Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed! (3 page)
Read Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed! Online
Authors: Frances O'Roark Dowell
Ben is a genius artist. That's the only thing he's a genius at, but it makes up for all the rest of the stuff.
I unfolded the paper flat on my desk and read Ben's comic strip. In the first panel there was a picture of him sitting on his couch in front of the TV. A thought bubble said, “I'm bored!” He certainly did look bored.
In the second panel there was Ben again, only now a bunch of lightbulbs were going off all around his head.
In the third panel he was thinking, “I'll run for class president!”
And in the last panel he was holding up a picture of me. “But who will be my campaign manager?⦔
I scrunched up the paper and threw it in the trash can. Ever since I'd known Ben, he'd had a bunch of really bad ideas, but running for class president had to be the worst. Here are the reasons:
- To be elected class president, you either have to be someone like Stacey Windham, who is the right combination of mean and every once in a while nice, so that all the girls want to be her friend, or you have to be someone like Chester Oliphant, who is funny and pretty much everybody's favorite person in
the class. To be an annoying artistic genius like Ben is not going to win you any votes. - Ben would be a terrible president. He is unorganized and is always saying stuff that makes people mad, and he doesn't care about anything like school spirit or making the cafeteria ladies serve pizza every day instead of just on Fridays. All Ben cares about is drawing comic books.
- I don't have time to be a campaign manager, and if Ben really wants to run for class president, he's going to need a campaign manager. But I have already dedicated my life to ridding Woodbrook Elementary
School of mold. This does not leave any room for politics.
That reminded me. I opened my door and yelled down the stairs, “Hey, Sarah, you didn't clean out the refrigerator today too, did you?”
“Yeah, I did,” Sarah yelled back. “Your mom paid me twenty extra bucks to do that, which I really need becauseâ”
I slammed my door shut. This was a real setback. Our refrigerator is one of the best sources of mold in the Western world.
I guessed I would have to go over to Ben's. Because if our refrigerator was the best source of mold, his bathroom shower was the second best. I could go over there, run some preliminary tests with different household cleaners, and start taking notes.
And while I was there, I would convince Ben that he'd win the Miss America contest before he'd win the class president election.
And he'd win by a lot more votes, too.
“I'd make a great class president!”
Ben waved the remote at the TV set and let it do its magic. At my house we have a very strict TV-watching policy. You can only watch public-television cartoons, and then you can only watch the ones made for four-year-olds. At Ben's house you can choose from about fifty different cartoon networks, and on every single one someone is always
either saying something really sarcastic or shooting some sort of computerized gizmo that makes everything explode.
It's awesome.
“Who told you you'd make a great class president?” I asked.
“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.