When I got to the lab, I gave the tunnel door a good kick, and it swung open and slammed against the side of the old dryer. The CLANG! was ear bursting.
Reynolds Pipkin didn’t flinch. Instead, he just sat there on the metal stool looking out at absolutely nothing. It was like he was playing a video game that only existed inside his head.
I glared at him and walked to my lab table.
“Well?” I demanded.
He put his brain on pause and looked at me. “Well what?”
“Aren’t you going to ask me if I had a bad day at school?”
“Is there any other kind?” he said.
This is what bugs me about Reynolds Pipkin — he can be right and still be annoying. I picked up a red shop rag and wiped it across the table.
“Look at that dust! You call this a laboratory?”
“I call it a garage,” Reynolds said.
I scowled at him. There is nothing worse than being in a bad mood and not being able to share it with the people around you. But with Reynolds selfishly refusing to feel miserable, I was forced to take my rage out on dirt. For as long as I can remember, I have been one of those people who cleans when he’s upset. There’s something oddly satisfying about seeking out unsuspecting scum and destroying it. I clinched the rag tightly in my fist and tried as hard as I could to scrub a hole right through the top of the lab table. When my elbow started to ache, I lifted the rag and inspected my work. The table looked clean.
But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. I could still feel an invisible layer of filth, and that’s when I knew that the table and the chairs and my beakers and my books and my lab couldn’t really be clean, not really, because they were tainted. Everything was.
Just that morning, I had gone to school knowing that I was the undisputed king of the seventh-grade science hill. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. Now everything was different. Gerald Forster had pushed me off my throne and I was rolling and rolling, and I didn’t think I was ever going to stop.
My eyes darted around the room, desperate for something else to scrub. They locked onto the large metal barrel in the corner. It was irresistibly gross.
I walked cautiously toward it.
“What are you doing?” Reynolds asked me.
“Nothing. Just cleaning.”
I pressed the red cloth against the silver metal and rubbed. As I made small, slow swirls with my hand, I had the strangest feeling that I wasn’t rubbing a barrel at all — it was Aladdin’s lamp. I half expected a genie to pop out and grant my fondest wish.
“Maybe you should clean something else, Howard,” a voice said.
It was Franklin. Reynolds had called him on my tablet.
“I’m cleaning this,” I said.
“I know,” he said, and I heard worry in his voice. “I just thought you were done with that.”
Funny, I thought so too. But now I wasn’t sure.
The rag moved to the top of the barrel, and I pressed down firmly against it. Steadily, I moved it around the rim, scrubbing harder and harder, and then I heard a tinny, metal pop.
“Oops,” I said.
The lid had opened.
There was a hush in the lab.
“Close the lid, Howard,” Franklin said gently.
“OK,” I told him.
But I didn’t close it. Instead I lifted it and looked down at the forbidden creation inside — my monster goo.
“Do you know how amazing this stuff is?” I said. “Just add the right ingredients and it can become . . . anything.”
I reached down and dipped my hand into the green, gooey slime. It was like touching magic. The secrets of transformation were flowing through my fingers.
“Don’t do it, Howard,” Franklin said. “It’s too dangerous.”
I pulled my arm out of the barrel and a big, messy wad came up with it. I’d forgotten how sticky the goo was. Once you picked it up, it was almost impossible to let it go.
“Everything is dangerous,” I said, as a slime trail oozed down my forearm. “Like fire. I mean, it can burn a house down, right? But it also keeps us warm and toasts marshmallows and gives off light. You can’t just say something is good or bad. It all depends on how you use it.”
The last time I’d used the goo, some terrible things happened. I knew that. And still, I couldn’t put it down. It was kind of like running into a friend you haven’t seen in a long, long time. It didn’t matter if you’d had a fight before — that was in the past. Now that you were back together, all you could remember were the good times.
I looked up and saw Franklin staring at me from his little electronic window. He was shaking his head.
“Howard . . . please don’t.”
“Will you stop worrying? Look at it,” I said, rolling the goo into a harmless round ball. “It’s mostly Wonder Putty. What could happen?”
Diving into the barrel with both hands, I pulled out a huge, gelatinous mound and spread it out on my lab table. When I saw it lying there, the memory of my one and only scientific breakthrough came rushing back. I felt this instant surge of power and excitement. Go ahead, let Gerald Forster build a basketball-playing toaster — let him build a hundred! It still wouldn’t compare with the spectacular discovery I had on my table at that very moment. This was real science — science that could change lives.
Well, it could change my life, anyway.
“Is it safe, Howard?” Reynolds asked.
“Of course it’s safe,” I said. “I mean, you like Franklin, right? Well, this is the stuff that made Franklin.”
“It also made Pookie,” Franklin reminded me. “And Mutt and Tarzana and Big Ape and Buffy . . .”
“And Steve Evil!” Reynolds gasped. His eyes were the size of bagels.
