Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed! (6 page)

This morning when I woke up,
The Red Monster Returns
was on top of my face, making it sort of hard to breathe. My bedside lamp was still on. My book report had not been written. I was pretty sure I was starting the second bad day in a row.

And then something awesome happened.

It all started when I had to go to the bathroom.

“At first I thought the frog in the toilet was dead,” I told everybody in Share and Stare later. Share and Stare is what Mrs. Tuttle has instead of Show and Tell. In Share and Stare you are only allowed to talk about stuff that has to do with what we're studying in Mrs. Tuttle's class. Like, if you found a Froot Loop in the shape of Alaska, and we were studying U.S. geography, you could bring that in. Or if your aunt sent you a postcard of a giraffe when we were studying vertebrates in science, that would be a good thing to share.

You are not allowed to share your stuffed pig named Oinky just because you feel like it, which Roland Forth learned the hard way.

“I knew it was a frog right away and not a toad,” I said, “because it had really long legs. You could tell it was a frog that
had been a really good jumper. So that made me feel extra bad that it was dead. Only, it wasn't dead at all, which I found out when my sister, Margaret, ran in and tried to flush it down the toilet.”

You would not have believed how far that frog jumped.

I mean, it went at least eight feet.

Right on top of my mom's head.

Okay, it really landed right on top of her shoulder, but that doesn't make as good of a picture as a frog landing on her head. Which it almost did, but it lost its balance at the last minute and plopped onto her shoulder instead.

Have I mentioned that my mom does not like frogs?

“Mac!” she screamed. “Get this monster off me! Now!”

“It's not a monster, Mom,” I explained. “It's an amphibian. That means it lives part of its life in water and part of its life on land.”

“I don't care if it lives part of its life on Neptune,” my mom yelled. “Get it out of here!”

By this time the frog had jumped off my mom's shoulder and was hopping down the stairs.

“Neptune's too cold,” I told my mom as I ran down the stairs after the frog. “Besides, it's a gaseous planet, so it'd be pretty hard to hop around on.”

I always enjoy it when you can bring interesting scientific knowledge into everyday conversation.

Right as the frog hit the landing, my stepdad came in through the front door with the morning paper. In came Lyle, out went the frog. In about three hops he was across our front yard and heading for the street. He hit the curb just as Markie Vollencraft was speeding by in his VW Bug with the window down.

One last hop and that frog was in the VW Bug and headed straight for West Linnett High School.

I am not making this up.

Mrs. Tuttle gave me a look like she thought I was. “That must have been quite some hop, Mac,” she said.

“Frogs can jump over twenty times their own length,” I told her. I'd taken the
F-He
volume of our old encyclopedia set with me to read on the bus, so I was
filled with frog information. “That would be like you or me jumping a hundred feet. The longest recorded frog jump is thirty-three feet and five inches. Compared to that, my frog jumping into Markie Vollencraft's VW Bug was nothing.”

“So how'd the frog get in the toilet?” Brandon Woo asked.

“That's what I'm not sure about,” I said. “Maybe it came through the pipes. But I don't know if a frog could do that or not.”

“You should ask Mr. Reid,” Aretha said. “I bet he knows a lot about pipes.”

Mr. Reid is our school janitor. He is famous for being able to fix anything, including the sinks in the boys' bathrooms, which for some mysterious reason are always getting clogged up with soggy toilet paper, and the school's field trip van, which breaks down at least once during every field trip. The teacher in charge always carries Mr. Reid's cell phone number so she can call him from wherever the van has broken down and he can come and make it run long enough to get back to school.

That's how I ended up going down to the basement to talk to Mr. Reid at lunch. In fact, Mrs. Tuttle made me go, since by that time all anybody in my class could talk about was how that frog could have gotten into my toilet.

“I'd say it'd be unusual for a frog to
make it all the way up through the pipes,” Mr. Reid told me when I explained to him what had happened that morning. He stroked his chin, like he was giving the matter some serious thought. “Where would a frog get into the system and swim up? Did he swim through the sewage line? Not unless there was a broken place where he could've gotten in. But if you've got a broken place in the sewage line, you've got sewage coming out of the sewage line, if you dig what I'm saying.”

I shook my head. I didn't dig.

“Sewage, son,” Mr. Reid said, “is what we flush down the toilet. Goes into the sewage pipes running underground, all the way to the treatment plant. Believe you me, sewage gets out through an open pipe, you'll hear about it pronto. But you'll smell it first.”

Mr. Reid took a bite of his ham sandwich. I was wondering how he could eat during a conversation about sewage, but I guess if you're a janitor, you probably get used to gross stuff. It might not affect you at all after a while.

“My guess is that frog got into the house through the door, same way it got out,” Mr. Reid continued. “Maybe it hopped in on its own, maybe it was in a box or a bag.”

Realizing that Mr. Reid didn't seem at all bothered by sewage, I decided now would be a good time to bring up my mold museum idea. I'd already asked Mrs. Tuttle about making a mold museum in the science corner of our room, but she'd said she was pretty sure the state health department had rules about growing mold in classrooms.

To be honest, she looked a little green when I told her my mold museum idea in the first place. It made me realize how much everyone, even teachers, needs to be educated about mold.

“A basement is an ideal place for it,” I explained to Mr. Reid after I'd told him my basic plan, “since it's naturally damp.”

Mr. Reid nodded. “It's the moisture from the earth seeping in through the walls,” he said. “The only problem is, there's not much natural light in here. Some molds like a little light.”

I stared at Mr. Reid. “You know about mold?” I asked. “I mean, real facts about mold?”

Mr. Reid grinned. “Sure I know about mold. You ever heard of Alexander Fleming?”

“He discovered penicillin,” I said. I was almost whispering, I was so surprised to be having a two-way scientific conversation about mold. This had never happened to me before.

“That's right,” Mr. Reid said. “He was growing bacteria in a petri dish, and some mold got in there.”

“And the mold killed the bacteria!”

Me and Mr. Reid slapped high fives.

“You get Mrs. Patino's permission, and
you can have your museum down here,” Mr. Reid told me. “I think mold is pretty interesting stuff myself.”

I shook my head. I had known Mr. Reid since kindergarten, and this was the first time I'd realized he was a scientific genius.