Phineas L. MacGuire...Erupts!: Chapters 7–15

"Do you ever get in an obnoxious mood, and you know you're being obnoxious, but you just can't stop?"

"And my first impression was a pretty bad one," Ben admitted, slumping back against the chalkboard.

I personally am a math person, so I started Share and Stare in high-octane Big Mac Attack mode.

A person can be allergic to animals, right? When this happens, it's usually because of their dander. If the word dander reminds you of dandruff, that's because it's just like dandruff. It is flaky skin that comes off and gets into the air and into people's noses.

I'm not allergic to my stepdad's dander, but theoretically I could be.

Okay, the way I see it, we need to plan the building of the volcano, the construction of the landscape around the volcano, the erupting of the volcano, and the use of any multimedia materials that the judges might give us extra points for.

What we're trying to demonstrate here is that lava can overcome gravity and be pushed through the earth's rock crust.

Since we can't actually use real lava, we kind of have to create a simulation, using the gas created by the baking soda and the vinegar.

"What you're looking at is a picture of the anterior septal blood vessels," Mr. Martinez explained to me, pointing at the picture. "That means the blood vessels in the front part of your nose. This time of year your nose gets dried out; it's not uncommon to have a nosebleed or two."

Kids around nine, ten, eleven, are notorious nose pickers.

This time of year it's hard to keep your finger out of your nose. I'm sympathetic to that. But you don't want to bleed to death for a bunch of mucus, now do you?

"It wasn't their babysitter," Mira insisted. "It was their stepmom."

"I didn't know you were a lawyer with all sorts of legal facts in your brain."
Aretha snorted. "Mac is just using logic, which is more than I can say for you people."

Now all we have to do is set a humane trap, and we'll send our little mouse friend back to the woods first thing in the morning.

It's because when she was a kid, this one time she had to carry this clay owl she made for homework on the school bus, and she tripped getting on. The owl's beak got smushed and both wings flopped off. So she's very sympathetic about getting stuff to school all in one piece.

This kid had pulled out the tape heads so he could run a strip of cassette tape across them using his hand. He was
 recording people's voices and then playing them back, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes backward, which sounded supremely weird.
You would think, with computers and the other technology we have today, hearing your voice on an old cassette player wouldn't be so fascinating, but it was.

I was almost ready to go throw myself into a vat of day-old spaghetti sauce in the cafeteria's kitchen, when something caught my eye.

"You're right," I said glumly.
The judges were one table away. We were doomed.

We told her about volcanoes, and we told her about the time period when dinosaurs and volcanoes coexisted, and we told her about the Ring of Fire.

Ben wore the honorable-mention ribbon pinned to his shirt to school the next day.