Mood Science Read online

  For the librarians

  CHAPTER ONE FRANNY’S HOUSE

  The Stein family lived in the pretty pink house with the lovely purple shutters down at the end of Daffodil Street. Everything about the house was bright and cheery.

  And even though it was bright and cheery, Franny thought that if you just mixed the purple and pink paint together, you could paint the house much faster and then get on to more important things than the color of a house.

  Many of Franny’s recent inventions were all about mixing things together.

  She’d gotten the idea the last time she saw her grandma, Granny Franny.

  “Each of the individual things I put in my soup are good,” she told Franny. “But when they’re all mixed together, they somehow make it better.”

  “I wonder what kind of science is at work here,” Franny said, holding up her grandmother to stir the pot.

  “I also wonder how you keep getting smaller every time I see you, Granny Fran. I bet that in a couple years you’ll be able to take a bath in a spoon,” Franny joked.

  “You might be right, Franny,” Granny Franny said, chuckling. “But just because something is small, that doesn’t mean it can’t have a huge effect. Have you ever been bitten by a mosquito?”

  Franny laughed.

  “I get the point,” she said.

  “And thanks for teaching me how to make soup! I can’t wait to get back to my lab and make my own version of soup.”

  Of course, Franny’s Lab wasn’t a pure Lab. He was also part poodle, part Chihuahua, part beagle, part spaniel, part shepherd, and part some kind of weaselly thing that wasn’t even exactly a dog.

  His name was Igor, and he was always ready to help Franny with her experiments.…

  Except when he was busy with his own stuff.

  CHAPTER TWO PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

  Maybe because Igor was a mix of so many different animals, he had a lot of different interests.

  He liked cake decorating and karate and banana wrestling, which might sound easy, but Franny had accidentally created a pretty fierce banana, and it was Igor’s job to play with it so it didn’t become bored and start getting into trouble.

  Igor’s newest hobby was jigsaw puzzles, which took a long time for him to complete, since his little fingers were kind of stubby and plump.

  Franny had no interest in solving a puzzle that others had solved before, so Igor put them together by himself.

  This was fine with Franny because it allowed her to work on her experiments without Igor’s help, and sometimes no help was exactly what she was in the mood for.

  Franny was especially excited about her newest invention, the Mixer-Upper Machine. She’d gotten the idea from Granny Franny’s soup.

  “I made it with parts from a broken blender and an old nuclear reactor I had lying around. With it, I can combine good stuff to make something even better.”

  For one of her first Mixer-Upper experiments, she put a substitute teacher in it with a ruler. The machine made a whirring sound like a blender, and then it dinged like a microwave.

  When Franny opened the door, the substitute teacher and the ruler had combined to make a foot-long sub.

  It flopped around on the plate and threatened to make Franny stay after school unless she separated them again.

  “Fine,” Franny said. “I’ll unmix you. But you might be making a mistake. Not everybody likes substitute teachers, but everybody can appreciate a delicious foot-long sub.”

  “Change me back!” the sub yelled.

  “Okay, okay,” Franny said, making some adjustments on the machine.

  “You know, the other teachers warned me about helping you with your experiments. I should have listened to them!” the sub shouted.

  “Perfectly understandable; everybody knows you should listen to the teachers,” Franny said.

  The next day she mixed an ice cream cone with a poodle and got a chili dog.

  “I need to adjust this thing. I mean, I get it, but that’s not even how you spell ‘chilly.’ ”

  Franny stayed up for the next two nights figuring out how to mix a duck with a beaver.

  “This will be my greatest achievement yet!” she howled as she led them into her machine and explained it to them.

  “All this device does is chop your molecules into chunks and then join those chunks together in a way that you two could never understand,” Franny said with a pleasant smile.

  “So just sit back, relax, and get chunked.”

  The machine made its familiar blender sound and then dinged.

  The door opened, and Franny’s newest creation stepped out.

  “A platypus?” Franny shouted. “I can’t believe I wasted all that time and all I got was a platypus! We already have those! We have a ton of those. This is nothing new!”

  Franny lost her temper. She pounded on her machine and sent laboratory equipment flying.

  She threw a wrench, which broke open jars from earlier experiments.

  She kicked the table where Igor was just about to put the very last piece in the puzzle he had been working on for weeks.

  She could tell he was upset, but she didn’t care.

  “Don’t even start complaining about it!” she yelled. “It’s just a dumb puzzle. It’s not like the big important science experiments I do. You already knew how it was going to look when it was complete! The picture is right there on the box!”

  Igor looked at all the pieces scattered on the floor. He had worked so long on that puzzle.

  He opened his hand and let the last piece fall to the ground.

  He walked away, and Franny saw a tear trailing down his face.

  “Oh, it’s just a silly puzzle!” she shouted at him. “A big waste of time!”

