Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Blasts Off! Read online

  That still wasn’t going to get me to Space Camp.

  At breakfast I tried to come up with job ideas while I ate my bagel. “If only there were something I could do at school to make money,” I said through a mouthful of cream cheese. “Like, I could help first graders with math or something. I could be a kind of substitute teacher.”

  “You’re pretty good friends with the janitor,” Lyle pointed out. “Maybe he’s got a job you could do.”

  That was Lyle’s first Number One Excellent Idea of the morning.

  The second one came about five seconds later.

  “Or maybe you could get a scholarship to camp.” Lyle took a sip of his coffee. “I think some camps have scholarships for kids who don’t have enough money to go. I’m not sure if technically you’d qualify, but it’s worth looking into.”

  I jumped out of my seat. “A scholarship! Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Lyle shrugged modestly. “It is a pretty good idea.”

  I turned to my mom. “Could I please go on the Internet right now and see if they have scholarships to Space Camp?”

  As you might guess, going on the Internet before school is not exactly encouraged at my house.

  In fact, it’s not even allowed.

  “Just this once, Mom?” I begged. “If I can get a scholarship to Space Camp, then all I have to do is come up with the money for the airplane ticket. And I’ll make that walking Lemon Drop.”

  “Mac, you know the rules,” my mom said, packing up her briefcase. “If I let you go online this morning, then you’ll ask to do it tomorrow morning. And if I say no tomorrow morning, you’ll say, ‘But you let me do it yesterday.’ And do you remember what happened last time I let you use the Internet before school?”

  I poked at my bagel with my finger. “I missed the bus,” I mumbled.

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you.”

  “I missed the bus,” I said a little more loudly. “But that was last year. This year (a) I am much more mature, and (b) I have a specific task. I just want to look up about scholarships.”

  My mom sighed and shook her head. I could tell she sort of wanted to give in, but she was fighting against that urge. This was a dangerous situation. If I pushed too hard, she might ban me from going online for a month, just for driving her crazy. But there was a tiny crack of opportunity here, I could see it. If I could just figure out the best approach …

  And then something amazing happened.

  Lyle stepped in.

  My mom and Lyle got married four years ago, when I was five. To be honest, I didn’t really understand what was going on. In fact, I was kind of scared that I would never see my real dad again, like maybe Lyle was a replacement dad.

  I think that’s one reason my real dad came to my mom and Lyle’s wedding. Just so I would understand he wasn’t going to be replaced by anybody.

  In the four years that my mom and Lyle have been married, Lyle has pretty much let my mom make the rules. He’ll tell me to do my chores or finish my homework, but when it comes to whether or not I can do stuff like use the computer or watch TV, he stays out of it.

  But this morning he actually did something.

  He said, “I’ve already got my computer on. How about I print out the info Mac needs?”

  A simple solution to a simple problem.

  My mom thought about this for a minute, probably going over her internal list of rules to make sure Lyle’s using the Internet to help me out on a school morning didn’t break some important law handed down from the commanders of the universe.

  Then she said, “That sounds good to me. How’s that sound to you, Mac?”

  “That would be great,” I told her, even though a part of me hated the idea of being so close to getting on the Internet and yet so far away. “Thanks, Lyle.”

  “Not a prob,” Lyle said, and gave me a wink.

  Sometimes I think Lyle understands a lot more about being a nine-year-old boy than my mom does.

  While Lyle went to print out Space Camp scholarship information, I went upstairs to get dressed. I tried to remind myself not to get too excited. Even if Space Camp did give out scholarships, I might not get one.

  I decided I better go ahead and talk to Mr. Reid about getting a job.

  Mr. Reid is the janitor of Woodbrook Elementary. Everyone knows, though, that he really should be principal. He is pretty much a genius at everything, including automotive repairs, any kind of fix-it-up job, and slime mold identification. On top of that, all the kids like him.

  It’s not that the kids don’t like Principal Patino. We just don’t want to hang out with her in her office and get her opinion on how to improve our kickball games.

  “Well, Mac, I don’t have any work around here for you to do,” Mr. Reid told me that afternoon in his basement office, after I’d explained that I needed a job and I needed it fast if I was ever going to make it to Space Camp. “Actually, that’s not true. I just can’t hire you to do the work I need done. I’m not the one who hires folks around here, the school superintendent does.”

  “Do you think he could hire me to do some odd jobs around the school?” I asked. “You know, sweeping, erasing chalkboards, searching out and identifying molds?”

  “Doesn’t work that way, Mac,” Mr. Reid said. “Which is too bad, because I could use some help.”

  Then Mr. Reid got an idea. I could tell he’d gotten an idea because he suddenly had a sort of wondering expression on his face. Then he tapped his chin with his finger and said, “Hmmmm.”

  “What? Did you think of a way the superintendent could hire me?” I asked.

  “No, that’s not it,” Mr. Reid said. “But the thought crossed my mind, I could use your help on weekends. My son, Carl, and I have started a part-time business, small building projects mostly, but we also clean out folks’ garages for them, haul out their junk, that kind of thing. We were just talking last weekend that we could use another person on the team. Just to do the little jobs, breaking down boxes to recycle, sweeping up, that sort of thing.”

