Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Erupts!

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  erupts!

  FRANCES O’ROARK DOWELL

  PRESTON MCDANIELS

  Sonia Chaghatzbanian

  Michael McCartney

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  1230 Avenue of the Americas,

  New York, New York 10020

  PHINEAS L. MAcGUIRE …

  1-4169-0195-7

  eISBN 978-1-439-10771-3

  ISBN 978-1-4169-0195-2

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  chapter one

  My name is Phineas Listerman MacGuire.

  Most people call me Mac.

  It’s okay if you call me Phin.

  You can even call me Phineas.

  Forget about calling me Listerman.

  I am allergic to fifteen things. My mom says this is not true, that I’m only allergic to two things, peanuts and cat hair. But I am a scientist, and she’s not. I have scientific proof that it makes me itchy to think about the following items:

  Avocados Yogurt, any flavor Cottage cheese Grape jelly Any kind of kissing, especially when there’s lipstick Celery Purple flowers Purple Magic Markers Purple crayons Anything purple Moist towelettes in foil packs Telephone calls All girls

  I started fourth grade three weeks ago. When I started, I had a best friend. His name was Marcus Ballou. Marcus is also a scientist. We were a scientific team. We specialized in volcanoes, caves, fossils, all insects, and the solar system. But mostly volcanoes.

  We have made and erupted over eighty-seven volcanoes in our lifetime. It’s very simple. You take an empty soda bottle (big) and put it in a baking pan (also big). Fill the bottle with lots of baking soda and four or five squirts of dishwashing liquid.

  Then add vinegar and stand back.

  You should do it outside, in case you were wondering. Unless you have a less irritated mom than mine. Then maybe you could do it on the kitchen table. If you’re like me and spill stuff everywhere even when you’re trying really hard to be careful, you should definitely do it at a friend’s house.

  Here is the problem with Marcus: He moved. To Lawrence, Kansas. This is bad for at least two reasons. Now we aren’t a scientific team anymore. Also, he waited until the second week of school to move. If he had moved before school started, then I would have known to look around for a new best friend on the first day.

  But I didn’t know to do this. I still had Marcus.

  Everybody knew that me and Marcus were best friends and a scientific team. No one else tried to be best friends with us. They picked other best friends.

  Here’s what you would hear all the time:

  “Mac and Marcus”

  “Mac and Marcus”

  “Mac and Marcus”

  Now all you hear is:

  “Mac”

  “Mac”

  “Mac”

  Scientifically speaking, it’s a pretty lonely sound.

  chapter two

  I do not have a best friend. I do have an un-best friend.

  Here is the weird thing: His name is also Mac. Mac Robbins, known as Mac R. in our class, since we have two Macs. He moved here this year from Seattle, Washington.

  The first day of school our teacher, Mrs. Tuttle, made the three new kids stand up in front of the class, one at a time and say a few words about themselves. Two of the kids shuffled their feet and said where they used to live and stuff like their hobbies were playing on their Game Boys and watching TV and their favorite class was lunch.

  Mac R. did not shuffle his feet. He looked everybody straight in the eye and said, “I am from Seattle, Washington. Everything is better in Seattle, including the ice cream, the road signs, and the television shows.”

  Then he said children from Seattle, Washington, are naturally geniuses. He said children from our state are not.

  “Quite a first impression, Mac R.,” Mrs. Tuttle said when Mac R. was done making everyone in our class automatically hate him. She took one of the rubber frogs from the rubber frog collection she keeps on her desk and put it on her head to put us in a better mood.

  It didn’t work. We still hated Mac R. And it got worse. The next day he tripped Chester Oliphant on his way to the pencil sharpener. Chester is the size of a kindergartner, but he’s the funniest kid in our class, so everyone likes him and sticks up for him out on the playground. He is the wrong person in our class to pick on.

  Mac R. said it was an accident, but nobody believed him. Marcus, who only had three days left at our school before going to Lawrence, Kansas, said having Mac R. in our class almost made him glad he was moving away.

  Two days after that Mac R. wore a Woodbrook Elementary School T-shirt, only he’d put a big red circle around the school logo and then a slash through the circle. It was like he wished our whole school didn’t even exist.

  We felt the same way about him.

  When I first heard there was another Mac in the fourth grade, I was interested from a scientific angle. I had never met another Mac before. I wondered if we would look anything alike. Maybe we would dream about the same things at night. Maybe we would have the same habits, such as drawing on our bedroom walls with Chap Stick (the picture shows up about two weeks later, when enough dust has stuck to the Chap Stick wax) or waiting three months to empty the trash can in our room so that any thrown-away, half-eaten snack foods, like bananas or grapes, have decomposed into a pile of slimy goop.

  Here’s what I know now: We do not have one thing in common.

  Mac R. is short, with stick-out brown hair and freckles. He picks his nose when he thinks nobody is looking.

  I’m tall for my age. I only pick my nose when I know for sure nobody is looking.