  She stomped on the pieces.

  “I probably saved you a lot of worthless effort,” she shouted.

  “That was pretty mean,” the platypus said.

  “You be quiet, beaver-duck,” Franny snapped. “I can unmix you anytime I want.”

  CHAPTER THREE I’LL BET THE PEPPERONI BUTTONS ARE GOOD

  A couple of days had passed, and Franny hadn’t been able to think of anything except how mean she had been to Igor.

  She remembered how Igor had always supported her experiments, even when he didn’t really think they were a good idea.

  She thought back about how earlier that week he had helped out when she tried to develop a virus that would make people feel good all the time, instead of bad.

  “I mean, think about it. Why do viruses always have to be bad? Smiles are contagious. Laughter is contagious. People should be able to catch all sorts of good things.”

  Igor nodded in agreement, even though he had no idea what he was agreeing to.

  She remembered how, a few days before that, he had assisted her when she tried to develop a breed of attractive and wart-free toads so that people would want them as pets.

  “Personally, I kind of like warts,” Franny said. “But not everybody does.

  “And toads would be great for people to have around. They eat bugs that bother us, like flies and mosquitos. And you know those can get in anywhere!”

  She thought back to when he had helped her attempt to make clothes out of pizza so that when they got dirty, you could just eat them instead of having to wash them.

  Actually, Igor thought this one was a terrific idea: From time to time he enjoyed eating nonpizza clothes, especially socks.

  “He’s always been a great assistant to me,” Franny said. “I should have been nicer.

  “I have to make this up to him. I’ll do something silly to make him laugh,” she said, and she got to work right away.

  It didn’t take her very long to finish his gift.

  “He’s going
to love this!” she shouted, and ran to find him.

  “Look, Igor! I wanted to apologize, so I made this for you!”

  Igor just stared at it.

  “It’s a jigsaw puzzle with only two pieces! That way, you won’t have to waste a lot of time putting the dumb thing together! Isn’t that fun?”

  Igor didn’t think it was fun at all.

  All it did was remind him of how long he had worked on the last puzzle before Franny wrecked it.

  He walked away, leaving Franny holding the pieces.

  “Fine!” she said. “I tried to apologize and you wouldn’t accept it. Now it’s your fault.”

  She stormed off and sat down at her workbench.

  She fiddled around with little bits of wire and gears, hoping to get her mind off what she had done, but Franny still felt terrible.

  “I’m afraid I’ve hurt his feelings so bad that he’ll never forgive me,” she said quietly.

  The platypus wanted to agree with her on this, but he knew it wouldn’t go well if he did.

  CHAPTER FOUR IT’S NOT YOU. IT’S ME.

  Franny paced back and forth. She had a long list of things she wanted to work on, but she kept thinking about Igor.

  First she’d get angry with herself, and then she’d come up with some silly solution, and then she’d get angry again, and then she’d start to worry about her projects.

  “How could one little experiment cause all this trouble?” she asked, pulling on her pigtails.

  “I’ve created much bigger problems than this before!” she shouted. “And none of them made me feel this way.”

  “Wait a second,” Franny said, a thin grin crawling across her face.

  “The problem here isn’t what I did. The problem is how I feel about it. I can’t work when I’m in one of these moods.”

  She looked over at her Mixer-Upper Machine.

  “A little adjustment here and there, and I should be able to unmix anything.”

  The platypus hid under a table.

  “I’m not unmixing you,” Franny said, and a bolt of lightning cracked outside.

  “I’m unmixing me.”

  CHAPTER FIVE GETTING YOUR FEELINGS OUT IN THE OPEN

  Franny finished some calculations and stepped into the Mixer-Upper.

  “Phew! It still smells like a sub in here,” she said. “I should install a fan.”

  She pressed a button and closed the door.

  The machine whirred and dinged.

  The door slowly opened.

  Franny stepped out.

  “Did it work?” she asked as she looked back into the machine.

  “C’mon out!” she shouted. “Come out here.”

  Four figures stepped out. They looked somewhat familiar.

  They looked a little bit like… Franny.

  “What dumb idea have you had now?” the angry-looking Franny snarled.

  “It’s simple. You’re my feelings and I’ve removed you. You were getting in the way,” Franny said. “Now maybe I can get something done.”

  Angry-Fran kicked a piece of lab equipment and grumbled.

  “I could have figured that out myself,” she snapped.

  Franny stepped up to a frightened-looking version of herself.

  “Do you know who you are?” Franny said.

  “I’m afraid to ask,” the other Franny said.

  “That’s right!” Franny said. “You are afraid. You’re my fear. You’re Scaredy-Fran.”

  Scaredy-Fran gasped. “Yikes!”

  “I know which feeling I am,” another one of the Franny look-alikes giggled. “I’m Elephant-Fran.”

