Hot Dog and Bob: Adventure 2 by L. Bob Rovetch

Chapter 1

Trouble
    Want to know the freakiest day of my life? It was the day I opened my lunch box to find a superhero hot dog sitting on top of my pizza.
    “Hot Dog’s my name, fightin’ bad stuff’s my game!” said the talking wienie. “It’ll be me and you, stickin’ like glue. Partners till the very end!”
    The next thing I knew, my teacher, Miss Lamphead, had morphed into a huge alien pizza person named Cheese Face. Things got really weird when she turned everybody, including our class hamster, into mutant zombie pizza soldiers.
    To make a long story short, everything turned out okay in the end. My classroom went back to normal, Hot Dog went back to his planet, Dogzalot, and my best friend, Clementine, and I were the only ones who remembered that anything weird had even happened.
    We promised never to talk about Hot Dog or the whole scary pizza thing ever again. We tried as hard as we could to act like normal kids in a normal school, and if you ask me, we did a pretty good job—until last week, that is.
    “Mmmm! Yummylicious!” Clementine said with her mouth full. “Wanna bite?”

    I looked at her lunch. It was another one of her usual
un
usual creations: a peanut butter, banana, avocado, red pepper, onion, ham, chocolate chip, cream cheese, raisin, alfalfa sprout and extra hot horseradish on rye bread sandwich. Yummylicious? I don’t think so!
    “I seriously don’t get how you can eat those things without getting sick,” I said. But I knew better than anyone that Clementine had a stomach of steel. She could handle even the most repulsive foods.
    That’s when Clementine broke our sacred promise. She burped and said, “Hey, Bob, don’t you ever wish you could see Hot Dog again? You know, just for old times’ sake?”
    “No way!” I said. “The only time superhero hot dogs show up is when something terrible is about to happen. Asking to see Hot Dog would just be asking for trouble.”
    “Did someone say
trouble?
” a voice called out from my lunch box.
    “Oh, no,” I said, lifting the lid. “It can’t be!”
    But it could be—it was! Smushed between my carrots and my juice box. Looking up at Clementine and me with that crazy gotta-save-the-world kind of look that only superheroes get. Hot Dog was back. I glared at Clementine. If only she hadn’t mentioned his name!
    “Dude,” I whispered into my lunch box. “PLEASE tell me you just popped by to say hello.”
    “I won’t lie to you, partner,” said Hot Dog. “You got a heapin’ helpin’ of trouble on this planet of yours.”

    “Don’t tell me Cheese Face is back!” said Clementine.
    “No such luck,” said Hot Dog. “This mission is so tough the Big Bun almost sent two of us superhero hot dogs down from Dogzalot.”
    “Well, why didn’t she?” I asked nervously.
    “Oh, I convinced her that we could handle it,” said Hot Dog.
    “W-w-w-we?” I stuttered.
    “Between you and me and the little lady here,” he said, pointing at Clementine, “we’ve got it covered. No problem!”
    The end-of-lunch bell rang, and I hadn’t eaten a single bite.
    “Tell me this isn’t happening again,” I begged Clementine.
    “Okay, Bob,” she said, rolling her eyes. “This isn’t happening again.”
    But we both knew perfectly well that it was happening. And there was nothing either of us mere mortals could do about it.

Chapter 2

Be Afraid, Humans!
    “Hurry and take your seats, class,” said Miss Lamphead. “It’s time for our Thursday spelling test.”
    I slid my lunch box under my desk and held my breath.
    “The first word is
boysenberry,
” Miss Lamphead said. “The nice boy made boysenberry jam with his mother.
Boysenberry.
”
    “
Yes
!” I thought to myself. “That is so easy.” And I wrote down the word
boysenberry.
But when I double-checked, it said, “BE AFRAID!”
    “The next word,” said Miss Lamphead, “is
history.
The history of our country is so fascinating.
History.
”
    “Another easy one,” I