Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Erupts! Read online

  Microwave marshmallows. Put a marshmallow on a paper plate and zap it for thirty seconds. The coolest part is when the marshmallow gets really huge and looks like it’s going to explode. The second coolest part is how it stays white on the outside but gets all toasted on the inside. It’s like the opposite of roasting marshmallows over a campfire.

  A cannibal insect study. There are many insects that eat their own kind, including praying mantises (sometimes), lacewing larvae (if there’s nothing else around to eat), cannibal mites (which actually aren’t insects, but everybody thinks they are, so we counted them), and pirate spiders. The only problem with this study was that it made us stop liking these insects after we thought about them awhile. I mean, eating your friends and relatives is a pretty gross thing to do.

  Remembering all our great experiments, I couldn’t believe that Marcus wasn’t here, now that it was finally time to prove to the world what great scientists we were. Years from now would anyone at this school even remember that Marcus had always gotten hundreds on his science tests? That in second grade me and Marcus had been famous for capturing seventeen tadpoles in the creek behind Marcus’s house and donating the whole jar to Mrs. Hinkle’s class?

  I guessed I would just have to win the fourth-grade science fair for the both of us.

  Ideas for projects started bouncing around in my head. I wouldn’t mind doing something that exploded and had lots of smoke and sparks, something with a Bunsen burner and a chemistry set. I’ve been begging my mom to buy me a Bunsen burner and a chemistry set since I was seven, but she says that people like me, people who never saw a glass they didn’t automatically knock over, should not be allowed in the same room with chemistry equipment.

  Mrs. Tuttle held up a clipboard. “Sign-up sheet. You need to work with a partner. Whoever doesn’t have a partner, please raise his or her hand.”

  Four kids raised their hands: me, Mac R., Roland Forth, and Aretha Timmons. I was surprised that Aretha didn’t have a partner, until she said, “Mrs. Tuttle, do we have to have a partner? My idea for a project won’t work very well with two people.”

  “Sorry, Aretha,” Mrs. Tuttle said. “That’s the rule this year.”

  Aretha shook her head like she couldn’t believe how stupid having partners was. “It’s not fair,” she muttered, and popped her pencil on her desk a few times.

  “It’s good to collaborate, Aretha,” Mrs. Tuttle said. This is a big word with teachers, I’ve noticed. I had never thought about how they were always making you work in groups and pairs, until I didn’t have an automatic partner. Now I am thinking they should just be quiet about all this collaborating and let some people work by themselves sometimes.

  I was working up my nerve to tell Mrs. Tuttle that I would be Aretha’s partner. I knew that if I said that, people would say I wanted Aretha to be my girlfriend. They would say this very loud and for a long time.

  I didn’t want people to say this. I didn’t want them to yell “Mac loves Aretha!” when I got on the bus in the morning. I didn’t want them to yell “Hey Mac, there’s your girlfriend!” every time Aretha walked into room 34.

  The only thing worse than everyone yelling about Aretha being my girlfriend would be having to do a science fair project with Mac R. or Roland Forth.

  “Roland!” Mrs. Tuttle called out. “You and Aretha partner up. And please stop that humming.”

  Aretha’s pencil popped even harder on her desk. Roland pulled his desk close to hers. He didn’t stop humming even for a second.

  “And that leaves the two Macs,” Mrs. Tuttle said, writing something down on her clipboard. “You guys pull your desks together and do some brainstorming. Everybody get together with your partners. I want a description of your project—in stunning, multicolor detail—by Monday. Research project or experiment, take your pick.”

  Here’s what surprised me: Mac R. actually seemed excited that we were going to be partners. I thought he would be as mad as Aretha. But he dragged his desk over to where mine was right away, bumping into about eight other kids on the way.

  “High fives, big guy!” Mac R. said when he sat down. He lifted up his right hand for a big high-five smack.

  This was the same hand he’d been using to pick his nose with all through journal writing. He had had a dictionary in front of his face, but I could see his finger jabbing in and out.

  I did not high-five Mac R.

  He changed his high five into a kind of wave, but when I turned around to see who he was waving at, all I saw was the art supply closet.

  Mac R. leaned toward me. He seemed to have forgotten about me being a stinkazoid person. “I’ve got one word for you,” he said.

  I closed my eyes. I knew what was coming.

  When I opened my eyes, Mac R. was grinning.

  “Dinosaurs,” he said. “Amazing, incredible, fantastizoid dinosaurs.”

  “That’s five words,” I told him. “Unless you only count dinosaurs once, and then it’s only four words. Plus, I don’t think fantastizoid is an actual word.”

  Mac R. waved away my word count. “We can do something really awesome, I just know it. Maybe something with raptors. Maybe we could build one that really flies.”

  I put my head down on my desk. “How do you build a dinosaur?” I asked, not bothering to look up. “A flying one, which has to be done in two weeks?”

  “You get a kit, moron.”

  I lifted up my head a few inches and looked at Mac R. “You can’t use a kit for a science fair project.”

  This didn’t seem to concern him at all. “You just throw away the box,” he said. “Nobody would even know it was a kit.”