  Mac R. loves dinosaurs. He’s in love with them. He has a DINOSAURS OF THE CRETACEOUS AGE lunch box and three dinosaur T-shirts—stegosaurus, iguanodon, and triceratops—that he wears over and over. Marcus and I liked dinosaurs back in preschool, mostly when we were three-day threes and four-day fours, and maybe a little bit in kindergarten. In first grade we gave up dinosaurs completely.

  Okay, maybe sometimes I take out my supersize T. rex and let it stomp on my LEGOs. But only once in a while.

  And I’m not in love with it.

  The funny thing is, once I started thinking about things I have in common with other people, I realized that I didn’t have everything in common with Marcus, either. We both love science and performing scientific experiments, and we both have dads who are teachers. Only, Marcus lives with his dad, and my dad lives two hundred miles away from me. Marcus collects baseball cards, and I collect dried worms (I want to win the world record for the longest dried earthworm ever recorded, but I will probably have to move to Australia, where they have the world’s longest worms, to actually do this).

  Marcus is neat. At the end of third grade I won the awards for Messiest Desk and Person Least Likely to Comb His Hair Before Coming to School in the Morning (my teacher made up that award especially for me). Marcus loses his temper and yells at people and then isn’t mad at all five minutes later. Frankie Wasserman punched me in the nose in first grade, and I still want to sock him one every time I see him.

  Today at lunch the person I have nothing in common with, Mac R., sat at my table. It’s the table for people who don’t have anyone else to sit with. Mason Cutwelder was there, setting up his little green army guys to attack Roland Forth’s peanut butter sandwich. Roland Forth sat across from him. He hummed. Roland Forth is always humming. It’s like having a radio going all the time when you’re in the same class as Roland Forth.

  I sat at the other end of the table, reading Scientific American, which is an important magazine that all scientists read, even if they don’t understand all the vocabulary.
>
  I was reading the letters to the editor when Mac R. plopped his tray on the table next to me. We had picked exactly the same things from the cafeteria line, except his Jell-O was green and mine was red. And mine had milk sloshed all over it from when I accidentally knocked over my milk carton with my copy of Scientific American.

  No one looked up when Mac R. sat down. Part of sitting at the table for people who don’t have anybody else to sit with is pretending no one else exists. I don’t know why that makes sitting there less bad, but it does.

  Mac R. didn’t know the rules of sitting at this table. He started talking immediately. He said that when his permanent records arrived at Woodbrook Elementary, we would know for sure that he was the smartest boy in Mrs. Tuttle’s class, and the whole fourth grade. His permanent records would be official proof.

  Roland Forth stopped humming for a second. “But probably a lot of the girls are smarter. Girls are always the smartest.”

  Roland Forth is the only boy in the fourth grade who would point this fact out.

  For the most part, other boys don’t like Roland Forth.

  Mac R. frowned. He said, “There are no smart girls.”

  He probably should have said that more quietly.

  “What do you mean there are no smart girls?” Aretha Timmons leaned over from her lunch table and gave Mac R. the evil eye. “Everybody knows girls are the smartest ones. There’s scientific proof.”

  My ears got all tingly when I heard the words scientific proof. When you’re a scientist like me, you’re always on the lookout for scientific conversations. You won’t find many in the cafeteria of Woodbrook Elementary.

  Mac R. stuffed a roll in his mouth. “Girls are stupid. They play with dolls. They wear pink shoes.”

  Aretha stuck out her foot. Her shoe was a navy blue sneaker with silver stripes.

  It was not pink.

  “Mrs. Tuttle doesn’t wear pink shoes either,” Aretha said. “You don’t know very much, do you?”

  Mrs. Tuttle wears green high-top shoes every day. She says they make her bouncy, like a frog. All in all, Mrs. Tuttle would be a very good teacher, except that she wears too much purple. It doesn’t match her yellow hair or her green shoes.

  Also, it makes me itch just to see it.

  “Mrs. Tuttle is different,” Mac R. said. “She’s a teacher. Teachers have to be smart. Besides, she’s a grown-up. She’s not a girl.”

  Aretha marched over to our table and pointed her fork at Mac R. He jumped back in his seat, like he was afraid she was going to poke him.

  I could tell she wasn’t going to poke him. She just wanted to make a point.

  “I’ll prove it that girls are smarter than boys,” Aretha said. “Or at least that I’m smarter than you. I’m reading on the sixth-grade level, for one thing.”

  Mac R.’s face turned red. You could tell he didn’t read on the sixth-grade level.

  “For another thing, I’ll beat you at the fourth-grade science fair in two weeks,” Aretha said. She put her fork back on her tray and smiled.

  Aretha is the only person I know who is as excited about the fourth-grade science fair as I am. She is also my only serious competitor, at least in Mrs. Tuttle’s class.

  I wonder what project she’ll do.

  I wonder if she likes volcanoes.

  I wish girls didn’t make me itch.

  chapter three

  My mom did a scientific experiment this morning.

  She didn’t mean to.

  “These beans have been in here at least a month,” she said, pulling a plastic container out of the refrigerator. “How did they get pushed way in the back?”

  My mom is always trying to get us to eat more beans. She says they’re healthy. The problem is, everyone in my family would rather eat pizza.

  Including my mom.

  I ran over to where my mom was standing. “Is there any mold on them?”

