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

in and tried to flush it down the toilet.”
    You would not have believed how far that frog jumped.
    I mean, it went at least eight feet.
    Right on top of my mom’s head.
    Okay, it really landed right on top of her shoulder, but that doesn’t make as good of a picture as a frog landing on her head. Which it almost did, but it lost its balance at the last minute and plopped onto her shoulder instead.

    Have I mentioned that my mom does not like frogs?

    â€œMac!” she screamed. “Get this monster off me! Now!”
    â€œIt’s not a monster, Mom,” I explained. “It’s an amphibian. That means it lives part of its life in water and part of its life on land.”

    â€œI don’t care if it lives part of its life on Neptune,” my mom yelled. “Get it out of here!”
    By this time the frog had jumped off my mom’s shoulder and was hopping down the stairs.
    â€œNeptune’s too cold,” I told my mom as I ran down the stairs after the frog. “Besides, it’s a gaseous planet, so it’d be pretty hard to hop around on.”
    I always enjoy it when you can bring interesting scientific knowledge into everyday conversation.

    Right as the frog hit the landing, my stepdad came in through the front door with the morning paper. In came Lyle, out went the frog. In about three hops he was across our front yard and heading for the street. He hit the curb just as Markie Vollencraft was speeding by in his VW Bug with the window down.
    One last hop and that frog was in the VW Bug and headed straight for West Linnett High School.
    I am not making this up.
    Mrs. Tuttle gave me a look like she thought I was. “That must have been quite some hop, Mac,” she said.
    â€œFrogs can jump over twenty times their own length,” I told her. I’d taken the
F-He
volume of our old encyclopedia set with me to read on the bus, so I wasfilled with frog information. “That would be like you or me jumping a hundred feet. The longest recorded frog jump is thirty-three feet and five inches. Compared to that, my frog jumping into Markie Vollencraft’s VW Bug was nothing.”

    â€œSo how’d the frog get in the toilet?” Brandon Woo asked.
    â€œThat’s what I’m not sure about,” I said. “Maybe it came through the pipes. But I don’t know if a frog could do that or not.”
    â€œYou should ask Mr. Reid,” Aretha said. “I bet he knows a lot about pipes.”

    Mr. Reid is our school janitor. He is famous for being able to fix anything, including the sinks in the boys’ bathrooms, which for some mysterious reason are always getting clogged up with soggy toilet paper, and the school’s field trip van, which breaks down at least once during every field trip. The teacher in charge always carries Mr. Reid’s cell phone number so she can call him from wherever the van has broken down and he can come and make it run long enough to get back to school.
    That’s how I ended up going down to the basement to talk to Mr. Reid at lunch. In fact, Mrs. Tuttle made me go, since by that time all anybody in my class could talk about was how that frog could have gotten into my toilet.
    â€œI’d say it’d be unusual for a frog tomake it all the way up through the pipes,” Mr. Reid told me when I explained to him what had happened that morning. He stroked his chin, like he was giving the matter some serious thought. “Where would a frog get into the system and swim up? Did he swim through the sewage line? Not unless there was a broken place where he could’ve gotten in. But if you’ve got a broken place in the sewage line, you’ve got sewage coming out of the sewage line, if you dig what I’m saying.”
    I shook my head. I didn’t dig.
    â€œSewage, son,” Mr. Reid said, “is what we flush down the toilet. Goes into the sewage pipes running underground, all the way to the