Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Blasts Off!

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “They’re finally going to make Mr. Reid principal?”

  Ben grinned. “I wish. But it’s even cooler than that. I heard some slobber news.”

  “Slobber news? Like, on the Slobber News Channel?”

  The Slobber News Channel.

  Sometimes I crack myself up.

  “Har, har, very funny, Mac.” Ben smacked my knee with his spelling book to let me know just how funny he thought I was. “No, I heard it from Chester Oliphant. He was going to share it at Share and Stare, but we ran out of time.”

  Chester Oliphant is the funniest boy in our class. In fact, he is so funny that I haven’t mentioned our slobber experiments to him. I have a feeling I would be hearing a lot of slobber jokes if I did. He is a pretty nice person, so they wouldn’t be mean jokes, but my guess is there would be a lot of them.

  For, like, the next five years.

  “So, what slobber news did Chester have?” I asked.

  “Gila monster slobber,” Ben announced. He leaned back in his seat and smiled. “How coolazoid is that? You know what a Gila monster is, right? It’s a kind of lizard. It’s not a real monster or anything.”

  I sighed. “I’m pretty sure I knew that already, Ben.”

  Ben shrugged. “You never know. Anyway, scientists are using Gila monster slobber for medicine. For people with diabetes.”

  “That’s really cool,” I admitted. “That’s like what we found out about vampire bats online. How their saliva might be good for people with heart problems.”

  “I’d probably have a heart attack if someone tried to give me vampire slobber,” Ben said. “So I don’t think it would be very good for me.”

  “But just think: Gila monsters, vampire bats … it’s like all this saliva is good for you. And don’t forget that dog slobber might be good for you too.” I was starting to get excited. “The saliva research we’re doing could be the next big thing.”

  “I guess,” Ben said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great research. Only, exactly what are we discovering?”

  I had to think a minute. “Well, we know that Labrador retrievers and bassett hounds have the gooiest slobber, and that Chihuahuas have the wateriest.”

  “Yeah, but what does that prove?”

  The bus pulled up to my stop. Ben and I got off, only Ben got off like a person in a normal mood, and when I stepped on the sidewalk, I was totally depressed.

  My slobber experiments didn’t prove anything.

  By the time we got to my room, I was ready to give up slobber science altogether. What could a fourth-grade scientist add to the amazing findings grown-up scientists had already come up with?

  I was pretty sure the answer to that was “Nothing.”

  “Look at it this way, Mac,” Ben said, flopping down on my floor and searching for a snack under my bed. “It’s pretty neat that you came up with the idea of slobber research on your own.”

  “Didn’t you come up with the idea?” I asked him. I grabbed a bag of cheese crackers from my top desk drawer and tossed them to Ben.

  “No, I’m pretty sure you did,” he said, opening up the bag of crackers and inhaling them. “At least, I think you did. Anyway, you were the one who got the idea to look up dog slobber online.”

  Ben sat up. He popped the last of the crackers in his mouth. And then his mouth fell wide open. I could see a bunch of chewed-up crackers inside.

  Which was pretty gross, in case you were wondering.

  Ben pointed to the top of my dresser, where all of the jars of dog slobber were sitting. He swallowed. “Um, is it my imagination, or is there something growing in some of those jars?”

  We both got up to look. Sure enough, mold was growing in five of the jars. I checked out the labels. The slobber belonged to Lemon Drop and Sheila, the dogs with the thickest saliva samples.

  There was no mold growing in the jars collected from the Chihuahuas, miniature poodles, or Killer.

  “I don’t know what it proves,” I told Ben. “But it proves something.”

  Ben nodded. “We might just be on to some amazing discovery here.”

  “Yep,” I said. “We just have to figure out what.”

  chapter twelve

  I have noticed that my life can go for long stretches without anything happening at all. I go to school, I come home and do my homework, I watch TV for thirty minutes, I play on the computer for thirty minutes, and at nine o’clock I go to bed.

  It sounds more boring than it actually is.

