Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed!

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  When he answered the phone, he still sounded unhappy.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “All you’ve been talking about for a whole week is winning this election. And now that it looks like you actually might do it, you’re acting like your pet hamster died or something.”

  “I had a pet hamster once,” Ben said. “It didn’t die, though. It escaped.”

  “Did you get another one?”

  “No, I just waited for the first one to come back. In fact, I’m still waiting.”

  “Where did you live when your hamster escaped?” I asked.

  “Seattle,” Ben said. “But they say animals sometimes track down their owners, even when their owners have moved hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.”

  Yeah, dogs maybe. One cat out of a million. But a hamster?

  I don’t think so.

  “So, did you call your dad to tell him what a great job you and Aretha did today?” I asked, keeping my hamster thoughts to myself.

  “Nope,” Ben said. “There’s nothing to tell him about. I’ve decided to drop out of the race.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “Are you crazy? You could win it, Ben. People thought your speech was really cool.”

  “No, they thought Aretha was really cool,” Ben said. “I think she’s really cool too. And she’s smart and organized, just like your speech said. She ought to be president, not me. She’d be the best one out of everybody.”

  “But what about your dad coming to visit you if you win? What about pay-per-view movies and pizza?”

  “There’s pizza in Seattle,” Ben said. “I’ll just go visit him there, same as always.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like Ben to be so, well, reasonable. I mean, Aretha would make a great president. And he and his dad could definitely order pizza and watch movies in Seattle.

  Still, it’s hard to see somebody’s dream die, even if the dream was sort of dumb to begin with.

  “Hey, some of our mold’s starting to grow,” I said, trying to cheer him up. “The stuff growing on the bread is this really interesting shade of blue. Sort of like a scab.”

  “Scabs are gray, or else purple,” Ben said. “I’ve never seen a blue scab in my life.”

  “Imagine mixing the purple and gray,” I told him. “That’s the sort of blue I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah, I can sort of see what you’re saying,” Ben said, and by the way his voice sounded, I could tell he could see it in his head. That is one of the good things about having an artistic genius for your best friend. They’re very good at imagining stuff.

  “You want to hear about the mold terrarium?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Ben said. He was starting to sound a little happier. “Is the tomato totally grossazoid or what?”

  If you ever have to cheer somebody up, try talking to them about mold.

  Scientifically speaking, it works 100 percent of the time.

  It turns out that Mrs. Wanda Patino, principal of Woodbrook Elementary School, is not a big fan of mold.

  “In the basement of my school?” she said after I’d given her my Amazing Mold presentation, complete with illustrations and fun facts. “You want to grow mold in the basement of my school?”

  “Well, it’s kind of everybody’s school,” I pointed out. “And Mr. Reid said it would be okay.”

  “You want to grow mold in the basement of my school?” she asked again.

  Scientifically speaking, this conversation was starting to get a little boring.

  “It’s a science project,” I told her. “It’s educational. It’s probably the most educational thing any kid will do in this school all year. And our school would be the only school around for miles with its own mold museum. You might win an award for Most Scientific Principal or something.”

  Mrs. Patino just shook her head. I could tell I was not doing a very good job of convincing her of the wonderful-ness of mold.

  “Mac, I’m impressed by your initiative here,” she said after about two more minutes of head shaking. “But there are health codes we have to think about. Under the wrong conditions mold can be a very dangerous thing.”

  “You’re thinking about a different kind of mold,” I insisted. “The kind that gets inside buildings and makes people sick. That’s not the kind of mold I’m growing. Most of the molds I’m growing are slime molds. And they’re all in covered containers.”

  “I’m sorry, Mac,” Mrs. Patino said. She stood up and walked around to the front of her desk. “But I think I’d have a hard time convincing the school superintendent that your mold museum was anything but a health hazard.”

  I knew there wasn’t any use in arguing anymore. You can always tell with adults. When they’re finished with a topic once and for all, they get this little smile on their face like, I win, and no offense, but there’s nothing you can do about it, so now I’m going to go eat some disgusting snack like green olives with pimentos stuck in them, if you don’t mind.

  When I got out of Mrs. Patino’s office, lunch was almost over, and everybody in my class was on the playground. After I put my posters and my mold samples back in Mrs. Tuttle’s room, I went outside and found Ben over by the jungle gym, planting some sticks in the ground.

  “You can’t make trees grow that way, you know,” I told him.

  “I’m not growing trees,” he said. “I’m visualizing.”

  “Visualizing what?”

  “This scene I’m trying to draw in ‘Derek the Destroyer Meets the Amazon Volleyball Players.’ The amazons are chasing Derek through the jungle, and there’s going to be this trap where a net falls down from some trees. Anyway, for some reason I’ve been having a hard time visualizing how the trap works.”

  I sat down next to Ben. I was visualizing my hard work flushed down the toilet. I was visualizing a whole bunch of mold all dressed up with no place to go. In a few short days I had created a universe of mold—blue mold, green mold, snowy white mold, and speckled black mold—and for what? Instead of going into a museum to be admired by millions—or at least by the entire fourth grade of Woodbrook Elementary School— it would go into the trash.

