No way! he told himself. I’m getting out of here.

He turned to run—and went sprawling over the other skate.

“Ow!” he cried out as he fell hard on his elbows and knees. Pain shot up his arms. He had landed on both funny bones.

Shaking away the tingling, he scrambled to his knees. He turned in time to see the seething goo roll over him.

He opened his mouth to scream. But the scream was trapped inside him as the heavy green gunk splatted over his face.

He thrashed both arms wildly. Kicked his feet.

But the sticky goo wrapped around him. Pulling him. Pulling him in.

I—I can’t breathe! he realized.

And, then, everything turned green.

“Evan—stop daydreaming and eat your Jell-O,” Mrs. Ross scolded.

Evan shook his head hard. The daydream had seemed so real. His mother’s voice still sounded far away.

“Evan—hurry. Eat the Jell-O. You’ll be late.”

“Uh … Mom …” Evan said softly. “Could you do me a really big favor?”

“What favor?” his mother asked him patiently, pushing back her straight blond hair into a ponytail.

“Could we never have green Jell-O again? Could you just buy other colors? Not green?”

He stared at the shimmering, quivering green mound of Jell-O in the glass bowl in front of him on the kitchen counter.

“Evan, you’re weird,” Mrs. Ross replied, rolling her eyes. “Hurry up. Kermit is probably wondering where you are.”

“Kermit is probably busy blowing up his house,” Evan replied glumly. He pulled the spoon out of the Jell-O. It made a gross sucking sound.

“All the more reason for you to hurry over there,” his mother said sharply. “You are responsible for him, Evan. You are in charge of your cousin until his mom gets home from work.”

Evan shoved the green Jell-O away. “I can’t eat this,” he murmured. “It makes me think of Monster Blood.”

Mrs. Ross made a disgusted face. “Don’t mention that slimy stuff.”

Evan climbed down from the stool. Mrs. Ross pushed a hand gently through his curly, carrot-colored hair. “It’s nice of you to help out,” she said softly. “Aunt Dee can’t really afford a baby-sitter.”

“Kermit doesn’t need a baby-sitter. He needs a keeper!” Evan grumbled. “Or maybe a trainer. A guy with a whip and a chair. Like in the circus.”

“Kermit looks up to you,” Mrs. Ross insisted.

“Only because he’s two feet tall!” Evan exclaimed. “I can’t believe he’s my cousin. He’s such a nerd.”

“Kermit isn’t a nerd. Kermit is a genius!” Mrs. Ross declared. “He’s only eight, and already he’s a scientific genius.”

“Some genius,” Evan grumbled. “Mom, yesterday he melted my sneakers.”

Mrs. Ross’s pale blue eyes grew wide. “He what?”

“He made one of his concoctions. It was a bright yellow liquid. He said it would toughen up the sneakers so they would never wear out.”

“And you let him pour the stuff on your sneakers?” Evan’s mother demanded.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Evan replied unhappily. “I have to do everything Kermit wants. If I don’t, he tells Aunt Dee I was mean to him.”

Mrs. Ross shook her head. “I wondered why you came home barefoot yesterday.”

“My sneakers are still stuck to Kermit’s basement floor,” Evan told her. “They melted right off my feet.”

“Well, be careful over there, okay?”

“Yeah. Sure,” Evan replied. He pulled his Atlanta Braves cap over his head, waved to his mother, and headed out the back door.

It was a warm spring day. Two black-and-yellow monarch butterflies fluttered over the flower garden. The bright new leaves on the trees shimmered in the sunlight.

Evan stopped at the bottom of the driveway and lowered the baseball cap to shield his eyes from the sun. He squinted down the street, hoping to see his friend Andy.

No sign of her.

Disappointed, he kicked a large pebble along the curb and started to make his way toward Kermit’s house. Aunt Dee, Kermit’s mom, paid Evan three dollars an hour to watch Kermit after school every afternoon. Three hundred dollars an hour would be a lot more fair! he thought angrily.

But Evan was glad to earn the money. He was saving for a new video game.

And Evan was earning every penny. Kermit was impossible. That was the only word for him. Impossible.

He didn’t want to play video games. He didn’t want to watch TV. He refused to go outside and play ball or toss a Frisbee around. He didn’t even want to sneak down to the little grocery on the corner and load up on candy bars and potato chips.

All he wanted to do was stay downstairs in his dark, damp basement lab and mix beakers of chemicals together. “My experiments,” he called them. “I have to do my experiments.”

Maybe he is a genius, Evan thought bitterly. But that doesn’t make him any fun. He’s just impossible.

Evan definitely wasn’t enjoying his after-school baby-sitting job watching Kermit. In fact, he had several daydreams in which Kermit tried one of his own mixtures and melted to the basement floor, just like Evan’s sneakers.

Some afternoons, Andy came along, and that made the job a little easier. Andy thought Kermit was really weird, too. But at least when she was there, Evan had someone to talk to, someone who didn’t want to talk about mixing aluminum pyrite with sodium chlorobenzadrate.

What is Kermit’s problem, anyway? Evan wondered as he crossed the street and made his way through backyards toward Kermit’s house. Why does he think mixing is so much fun? Why is he always mixing this with that and that with this?

I can’t even mix chocolate milk!

Kermit’s house came into view two yards down. It was a two-story white house with a sloping black roof.