The McVentures of Me, Morgan McFactoid

by Mark S. Waxman

  I pointed to a camera lens encased in the rafters above, hidden inside the “O” of the element, H2O. “It’s from my security camera. It captures picture, but not sound,” I said. “My gas generator switches on when the power unexpectedly shuts off, like it did last night.”

  “So we’re on television right now? Cool,” she said, waving to the camera.

  “It records everything around the clock. Except last night a hole in the roof sent water rushing onto the camera and soaked the memory card inside.”

  “H2O. Such irony . . .”

  “I can dry my camera in a bucket of uncooked rice, but the card won’t play back.”

  “A little water shouldn’t hurt a memory card. Cutting it in half . . . now that would destroy all the data.” Robin said, joining me at the lab table.

  “Do you have a hair dryer up here?” Robin asked, lifting the card from my hand.

  “I have everything up here,” I declared.

  I retrieved a blow dryer from my junk trunk. Robin plugged it in, turned it on, and patiently passed the hot air over the card, front and back. I wondered whether she had attempted this technique on her history book or if she used her wet book as an excuse to see me. While I was engaged in hopeful thinking, she started to sing the song “Jimmy Crack Corn.”

  “If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a song about him?” I asked.

  Robin just looked at me. She must have thought I was a real doofus. “Harriet Stern invented the portable hair dryer in 1962,” she said casually.

  “Walmart, Kmart, and Target started in 1962,” I said.

  “Walmart is the largest company in the history of the world,” she said.

  It was like playing facts ping-pong. I had surely found my factoidal soul mate. After a couple minutes, she turned off the hair dryer and handed me the flash card. “Now try it.”

  I inserted the card into the laptop and this time the video images were there!

  “It worked!” I said.

  “Told ya,” Robin said.

  “Told ya!” Echo said. “Woman hath no limits!”

  “Behave yourself,” I said to Echo.

  “Behave yourself!” Echo shouted back to me.

  We could see a shot of me on the monitor preparing my formula from the night before, talking aloud to my pets, my lips moving—though we couldn’t hear anything—as I measured each ingredient, pureeing the concoction, and applying the purple cream to my face. The blackboard was in plain sight, showing my latest formula clearly written out.

  I played the video at double speed. We watched me leave the lab for the night and, in the glow of the nightlight, we saw Taxi sleeping on the floor under my stool. I fast-forwarded at triple speed. We saw a flash of lightning followed by the moment the electricity went out, plunging the McFactory into darkness. That’s when the gas generator would have kicked in, restarting the camera. I continued fast-forwarding, seeing only a black screen.

  Just as I was about to stop the video, we saw another flash of lightning on the monitor, which illuminated the entire attic. I resumed playing the video at normal speed. A bolt of white lightning burst into the lab, shattering the glass, blowing out the entire window!

  Robin and I jumped back. We kept watching the screen, transfixed as a sparkling electrical current zipped around the McFactory. The current lit up the lab, allowing us to watch the wind and rain stream in through the blasted out window, drenching the room, blowing things off the shelves and flipping over furniture, including my stool. It was like an F5 tornado had formed inside the attic. (Each year, about a thousand tornadoes touch down in the United States, far more than in any other country.)

  The electric current continued to travel throughout the lab, just missing Echo. I was grateful that her cage wasn’t made of metal, or else Echo would have been one fried bird. Taxi huddled on the floor under my fallen stool. The electricity surged along the edge of the lab table, up and down the metal file cabinets, onto the tabletop. It zigzagged across the beakers, over the bell jars, and flickered in and out of the funnels and flasks, blazing through the test tubes and balance scales, busting the top off my big steel blender, diving inside, zapping the purple potion and causing it to boil. And turn red.

  “That’s my anti-shaving formula!” I exclaimed.

  We saw the solution in the blender bubble, and a single dollop of bright red liquid erupt from the blender and fall directly onto Taxi’s solid shell! Splat!