  Well, not the slime mold. The slime mold was staying in my room.

  “Hey, Mac, didn’t we have a deal?”

  I looked up. Aretha was standing in front of me. She had her hand on her hip.

  “If I recall correctly, you owe me some penicillin mold,” she went on. “My troop meets tomorrow. It would be nice to be able to make the penicillin before then so I can get my badge.”

  I couldn’t believe it. In all the excitement of the last few days, the big speech and the big presentation and now the big, huge, disappointing letdown of no mold museum, I’d forgotten all about the penicillium mold growing in our bathroom closet.

  “I can bring what I have tomorrow,” I told her. “You know it’s not going to be like some pink bubble-gum-tasting stuff in a childproof bottle, right? I mean, I grew the mold. I don’t exactly know how to squeeze out the mold juice and turn it into medicine. I guess that would be your part of the process.”

  “Mold juice?” Aretha said. “Nobody ever said anything about mold juice.”

  “That’s what penicillin comes from,” I said. “Mold juice.”

  “I don’t know if the Girl Scouts will like that,” Aretha said.

  “If they’re like everybody else, they’ll hate it,” I said. “They’ll find it disgusting and gross and a health hazard. But it’s just mold. It’s part of nature’s recycling project. You can use it for medicine or for blue cheese. What could be so wrong with it?”

  “I love blue cheese,” Aretha said. “At least, I love blue cheese salad dressing.”

  “It’s mold,” I said with a sigh. “Just good old misunderstood mold.”

  Aretha looked at me. “Let me guess. Mrs. Patino said no to your mold museum idea.”

  I nodded.

  “Hey, you didn’t tell me that,” Ben said. “That’s really stinkazoid.”


  “She said mold is a health hazard,” I said.

  “Blue cheese is a health hazard?” Aretha folded her arms over her chest. “I don’t think so.”

  Then she turned to Ben. “Maybe we should make this part of our campaign. ‘A vote for Ben and Aretha is a vote for mold!’ If we get elected, we could get everybody to sign a petition, and then Mrs. Patino would have to let Mac have his mold museum.”

  “Um,” Ben said. He cleared his throat. “Um, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  Aretha eyed him suspiciously. “You have a problem with mold too?”

  “Uh, no, that’s not it,” Ben said. “It’s just that I’ve decided not to run for president.”

  “What? Why not?”

  Ben looked at his sticks. “Because I think you should be president. You’d do a lot better job than I would.”

  “But I don’t want to be president,” Aretha said. “I don’t even want to be vice president. All I want is twenty merit badges by December.”

  “If you didn’t want to be vice president, why did you agree to run on my ticket?” Ben asked.

  “Because I didn’t think you would win, quite frankly,” Aretha said. “Besides, I needed some help making penicillin, remember?”

  “But now I probably am going to win,” Ben said. “Only, the only reason I’m probably going to win is because of you. When you and I made that speech, everybody saw that you’re, like, a leader or something. I’m just an artist.”

  “I do have natural leadership abilities, it’s true,” Aretha admitted. “But I do not have political drive. The only time I really got excited about the election was when we made that speech together. Then it didn’t seem like politics. It seemed like fun.”

  “It’s like Ben has the drive and you have the skills,” I said. “And together you make a team that people want to vote for.”

  “We do make a good team,” Aretha agreed. “It’s not something I would have predicted, but I have to admit it’s a fact. And I guess after we made that speech, I did start to feel like being vice president would be interesting. Although, frankly, I would make a better president than vice president. Ben’s right about that.”

  A flash went off in my head. “So why don’t you switch?” I asked.

  “Switch what?” Ben asked.

  “Why doesn’t Aretha run for president and you run for vice president? Because Aretha would be a great president, which everybody knew the minute you guys started making your speech, including Aretha. But you’d make a good vice president, Ben. You’re the one who would bring creativity and energy to your administration.”

  Ben and Aretha looked at each other. They nodded.

  A switch. What a brilliant concept.

  Really, sometimes I amaze myself with my own geniosity.

  The next genius idea came from Ben.

  Which sort of surprised me, if you want to know the truth.

  I mean, he’s a great artist and everything, but his ideas aren’t usually so hot. Like the time he decided to draw an entire Derek the Destroyer story on his bedroom walls.

  Using permanent markers.

  Specifically speaking, using Midnight Black permanent markers, which can never ever be washed off, even if your mom has a total fit when she sees what you’ve done.

  That’s a pretty typical Ben idea.

  His genius idea came after his dad’s visit, after Ben and Aretha won the election on Thursday morning. Even though Ben was only vice president and not president, his dad still flew all the way from Seattle.

  It turns out that Ben’s dad thinks being vice president will look almost as good on Ben’s résumé as being president.

  Not that Ben has a résumé.

  To be honest, I’m not even sure Ben knows what a résumé is.

  When Ben’s dad came to visit him the weekend after the election, he gave Ben his old video camcorder, since he’d just gotten a new mini-DV camcorder. He told Ben if he wanted to be an artist so much, he should at least be a video artist so he could make some money. Ben said he would think about it, which made his dad happy.