  “They would know. Even if they aren’t automatic geniuses like people in Seattle, Washington, the judges would know. My sister would know, and she doesn’t know anything about science at all.”

  Mac R. pounded his fist against his desk. He was even more excited than before. “Hey, I saw you reading about volcanoes on the playground. We could do raptors flying around a volcano, and the volcano could explode!”

  “Erupt,” I said. “Volcanoes do not explode. They erupt.”

  I may be the world’s biggest milk spiller, but I am not sloppy when it comes to scientific terminology.

  “Whatever,” Mac R. said. “A volcano would be awesome.”

  I didn’t want to do a volcano, and I especially didn’t want to do a volcano with Mac R.

  But I had a feeling that was exactly what I would be doing.

  chapter five

  This morning, after I’d watched Saturday cartoons, I sat at the kitchen table and brainstormed some alternate science fair project ideas. Here’s what I came up with:

  When you drink milk and start laughing, why does the milk automatically squirt out of your nose? Does only milk from a little carton do this? How about milk from a glass? From a plastic cup? If you were drinking a juice box, would stuff still come out of your nose, or does juice automatically go straight to your stomach?

  Why do rotten eggs stink? How long does it take an egg to get rotten? What would happen if I put an egg under my bed with all the unwashed socks and underpants and empty potato chip bags and banana peels and all the black and pink jellybeans from every Easter basket I’ve ever had? Would the egg turn rotten faster than if it were stashed somewhere halfway clean?

  What makes mold? What stuff gets the moldiest? Why is the cheddar cheese in our refrigerator always moldy?

  The more I thought about number three, the mold idea, the more interested I got. And then I had an amazing scientific breakthrough. What if I brought our refrigerator to school for my science project?

  Our refrigerator is practically a museum of mold. We should ship it off to a science lab where they’re trying to come up with cures for diseases. Penicillin is made from mold. Who knows what they might discover after studying our fridge for a few weeks?

  Here’s what happens: My mom does the grocery shopping on Saturdays. She brings home about ten bags of very healthy food
and about two bags of stuff my family will actually eat. The healthy food gets pushed to the back of the refrigerator or stuffed into the produce drawers.

  Every week my mom piles on a new layer of healthy food. This goes on for three or four weeks, until (a) there is no more room in the refrigerator and (b) something starts to stink really bad. Then it’s time to clear out the fridge and start over. This is the best time to look for mold.

  You should start in the dairy drawer. Our cheese gets moldy the fastest. There are probably four or five plastic-wrapped chunks of moldy cheddar cheese in our refrigerator any time you open the door. And it’s amazing how much mold will grow on feta cheese that comes in a container. It’s also amazing how much feta cheese stinks even before it gets old and moldy.

  I won’t even discuss the cottage cheese situation.

  Next you should look at all the opened cans on the top shelf. There is a very interesting black mold that grows in tomato paste, for example. Don’t forget to look at any open cans of soup. Soup grows mold that looks like little stars.

  I was taking mold notes in my science journal like crazy. And then I thought: Big Mac Double Attack! Magnets on the outside, mold on the inside. I would take down all the junk our fridge magnets were holding up, mostly notices for PTA meetings from last year, and once I got everything down, I could put up interesting information about magnets. I would use magnets to hold up all this interesting information, of course.

  I wasn’t quite sure how I would convince my mom and stepdad to let me take the refrigerator to school. Well, I knew I couldn’t convince my mom, but sometimes my stepdad could be reasoned with.

  First, though, I would have to reason with Mac R.

  I was supposed to go to Mac R.’s house at four. Actually, it wasn’t a house, it was an apartment three streets away.

  Marcus’s house had been three streets away in the other direction. On Saturday mornings I would ride my bike to his house or he would ride his bike to mine, and we would watch cartoons and make plans for new volcanoes and other interesting scientific investigations.

  I started getting that sad feeling again, thinking about Marcus. I was getting a little tired of that feeling, if you want to know the truth. So instead of sitting around thinking about how bad it was not to have a best friend, I hopped on my bike and rode to Mac R.’s place. I would share my great scientific ideas with him. I could bring him back to my house and show him all our refrigerated mold. Maybe I could convince him that mold was about a trillion times more interesting than dinosaurs and volcanoes.

  Just thinking about mold made the sad feelings go away.

  If you need cheering up, a little mold will do the trick.

  When you’re riding your bike really fast, your brain starts going pretty fast too. From the time I left my house until the time I got to Mac R.’s apartment, about a thousand ideas went through my head. More and more of these ideas started being about how much I didn’t want to do my first really important science project on little-kid things. I was supposed to be a scientist, not a kindergarten teacher. My job wasn’t to do something just because Mac R. wanted to do it. I was in the business of making scientific breakthroughs. Dinosaurs and volcanoes were not in the scientific-breakthrough department.

  By the time I got to Mac R.’s apartment, I pretty much wanted to punch him in the mouth.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked when he opened the door. He was wearing Spider-Man pajamas, and his hair was sticking out even worse than usual. He looked like he was a very tall two-year-old, if you want to know the truth.

  “One word,” I told him, holding up a finger, which I thought about poking him in the chest with, just to let him know I meant business. I probably would have if he hadn’t looked like such a preschooler.

