This afternoon, after school, I rode the bus home with Ben. I needed his artistic-genius help with my mold museum presentation for Mrs. Patino. In return I promised I’d help him work on his campaign strategy.
The best strategy I could come up with was that Ben should drop out of the race. Immediately.
“Can’t do it,” Ben said. We were sitting on the floor of his bedroom. Ben was working on a new comic book, and I was drawing mold samples in my notebook, using colored pencils. “My dad said if I win, he’ll come visit and stay for the whole weekend, all the way till Monday morning. We’ll stay at a hotel and watch pay-per-view and eat pizza.”
“He could do that even if you didn’t run for class president,” I pointed out.
“No, because he has to take off work to come visit, so it’s easier for me to go see him. Him coming here is special.”
Ben held up his sketch pad so I could see how the story was coming along. In the comic-book series he’s doing, his main guy, Derek the Destroyer, races around the globe saving the world from evil. In this story Derek was thwarting an amazon girls’ volleyball team in their attempt to take over the White House and force everyone in the country to play volleyball twenty-four hours a day.
Volleyball, in case you were wondering, is not exactly Ben’s favorite sport.
“That’s cool about your dad coming here,” I said. “But you’ve got to be realistic about the election. Why would somebody vote for you instead of Chester or Stacey?”
Ben chewed on his pencil. “Because I’m a good artist?”
“That’s all you’ve got?” I asked. “Why should anybody vote for you just because you’re an artist?”
“I’m a creative guy,” Ben said. “Creative people are creative problem solvers, Mrs. Tuttle said so.”
“So, what problems are you going to solve?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Ben said. “Have you ever noticed that around ten thirty everybody’s stomachs start growling? But there’s still an hour until lunch, and you can’t concentrate on anything because you’re, like, totally starvazoid.”
“Starvazoid” is one of Ben’s made-up words. He practically has his own dictionary of Ben words that sound like they just jumped out of a stack of comic books.
“So, what’s your idea?” I asked. “Mandatory snack time?”
“Exactly!” Ben exclaimed. “It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. I’m thinking doughnuts and milk, maybe, or candy bars.”
I thought about this for a few seconds. “It’s got to be nutritious,” I told him. “Definitely no candy. But overall it’s not a bad idea. You could be onto something here.”
Ben grinned. “Okay, then, check out this cool-a-bomb idea. Two words, buddy: mucho, mucho longer recess.”
“That’s four words.”
“Two words, four words, same dif,” Ben said. “My point is, we get fifteen lousy minutes on the playground after lunch. By the time you choose up teams for kickball, you have, like, three minutes to play the game.”
“But you hate playing kickball,” I said. “Today you spent recess trying to build a T. rex out of broken Popsicle sticks.”
“It’s not about me,” Ben said. “It’s about the people.”
I had to admit, the people would definitely vote for more recess.
“Those are good ideas,” I told him. “But you’ve still got a problem. Chester and Stacey are really popular. You’re, well, less popular.”
“I know,” Ben said. “I still haven’t figured how to creatively solve that problem.”
We decided to work on my mold presentation. Sometimes if you stop thinking about something for a while, you get an awesome idea without even trying. It’s like all the neurons in your brain just keep popping away all by themselves until they hit on the exact right thing.
The brain, in case you were wondering, is an incredible machine.
I showed Ben this killer mold book I’d checked out of the library. “I figured I could write down a lot of interesting facts about mold, and then you could copy them over on a poster and draw some good pictures. I mean, pictures that make the mold look really amazing. Like art, practically.”
Ben nodded. “I could do that,” he said. “In the close-up pictures mold isn’t nearly half so gross looking as it looks in real life. You could probably fool Mrs. Patino into thinking that mold is something really cool. Like something she might want to give someone for Christmas.”
That was probably taking things too far. Nobody likes mold more than I do, but I still don’t want to find it in my stocking on Christmas morning.
Still, I was glad Ben was finally on Team Fungus.
Ben started sketching out pictures of mold on a piece of poster board, while I wrote down fascinating mold facts, such as:
It only took an hour to come up with an amazing poster presentation. Ben drew four of the most beautiful molds known to humankind: Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa, otherwise known as white coral slime; Pulcherricium caeruleum, which is blue and sort of velvety; Licea sambucina, a slime mold made up of really tiny orange balls; and another slime mold, Lamproderma granulosum, that looks like greenish soap bubbles.
There’s probably nothing more beautiful on the whole planet Earth than a colorful slime mold.
Mrs. Robbins, Ben’s mom, stuck her head in the doorway. She manages the apartment complex where she and Ben live, and when she’s working, she always calls from the office or comes by every thirty minutes or so to check on Ben and make sure he isn’t getting into trouble.
About 85 percent of the time he is.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to Ben’s mold pictures. “It’s really beautiful. Like flowers, almost, but not quite. Undersea plants, maybe?”
“It’s mold,” Ben said, coloring in some P. caeruleum with a blue Magic Marker.
Ben’s mom put her hand over her mouth like Ben had just told her he was drawing dog poop. “No way!”
“Yep!” Ben grinned. “It’s for Mac’s big science project.”
I could tell he was starting to enjoy the way that just talking about mold could freak some people out.
Ben’s mom shook her head. “Comic books and mold. You boys make quite a team.”
After his mom left, Ben got quiet for a minute. Ben is always quiet when he’s drawing, but when he’s not drawing, usually he’s talking. In fact, it’s pretty hard to shut him up. So when he’s quiet and not drawing, watch out.
When he suddenly jumped on his bed and started dancing around, I knew I was in serious trouble.
“I just came up with a fantastatomic plan!” he yelled, like I was in Alaska instead of sitting five feet away from him. “Why don’t you run for vice president on my presidential ticket? You could pick out the snacks every day if you wanted to, and you could be in charge of punishing the people who rebel against our administration!”
I thought about this plan for approximately three seconds. To be honest, I didn’t actually need three seconds to know the answer was no. I am a scientist, not a politician.
But right as I was about to open my mouth and deliver the bad news, I had one of my famous Big Mac attacks. I could not believe my own personal geniosity at that very moment.
My brain had come through, just like I knew it would.
“I’m not the one you need to run as your vice president,” I told Ben. “But I know who is.”