  I mean, don’t forget that there is a bunch of eating, too, plus hanging out with Ben and walking Lemon Drop.

  And there is my dried worm collecting. As of three weeks ago I am up to 178 dried worms. I mean, in pristine condition, no broken or partial ones.

  I’m pretty sure that is a world record.

  But here is what always happens: Just when my life is going at a slow, steady pace, events start piling on top of one another until it seems like everything is happening at once.

  There is a scientific explanation for this.

  I just don’t know what it is.

  Here is everything that has happened in the last five days, starting with Saturday.

  The first thing that happened was I went to work for Mr. Reid. Correction: Lyle and I went to work for Mr. Reid.

  Lyle was just supposed to drop me off on his way to Fitness World. But when we got to the house Mr. Reid and his son, Carl, were working at, 4356 Brightwood Way, he decided he should give Mr. Reid his cell phone number, just in case there was an accident or we got finished early. And then he got interested in what Mr. Reid was doing when we found him, which was tearing the deck off the back of the house. Mr. Reid said they were going to replace it with a screened porch.

  “Boy, I used to do this kind of work during the summers when I was in college,” Lyle told Mr. Reid. I could see him looking at the crowbar in Mr. Reid’s hand. His eyes got all shiny, like he wouldn’t mind taking a whack at something himself.

  Mr. Reid noticed too. He handed Lyle the crowbar. “Have at it. I need a few minutes to show Mac what to do.”

  We left Lyle trying to pry off a railing from the side of the deck. He was pulling at it and twisting around and getting all red in the face.

  It was the happiest I’ve ever seen him.

  Mr. Reid pulled a pair of work gloves from his overalls pocket and handed them to me. “Your job is going to be moving pieces of the deck from here,” he said, pointing to a pile of pried-off deck pieces, “to there.” He pointed to a humongous portable Dumpster. “Watch out for nails, okay?”

  I nodded. Then Mr. Reid led me to the garage, where a man was sawing some boards. “This is my son, Carl,” he said. “Carl, this is Mac.”

  Carl waved at me. “Glad to have you on board, Mac. Dad tells me you’re quite the scientist. I hear you’re going to Space Camp.”

  “If I can save up enough money,” I told him.

  “Well, good luck,” he said. “I was always interested in space. When I was a kid, I thought I might be an astronaut one day. Saved up all my money to buy a telescope. Boy, I used to spend half the night looking through that thing. It’s still up in Dad’s attic, as a matter of fact. It’s pretty beat up, but if you wanted to try it out, I’d be happy to lend it to you. But you probably already have one, huh?”

  I shook my head. Why hadn’t it occurred to me to get a telescope? I could be studying the planets every night from my backyard. I could be making important astronomical discoveries. I could be spying on our next-door neighbor Mr. Clutterman, who seemed very nice but sort of nervous, like he had a secret he was trying to hide out in his garage….

  Not that I would ever use a scientific instrument for something as unscientific as spying.

  Nope, not me.

  “You don’t have a telescope?” Carl asked. “Then I’ll bring my old one next—”

  He was interrupted by a huge crash. We all ran out to the yard, where we found Lyle standing in the middle of a pile of boards
, grinning.

  “I finished the job myself,” he said. “Mind if I hang around and help out some more?”

  That is how Lyle became the fourth employee of Reid & Son, Inc.

  The next thing that happened was that on Monday I met Corey Anderson, Genius Fifth-Grade Scientist.

  It wasn’t by choice. Mr. Reid stopped by Mrs. Tuttle’s classroom first thing in the morning and told me to come by his office when I was done eating lunch. Corey would be there, waiting to talk to me about Space Camp.

  For the rest of the morning I was as jumpy as an overheated atom.

  “Why are you making such a big deal about this guy?” Ben asked me at lunch. “He’s just another human being, like you or me.”

  “I know, but I want to make a good impression.” I finished chewing my tuna fish sandwich. “The thing with fifth graders is, they think they’re such a big deal. And Corey Anderson sort of is a big deal. I mean, he’s pretty much a certified scientific genius. But I want him to know that I’m not a nobody.”

