“Look!” I said, pointing at the Scribbler, who was rolling around on the floor.
“Phooey! You stinky party poopers!” He gasped. “This planet could have been so beautiful! It could have been my greatest masterpiece! You’ve ruined everythingggg!”
And that was that. He couldn’t handle the smell of the gas I’d passed for one more second. He was a lifeless little stick of wood, just exactly like a pencil is supposed to be.
“Fantastic!” said Hot Dog.
“Yes!” Clementine and I said, high-fiving each other with one hand and holding our shirts over our noses with the other.
It took a while to erase a big enough hole in the cage for Hot Dog to squeeze out, but we did it. Then we sharpened the Scribbler into nothingness. Don’t ask me how, but as soon as the Scribbler was gone, our classmates reappeared.
“Sick!” said Barfalot. “Who cut the cheese?”
“It’s sad,” sighed Clementine. “He was so much more pleasant when he was a pile of eraser dust.”
“Pleasure workin’ with you, as always,” Hot Dog said with a salute.
“I’ll see you on our next mission!”
And then it was total déjà vu. Just like last time, Hot Dog pushed his secret everybody-forgets-everything magic-sparkle rain-shower button and disappeared into thin air. And just like last time, his mysterious forgetting shower worked on everybody but Clementine and me. We got to remember every single sick, slimy, scribbly detail.
Just then Miss Lamphead and Marybell returned. “You’ll all be delighted to know Nurse Bunyan says Marybell is going to be fine,” Miss Lamphead announced as she opened the door.
I looked around the classroom. It was so weird, like no time had passed at all. All the kids were sitting at their desks with people heads instead of animal heads. They were holding regular pencils instead of scary evil alien ones. And nobody but Clementine and me had any idea that the world had been moments away from being completely erased forever.
THE END
(for now)
As an award-winning investigative reporter specializing in extraterrestrial activity, L. Bob Rovetch has spent hundreds of hours interviewing Bob and helping him record his amazing but true adventures. Ms. Rovetch lives across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco with two perfect children and plenty of pets.
Dave Whamond wanted to be a cartoonist ever since he could pick up a crayon. During math classes he would doodle in the margin 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.
Text © 2006 by Lissa Rovetch.
Illustrations © 2006 by Dave Whamond.
All rights reserved.
Book design by Mary Beth Fiorentino.
Typeset in Clarendon and Agenda.
The illustrations in this book were rendered in ink, watercolor washes, and Prismacolor.
ISBN 978-1-4521-2357-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street, San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclekids.com
Hot Dog and Bob: Adventure 2 Page 3