“Phineas,” I said. “I’m named after my great-great-uncle. He was an inventor and played baseball for the Cleveland Indians’ single-A team, and one time he went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.”
“What did he invent?”
“This kind of gum that had cloves in it, for people with toothaches,” I said. “And some other stuff too. But the gum was his most famous thing.”
Mac R. grabbed his comic book back. “Gum’s stupid.”
“So’s telling everybody your name is Mac when it’s not really your name. That’s about the stupidest thing I can think of.”
“I know it’s stupid!” Mac R. stood up and glared at me. “Don’t you think I know it’s stupid? You’re the one that’s stupid if you don’t think I know it’s stupid to tell people that your name is Mac just so you’ll have one stupid thing in common with somebody in your class.”
I was thinking it was possible that Mac R. was the most confusing person I’d ever met in my whole life. But I decided not to say this. I thought maybe it was time to not have this conversation anymore. Maybe we could start a conversation that didn’t have so much yelling in it. I said, “So should I start calling you Ben? I mean, it’s a good name and everything.”
All the sudden Mac R. looked tired, like he’d just run a hundred miles. “Yeah,” he said, sitting back down on the bed. “It’s starting to feel really weird that nobody in this school calls me Ben.”
I looked some more at Mac R./Ben’s comics. He was a genius, that was for sure. Just not a school kind of genius.
“Do you just want to do pictures of volcanoes for our project?” I asked him.
“No, these are just design ideas. I was thinking we could get some plaster and some sculpey clay. It would be pretty easy to build a model. We could put some drawings on a board, too, maybe to show the inside of the volcano, stuff like that.”
I nodded. This was actually a good plan. It was sort of getting me interested in volcanoes again. I could make some posters that explained how volcanoes worked and told some facts about the really famous volcanoes, like Mount Saint Helens and the volcanoes in the Ring of Fire.
“Do you know how to make a volcano erupt?” I asked Mac R./Ben. He shook his head no.
“Then, I’ll be in charge of that,” I told him. “It’s too bad we can’t build a real volcano, like a miniature one. But the lava’s around two thousand degrees Fahrenheit or something. It’s just this big mass of molten rock charged with gas, and it breaks through the earth’s crust, which is totally hard to do. Lava is like the Superman of nature, if you know what I mean.”
Mac R./Ben nodded again, like he knew exactly what I meant.
And then he put up his right hand and we slapped high fives.
The word boogers never even crossed my mind.
chapter seven
Here are some weird facts about what happened after that:
My brain had no problem making the switch from Mac R. to Ben. I think this was because I didn’t like Mac R. and I did like Ben. So my brain sort of forgot that Mac R. ever existed.
I started playing with dinosaurs again. Or at least I took them out when Ben came over to my house for lunch, after we kind of, sort of, halfway straightened his room so his mom wouldn’t go ballistic when she saw it. When we got to my house, my mom had just come home from the store and was stuffing some doomed spinach into the refrigerator.
“I thought you said you didn’t like dinosaurs anymore,” my mom said when I told her I needed the step ladder to get the box of dinosaurs down from the top shelf of my closet. “I thought that was a Let-it-Go box.”
A Let-it-Go box is one where you put stuff that you don’t play with anymore but aren’t quite ready to send to Goodwill. What happens is that you sort of forget about it, and then one day you look in your closet and the box is gone and you can’t remember what was inside it in the first place.
“I guess I’m not ready to let it go yet,” I said. I could tell this answer did not make my mom happy. She’s very big into decluttering. Every few weeks you hear her on the phone saying, “I can’t believe what a mess it is in here. Time to declutter!” It’s the most cheerful you will ever hear my mom sound.
She sighed an irritated sigh. “Okay,” she said. “You can get it down.” Then she turned to Ben. “Do you like dinosaurs?”
Ben nodded. My mom sighed again and looked at me. You could tell she thought I’d made a crummy choice when I picked Ben for my new friend. A re-clutterer. That’s like a crime to my mom.