  “I’m that person, Mr. Reid,” I told him. “I’d do a great job.”

  Mr. Reid nodded. “I know you would, Mac. The only thing is I’d need your mom and dad’s permission for you to help, and one of them would need to drive you over to the job every Saturday.”

  “No problem,” I told him. “They know how important Space Camp is to me.”

  Mr. Reid’s beeper beeped. He looked at it and said, “Trouble up in the kindergarten wing. I’d better get a move on.” Before he left, he wrote his phone number on a piece of paper. “You have your mom or dad call me tonight so we can discuss the details.”

  “Okay,” I said, following him out the door.

  “By the way, Mac, do you know a boy named Corey Anderson? Fifth grader?”

  Of course I know Corey Anderson. Everybody does. He is a famous fifth-grade scientist who won first place in both his fourth- and fifth-grade science fairs. For the fifth-grade science fair he built a computer that actually talked.

  “Well, if I’ve got my facts straight, Corey Anderson went to Space Camp last summer. He’s quite the young astronomer. You ought to talk to him about what it was like. He probably has all sorts of interesting stories he could tell you.”

  That sounded like a great idea. Except for the fact that at Woodbrook Elementary School fourth graders don’t even think about talking to fifth-grade scientific geniuses like Corey Anderson. It just isn’t done.

  Mr. Reid waved as he turned the corner to the kindergarten wing. “I’ll tell him you’d like to have a word with him the next time I see him.”

  “Thanks,” I called after him. But to be honest, I just couldn’t imagine it. Why would Corey Anderson ever believe that some fourth-grade kid was worth talking to, even if that kid was a scientific genius?

  In my experience, fifth graders think they’re the only geniuses on the planet.

  chapter ten

  The good news about Space Camp
scholarships: They had one for academically really smart kids.

  That would be me.

  The bad news: I would have to write an essay to get one.

  It’s not that I’m a bad writer. I’m actually a pretty okay writer.

  But I hate writing essays.

  First of all, you are almost always given a topic you don’t have any interest in. Then you have to write an outline that shows you will:

  I. Introduce your topic in a brilliant way

  II. Have a brilliant first point (you will need a topic sentence)

  III. Have a brilliant second point (another topic sentence goes here)

  IV. Have a brilliant third point (come up with yet another stupid topic sentence)

  V. Conclude your essay in a brilliant way (restating all topic sentences using different words, even though it was hard enough coming up with the words for the first time)

  Then you have to hand your essay in and have Mrs. Tuttle write all over it in purple ink, which, if you’re me, will give you hives.

  All in all, it is not a very fun process.

  Mostly what I don’t like about writing essays is that you never get to write about stuff that’s interesting. The last essay we had to write for language arts was on the topic of cafeteria food—was it nutritious enough? First of all, I am not a nutritionist, so I am not qualified to comment on the nutritional value of cafeteria food. Second of all, I don’t care if it’s nutritious or not. If they have pizza and french fries on the days I buy lunch, that’s all that’s important.

  I was thinking about all of this on my way to my dad’s house on Friday afternoon after school. My mom was driving me. When I asked her what she thought I should write about for my scholarship essay, she said she thought I should write about the importance of space travel or how Space Camp would change my life.

  I knew those were pretty okay topics. The only thing was I also knew every other kid was going to write on the exact same thing. If my essay was the last one the scholarship people read, they’d be so bored of reading about the importance of space travel, they’d automatically throw my essay in the trash.

  To be honest, I wouldn’t blame them.

  I was hoping a weekend at my dad’s house would kick-start the part of my brain responsible for coming up with scholarship-winning essay topics. That would make up for the fact that I was going to miss what would have been my first day on the job with Mr. Reid. He and my mom agreed that I could work four hours every Saturday afternoon, for five dollars an hour.

  If you added that twenty dollars a weekend to the thirty dollars a week I made walking Lemon Drop, that was fifty dollars a week, or two hundred dollars a month.

  It would be just enough to get me to Space Camp, if I didn’t get sick or break an arm.

  Or take weekends off.

  Don’t get me wrong. I love going to my dad’s house. First of all, he has a flat-screen TV, and on Friday nights we watch old-time movies on it, like Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges. It’s just this guy thing we do.

  Second, my dad is, like, the world’s greatest math teacher, so we spend a lot of time testing out math games and puzzles for him to use when he teaches. I always leave my dad’s house feeling like my brain has been sharpened.

  Third, my dad doesn’t recycle. Now, I am for the environment and not against recycling. I think it’s good that my mom recycles everything that has an atom of recyclable material in it. But sometimes it’s kind of fun to throw something away. Just chuck it into the trash can without a second thought.

  Do not tell my mom I said that.

  I was prepared to spend the whole two-hour drive worrying about my essay topic and how I was going to make enough money for Space Camp if I didn’t win the scholarship, when my mom turned on the radio. The newscaster was talking about Mars.

  It turns out that a little bit of Mars news will cheer me up in no time flat.