  Then, everything on the video went dark again. We kept watching, but the storm had passed and the lightning no longer illuminated the room. The screen was black.

  I pushed “stop.” Neither of us spoke. My legs started to tremble as I slowly realized that, although I failed to invent the solution to shaving, the lightning bolt from the storm may have caused the exact opposite to take place inside the blender, reversing the results. Instead of preventing facial hair from growing, I may have accidentally stumbled across the formula for growing hair!

  Goodbye impossible.

  Hello miracle!

  FAME, FORTUNE, AND FRUSTRATING GIRLS

  I took the flash card out and placed it on the table. It no longer felt as if Robin and I were strangers. We had just witnessed an amazing occurrence together. Robin peered into the blender.

  “You made a whole batch?”

  “Yeah,” was all I could say.

  “There’s enough in here to try the experiment again,” she said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  More silence.

  “Maybe it was a fluke,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Echo chirped.

  Robin and I just looked at each other, wondering what it meant if it wasn’t a fluke.

  “You should test it again on Taxi,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “You should see if one drop is enough.”

  “Okay.”

  “Try two. Or three. Or more.”

  “Multiple drops. Got it.”

  “Or if it needs to be applied every few hours . . . to keep working . . . to keep the hair growing . . . like watering grass.”

  “Re-apply it. Grass. Right.”

  “You should put some of your formula on other surfaces, too.”

  “Other surfaces?”

  “Just to see what happens.”

  “Alright.”

  “I mean maybe it only works when it comes in contact with tortoise shell. Or, on the other hand—”

  “What’s on the other hand?” I asked.

  “Maybe it can work on anything.”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  “Is there an echo in here?” I asked.

  “Aye, aye, Matey!” Echo answered.

  “Like wood, bricks, steel . . .” Robin continued.

  “Hair on bricks,” I said. “Yeah, that’s just what I want for Christmas.” I picked up the blender, handling it delicately, like it was a human heart ready for transplant. I inched carefully toward the mini-fridge, being careful not to trip.

  “What’s your problem with hair on bricks?” Robin asked.

  “When was the last time you were at the mall shopping for hairy bricks?”

  Robin plopped down on the couch. A couple plastic bubbles popped.

  I stopped at the fridge and turned to her. “Robin . . .”

  “What?”

  “We can’t tell anyone about this.”

  “We?”

  “Do you know what our discovery could mean?”

  “Our?”

  “The two of us could be—”

  “Us?”

  “Yes! We, our, us.” I said. “If you hadn’t seen that spot on Taxi, I would never have known about it, especially because it disappeared. I would’ve given up being an inventor. I would’ve continued running away from Buckholtz. We’re like partners. I owe all this to you.”

  “Owe what?”

  As I placed the blender gently in the refrigerator, I said, “If this secret
potion really grows hair on anything—”

  “That’s a super-sized if,” she said.

  “We don’t need it to grow on wood or bricks or steel.”

  “You said ‘we’ again.”

  I closed the refrigerator door, took a deep breath, and walked over to her. “We just need it to grow on a human.”

  “You keep saying ‘we.’”

  “Do you have any idea how many people will pay for hair? And how much they’ll pay for it?”

  “People?” Robin asked. “What people?”

  I sat next to her on the popping couch and spelled it out for her, one letter at a time. “B-A-L-D people.”

  Robin and I were closer than ever. I could feel her breath. I thought she might be happy enough to hug me. Or, better yet, kiss me. She looked into my eyes and, after a long silence, said, “I think I should leave now.”

  “What? Why?” I stuttered.

  “Well, you solved the mystery. You found out what you wanted to know. You discovered how Taxi got hair.”

  “We,” I said. “We did that together!”

  She stood up and headed toward the trapdoor. I followed her, determined to make her stay. “Wait. You can’t leave now,” I said. “The two of us could be—”

  “Good night,” she said.

  “But, what if . . .” Actually, I didn’t know what I was going to say after that. I just didn’t want her to go.

