Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed! Read Online Free Page B

in a row on the closet floor.
    All my games and LEGOs and Lincoln Logs were stacked up neatly.
    Sarah the Teenage Girl Space Alien had cleaned my closet.
    â€œMom!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Sarah threw out my worms!”
    I ran to check the outside garbage cans. No shoe box. I checked the recycling bin. No shoe box.
    â€œSarah probably dropped it off at Goodwill,” my mom said when I came back into the house. “I asked her to pull out all the clothes in your closet that didn’t fit anymore. She probably just looked at the size printed on the shoe box and thought there were too-small shoes in there.”
    â€œShe should have looked in the box!Who takes a shoe box to Goodwill without even looking to see what’s inside? It could have been a box full of tarantulas!”
    â€œShe would have heard tarantulas scurrying around inside the box,” my mom pointed out.
    I should mention that my mom is not the world’s biggest fan of my dried-worm collection. Which probably explains why she didn’t sound too upset about the missing shoe box.
    I sat down on the couch and put my head in my hands. Two years of worm collecting, down the drain.
    My mom must have realized how depressed I was. “I’ll call Goodwill tomorrow and see if they’ve found your worms,” she said. “I’m sure they would be more than happy to return them.”
    I decided to go to bed so that no morebad stuff could happen to me. Usually you’re pretty safe in bed.
    Except when you remember you have a book report that is due first thing in the morning.
    3. I had my pajamas on, my teeth brushed, the light turned off, and was chewing on a Fruit Roll-Up I’d found under my pillow, when I remembered. One page, front and back, every other line, whatever book I wanted. Plot summary and personal analysis.
    No copying off the book jacket.
    I sighed. Every time Mrs. Tuttle assigned us a book report, I always meant to do a really good job. I was going to read a book and write the report the minute I finished. It would be a book I had never read before, and I would make many interesting observations.

    It is a known fact that most scientists are excellent book report writers.
    Only, I never got around to reading a book I had never read before. This is because there are forty-three books in the Mysteries of Planet Zindar series, and I keep reading them over and over.
    I am obsessed with the planet Zindar.
    I leaned over and picked up book number twenty-four from the stack of Planet Zindars beside my bed.
The Red Monster Returns.
I started reading it, just to refresh my memory.
    And then I fell asleep.

This morning when I woke up,
The Red Monster Returns
was on top of my face, making it sort of hard to breathe. My bedside lamp was still on. My book report had not been written. I was pretty sure I was starting the second bad day in a row.
    And then something awesome happened.
    It all started when I had to go to the bathroom.
    â€œAt first I thought the frog in the toilet was dead,” I told everybody in Share and Stare later. Share and Stare is what Mrs. Tuttle has instead of Show and Tell. In Share and Stare you are only allowed to talk about stuff that has to do with what we’re studying in Mrs. Tuttle’s class. Like, if you found a Froot Loop in the shape of Alaska, and we were studying U.S. geography, you could bring that in. Or if your aunt sent you a postcard of a giraffe when we were studying vertebrates in science, that would be a good thing to share.
    You are not allowed to share your stuffed pig named Oinky just because you feel like it, which Roland Forth learned the hard way.
    â€œI knew it was a frog right away and not a toad,” I said, “because it had really long legs. You could tell it was a frog thathad been a really good jumper. So that made me feel extra bad that it was dead. Only, it wasn’t dead at all, which I found out when my sister, Margaret, ran