  “You want me to go with you?” Ben asked. He flexed his arms to show off his muscles and cracked his knuckles. “In case this Corey Anderson kid needs some straightening out?”

  I shook my head. I appreciated that Ben wanted to stick up for me, but I was pretty sure things wouldn’t get violent. I just didn’t want to walk out of the room feeling like a failure. What if Corey Anderson told me he didn’t think I was Space Camp material? What if he doubted my scientific credentials? I mean, what did I have to show for myself, except for an honorable-mention ribbon from the fourth-grade science fair and an excellent collection of slime mold?

  As it turned out, the slime mold was all I needed.

  That’s pretty much always the case.

  “Slime mold rocks,” Corey told me two seconds after Mr. Reid introduced us. We were in Mr. Reid’s office, just kicking back like a couple of Einsteins who’d finished lunch early. “Mr. Reid told me all about your collection. You’re so lucky your house is near some woods. There’s maybe two trees in my yard. I’ve looked everywhere for slime mold, but it’s not to be found.”

  “Does your house have a crawl space?” I asked him.

  He nodded.

  “You should try under there. Crawl spaces can get pretty damp. There’s not a lot of light, and slime mold likes a little light, but still, I found a pretty good sample of Physarum once in our crawl space.”

  Corey Anderson’s eyes grew wide. “No way! That’s so cool.”

  Then we got down to business.

  “Here’s the thing about Space Camp,” Corey said, leaning back in his chair. “It’s the most awesome thing you’ll ever experience.”

  “What was your favorite part?” I asked.

  “That’s easy,” Corey said, grinning. “The Mars roller coaster.”

  I nearly fell out of my chair. “A roller coaster? On Mars?”

  Corey sat up and pointed toward the ceiling. “You know how Mars has humongous mountains?”

  I nodded, looking up, like I could see the mountains on Mars from where I was sitting.

  “Well, basically, on the Mars roller coaster you’re getting a feel for what it would be like to ride down one of those mountains. And you go reeeaaaallly fast. One kid threw up.”

  “Cool!” I said.

  Corey looked sort of embarrassed. “Actually, it was me,” he admitted. “But it was really close to the end. And up to that point I was having a great time.”

  “It sounds awesome,” I told him.

  “Did I mention you get to build your own rocket—and launch it?” Corey asked. “You would not believe how high up those things go.”

  I fell back in my chair. I’d read about the rocket launches, but that wasn’t the same as someone talking about them in real life. The idea that I might launch my own rocket was almost too much for me. I have been asking my mom for a rocket launcher kit since I was five. She says I can have one when I’m thirty.

  But if I went to Space Camp, I would launch my first rocket before I even turned ten.

  At that point it was official: I was going to Space Camp if I had to sell everything I owned to get there. Even my slime mold collection.

  Okay, maybe not my slime mold collection.

  But I’d trade my dried worm collection for a week at Space Camp.

  And that’s saying something.

  • • •

  The third thing that happened: Ben finished the Lemon Drop documentary.

  Here’s what I’d been counting on: that he’d never finish it. Ben is the sort of person who has a lot of unfinished projects lying around. I think it’s because he’s very creative and is always coming up with new ideas. He’ll be working on one comic book when an idea for another one will come to him, so he’ll start working on a second comic book.

  He always finishes his comic books eventually, but it can take months of going back and forth between “Derek the Destroyer Versus the Mutant Toad Warriors,” “Derek the Destroyer Versus the Putrid Pea Men,” and “Derek the Destroyer Versus the United Ignited Iguanas.”

  So I figured the same thing would happen with the Lemon Drop documentary. Which would solve my problem of Ben applying to private school near where his dad lived, because, let’s face it, a stack of comic books he’d drawn, no matter how amazing they were, wasn’t going to get him accepted anywhere.

  So when he walked into Mrs. Tuttle’s room Wednesday morning waving a USB memory stick at me, I went cold all over.