  “What if what, Morgan?” Robin said, as she stepped onto the attic ladder.

  “What if . . .” I swallowed hard. “What if . . . it’s the . . .”

  “The what, Morgan?”

  “The cure to baldness?” I whispered.

  She thought for a moment. “Then I suppose you’d get what you want.”

  I just looked at her.

  “Rich and famous,” she said, before descending the stairs into the garage, walking down the driveway, and returning to her home across the street without a glance back.

  Girls! I wished they came with instruction manuals.

  HUMAN TRIALS

  I watched out my lab window until Robin went into her house and shut the door.

  What was going on in her mind? Couldn’t she see the possibilities of a hair-growing business? How could she not understand that this could be a historic scientific advancement—that together, we could become bazillionaires?

  I knew I had to conduct further tests of my formula (which I named simply Hair Today), to prove it was what I hoped it was. I filled a lipstick-sized plastic vial with my special red formula. I attached the vial to a leather strap and wore it around my neck.

  I placed five drops of Hair Today from my vial onto Taxi’s shell. And, following Robin’s suggestion, I placed drops where nobody could see them: one on the bottom of our dining room table, one on a cinder block inside our fireplace, and one on the back bumper of Dad’s old Jeep. Wood, brick, steel.

  As I was going downstairs to bed, I heard a noise that sounded like an outboard motor coming from the den. Poppy was in there snoring loudly. He’d fallen asleep on the couch in front of the television. He still had his reading glasses on and the newspaper in his hand, opened to the want ads. I stared at his bald head.

  I was tempted to squeeze a drop of my solution from my vial on top of his shiny head. But I decided to wait until my other test results were in before trying the formula on humans, just in case there were any peculiar reactions.

  I turned off the TV, covered Poppy with a quilt, and tiptoed away.

  I set my alarm clock for 5:00 a.m. so that I would wake before anyone else. The moment my eyes opened, I bolted upstairs to check on my various “control studies.” I found Taxi outside munching on a leaf. I picked him up and inspected his back carefully. Once again, he had developed a very small patch of red hair on his shell!

  I darted to the dining room and dived under the table where Kitten Kaboodle, our Calico cat, was playing with a long strand of red hair. It was one of many that had grown out of the wood. The strands looked like stalactites. Each hair was nearly six feet long! I made note of my findings on the McCorder. “Message to me: hair grows longer and faster on wood than on shell.”

  I looked inside our fireplace at the test brick. It, too, was covered with long, red hair. Really long hair—thirty feet long! “Message to me: hair grows much longer and much faster on brick than on wood.”

  Finally, I ran to the driveway and examined the back bumper of Dad’s Jeep. Red hair was hanging from the steel like a bunch of “Just Married” streamers. The hair stretched from the driveway to the street—a good hundred feet! “Message to me: hair grows much, much longer and faster on metal than on brick.”

  I cut all the hair from the table, fireplace and Jeep and hid it in the McFactory’s iron safe for further analysis. Now I really wondered how human skin would respond to my formula. But dad was honking the car horn. He was ready to drive us to school. Experiments on people would just have to wait.

  In the car, Chloe said she heard that Buckholtz had recovered from his bout with mononucleosis and was returning to class that very day. “Better start running, little brother,” she said. I shuddered and clutched the vial around my neck, hoping it would ward off evil spirits.

  “Has that Buckholtz kid been picking on you again?” my dad asked.

  I didn’t want to burden my father. He had enough on his mind. So I merely said, “Buckholtz? No way. He’s a wimp.”

  “I read that his father was arrested for getting into another bar fight,” Dad said.

  “Setting a fine example for his son,” Chloe said.

  “Well, let me know if that kid gives you any trouble,” Dad said, as he pulled the Jeep up to the school.

  Oh, right. Like telling on Brad Buckholtz was going to make my life easier.

  To lighten the mood, I fired off a fabulous fact. “Did you know that the sentence, ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,’ uses every letter in the alphabet?”