My dinosaur collection isn’t all that great, if you want to know the truth. Partly that’s because I stopped collecting dinosaurs in kindergarten, and partly it’s because Marcus borrowed a bunch of my dinosaurs and didn’t actually return them. So now most of my dinosaur collection is living in Lawrence, Kansas.
Here are two things I learned about Ben that afternoon:
He is not only a drawing genius, he is also a dinosaur genius. He knows every fact there is to know about dinosaurs, and he’s pretty good at telling you these facts without making you want to jump out of your window just so he’ll shut up.
He’s really a pretty nice person. I realized this when he acted like my dinosaurs were very interesting and worthwhile, when in fact, two of them have spent time in the microwave, four of them were left outside on the deck for three years in all sorts of weather conditions, and the rest of them have been pretty well chewed on by my dog, Schmitty, and my little sister, Margaret.
I wondered how a pretty nice person like Ben could have spent the first month of school acting like the pretty-not-nice person Mac R. And then I wondered if the other people in our class would ever give him a second chance. He had made a big mess out of the first one, you had to admit.
“Are you going to tell everybody that your name is Ben?” I asked him as we were putting the dinosaurs back into the Let-it-Go box. “I mean, at school next week? Because they might like you if you were Ben. They still think you’re Mac R.”
Ben tossed a stegosaurus from hand to hand. “I wish Mac R. had never been born,” he said.
“Me too,” I agreed. “He was really irritating.”
Ben sighed and looked at me. “Do you ever get in an obnoxious mood, and you know you’re being obnoxious, but you just can’t stop?”
I nodded. I’m like that when my cousin Alien comes to visit. Separately me and my cousin Alien are both sort of quiet and prefer scientific thinking to stuff like wrestling and chasing other people around with sticks. But if you put us in the same room, watch out. It’s like a chemical reaction we have to each other.
“It’s probably too late to make friends with anybody but you,” Ben said. “I think I blew it with the rest of our class.”
If you’re a scientist like me, you’re always interested when a problem comes around. Because what you learn when you study science is that if you think hard enough and are willing to take risks, almost every problem has a solution.
It’s just a matter of discovering what that solution is.
“Don’t worry,” I told Ben. “I’ll think of something.”
And you know what? About five minutes later I did.
chapter eight
I met Ben in front of the school first thing this morning. “Did you get everything done?” I asked him.
Ben nodded and dropped a paper bag at my feet. We’d spent most of Saturday night and all of yesterday coming up with a plan for reintroducing Ben to the kids of Mrs. Tuttle’s class. The ideas were mine, but Ben had to do most of the actual work. Of course, I had to write up our volcano plans for Mrs. Tuttle, so we were even.
“I didn’t make as many copies as you said,” Ben told me as we walked toward the door. “My mom wouldn’t let me use the copier in her office, so I had to go to the library, and the library copier sort of exploded before I got finished.”
I was automatically jealous. The most exciting thing I’d ever seen at the library was when this kid got his arm stuck in the outside book retur
n and his mom started yelling for someone to call the fire department. The head librarian finally came outside with a toilet bowl plunger and unstuck him.
“Did it explode explode?” I asked. “Did you get burned? Did they take you to the hospital?”
Ben pushed through the door, dragging his bag behind him. “Well, maybe it didn’t explode exactly. But there were definitely sparks. And smoke. Really bad-smelling smoke.”
“Electrical fire,” I said. “That’s the worst-smelling smoke, next to burning hair. My sister Margaret’s hair caught on fire last year when she was blowing out her birthday candles. Talk about stinkazoid.”
Ben turned around and grinned. “You learned that word from me,” he said. “I use that word in my comic books all the time. I’m pretty sure I made it up.”
We were the first kids in school. That was part of the plan, to corner Mrs. Tuttle before anyone else got there and get her okay for what we wanted to do.
