Table Of ContentThe fun never stops! Visit John and Dave on the web at www.rubbercave.com!
Copyright 2011 by Jonathan Neuman Smashwords Edition
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1. The Pirates Are Coming! The Pirates Are Coming!
2. The Great Baldini
3. Squirrels and Janitors and Gum, Oh My!
4. It’s Raining Frogs
5. Tastes Like Chicken
6. Revenge is a Dish Best Served During Detention
7. