighed. “I guess I’ll just call my dad tonight and tell him that I’ll be letting him down.”

  Aretha looked at Ben. “Does it really matter to your dad that much?”

  Ben nodded. “It’s what’s keeping him alive. See, he’s got this mysterious illness—”

  I cut Ben off. “What Ben is saying is that his dad has been sort of down in the dumps lately. Ben’s campaign is keeping his mind off of his troubles.”

  That was a lie too, but it was less of a lie than Ben’s lie about his dad’s mysterious illness.

  “My dad’s depressed,” Ben said. “He got fired from his job last week.”

  Great. Lie number three.

  “How come?” Aretha asked.

  “He stole a hundred thousand dollars from the cash register.”

  “Your dad worked at a place where they keep a hundred thousand dollars in the cash register?”

  “Uh-huh,” Ben said. “He works at a bank. He’s a bank teller.”

  “He’s a bank teller and he stole a hundred thousand dollars? And all they did was fire him?” Aretha asked.

  “His trial is in two weeks,” Ben said. “That’s the other reason he’s so depressed.”

  Aretha shook her head. “I know you are making this story up, Ben. I know you are trying to make me feel sorry for you. Well, I guess your plan has worked, because I feel sorry for anybody who has to make up a bunch of lies just to get somebody else to help him out. That’s pathetic.”

  “I know,” Ben admitted. “But I thought it was worth a try.”

  Aretha straightened up in her seat. “Here is the deal. I will run as the vice presidential candidate on your ticket, but I want something in return.”

  She turned to me. “I want you to help me make penicillin.”

  “Penicillin? Me?” I asked. “Why? Can’t your doctor give you a prescription?”

  “It’s for a Girl Scout merit badge,” Aretha said. “It’s called A Healthier You. What’s healthier for you than penicillin?”

  “I don’t know the first thing about how to make penicillin,” I said.

  Ben leaned over and punched me on the shoulder. “Come on, Mac! You could figure it out. Just buy a kit off the Internet or something!”

  “What do you say, Mac? It’s a hard-to-beat deal. I’ll help out your friend if you’ll help me out.”

  I sighed. “I guess we could try. But isn’t there an easier way for you to get a merit badge?”

  “I don’t do things the easy way,” Aretha said. “I do them the Aretha way.”

  Then she turned to Ben and held up her hand. They slapped high fives. “Okay, Ben,” she said, “we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  They had a lot of work to do? What about me? I had to figure out how to make penicillin, the most important medical invention of the twentieth century.

  In case you were wondering, penicillin production is not a normal part of the fourth-grade science curriculum.

  Unless you are Aretha Timmons.

  Here is the list of everything I have to get done this weekend:

  Write a speech for Ben for the Meet the Candidates session on Monday. This was part of the deal Aretha made with us. If she had to be Ben’s vice presidential running mate, I had to be Ben’s speechwriter. Ben may be a genius artist, but he can’t write his way out of a box filled with dictionaries and all the famous speeches of the universe.

  Begin developing sample molds to show Mrs. Patino for our big Mold Museum meeting on Tuesday.

  Write the book report I never got around to writing for Mrs. Tuttle.

  Make penicillin. And maybe when I am finished, I can reinvent the cure for polio.

  But before I got started on my list of things to do, I had to go with Sarah Forte-meyer, Teenage Girl Space Alien babysitter, to Goodwill to get my worms back.

  Sarah was waiting for me in the driveway when I got home from school on Friday. She was leaning against my mom’s minivan, jingling the keys. My mom and Lyle had taken Lyle’s car on their trip, leaving the van for Sarah in case there was an emergency situation.

  “Hop in the van, Stan,” she said. “The Goodwill people called five minutes ago. Somebody found your worms when they were sorting through clothing donations. Lucky for us, the manager your mom talked to was working, so he called right away.”

  This was the best news I’d heard all week. It almost made up for having to spend twenty-four hours straight with Sarah Fortemeyer.

  Almost, but not quite.

  “Let’s go!” I yelled. I threw my backpack on the front steps and jumped in the van. Margaret was already in her car seat and looking at her favorite book, Mr. Monkey Makes a Milk Shake.

  Before I became a scientist, Mr. Monkey was my favorite book too.

  This is not something I advertise.

  For a Teenage Girl Space Alien, Sarah Fortemeyer is an okay driver. The only problem about being in the van with her is that she has this sort of purple smell, which is either her perfume or her natural Teenage Girl Space Alien scent. Either way it makes me itchy. Fortunately, we made it to Goodwill before my body broke out in red, scratchy hives. My weekend was already going to be rotten. There was no need to add hives to the mix.

  When I got my worms back at Goodwill, ten of them were missing. “They must have fallen out of the box when the lid was taken off,” the manager said. He shrugged, like ten missing dried worms was no big deal.

  To me, it was a big deal.

  Do you know how hard it is to find dried worms? Oh, maybe if you live in Australia, it’s not a problem. But where I live, finding a dried worm is a major event. Especially if it’s not smushed beyond recognition.

