Continued
None of us could imagine what he could be doing with all that gum. At lunch one day, (Bob's favorite subject) a couple of us came right out and asked him. But Bob L. just smiled, closed his eyes and kept on eating. Some of us figured he was trying to invent a new kind of equipment for dodge ball. Others reckoned he was going to try to sell it to the Bubbaville Historical Museum as one of the Seven Wonders of Bubbaville, since there were only three back then.
Anyway, it was so darn hot out that we didn’t have the energy to ponder on Bob L. Gum and his giant wad of glop. I was trying to finish my history project before school let out so I wouldn’t be sitting in summer school while everybody else, including my ex-best buddy, had fun. But there was no letup of that smack chomp smack! Finally, I’d had enough! If I had to listen to any more of it, I just knew I wouldn’t finish my report on “The Battle of the Bulge,” and I’d be stuck in that hot, boring room forever!
I admit it…I finked on Gum. It was against the unwritten Kid Law, and I felt miserable doing it; but heck, I’d already lost my best buddy. So I figured, how much more miserable could I be?
When Mrs. Chomper got a good look at that gooey mass stuck under Bob’s desk, she got pretty dizzy. What with the heat and all, it was enough to make anybody a might unsteady. As she eased herself down onto her knees, I used my spelling workbook to fan her chins, while Sadie and Sophie went for Principal Popper. I thought my troubles were over, when Old Man Popper not only made Bob clean off the gum from his own desk, but also made him hunt under every desk in the whole school for any ancient, sticky ‘treasures’!
We figured after that punishment, no kid, not even Bob L. Gum would want to LOOK at another piece of gum ever again. And the next morning, since I was able to sweat out another three or four sentences of my report without the bother of Bob’s gum smacking, it seemed we might be right.
But Bob L. Gum didn’t give up that easy. I thought he was acting weird that day at lunch, since he disappeared before he’d finished even half of his peanut butter and creamed herring sandwich, but I chalked it up to the sight of all that prehistoric gum he’d cleaned up the day before. Well, that was only part of it….
The rest of us finished our lunch and went outside, but it was so dark, we thought we were in for one of those spring cyclones. On closer look it wasn’t clouds that blocked out the sun, it was a BUBBLE! An enormous, pink gum bubble. Nothing in all my lunch recesses prepared me for the sight of that quivery monster, growing bigger right before my eyes.
Bob L. had cleaned up all that used gum, but he hadn’t thrown it away. He took those stick clods, added them to his own giant boulder, and created a mountain of a wad! And while we’d been eating our lunch, Bob had gotten out the electric air pump from the janitor’s closet, brought it into the schoolyard, and stuck the hose into the very center of the molten goo, flipping the switch.
By the time we saw it, it was almost ready to pop. That bubble towered over the top of the school roof and had practically swallowed up the swings, slides and monkey bars on the playground. Once we took in the size, heard the thunderous sounds of its walls stretching to their limits, everybody took one giant step back…I’ve heard tell that folks twelve miles south, clear to gumdrop gulch heard that giant Ka-Blop! and thought their long-extinct volcano had erupted. Luckily, because we took that giant step backward, most of us escaped the bubble gum shrapnel that flew during the blast.
Continued