They were right. The goo had made Steve Evil — “Steevil,” as he called himself — and all the other bad monsters. They attacked the school and kidnapped the UPs and came within seconds of hurting Winnie McKinney. And if it hadn’t been for Franklin . . .
I stopped myself. I didn’t like to think about what might have happened if Franklin hadn’t shown up when he did.
Still, now that I looked at it lying there all soft and harmless, I realized it hadn’t been fair to blame the goo. Because the goo was just a tool, right?
“I really think the problem was the DNA,” I said. “I got it from kids like Kyle Stanford and Josh Gutierrez — I mean, looking back, it’s so obvious. Bad people turn into bad monsters.”
“You know it wasn’t just that, Howard,” Franklin said.
I ignored that comment.
“I’m not going to make any more monsters, Franklin. What are you so worried about?”
Franklin didn’t say anything. But I could tell he wanted to.
“Then what are you going to do with it?” Reynolds asked.
Up until that moment, I honestly didn’t know. But then I looked at Reynolds and Franklin, and when I opened my mouth, an answer came out.
“What?” Franklin asked.
“I’m going to make a robot. Look, it’s perfect. Robots don’t even have DNA. They’re machines! All I need is to somehow get the goo to transform into a cool-looking mechanical whatever, and then, the minute I win the contest — ZAP! — I’ll get rid of it.”
The two faces in front of me looked nervous. So I raised my right hand.
“I, Howard Boward, hereby pledge to use only quality, non-evil ingredients in the making of this robot, and to shut it down if even the slightest thing should go wrong. Does that make you happy?”
Reynolds hesitated but nodded. I glanced at Franklin.
“You know best, Howard,” he said. But I don’t think he meant it.
“Awesome!” I said. “OK, first things first. What do we want in our robot?”
“Metal? Nuts and bolts?” Reynolds said.
“Exactly. Let’s find some.”
A quick search of the garage turned up a small jar of nuts and bolts, some loose screws, an assortment of wires, and a couple of aluminum cans. We tossed them into the goo.
“What’s next?”
“Electronics,” Reynolds said.
This search took longer, but, when we returned to the table, we had a flashlight, parts from an old vacuum cleaner, a burned-out blow dryer, and the remains of a once-awesome TV set. They all went into the goo. Then I added some spare computer components that I kept around the lab for emergencies.
“Anything else?” I asked.
Reynolds thought for a while but couldn’t come up with anything.
“Something nice,” I heard a quiet voice say.
Good ol’ Franklin. He might just be a Facespace friend these days, but he was still trying to protect me from real-world danger. And if it made him feel better to think there was some way we could add a dash of “nice” to our robot mix, well, who was I to argue?
I picked up my boogie banana. It was bright and colorful and fun, and the first time I saw it, it made me laugh out loud. Besides, if real bananas are good for people, I didn’t see why a mechanical one wouldn’t be good for a robot.
“This is nice, right?” I said, holding it in front of the tablet.
Franklin smiled.
I tossed it into the goo.
“OK, now all I have to do is program it,” I said.
Turning on my laptop, I googled “robot designs” and picked an impressive-looking model. And I don’t mean one of those weird square robots like Gerald built. I mean the real thing, the kind you see in the movies, the ones with arms and legs and working metal claws that could crush a car. Then I ran a cable from the computer to the goo and stuck the unattached end deep inside the mysterious squish.
I pressed ENTER.
For the first few minutes, nothing happened. From the look of things, I might as well have connected my laptop to a giant bowl of mashed potatoes. But just when I was about to give up, bubbles appeared on the surface. They grew bigger and took on strange shapes, until the entire concoction on my lab table looked like a boiling goo-stew. The nuts and bolts and wires were gone now, absorbed into the doughy mixture, and it throbbed and vibrated and let out great belches of steam.
I looked at Reynolds. His mouth was wide open like a baby bird waiting to be fed. I tried to smile but realized I couldn’t because my mouth was wide open too. This was a glorious sight for scientific eyes!
And then, after the blob had done every amazing thing you could reasonably expect a blob to do, it stopped. I waited for the next fantastic transformation. And waited . . . and waited . . . and waited. But it didn’t come.
“Is that a robot?” asked Reynolds, squinting through his glasses.
I bit my lip and stepped closer. “No,” I said finally. “That’s a failure.”
The blob on my lab table . . . was a blob. It had put on quite a show and had grown way too large to put back into the barrel with the rest of the goo. But it wasn’t going to walk or talk or do amazing robot stuff. And it wasn’t going to beat Gerald Forster. Not unless there was an award for laziest robot blob.
“Get a box, Reynolds,” I said.
He looked around the garage and came back with a big brown box that used to hold a dishwasher. On the side were the words “Handle with Care.”
I scraped the big wad of useless goo off the table and into the box, then closed the four flaps to seal it inside.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work, Howard,” Franklin said.
I knew he wasn’t really sorry. He was relieved. But it was a nice thing to say.
I headed back into the house and prepared for the next day of school — my first day as the second-smartest kid at Dolley Madison.