Monsters and Mold Read online

  Just as I said it, that pesky fly flew by Sassafras. And he ate it.

  Gorp shrieked.

  Whoops. I tossed Sassafras in the barn and shut the door. I patted Gorp’s arm until he started to breathe more normally. Then it was time to get to work.

  “What to try . . . what to try,” I muttered as I tapped my Thinking Goggles. “Oh! I should try lots of things. I should run an experiment!” I could try adding a bunch of different things to Gorp’s fur to stop it from molding.

  “Bingo! Give me a minute, Gorp. I need to grab something from my house.”

  I held on to my goggles and dashed into the house to grab some ziplock bags and scissors. I wasn’t sure what to try on Gorp’s fur yet, but I knew I’d need several fur samples to get started.

  When I returned to the barn, I didn’t see Gorp anywhere. Oh no.

  “Gorp? Gorp, are you here? Where did you go?”

  The trees rustled, and I heard someone breathing hard. I looked up, and Gorp peered down at me.

  “Your cat was scratching at the barn door with his ferocious claws. He was trying to get out so he could eat me while you were gone. It was safer to wait in a tree. Is it OK to come down? Did he break through the door?”

  “No, he’s still in the barn. I promise I’ll protect you if you come down.”

  Gorp slowly climbed to the ground. “What are those bags for?”

  “I’m going to find something we can put on your fur that will stop the mold from growing. To figure out what works best, I’ll try a bunch of things and compare them. I’m going to need some fur samples for my experiment. Is that OK?”

  Gorp sighed and dropped his shoulders. “I guess that makes sense. Just don’t take too much. Or give me a funny haircut.”

  I nodded. How many things should I try? I wasn’t sure. Maybe five samples would be good. I’d need to leave one sample alone. That way I could see how much mold normally grew on Gorp’s fur. Then I could add different things to the other samples to try to stop the mold from growing.

  I used the length of my pointer finger to measure a piece of orange fur on Gorp’s back. I needed some way to make sure I’d have the same amount of hair each time. In an experiment, you change only one thing and keep everything else the same. Since I was changing what I was adding to the fur, I’d need to keep the amount of fur the same.

  Gorp wiggled and peered over his shoulder. “You’re going to cut hair off of my back? Maybe this is a bad idea. Having weird bald patches on my back might be even worse than having mold.”

  I sighed. “How about I take the samples from down here by your foot? I don’t think anyone will notice if you have less hair all the way down at the ground.”

  “I guess,” grumbled Gorp. “If you really mess up, I suppose I can always wear socks to the Monster Ball.”

  He was finally holding still, so I worked quickly. I was careful not to touch any of the mold. “Ta-da!” I announced. “I’ve got five fur samples. Bet you can’t even tell that I took any hair.”

  Gorp held his foot out and twisted it left and right. He grunted in approval. “So if I come back later today, you’ll have a fix for the mold?”

  “Well, no. It’ll probably take me at least two days to get results.”

  “Two days? But you’ll definitely have an answer then?”

  “Well, I hope so,” I said cheerfully.

  “You hope so?!” he yelped. “But the Monster Ball is in six days! What if you don’t figure it out in time?”

  “You know, you could always go even if we don’t solve this. Sassafras and I love being your friends. We don’t mind that you have a little mold on your fur. I’m sure you have some nice monster friends who don’t mind either.”

  Gorp threw his hands in the air. “I can’t show up at the dance moldy. It would be the worst. I hate being moldy. I hate it!”

  Poor Gorp. He was super worried about this moldy fur. We had to figure out a solution!

  “Don’t worry. I’m going to try a bunch of things in my experiment. I’m sure that one of them will work!”

  Gorp sniffled and wiped his nose. He nodded.

  After he left, I ran back to the house with my bags of monster fur and washed my hands carefully. I had two days to figure out a solution. The clock was ticking.

  CHAPTER 6

  PLAYDOUGH

  I sat and thought. And then I stood and thought. And then I walked around and thought.