  I am scientifically very interested in mold.

  “Nope,” she said, prying off the blue lid. “But they’ve been in the fridge so long we probably shouldn’t eat them. I’m going to throw them away.”

  Five seconds after the lid came off, the kitchen started filling with a strange smell. It was like everybody in the world had farted at the same time.

  As a scientist, I found this very interesting.

  “Open the windows, quick!” my mom yelled. She ran to a window in the living room and started tugging at it.

  It wouldn’t open.

  She tried the other living-room window.

  It wouldn’t open either.

  This is how we found out all the windows in our house are stuck closed.

  My mom was pretty upset. She had to leave for work in fifteen minutes, and she was afraid that the bean smell would still be there when she got home. She didn’t like the bean smell. Even worse, she didn’t think the women in her book club would like the bean smell either.

  “Eight people will be here at seven PM and it’s going to smell like every toilet on the street backfired,” she moaned. She rubbed her forehead, like she suddenly had the worst headache in the world.

  “Mom?” I said.

  “Not right now, Mac,” she said, waving her hand at me.

  “But Mom.”

  “I mean it, Mac,” my mom said, sounding irritated. “You need to run and catch your bus. Your lunch money is in your backpack.”

  It’s very easy to irritate my mom. Marcus could do it by just walking in the front door. He never knocked, and the first thing he did when he came in was yell “Hello!” at the top of his lungs. He didn’t care if my sister was napping or if someone was on the phone or anything.

  My mom cared.

  When you have grown up with an irritated mother, you know when to leave her alone. I grabbed my backpack off of the kitchen table and left for the bus stop. I felt pretty happy. I had needed something for Share and Stare, and now I had something. Even better, it was a scientific something.

  Share and Stare is Mrs. Tuttle’s version of Show and Tell, in case you were wondering. You have to show something or talk about something that has to do with a school subject, like math or science or books. I think she’s afraid that fourth graders would think regular Show and Tell is for babies.

  She’s pretty right about that.

  “So you see,” I told my classmates at the end of my Share and Stare turn later that morning, “my mom shouldn’t worry, because the gas molecules—that’s what was stinking up our house, the gas from the beans—will have broken apart long before tonight, and our house won’t stink anymore.”

  I thought everyone would be interested in my story. What I didn’t realize was that some people would be interested in the wrong way.

  “Hey, Stinkazoid,” Mac R. called on the playground. “Remind me never to come over to your stinkoid house, okay?”

  I was sitting on a swing, looking at a volcano book that Marcus had given me before he moved. Reading this book made me feel sad. There were two reasons:

  It made me miss having a best friend, and

  It made me realize I was sort of losing interest in volcanoes.

  “I mean it,” Mac R. called. “I’m going to stay three miles away from your house at all times. Pee-yew!”

  “Good,” I told him, hardly bothering to look up from my sad volcano book. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  I heard somebody laughing like my comeback had been really good instead of just okay. “Big Mac attack!” Aretha shouted from the monkey bars. She ran over to the swing and slapped high fives with me. Then she turned to Mac R.

  “You shouldn’t talk so much about stinking, Stink Bomb!” she yelled.

  You could tell Aretha hadn’t forgotten Mac R.’s remarks about boys being smarter than girls.

  My hand stung a little bit from slapping high fives. I didn’t mind, though. Me and Marcus used to slap high fives all the time. That’s how we celebrated our many scientific breakthroughs.

  Slapping high fives wi
th Aretha made me feel better. And my hand didn’t even itch. I walked back to room 34 feeling like it was going to be a good rest of the day.

  Which shows you how much I knew.

  chapter four

  “Listen up, team,” Mrs. Tuttle yelled. “Time to zip your lips.”

  She made the zipping sign by pulling her fingers across her mouth. A bunch of kids did the same thing and started making funny buzzing noises, like they were trying to talk through their zipped lips.

  This made Mrs. Tuttle learn her lesson that “zip your lips” is more of little-kid thing. This is her first year of teaching fourth grade after three years of first-grade teaching. She’s still getting adjusted.

  Here is what makes Mrs. Tuttle a good teacher: Instead of yelling at us some more about being quiet, she made the buzzing noise back at us. Then she skipped through the room singing, “I am the Bee of Silence, beware my sting!” and poked the buzzers in their arms. It helped people get the silliness out of their system, and we all quieted down.

  “Fourth-grade science fair,” she said, writing it on the board. “We’ve talked about it, we’ve dreamed about it, and now the time has finally come.”

  I pounded my fists on my desk so it sounded like a drumroll, which is what guys do instead of jumping up and down in their seats and screaming when something the teacher says makes them happy, which is what girls do. The fourth-grade science fair is the first time you can be in a science fair at our school. Me and Marcus had been practicing science projects and experiments for the fourth-grade science fair for years. Some of our greatest hits included:

  Exploding film canisters. You fill a film canister halfway with water, drop half a tab of Alka-Seltzer in it, put the top back on, then move out of the way—the cap pops off and flies into the air like a rocket ship. This is an experiment about gas buildup, although not the kind that stinks up your whole house.