  It didn’t work. I was scared beyond words.

  Beyond facts.

  First period was geometry. With ten minutes left to the hour, Mrs. Constantine roamed the room, teaching us about trapezoids. The classroom door opened and a slightly pallid Buckholtz aimlessly wandered in. Mrs. Constantine stopped her lecture and stared at him. Over the years, he had failed her course more than once.

  Buckholtz started to improvise a rap song, “C’mon, Teach, first day back, cut some slack. Been so sick, been so down, but look out folks, Bucky’s back in town.” He snapped his fingers, spun around, and took a clunky bow.

  “Find a seat,” Mrs. Constantine said, unmoved. Buckholtz took his time as everyone watched him mosey to the back of the room and slump into an empty chair, right next to me. As Mrs. Constantine continued her trapezoid speech, Buckholtz leaned over and whispered, “Did you miss me, Hairy-boy?”

  Chills vibrated throughout my body. I knew he couldn’t hurt me as long as Mrs. Constantine was there. Even so, I said nothing.

  “I missed you,” Buckholtz said.

  When Mrs. Constantine had her back turned and was writing on the board, Buckholtz grabbed my arm. “Hairy-boy, did you hear what’s happening after school today? You know, in celebration of my return?”

  I kept looking straight ahead. A couple random facts quickly came to mind: The penguin is the only bird that can swim but not fly. It would take about 1, 200,000 mosquitoes to fully drain the average human body of blood. And no president of the United States was an only child.

  “You’re getting a free shave,” he said, squeezing my arm harder. “I owe you one. Remember? And I always pay my debts.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. I felt like 1,200,000 mosquitoes had fully drained my body of blood. I felt dead. Buckholtz stretched out in his chair. “I’m going to shave your face and I’m going to shave your head. Won’t that be fun, Hairy?” He flashed a smile and flashed electric clippers from under his windbreaker. Then he closed his eyes. To compose myself, I flashed on more arbitrary facts: Your ton
gue is the only muscle in your body that is attached at only one end . . . snails can sleep for three years without eating . . . elephants are the only mammals that can’t jump . . . and if NASA sent Echo into space, she would soon die; she needs gravity to swallow.

  Mrs. Constantine finished writing her long question on the board: What is the area of a trapezoid if its height is ten feet and the length of one of its bases is three times the length of the other base, which is four feet?

  “You have until the bell to work out the answer,” Mrs. Constantine said, before sitting down to grade papers.

  With his eyes still closed, Buckholtz turned to me and said in a low voice, “Hairy, when you get that answer, slide it over. Until then, don’t disturb me. I’m napping.”

  “Bradley!” yelled Mrs. Constantine. “No talking!” She returned to her grading and Buckholtz immediately fell asleep.

  My skin was clammy and my insides were turning. There was no way I was going to get scalped that day. I tried to think coolly and logically. I knew that one more spiffy statistic would calm my nerves: nine out of every ten living things live in the ocean. I promptly felt better.

  I had established that Buckholtz picked on me because he was jealous of my facial hair. Therefore, what if he suddenly grew some? Would he stop teasing me then?

  Poppy had said I needed to use my noggin against Buckholtz. Well, I decided to use something in addition to good old McCracken brainpower. I would use my secret weapon: Hair Today. It was time to test my special formula on a human.

  THE BURLY BEARDED BULLY

  Buckholtz was in a deep slumber. His body sprawled in his seat, his arms dangling by his sides. I saw that Mrs. Constantine was focused on her work and everyone else was fully engaged in figuring out the area of the trapezoid. Meanwhile, I was about to set a little “trap”-ezoid of my own.

  When no one was looking, I squeezed a drop of formula from my plastic vial onto each fingertip of Buckholtz’s left hand. I observed him carefully. He wasn’t waking up, not even stirring. And then, using the eraser of my pencil, I lightly tickled his jaw, cheeks, and chin.