  What could I add to stop the mold from growing on Gorp’s fur? My investigations with the bread had been about getting more mold to grow, not about stopping it from growing at all. The bread in the freezer never grew any mold. But putting Gorp in a freezer was probably not the sort of solution he had in mind.

  I sat down at our dining room table. Sassafras jumped into my lap. I petted him and stared at the messy table, covered with my art projects and things I’d invented using stuff my mom saved for me from our recycling.

  Maybe my Thinking Goggles weren’t positioned right. I moved them to the spot on my head I figured was closest to my brain and waited. I was looking at all the things on the table when a word started bouncing around in my head. Playdough. Playdough?

  “OK, Thinking Goggles. If you say so,” I muttered. I started playing with the playdough and waited for more inspiration from my goggles.

  I made a little Gorp out of playdough. Sassafras saw the playdough Gorp and purred. I laughed. Boy did my cat love Gorp!

  I was making a little Sassafras to put next to the little Gorp when it hit me. The moldy playdough! Of course!

  One time I’d wanted to make a batch of sparkly grape-scented playdough. I gathered up all of my supplies, but the salt container was almost empty. It only had a teaspoon of salt left in it. The playdough recipe said I needed two-thirds of a cup of salt. I decided to add the teaspoon of salt and hoped the playdough would still turn out fine.

  And it did. Well, at first. I went to grab it a few days later, and it was completely fuzzy with mold. I was shocked. I brought the container to my mom to show her.

  “Salt keeps the playdough fresh,” she’d said. “If there’s not enough salt, the playdough will mold.” Mom called the salt a special word. What was it again?

  It started with a p . . . p . . . p . . . This was going to drive me nuts!

  I heard the front door close. Phew. Mom was here. She could remind me. And I bet she’d also know what to put on Gorp’s fur.

  CHAPTER 7

  KITCHEN SCIENCE

  “Mom!” I hollered. “What is that p-word? For salt? In playdough?”

  “Well, hello to you too, Zoey!” My mom chuckled as she came into the room. “Salt is a preservative. A preservative is an ingredient you add to keep mold and bacteria from growing. That way, whatever you’re making will last longer. But why the sudden interest in preservatives?”

  “Gorp still needs my help. My towel idea didn’t work. I was thinking there must be something about his monster fur that makes mold grow like crazy, even if it’s dry.”

  “Poor Gorp. That mold must really like his fur. Was he terribly disappointed?”

  “He was so sad. He even cried! I feel so bad for him. The Monster Ball is only a few days away now. I’ve got to figure this out.”

  “So, you’re thinking of trying something with salt?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah. I put on my Thinking Goggles, and I remembered that salt keeps our playdough from growing mold. But I should test some more things in case the salt doesn’t work, right? I can test three more things. What else should I try?”

  Mom smiled at me. “I bet you can figure that out all by yourself.”

  “OK. Ummm . . . ?”

  “Why don’t I give you some clues, and if you can’t figure it out by the end of the day, I’ll let you know what I would try?”

  I smiled. Clues would be a big help. “What’s my first clue?”

  “Well, there are lots of different ways to preserve things against mold. Some preservatives are made in big factories,
so we obviously can’t use those. But lots of preservatives can be found in our kitchen. What do you think you should look at?”

  “Hmmm. Preservatives make things last a lot longer. So food that lasts a long time?”

  Mom nodded. “You’re on the right track, kiddo. See if you can figure out what the preservatives might be by looking at the stickers with the printed ingredient lists.”

  “To the kitchen, Sassafras!” I announced. “We’re going on a preservative hunt!”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE PRESERVATIVE HUNT

  “Preservatives, preservatives. Where are you, preservatives?” I muttered as I walked around the kitchen. I decided to start by looking on our counters. I saw some cooking oil we’d had forever and checked the ingredient list. The only ingredient listed was cooking oil. Hmmm. Maybe that was a preservative? I set it aside to check with my mom.

  Next, I picked up a can of beans we’d had for at least a year. Beans, water, and salt. Another vote for salt as a great preservative.