  “I’ve got to find those worms!” I said. “They’re scientifically important to me and to worm collectors everywhere!”

  “I’m sorry,” the manager said. “Only Goodwill employees are allowed in the sorting areas.”

  “You don’t understand!” I yelled, but the manager just shook his head. You could tell he wasn’t going to budge.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mac,” Sarah said. “I personally guarantee that I’ll find you ten worms this weekend to make up for the ones you lost.”

  “Dried worms?” I asked.

  Sarah nodded. “Dried worms.”

  “Okay,” I said. At least that would keep Sarah out of my hair. She’d have to spend the whole weekend searching high and low.

  It has been a bad fall for dried worms.

  When we got home, Sarah immediately turned on the TV to some talk show. I thought about watching, just because I never get to watch anything at my house besides Polly Puppy and Her Puppy Friends. But after one minute I learned a valuable lesson.

  There are some shows even stupider than Polly Puppy.

  I know. It’s hard to believe.

  Besides, I needed to make some penicillin, and fast. Aretha said if I didn’t have something growing by Monday, she wouldn’t put her name on Ben’s presidential ticket.

  “I need to use the computer,” I told Sarah. “I have some scientific research to do.”

  “Are you allowed to use the computer, Scooter?” Sarah asked. “I thought your mom had a ‘No computer’ rule.”

  “Actually, it’s a ‘No computer on school days until after dinner, and then only if all homework has been completed and all teeth have been brushed’
rule,” I explained. “Besides, my mom has about two million filters downloaded. It’s not like I can actually do anything fun on the computer.”

  “Okay,” Sarah said. “As long as you can’t have any fun, I guess that’s all right.”

  Sarah Fortemeyer and my mom are two peas in a pod.

  I sat down at the computer on my mom’s desk in the family room and typed “penicillin” in a search engine. In about two seconds I got a return of 6,140,000 hits.

  Maybe I would need to narrow my search specifications.

  I typed in “How to grow penicillin.”

  I got 550,000 hits.

  That would have to do.

  The first thing I learned was that to make penicillin, you have to grow a mold called penicillium. Penicillium produces a liquid that is made into penicillin. All I needed was a lemon, a milk carton, and some dust.

  In our house finding dust would not be a problem.

  The lemon and the milk carton, on the other hand, would take a little more work.

  I stuck my head in the fridge. I found a half-full plastic milk jug with no lid and not one single lemon. There was a carton of smushy, oozing cherry tomatoes, three chunks of cheddar just beginning to show green spots, and something in a plastic container that I couldn’t recognize. There was even a plastic lemon that at one time had held lemon juice but was now empty. But no real lemons or citrus fruit of any kind.

  We would have to go to the store. That meant another car trip with the Teenage Girl Space Alien. Which meant more purple smells. More potential for red, scratchy hives breaking out all over my body.

  I picked up the phone and called Ben. “You have to help me,” I said. “I need a lemon and a milk carton, and I need them fast.”

  “No prob,” Ben said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes, tops.”

  Forty-five minutes later Ben showed up at my front door.

  He had two plastic bags dangling from his bike handles. In one there were three cartons of milk. Full cartons.

  In the other there were about forty lemons.

  “The great thing about living in an apartment complex is that somebody always has what you need,” Ben said, carrying the bags into the house. “Especially when about nine out of ten people who live there are senior citizens. Senior citizens have the best supplies. They’re totally organized.”

  “Why’d you get so much stuff?” I asked. “I mean, one lemon and one empty milk carton would have done it.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Ben said. “Only, when Mrs. Markowitz heard that Mrs. Grimes was giving me a lemon, she swore she had an even better lemon, and Mr. Penderthal said he had the best lemons of all. It went on like that for about twenty minutes.”

  “Well, all we need is one little lemon wedge,” I said.

  Ben thought about this for a second. “Maybe we can donate the rest to charity,” he said.

  We spent the next ten minutes drinking milk and eating cookies. Then I washed out the empty milk carton and sliced a lemon wedge.

  “Step one,” I said, “is putting dust on the lemon.”

  I swiped the lemon wedge on top of our fridge. It came back loaded with dust.

  “Step two,” I said, “the lemon wedge goes in a plastic Baggie, and we add five drops of water.”

  “And step three,” I said after I’d put the lemon wedge in the bag and Ben had used an eyedropper to drop five drops of water in with it, “is putting the Baggie in the milk carton and sealing the carton.”

  “How long will it take the penicillin to grow?” Ben asked.

  “A few days, I think,” I told him. “I’ll put the milk carton in the bathroom closet so it can get nice and steamy.”

  Ben looked thoughtful. “You know, this science stuff is pretty cool. Not as cool as art, but almost.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” I told him. “Because we’ve got a lot more work to do.”

  There was mold to be made. Lots of mold.

  Really, when you think about it, it was my kind of Friday night.

  “Mold experiment number one,” I said, “bread mold. The world’s most common mold, some would say. All we need is a slice of bread, a plastic Baggie, and some water.”