“Ben, huh?” Mrs. Tuttle said after we’d explained the situation to her. “I’ve been wondering why you decided to use a nickname in class, especially since your mom referred to you as Ben instead of Mac when she came to Parent Open House night.”
Mrs. Tuttle leaned back in her seat, giving Ben the big once-over. She chewed thoughtfully on the end of a purple pen she’d been using to grade papers when we walked in.
“Why don’t you use red ink like other teachers?” I asked her. I was starting to feel itchy thinking about homework papers covered in purple ink.
“Red is a nervous-making color for some people,” Mrs. Tuttle explained. “They see a lot of red ink on their paper, it stresses them out. Purple, on the other hand, is a soothing color.”
“Not to me, it isn’t,” I said, scratching my arm. “I’m allergic to purple.”
“Do you actually break out in hives when you come in contact with it?” Mrs. Tuttle wanted to know, sounding interested.
“Practically,” I told her. “It’s pretty bad.”
“Well then, I’ll use red on your paper. You’re not allergic to red, are you?”
I shook my head no. Mrs. Tuttle smiled. Then she told us we were welcome to try out our plan at Share and Stare, but not to get our hopes up too high. “No offense, Ben,” she said, “but it can be hard to undo first impressions.”
“And my first impression was a pretty bad one,” Ben admitted, slumping back against the chalkboard. “My second and third ones too.”
Mrs. Tuttle handed Ben a red rubber frog from her desk drawer. “Why don’t you hold on to Felix today? He’ll put the spring back into your step.”
Share and Stare was right after math. Mrs. Tuttle does math first thing every morning because she says it pumps up the brains of all the math people in the class and gets it out of the way for the nonmath people. I personally am a math person, so I started Share and Stare in high-octane Big Mac Attack mode. Usually I’m the sort of person who stays halfway in his shell, more observing than making a lot of noise about everything, but when I’m in Big Mac Attack mode, watch out.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced first thing, “only moments ago, without anyone noticing, I made someone in this class disappear. Look around you and see who’s missing!”
It surprised me how long it took for somebody to figure out it was Ben. He’d slipped out of the room a few minutes before, when Mrs. Tuttle was showing the class her fake poisonous rubber frog named Lester, the latest addition to her frog jar.
Finally Melissa Beamer figured it out. “Where’s Mac R.? If he’s the one you made disappear, I hope he’s gone for good.”
A bunch of kids clapped. I noticed that Aretha Timmons clapped loudest of all.
“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “I made Ben—I mean, Mac R.—disappear. And for my next trick I am going to replace him with someone much, much better.”
“Who?” everyone in the class asked at once. “Who?” It sounded like a gigantic owl had just flown into the room.
“A practically famous artist,” I told them. “In fact, this artist has been observing our class for several weeks now, and I have some of his artwork to share with you.”
I pulled Ben’s bag from behind Mrs. Tuttle’s desk and took out a stack of stapled papers. “There aren’t enough to go around, so you’ll have to share with a buddy,” I said. Everybody automatically turned to the person to their right, except for the kids on the farthest right row, who automatically turned to their left. Mrs. Tuttle is very big on buddies. She brought this habit over from the first grade.
At least she doesn’t make us hold hands when we’re walking to the playground.
As soon as people got a look at the handouts, they got very quiet. There were four sheets stapled together, copied front and back. You could almost hear people concentrate as they looked at the pictures and read the words. I walked over to Aretha’s desk and looked over her shoulder. She was staring at a picture of herself.
“Who did this?” she asked me. “Who drew this picture? It looks just like me, or what I’d look like if I lived in a comic book.”
It was true. You could have looked at that picture cross-eyed and upside down and still have known it was Aretha.
All around us people started talking. They were saying, “Did you see the picture of me?” They told one another their superhero names, which were written under their pictures.