  “An elephant is not something you feel,” Angry-Fran snapped.

  “Oh no? I’ll bet if an elephant sat on you, you’d feel it,” the other Franny said, and then she laughed and laughed.

  “I can see that you’re my silliness,” Franny said. “You’re Silly-Fran.”

  “And you want to… get rid of us?” the last Fran asked, with tears welling up in her eyes.

  “That’s right, Sad-Fran,” Franny said. “You feelings are just getting in my way. Everything goes wrong when I start feeling too much.”

  “You’re so dumb,” Angry-Fran said. “You have more than four moods. We’re not the only feelings in there.”

  “I know that there are more than four feelings,” Franny said calmly. “I’ll do the rest later. I wasn’t even sure that this would work.”

  She pointed at the platypus. “I mean, take a look at that thing. This is new technology.”

  The platypus frowned.

  Franny closed the door on the Mixer-Upper and went to look over her list of projects.

  “Wait a second. What are we supposed to do?” Scaredy-Fran whimpered.

  “You’re feelings, right?” Franny asked them. “So go do whatever you feel like.”

  The feelings looked around the lab. They had never been on their own before.

  Franny waved her arms. “C’mon, Scaredy-Fran, Silly-Fran. You’re moods, aren’t you? I’ve heard of something called mood swings. Maybe you could go find some of those to play on.”

  “I guess I could go find something to get mad about,” Angry-Fran sneered.

  “And I’m sure I can find something miserable to enjoy,” Sad-Fran said, sighing

  “Yes, you can all go find things that interest you,” Franny said impatiently.

  “When should we be back?” Scaredy-Fran whined.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever need you back, so how does never-o’clock sound? Just stay out of my way and stay out of trouble. I have a whole long list of projects I can finally complete without you pests slowing me down.”

  And with that, her feelings went off to do whatever they felt.

  CHAPTER SIX JUST NOT FEELING IT

  Franny looked through her long list of projects.

  “Here’s one that I wanted to get started on—inventing an ice cream that would never melt.”

  Franny thought for a moment.

  “I must have been feeling pretty silly when I thought of that,” she said. “Ice cream that never melts? Isn’t that just a milkshake?”

  Without her silly side, Franny didn’t feel like pursuing that one, and she crossed out the idea.

  “Okay, let’s have a look at the next one,” she said, reading down her list.

  “A robot that finds your lost pet because it’s so sad when somebody loses a pet.

  “I don’t know. When I think about it now, that doesn’t really seem that sad to me.”

  She looked out the window.

  “Look. There’s that weird toad I created, hopping away, and I really don’t care.

  “I mean, most animals don’t live in houses with people. What’s the big deal if a few more leave home?”

  Without her feeling of sadness, the project just didn’t seem very important to her, and she crossed it out.

  She looked at the next project on her list.

  “Ah!” she said with a smile. “Now, this one should be good. It has a monster in it. I always enjoy making monsters.”

  Her notes described making a giant, slobbery creature that would sit on the roof of your house.

  “Oh, yes, and it has slobber. This has real potential,” Franny said.

  She kept reading her notes. They said that if your house caught on fire, the monster would drool all over it and put out the fire.

  “I like the drooly part,” Franny said, “but what does a house fire have to do with it?”

  She read the note she had written on the sketch. It said, FIRES ARE SCARY.

  “Your house catching on fire is supposed to be scary?” Franny scoffed. “That doesn’t scare me.”

  Without her fearful side, Franny didn’t see the point in pursuing it.

  That was the last thing on her list. She had no more projects written down.

  “No more projects to do?” Franny asked. “That used to really upset me.”

  She climbed down from her chair and shuffled ov
er to a couch, where Igor was watching TV.

  “But I got rid of my angry side. So I really don’t feel mad that I have nothing to do.

  “In fact, I really don’t feel like doing anything.”

  And she plopped down next to Igor and stared at the TV.…

  For a very long time.

  CHAPTER SEVEN I’VE NEVER NOT FELT LIKE THIS BEFORE

  Igor wasn’t upset with Franny anymore, and he really liked watching TV with her.

  But after a couple of days of watching TV, he began to notice that Franny didn’t laugh at the funny parts. She didn’t get sad when tragic things happened.

  When they watched a scary movie, Franny never screamed or jumped.

  Sometimes Igor would pick a really bad movie just to see if Franny would get angry about it.

  But Franny never reacted very much at all. Without her feelings, she was kind of boring.

  Igor had seen Franny be a lot of things, but never boring.

  Eventually they didn’t watch anything but the news.

  CHAPTER EIGHT DUTY CALLS

  “This just in,” the newscaster on the TV said. “Reports are coming in that a strange new disease is turning people into toads.”

  Igor sat up straight and stared at the TV. Franny just shrugged. She didn’t feel anything.