  A jar of pickles from our garden caught my eye. We’d made them ourselves at the end of last summer, so those were pretty old too. Oh! And Mom had said that pickling the cucumbers would preserve them.

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember what we added. Tiny cucumbers! They were so cute. Then we poured something over them. My nose wrinkled from the memory of the smell. It was vinegar! I really don’t like the smell of vinegar. Which is funny because I actually use it a lot. I love playing with baking soda and vinegar. I never get tired of watching them foam and bubble when they mix. I used to make horrible faces while I played until my mom invented an awesome trick. She adds a few drops of peppermint extract to each cup of vinegar she gives me. When I make my pretend volcanoes erupt, it smells like candy canes are floating through the air.

  Sassafras interrupted my thoughts with a meow and pawed at the fridge.

  “Great idea! I’ll check the fridge next.” I grabbed the vinegar and set it next to the oil.

  I opened the fridge and poked around. Milk, eggs, butter. All had only one ingredient, like the cooking oil. But unlike the oil, we kept them in the fridge. So maybe they didn’t prevent mold on their own. I was pretty sure the cold from the fridge was keeping them from spoiling.

  Then my hand landed on some raspberry jelly. Hmmm. That was interesting. I’d been working on eating this giant jar of jelly for weeks now, and it was still good. It was in the fridge, but we also kept fresh raspberries in the fridge, and black mold spots still started growing on them after a few days. Which meant there just might be something special in the jelly to keep it from molding.

  I took it out and read the ingredients: raspberries, water, sugar. Sugar? Hmmm. Maybe. I set the jelly on the counter next to my other guesses.

  I looked through the pantry next, but all the crackers and cereal I found only listed strange-sounding ingredients at the end. Those were probably the chemicals made in factories my mom had talked about. I couldn’t even read some of the names. They sounded like another language!

  I smiled down at Sassafras, who had decided to sit on my right foot. “Any other ideas?”

  Sassafras seemed to think for a minute and then left the kitchen. I followed. He ended up hopping into my mom’s lap and purring. I guess that meant he was all out of ideas, too!

  Mom looked up and smiled. “Do you have some guesses for me?”

  I nodded. “We found a bunch of stuff that uses salt. That’s a popular preservative. Our next guesses are oil, vinegar, and maybe sugar?”

  Mom grinned. “Great work! Those are all preservatives. I think they’d all be great to test. Are you ready to finish setting up your experiment? Just remember to change only one thing and . . .”

  “I know, I know,” I interrupted, “and keep everything else the same. I will, Mom.”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE MOLDY FUR EXPERIMENT

  I grabbed my bags of monster fur and my science notebook and went into the kitchen. I started writing down all the bits of my experiment so I wouldn’t forget what I’d done. It would probably take a day or two before I could even tell if the mold wasn’t growing on some of my test fur. I could definitely forget a lot in two days.

  QUESTION:

  What will stop the mold from growing on Gorp’s fur?

  Now I needed to make my guess. Which preservative did I think would work? Most of the stuff in the kitchen used salt. It seemed to work for an awful lot of things. So it would probably work on monster fur too.

  HYPOTHESIS:

  I think salt will stop the mold from growing on Gorp’s fur.

  All right. Now to decide how much of each preservative to add. I needed to add the same amount each time. Let’s see. Maybe two teaspoons would be enough? That seemed good to me.

  PROCEDURE:

  1.Put the Same amount of Gorp’s fur in each ziplock bag.

  2.Don’t add anything to one bag. Add 2 teaspoons of oil to another. Add 2 teaspoons of vinegar to another. Add 2 teaspoons of salt to another. Add 2 teaspoons of sugar to another.

  3.Seal the bags.

  4.Put the bags in the same place in the barn and check every day to See if mold grows.

  Phew. That was a lot of writing. I shook out my hand.

  First, I sealed the bag with nothing but fur in it. I labeled it so I could remember that it was the one where I didn’t add anything. The nothing bag should grow mold like normal. In a few days, I could hold it next to the other bags to see if they were doing a better job of stopping the mold.

