Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed! (5 page)

Here is a scientific observation I have made about my life: For
every
good thing that happens, there is usually an aqually bad thing that happens. For instance, this year I got Mrs. Tuttle for my teacher. That's a good thing. Then my mom hired Sarah Fortemeyer, Teenage Girl Space Alien, “to be our babysitter. That's bad.

Very bad.

Sometimes it's the other way around,
though. At the beginning of the school year my best friend, Marcus, moved away, which was bad, but a little while later I got a new best friend, Ben, which was good.

At the end of every day you can add everything up to see how your life is going so far. If I graphed it, I think the graph would show that most days everything sort of evens out—not great, not terrible. At first I thought yesterday would be that kind of day. The mold museum idea was great, Ben running for president was not so great. It was kind of even steven. But then three things happened to make me change my mind:

1. At dinner my mom told me that she and my stepdad are going away this weekend. On Friday they are going to a dinner theater that's two hours away,
and coming home Saturday afternoon. At first I thought this was a great thing, because then maybe my dad could come and take care of me and Margaret, even if Margaret is my half-sister and not even related to him. My dad treats Margaret like she's a regular person. He doesn't even mind that she only says about seventeen words and is obsessed with this doll she has named Trudy, whose nose she has completely chewed off.

My dad just acts like Trudy is a regular person too.

“I'm sorry, but your father can't come this weekend,” my mom told me when I asked if Dad would take care of us. “He's coaching the Mathletes again this year, and they've got a meet on Saturday.”

“We could go there,” I suggested. I love watching the Mathletes. My dad is a high
school math teacher, and the Mathletes are his best students. My dad is a great teacher, so whenever I'm around his students, they treat me like I'm the world's most incredibly important person.

You could get used to being treated that way, in case you were wondering.

“I'm sorry, sweetie, but driving you to Dad's would take us three hours out of our way.” My mom wiped her mouth with a Pete's Pizza Express napkin and smiled at me. “But I've got very exciting news. Guess who's going to take care of you while we're gone?”

“Grammy?”

I wouldn't mind if my grandmother took care of us. She's the only adult in captivity who actually believes watching TV is good for children.

“Even better! Sarah's going to babysit!”
My mother's smile stretched two miles wide, like she'd just told me she was giving me my own chemistry lab for Christmas.

I panicked. “Couldn't I stay at Ben's this weekend?” I asked.

“And miss the fun here? No way, mister!”

Sometimes when my mom is trying to convince you that something she wants you to do is a good idea, she gets this cheerful tone to her voice that is almost scary.

You would think that finding out Sarah the Teenage Girl Space Alien was staying at your house for an entire twenty-four-hour stretch, possibly longer, would be bad enough. You would not need one more negative thing in your life to make your day totally rotten. In
fact, you would probably feel like another bad thing was entirely impossible.

You would be wrong.

2. After finding out about Sarah, I needed time to recover from the bad news and come up with a plan for keeping her away. So I went to my room to count my worms.

Counting worms is an excellent way to get your brain rolling.

I collect dried-up earthworms. So far I have 147, which I keep in a shoe box in my closet. The longest dried-up worm I have is four inches. My goal is to find one that is at least four feet. This will be hard to do because worms shrink up when they dry. Also, I will have to move to Australia to do this, since they have the longest worms.

I asked my mom if we could move to Australia, but she said no.

I asked my stepdad, Lyle, if we could move to Australia, and he said maybe, and if we didn't move there, maybe we could take a vacation there someday.

If you have to have a stepdad, Lyle is the kind to get.

When I got up to my room, I couldn't find the shoe box. Usually if something gets lost in my closet, it's because it's gotten mixed up with a bunch of my shirts and pants, which I'm supposed to hang up, only I never do. In case you're wondering, if you pile stuff up just right, it hardly wrinkles at all.

I went to look for the shoe box under a pile of clothes, but all of a sudden I realized that there wasn't a pile of clothes. All my clothes were hanging from hangers.

All my shoes were lined up in a row on the closet floor.

All my games and LEGOs and Lincoln Logs were stacked up neatly.

Sarah the Teenage Girl Space Alien had cleaned my closet.

“Mom!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Sarah threw out my worms!”

I ran to check the outside garbage cans. No shoe box. I checked the recycling bin. No shoe box.

“Sarah probably dropped it off at Goodwill,” my mom said when I came back into the house. “I asked her to pull out all the clothes in your closet that didn't fit anymore. She probably just looked at the size printed on the shoe box and thought there were too-small shoes in there.”

“She should have looked in the box!
Who takes a shoe box to Goodwill without even looking to see what's inside? It could have been a box full of tarantulas!”

“She would have heard tarantulas scurrying around inside the box,” my mom pointed out.

I should mention that my mom is not the world's biggest fan of my dried-worm collection. Which probably explains why she didn't sound too upset about the missing shoe box.

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.