2 Fleas and Thank You

CHAPTER TWO FLEAS AND THANK YOU One afternoon Franny's mom cautiously poked her head into Franny's room. When poking one's head into a mad scientist's lab, it's always best to do so cautiously. "Franny, honey, I have somebody I want you to meet." "I'm kind of busy here, Mom. I'm working on a machine that will make dirty socks smell worse." "Why would you want that?" Franny's mom asked. Franny paused, then said, "I guess you wouldn't Mom. But that's how mad science works."

"Okay, but I just thought you might like to meet your new lab assistant." "A lab assistant?" Franny said, totally forgetting about the sock experiment. More than anything, she had always wanted her very own lab assistant. "Well," her mom said, "he's not a pure Lab. He's also part poodle, part Chihuahua, part beagle, part spaniel, part shepherd, and part some kind of weasly thing that's not even exactly a dog."

Franny stared blankly at the thing Mom had at the end of a leash. "But he'll always be interested and excited about your projects, sweetheart, and you can teach him to be your assistant. His name's Igor."

Igor coughed and cocked his head. A few fleas hopped around in his fur. He could tell right away that he liked Franny, and he hoped that she liked him in return.

"Oh. It's a dog," Franny said flatly, looking at Igor like he was half a glass of warm water. "I thought you meant..."

Franny was all ready to tell her mom to take Igor away, but as she looked into her mother's smiling face she could tell that her mom had really and truly thought that Igor was going to be a big hit.