  I got a new bag and added two teaspoons of vinegar and swished it around until all of the monster fur in the bag was wet. I crinkled up my nose. Blech. I quickly sealed the bag so I wouldn’t have to smell it anymore. I labeled it vinegar. I did the same thing for the oil bag.

  Things were going just fine until I added sugar to the fourth bag.

  “Ergh! This isn’t working, Sassafras. The sugar keeps falling to the bottom of the bag. Most of it isn’t even touching the fur.” Maybe it would be fine? No. It was definitely bugging me that it wasn’t coating the fur like the vinegar and oil had.

  Whump!

  Suddenly a big ball of fluffy fur was next to me on the kitchen counter. I was about to yell “Sassafras! Off the counter!” when I realized he was bumping his head against the jelly jar. That was weird. Sassafras liked to eat bugs, not jelly!

  I popped him down off the counter. Maybe he was trying to tell me to put the jelly back in the fridge? I picked up the jar and glanced over the ingredients one last time. Oh! Water!

  I turned around and picked up the can of beans. It had water too. Right. The beans used salt mixed in water, and the jelly used sugar mixed in water. Of course!

  I added two teaspoons of water and two teaspoons of salt to a little bowl, and two teaspoons of water and two teaspoons of sugar to another little bowl. I stirred them both really well. Then I added two teaspoons of the salt water to the salt bag and two teaspoons of the sugar water to the sugar bag. This time when I swished the ingredients around, the sugar and salt water coated the monster fur instead of falling to the bottom of the bag. In my science journal, I wrote down the change I’d made to the sugar and salt bags.

  I clapped my hands together. Perfect! I was ready to move everything to the barn.

  Just then my dad walked into the kitchen. I froze. Mom had told me that Dad couldn’t see anything magical. Would these bags look empty to him? He’d probably think this was the weirdest experiment ever.

  Dad walked over and ruffled my hair. “Experimenting again, Zoey? What’s this one about?” He glanced over my journal notes. “Monster fur? That’s a cute idea. Are you running a pretend experiment?”

  “Ummm . . .”

  He lifted up a bag to the light. “It might make it more fun if you had some actual fur in there. Maybe Sassafras could donate some?”

  Sassafras growled. I laughed. The bags did look empty to my dad!

  “That’s a great idea, Dad! Thanks,” I chirped.


  After my dad left, I leaned down and whispered to Sassafras, “Don’t worry, you can keep your fur.”

  Then I gathered up all of my supplies and headed out to the barn. As I laid everything on the barn desk, I thought of poor Gorp’s tears. If the things I was trying didn’t stop the mold from growing on his fur, there wouldn’t be enough time to run another experiment before the Monster Ball. And if Gorp was still moldy, he’d stay home from the dance. Again. My heart dropped. He had to go. This experiment had to work!

  CHAPTER 10

  SUCCESS?

  It was hard to wait, but mold needs time to grow. So Sassafras and I did our best to stay busy over the next two days. We went for walks in the forest with my mom. We hunted for bugs. I built cat-sized forest houses for Sassafras using sticks and giant leaves.

  Finally we couldn’t distract ourselves anymore. I grabbed my science notebook and ran out to the barn to see how the experiment was going.

  The first bag I checked was the bag with nothing added. There was definitely mold everywhere. Next, I looked at the oil bag. There was some mold, but not as much as in the nothing bag. So oil had worked a little bit.

  Then I looked at the salt, vinegar, and sugar bags. I squealed so loudly that Sassafras jumped into the air with all his fur puffed out. I dropped my science notebook and grabbed Sassafras and twirled him around.

  “It worked, Sassafras! It worked! Salt and vinegar and sugar all worked!”

  Right then the barn doorbell rang. Perfect timing! I ran to the door and flung it open. I was so excited, I hugged Gorp before I even said hello.

  “It worked! I know what to do!” I cheered.

  Gorp’s eyes got huge. “It worked?” He was so happy, he didn’t even notice Sassafras purring and weaving around his legs.