  “And now, here’s the latest on what’s been happening on Mars,” the announcer said, sounding like he’d done the research himself instead of just reading it off of a piece of paper. “Looks like Mars is wetter than we thought. NASA’s Spirit rover has been kicking up Mars’s dirt and getting the dirt on it. A recent discovery shows that there’s plenty of silica on the red planet, and as we all know, the production of silica requires water. A NASA spokesperson called this ‘a remarkable discovery.’”

  “Did you hear that, Mom?” I leaned forward and pounded on the back of her seat. “Water on Mars! Water means life! There’s life on Mars!”

  “But is there takeout?” my mom asked, cracking herself up.

  “Mom, this is serious. If there’s water on Mars, humans can live on Mars.”

  “But there aren’t any trees on Mars, no flowers or birds,” my mom pointed out. “Who wants to live on a planet without trees or flowers or birds?”

  My mom is such a mom, it’s ridiculous.

  However, her comment did give me a great idea. If Mars had water, why couldn’t you grow things on it? There were weather issues to deal with, of course, lots of space radiation, for one thing, and meteor showers, and it was cold—like, below-zero-in-the-middle-of-summer cold. But scientists think that with the right equipment and protective gear, astronauts will be able to go to Mars one day, and one day people might actually be able to live there. So why not build the first Martian greenhouse and grow the first Martian tomatoes?

  Because the fact is I really love tomato sandwiches.

  I told my dad my great idea the minute I saw him.

  “I think you might be onto something, Mac,” he said, taking out a carton of ice cream from his freezer. That is our ritual: We wave good-bye to my mom, watch her pull the minivan out of the driveway, then head inside my dad’s house to make milk shakes.

  He dumped practically the whole half gallon into the blender and poured in some milk. “The thing is you’ve got to deal with the fact that the air is pretty thin on Mars. You’d have to research how plants could survive with so little oxygen. Or how to create an oxygenated environment for them.”

  “Like a greenhouse?” I asked, pushing the mix button on the blender.

  “Yeah, I guess it would be something like that. But maybe sturdier than a greenhouse you’d have on Earth. More protective. Mars has a pretty harsh environment.”

  A few minutes later we were sitting on the couch, drinking our milk shakes and watching a golf tournament on TV.

  Watching televised golf is pretty much my dad’s main flaw.

  Letting me drink milk shakes on the couch makes up for it, though.

  I was getting a relaxed feeling from drinking milk shakes and hanging out on my dad’s couch, which is a hundred percent comfortable. Also, I was just sort of happy. My brain was filled with good, scientific thoughts.

  Then I remembered to ask my dad what he thought I should write about for the Space Camp scholarship essay.

  My dad looked at me and grinned. “Uh, duh? What did we discuss as soon as you walked in the door, Einstein?”

  I was so relaxed, I couldn’t remember. We’d talked about a hundred things since I walked in the door. “What flavor ice cream to make milk shakes with?”

  My dad slapped his forehead. “Mac, Mac, Mac! Don’t make me spell it out for you, buddy. Think about it—what were we just discussing while we made milk shakes?”

  “Tomatoes?”

  My dad nodded. “Exactly. Tomatoes.” I shook my head.

  Tomatoes.

  It was that simple.

  chapter eleven

  “‘How to Make a Tomato Sandwich on Mars’?”

  Aretha shook her head and bounced her pencil a couple of times, then started reading the essay I’d just handed her. I waited nervously to hear what she thought.

  I thought it was a work of genius, but that didn’t mean Aretha would.

  Scientists sometimes have very different opinions on controversial topics.

  I had gotten my entire essay written by World Studies period, right before lunc
h. I wrote about building greenhouses on Mars, and how I was going to be the first tomato grower on the red planet, which was kind of cool, since tomatoes were red too. I talked about the weather on Mars, and the possibility human beings could actually live on Mars one day and grow food there. It would be hard work and would take a long time, I concluded, but I believed that one day earthlings would be happily eating tomato sandwiches and many other tomato products in a restaurant on the next planet over.

  It is the first essay I have ever really, truly been excited about writing.

  I mean, in my life.

  Aretha took forever to read it. She bounced her pencil while she read. I couldn’t tell if she was excited to read it or was just coming up with a bunch of critical things to say about it.

  Aretha is a big believer in constructive criticism.

  Emphasis on the “criticism” part of that phrase.

  Finally she leaned forward and handed my essay back to me. She had a thoughtful expression on her face, like she was trying to find the exact right words to express herself. After about a million years she said, “Not bad, Mac. In fact, I’d call it interesting and thought-provoking. I bet nobody else writes about tomato sandwiches.”

  “That’s what I’m counting on,” I told her.

  I felt great for the rest of the day. If Aretha liked my essay, then the Space Camp scholarship judges would probably love it. I could take the money I earned from walking Lemon Drop and working for Mr. Reid and use it all to buy a round-trip plane ticket. Any leftover money I could use for the chemistry set I’d been saving up for since third grade.

  Ben rode home on the bus with me that afternoon. We were going to do some more slobber work. Correction: I was going to do slobber work. Ben was going to document me doing slobber work.

  “Guess what I just heard?” Ben asked as the bus pulled out of the Woodbrook Elementary School parking lot. “You won’t believe it.”