Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed! Read Free Page A

and looked at me. His face was a very pale shade of green. “I’ve never heard of a kid having to live at school,” he said.
    â€œThat’s what happened last year,” I told him. It was a big lie, but I was desperate. “You didn’t go to our school then, so you wouldn’t know about it, but all the class presidents ended up sleeping in the nurse’s office practically every night.”

    I could see Ben was beginning to have second thoughts about running for class president. I sank back into the couch and smiled. My work was done.
    Or maybe not.
    â€œI’ll just pass a law saying class presidents never have to stay after school, even if they get in trouble. It will be the big privilege of the class president to be able to leave school property whenever he wants to.” Ben smiled and clicked the TV back on.
    I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, like that’s a law Mrs. Patino will approve in two seconds flat.”
    Ben shrugged. “The president makes the rules, what can I say?”
    I could see this battle would not be won in an afternoon. I decided to turn my attention to mold.

    Scientifically speaking, there are few things in the world more interesting than mold. Here’s what I already knew, other than that mold is really gross in a cool kind of way:
    Mold is a fungus. A fungus is a single-celled organism that grows into colonies of cells that become molds, mushrooms, and other cool stuff. Even though mold grows, it is not a plant or an animal. One way you know this is that no one wants it for a pet, and nobody wants to grow it in their garden, either.
Mold is everywhere. All you need is moisture, air, and stuff that mold likes to eat. If you look insidemy fridge, you will see that mold really, really likes cheese. But it likes other stuff too, like oranges that have been sitting out in a bowl on the kitchen table for a long time, and an old shoe box that maybe you one time tried to make sail like a boat in your bathtub and then stuffed into the cabinet under the bathroom sink when you heard your mom coming upstairs. Mold likes wet stuff a lot.
The way mold gets places is by sending out spores, which are kind of like seeds. If it is a dry kind of mold, the wind will blow its spores around for it. If it is a wet kind of mold, sometimes animals or insects will move it.Slime molds, some of nature’s most awesome organisms, move by sliming stuff. They just keep stretching along, eating anything in their path.
If you look at mold under a microscope, it looks a lot like spaghetti. Don’t eat it!
The mold that grows in your shower is called mildew. It is there because mold likes moisture.
    Ben’s shower is very, very moist.

    When I pulled back the shower curtain, it was like I was interrupting a mildew party. Mildew was creeping up and down the walls and the shower curtain, and it was hanging around the drain like it couldn’t wait for somebody to turn on some more water. The mildew was black and spotty and really, really cool looking.
    In fact, it was so cool looking it occurred to me that I didn’t actually want to get rid of it.
    This was a problem.
    â€œI guess we probably couldn’t talk your mom into learning to live with mold, could we?” I asked Ben.
    Ben shook his head. “No way. She hates it.”
    â€œIf she really hated it, she’d get rid of it,” I pointed out.

    â€œShe doesn’t have time. And whenever she decides she’s going to clean out the shower, it turns out she doesn’t have the right supplies. It’s a bad situation.”
    â€œBut the mildew isn’t actually hurting anything,” I said. “Maybe if she tried to look at it in a more positive way, she wouldn’t mind it so much. Maybe she could try to think of it as a sort of plant or something.”
    â€œIt’s slimy,” Ben said. “It’s gross and slimy, and you’re pretty crazy if you think you’re going to