  “I get to do the water drops again!” Ben yelled.

  “Okay,” I told him. “You’re good at that.”

  Ben whooped. “All right!”

  Sometimes it is ridiculously easy to make him happy.

  The first trick was finding some bread in my house that wasn’t already moldy. Finally I noticed an unopened bag of white bread in a cabinet that looked relatively mold-free. I took out a slice, and Ben dribbled some water on it.

  “Now we leave the bread exposed to the air for about thirty minutes, pop it in the Baggie, put it in a closet, and wait for the mold to start growing. We ought to see something in three or four days.”

  “And then what do we do?” Ben asked.

  “Just look at it,” I said. “Just admire the wonder and beauty that is mold.”

  “So we don’t have to eat it or anything, right?”

  “No way,” I said. “In fact, you’re not even supposed to ever open the bag again. Some people are allergic to mold spores, so you don’t want to let any out of the bag. Everything has to be destroyed.”

  “That is so cool,” Ben said.

  Next I found a nearly empty mayonnaise jar in the fridge. “We’ll clean this out and use it for our mold terrarium. We’ll put in four or five different kinds of food, spray on a little water, put on the lid, and wait for the fun to begin.”

  Ben and I looked through the refrigerator and the cabinets and came up with one tomato slice, a piece of cheese, half a stale chocolate-covered doughnut, a handful of Cheerios, and a clump of macaroni. I turned the jar on its side and put the different foods inside. Ben added the water. “I can’t wait until all this mold starts growing,” he said. “It’s just going to be like this zoo of fungus.”

  That’s when inspiration hit me. “Maybe we could jump-start it,” I said. “Give our mold experiments a steam bath to get them growing. Only, if we do it in my bathroom, Margaret will destroy everything.”

  Ben frowned. “I’d say let’s do it at my place, but my mom would just scream and throw everything out.”

  And that’s when I had inspiration number two. “But my mom’s not here. Her bathroom’s going to be empty until tomorrow night. We can put all the mold up there now, run a hot shower for thirty minutes, turn off the water, close up the doors, and let the steam do its magic. Who’ll know the difference?”

  “Excellent idea!” Ben exclaimed.

  It took us only a few minutes to transport all our mold experiments upstairs and get the steam bath going. Once my mom’s bathroom was nice and steamy, I shut off the water and shut the door behind us. “All right, then,” I said when we were back downstairs. “This is a good start. But the best part of our mold project is yet to come.”

  “Better than spraying water on everything?” Ben asked.

  “A hundred times better,” I told him. “A million billion times better.”

  Ben’s eyes got wide. “What is it?”

  “I think you better plan on spending the night,” I told him. “Because in the morning we’re going on a slime hunt.”

  The amazing thing to me about science is that it is everywhere.

  It is a lot like mold in that way.

  I mean, look around you. There is dirt, water, and air. There is the sun and gravity. There are chemical reactions happening all over the place. Baking cookies is a scientific activity. Pour a little vinegar on some baking soda, and you get an explosion.

  I mean, how cool is that?

  And if you’re reading a great book about slime mold, and you get all excited and start wishing like anything you could see some slime mold for yourself, you don’t have to book the next flight to Australia. You can go out to the woods behind your house and find your very own slime mold right where you live.

  This idea is more exciting to some peopl
e than to others.

  “You’re going out to the woods to do what?” Sarah Fortemeyer asked Saturday morning when me and Ben announced we were off on an important scientific expedition.

  “To find some slime molds,” I told her again.

  “The slimiest slime molds that ever lived,” Ben added.

  “And this is something that would be okay with your mom?”

  “My mom understands the importance of scientific discovery,” I said. I wasn’t really making that up, either. It’s true my mom doesn’t like messes, and she pretty much hates frogs and almost any kind of insect you can think of. She has no appreciation for smelly stuff. I’ve asked for a chemistry set for every birthday and Christmas for the last three years, but so far her answer has been a big fat N-O. In general, she doesn’t like me doing anything that has the potential to mess up her carpet or burn down the house.

  But she takes me to the science museum downtown every other Sunday afternoon and whenever they open a new exhibit, and even though she complains about the mess I make when I start a new scientific project, she never says I can’t do it.

  It’s possible that in secret my mom kind of wishes she were a scientist herself.

  The woods behind my house would not appear to be the best woods in the world for scientific research, but even the smallest ecosystem is filled with surprises.

  “Look for rotten stuff,” I told Ben as we walked through my backyard. “Tree bark on the ground. Wet, rotted wood. Dead leaves.”

  It hardly took any time at all to find a nice slab of yellow slime mold growing on a chunk of wet pine bark.

  “It looks like somebody threw up,” Ben observed.

  “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “The coolest,” Ben said.

  “Here’s my idea,” I said as I carefully put the bark in a large bread bag. “We get a couple of these babies and we have a slime mold race. Keep track of which slime is sliming the fastest, that sort of thing.”