Hot Dog and Bob: Adventure 1 (6 page)

Other than the fact that kids kept finding mysterious bits of pepperoni and olives in their hair, Hot Dog’s cleanup shower seemed to make everybody forget all about the disgusting Cheese Face disaster. Everything went back to normal at Lugenheimer Elementary School. Except, that is, for our class pet, Esmeralda. She smelled so spicy and delicious nobody could hold her without licking her. Miss Lamphead got so tired of sending students to the nurse’s office with hamster bites on their tongues that she declared Esmeralda offlimits and got the class a goldfish for the pet corner instead.

A couple of months later Clementine threw her string cheese at me in the cafeteria.

“Want this?” she asked. “I’ve told my mom a thousand times I don’t eat this stuff anymore, but she keeps sticking it in my lunch anyway.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “My mom still asks what made me switch from pizza to Chinese food.”

“Why don’t you just tell her the truth?” asked Clementine. “Pizza makes you sick now because it reminds you of Cheese Face. And Chinese food is cool because a flying weenie used it to save your life.”

“Yeah, she’ll definitely believe that!” I laughed. I was glad I wasn’t the only one who had escaped Hot Dog’s forgetting shower. Without Clementine to back me up, I’d probably think I had imagined the whole thing. “You know, I still wonder why we were the only ones who weren’t affected by any of that weird stuff.”

“I know,” said Clementine. “Sometimes I even wish I could see Hot Dog one more time, just to ask him.”

“Will you two quit your yappin’ and open this thing up?” said a voice.

I looked at Clementine. “It can’t be,” I said.

“Why not?” she said. “It’s happened before.”

I cracked my lunch box open an inch and whispered into it, “Please,
please
tell me you just popped by to say hello.”

“Sorry, partner, there’s no time for small talk,” said Hot Dog. “The Big Bun says you got big trouble, and—”

“I know, don’t tell me,” I groaned. “If the Big Bun says you got big trouble, then believe you me, you got big trouble!”

The End. (Or should I say, The Beginning?) To be continued …

L. Bob Rovetch
and her brilliant advisers, Kia and Niko, live across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. When she isn’t busy looking after her crazy puppies, man-eating lovebird, and mystery pet, L. Bob enjoys having burping contests with her family.

Dave Whamond
wanted to be a cartoonist ever since he could pick up a crayon. During math classes he would doodle in the margins of his papers. One math teacher warned him, “You’d better spend more time on your math and less time cartooning. You can’t make a living drawing funny pictures.” Today Dave has a syndicated daily comic strip called “Reality Check.”

Dave has one wife, two kids, one dog, and one kidney. They all live together in Calgary, Alberta.