  One day Ben’s dad will accept him for being the comic-book artist genius that he is. But for now Ben is having a lot of fun taking videos of everything that moves.

  Even stuff that moves really, really slowly.

  Ever watched a video of slime mold?

  Now you can, every day at lunch, in the basement of Woodbrook Elementary School.

  Mr. Reid provides the snacks.

  Not that too many of the people watching the video have really felt like eating snacks. I like to think this is because they are so in love with the slime mold that they are too enraptured to even think about eating.

  But I’m pretty sure it’s because they’re grossed out.

  It took three weeks to make the video. Every day Ben would come over to my house, and we would set up bright lights and film the slime mold race.

  From day to day it was hard to see any progress. But when you looked at three weeks of tape all run together, you could really see the molds moving.

  It’s possible that slime mold racing will be the next big trend at Woodbrook Elementary.

  Ben also videotaped me telling all the wondrous facts about mold, what it is and what it does. And Lyle lent me his digital camera so I could take lots of pictures of the mold I grew at home, as well as mold I found out in the woods and other places, such as my refrigerator and Ben’s shower. I put the pictures into a slide show that Mr. Reid shows on his computer for anybody that’s interested.

  You will be happy to hear that a lot of people are very interested.

  I think one reason mold has caught on in a big way at my school is that the first week we set up the exhibit, it was rainy. So after lunch you had the choice of being bored out of your mind playing hangman in Mrs. Tuttle’s classroom, or going down to the basement and watching Mold TV.

  I don’t know one single fourth grader who would say no to a little TV watching during school hours.

  Now that people know I know how to grow slime mold, I am getting a lot of orders. So me, Ben, and Aretha are thinking about starting a business.

  “Maybe we should start a campaign to make slime mold our official classroom mascot,” Aretha said this morning at recess. We were sitting on the jungle gym, which had sort of become our meeting spot for discussing fourth-grade politics and mold ideas.

  “I could design slime mold T-shirts,” Ben said. “We could sell them to raise money for a class pizza party.”

  “And if a slime mold is our class mascot, our business would really take off,” I said. “Everybody would want their own slime mold to show their class spirit.”

  “And if we have a successful business, I will earn the Business-Wise merit badge,” said Aretha. “Which means I only have seven more to go to meet my goal of twenty by December, since I got my health merit badge last week.”

  Aretha ended up using her mom’s blender to get the penicillin juice out of the penicillium mold, in case you were wondering.

  Her mom is making her buy a new blender. With her own money.

  As I walked home from the bus stop, my brain was full of ideas for a successful mold business. Besides selling slime molds, we could sell Grow Your Own Mold kits, which would include bread, an eyedropper, some mold spores, and instructions. We could also give tours of my refrigerator, for a small fee.

  Sarah Fortemeyer, Teenage Girl Space Alien, was sitting at the kitchen table polishing her fingernails when I got home. Today she was trying out various shades of purple.

  I nearly broke out in hives just watching her.

  “You know, Macky Mac, I’ve been thinking about it,” Sarah said, “and I’ve decided that we have a lot in common.”

  I staggered backward a few steps.

  This was the meanest thing Sarah Fortemeyer had ever said to me.

  “For instance, we both like to experiment,” she said, waving her fingers at me. “You like to experiment with mold, I like to experiment
with fingernail polish. Today I have ten different shades of purple, from Greatest Grape to Violently Violet.”

  I checked my arm. I was pretty sure I could see little red dots popping up as Sarah spoke.

  “Today I think I have accomplished one of my most significant experiments to date,” Sarah continued, standing up. “If you’ll follow me, you will witness an amazing transformation.”

  Sarah began walking toward the stairs. I felt my stomach grow cold with fear.

  She was heading toward my room.

  I followed behind her, slowly. Very slowly.

  As slowly as a slime mold, only slower.

  “Come on, Mac!” Sarah called to me from the top of the steps. “You’re really going to like this. One hundred percent guaranteed.”

  I slimed my way up the stairs. When I reached the doorway to my room, I closed my eyes.

  I had always really liked my room. The comfortableness of it. The lived-in quality of it. The sheer sloppy Big Mac-attack factor of it.

  I knew when I opened my eyes, that would all be gone.

  “I checked with your mom to see if this would be okay,” Sarah said. Her voice sounded like it was coming from inside my room. My eyes were still closed, so I didn’t know for sure. “Since I’m taking a carpentry class in school, I do have the necessary skills needed for this sort of project.”

  Sarah Fortemeyer, Teenage Girl Space Alien from the Planet of Really Pink Stuff, was taking a carpentry class? My eyes popped open from the sheer surprise of this idea.

  And that’s when I saw what she had done to my room.

  She had turned it into a mold museum.

  She had mounted three shelves to the wall above my desk, and three more above the head of my bed. My mold samples, which now number thirty-seven, lined the shelves.

  “I … I can’t believe it,” I stammered. “This is incredible.”