  “T. rex?”

  “Officially speaking, T. rex would be two words,” I said. Looking past him into the apartment, I saw he had cartoons on the TV, and not the public-television cartoons, which were the only ones my mom let me watch at home. “Can I come in, by the way?”

  Mac R. looked nervous. “I’m not supposed to have anyone over when my mom’s at work. That’s why I told you to come at four. That’s when she gets off.”

  “Where does she work?” I asked.

  “She’s the manager of the apartment complex,” Mac R. said. He poked his head out the doorway and looked left and right. “I guess you could come in for a few minutes. But if my mom calls, don’t answer the phone.”

  Scientifically speaking, I was starting to think it was highly unlikely Mac R. was the smartest fourth grader at Woodbrook Elementary.

  I mean really highly unlikely.

  chapter six

  “Mold? You want to do a science project about mold?”

  Mac R. fell back against the couch. He looked a little green.

  “Yes,” I told him. “Mold is very scientific. And it’s everywhere, in my refrigerator, under the wall-to-wall carpet, and blowing around in the air. You’ve heard of mold spores, right?”

  Mac R. looked even greener. “I thought we were going to do a volcano.”

  “I remember you said something about volcanoes the other day, but this mold idea came to me from out of nowhere. I think we could win first place with it. It’s a much better idea than a volcano.”

  “Do you really think your mom will let you take your refrigerator to school?” Mac R. asked.

  I shrugged. “I think my stepdad could talk her into it if he felt like it. He does this thing where he tickles her and says funny stuff, and after about five minutes of that she usually gives in.”

  Mac R. stared at the TV. It didn’t look like he was watching it, though.

  “My dad’s still in Seattle,” he said. “We moved here after my parents got divorced.”

  Now it was my turn to stare at the TV. It’s hard to know what to say when people tell you terrible stuff about their lives. I probably should have said something like maybe one day he would end up with a nice stepdad like I did, which doesn’t automatically make your parents getting a divorce okay, but it does make the day-to-day stuff a little better.

  I didn’t say that, though. I can never think of the right thing until about four hours later.

  Mac R. turned and looked at me. “The thing is, I was already sort of working on the volcano plan. Do you want to see what I’ve done so far?”

  Not really I felt like saying, since I’d already decided a volcano was a dumb idea. But you can’t be rude two seconds after someone tells you the worst thing in his life, so I followed Mac down the hallway and into the bedroom at the very end. He flipped on the overhead light. “This is my room,” he said. “I’m supposed to clean it before I watch any TV, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

  Mac R.’s room looked like it had been picked up, turned upside down, and shaken all around until it rattled.

  I was impressed.

  He started tossing things all over the place. “Okay, now let me just find that notebook,” he muttered. “It’s here somewhere. Maybe it’s under the bed—no, no, here it is. Okeydokey artichokies, take a look at this.”

  He handed me a sketchbook opened to a picture of a volcano. “Did you draw this?” I asked. Mac R. nodded.

  It was the best drawing of a volcano I’d ever seen in my life. Every single detail looked exactly real. I shook my head. “You’re an artist. You’re probably the best artist of the fourth grade.”

  “I’m not an artist,” he said. “Boys can’t be artists. I just like to draw.”

  “What do you mean boys can’t be artists?”

  Mac R. took the notebook back from me and closed it. “My dad says boys can be architects, they can go into graphic design, or they can be advertising art directors. But they can’t be artists, because art is for girls.”

  “No offense,” I said, “but your dad’s wrong. My uncle Conrad is an artist. He draws comic books. He did paintings of me and my sister that look exactly like us. He’s an amazing artist.”

&nb
sp; Mac R.’s eyes lit up. “He draws comic books? Because that’s what I want to do.” He got down on his hands and knees and pulled a box from under his bed. It had about two million sketch pads in it.

  “I’m working on a comic book now, as a matter of fact,” he said, handing me one of the sketch pads. “It’s called ‘Derek the Destroyer.’ It’s about a guy who flies around at night stopping crimes and destroying evil stuff.”

  I looked at a couple of pages. Mac R. was not only an excellent drawer of volcanoes, he could also draw comics. I’m not a big comic-book reader, even though my uncle Conrad is always trying to get me interested in them. But I could tell Mac R.’s were good.

  I noticed something at the end of one of the stories. It was a little signature in the corner of the last box. “Who’s Ben?” I asked.

  Mac R. turned red. “That’s me.”

  “Is that your comic-book artist name?”

  “No,” he said. “That’s my real name. Mac is my middle name.” He picked up a robot action guy that was on his bed and twisted its arms into different positions. “Well actually, Peter is my middle name. Nobody calls me Mac except for people at school.”

  I sat down on the bed. “Why? I mean, our class already had a Mac. It’s not like we need another one.”

  Mac R. had gone back to his normal color for a few seconds, but now he was redder than ever. “It’s stupid. I don’t even know why.”

  “There must be some kind of reason.”

  “I just like the name Mac, okay? You don’t own it, you know. It’s not your real name either. You’re really Atticus or Maximus or something.”