Ben had done a comic book of our class. That was my great idea. Because everybody loves to see pictures of themselves. And everybody likes people who can draw. It’s practically a rule that if you can draw, people will want to be your friend. In third grade there was this girl in my class named Emily Porter who could draw great pictures of horses. Everybody was always asking Emily Porter to draw them a horse. They completely ignored the fact that she cheated on spelling and math tests, and you had to cover up your paper if she sat anywhere near you.
After people had had a chance to point out their pictures to everyone, I clapped my hands to get their attention. “Would you like to meet the artist of this brilliant document?” I asked them. They all nodded.
I walked to the door and opened it. Ben was waiting outside in the hallway. He looked very, very nervous.
As a matter of scientific fact, he looked like he might throw up any second.
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce to you the world’s greatest artist, Ben Robbins!”
When Ben walked into the room, he was squeezing Felix so hard I couldn’t help but be glad that Felix wasn’t real. Frog guts all over the floor might have made everyone forget about Ben’s great art.
“Ben?” somebody yelled out. “That’s not Ben! That’s Mac R.”
Somebody booed.
Mrs. Tuttle walked over to Ben and put her arm around his shoulder. “Maybe you’d like to do some explaining now, Ben?” she said. Ben nodded.
That’s when he told everybody that he knew he’d been a jerk and he was sorry he’d said a bunch of obnoxious things at the beginning of school. He also told them that he wished they would call him Ben instead of Mac R.
“I’m tired of being a Mac,” he said. He turned to me. “No offense.”
I wasn’t offended. I was tired of him being a Mac too.
Two seconds later Ben was mobbed. Everybody wanted him to sign the comic book he’d drawn of our class. People wanted him to sign the cover and by their picture. Michelle Lee, who’d been in the same third-grade class as me, wanted to know if Ben knew how to draw horses.
I sat down at my desk, feeling satisfied. Using sound scientific reasoning, I had come up with a plan to make people like Ben, and looking around the room, I could tell my plan had worked. You could tell that people had already forgotten Mac R. completely and thought Ben was great.
Well, maybe not everyone had forgotten. Behind me I could hear the sound of a pencil popping against a desktop. It was a very mad-sounding pencil. I turned around slowly.
“Maybe he can fool everybody else into believing he’s changed,” Aretha Timmons said,
glaring at me. “But I know better. That boy will always be Mac R. to me.”
chapter nine
I think I have mentioned the fact that I’m allergic to girls. My mom says you can’t actually be allergic to other human beings, but she’s wrong about that.
Here is my scientific reasoning: A person can be allergic to animals, right? When this happens, it’s usually because of their dander. If the word dander reminds you of dandruff, that’s because it’s just like dandruff. It is flaky skin that comes off and gets into the air and into people’s noses.
Which is kind of gross if you think about it for too long.
If you are allergic to an animal’s dander, you will spend a lot of time sneezing your head off if you get near that kind of animal. Your skin will also start to do weird things. Once I did this experiment where I touched a cat on purpose, and then I videotaped the hives coming out on my arms. It was really cool.
Until they started to itch.
They itched for three hours.
It was a pretty stupid experiment, if you want to know the truth.
People’s skin flakes off all the time. My mom won’t let my stepdad wear anything black or dark blue because he has dandruff like snowflakes falling from his head.
I’m not allergic to my stepdad’s dander, but theoretically I could be. Dander is dander, is the way I see things. And if I could be allergic to my stepdad, I could be allergic to girls. Maybe most girls have extra-flaky skin, and that’s why they make me itch so bad.
Since I’m allergic to girls and am not friends with any girls, you wouldn’t think that I’d care about Aretha Timmons’s opinion. I should just try to stay away from her the way I stay away from peanuts and cat hair.
But the fact is, Aretha Timmons is my only fellow scientist in Mrs. Tuttle’s fourth-grade class. There are some other kids who get As in science like me and Aretha, but that doesn’t automatically make them scientists.
Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Erupts! Page 3