  “It’s all right here, Mac!” he shouted across the room. “My brilliantoid Lemon Drop documentary, uploaded fresh from my camcorder this morning. We can watch it on Mr. Reid’s computer at lunch-time.”

  My only hope was that Ben’s Lemon Drop documentary would be terrible. But I couldn’t really hope that, because I knew Ben had worked hard on it. It was important to him. And I knew that he hoped it would make a good impression on his dad.

  So when Lemon Drop: Dog Slobberer turned out to be brilliant, I did my best to feel happy for him.

  But I felt terrible. I knew I was about to lose my best friend. Which, in case you were wondering, is one of the worst feelings in the world you can have. Especially when you know you’ll never have another best friend as good as the one you have now.

  “So when’s the application due, anyway?” I asked him as we got back to Mrs. Tuttle’s classroom. I was thinking about the great scene where the camera caught Lemon Drop batting his slobbery tennis ball against the garage door with his paw. “He’s playing slobberball!” Ben had yelled, and Lemon Drop turned to the camera and started barking, like he couldn’t believe that Ben figured out what he was doing. Then he whacked the ball so hard against the garage door that it bounced about ten feet into the air. Lemon Drop caught it in his mouth and started turning around in circles on his hind legs.

  How could any school not accept Ben after seeing that?

  “What application?” “For that private school near your dad’s house,” I told him. “The one you’re going to try to get a scholarship to?”

  “Oh, that’s not until high school,” Ben said. “I just wanted to get an early start learning how to make documentaries. By high school I’m going to be like George Lucas or somebody, don’t you think?”

  High school?

  He wasn’t going to apply to private school in Seattle until high school?

  That was about a hundred years away.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or sock him in the nose.

  “George Lucas doesn’t make documentaries, bozo,” I told him. I decided I was too relieved to do anything but call him a dumb name.

  Ben turned and looked at me. “Star Wars isn’t a documentary?”

  “It’s all made up,” I informed him. “Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader—they never existed.”

  Ben looked shocked.

  And then he nearly fell on the ground laughing.

  Mrs. Tuttle came over to see what the problem was. She ended up throwing one of the rubber frogs she k
eeps in a jar on her desk at him. Not hard, just enough to get his attention.

  Ben stood up and wiped tears from his eyes. “I guess E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial isn’t a documentary either, huh?”

  I froze. E.T. wasn’t for real?

  I’d always sort of thought it was.

  chapter thirteen

  On Wednesday I got two dozen petri dishes in the mail.

  It was like a dream come true.

  “Mrs. Cavazos, the ninth-grade biology teacher, was cleaning out her supply closet,” my dad told me when I called him to say thanks. “She had some extras she couldn’t use and remembered I had a son who was a budding biologist, so she gave them to me.”

  Strictly speaking, I prefer not to limit myself to one branch of the sciences. On the other hand, if someone gives me two dozen petri dishes because they think I’m a biologist, I’m not exactly going to tell them they’re wrong.

  I opened the box and took out a dish. A petri dish is a small, flat-bottomed container that comes with a lid. You can use it for all kinds of experiments, but mostly it gets used for growing stuff. You put some special petri-dish jelly in it (called nutrient agar) and then samples of stuff, like bacteria or even seeds, and see what grows.

  That’s what happens when the doctor thinks you have strep throat. Your tonsils get jabbed with a giant cotton swab, and then the doctor rubs the cotton swab in a petri dish and waits for something to develop. If it’s streptococcus bacteria, be prepared to spend the next week swallowing a bunch of putrid pink antibiotics.

  Just warning you.

  Anyway, after I got off the phone with my dad, I tried to think of some great experiments I could run using my new petri dishes. Growing bacteria wouldn’t be too hard, since bacteria is everywhere and multiplies like crazy. All I’d have to do was prepare the nutrient agar, put it in a petri dish, and leave the dish uncovered for a little while. Plenty of bacteria would find its way in.

  Or, I thought, I could use a Q-tip and do a swab of the inside of my cheek.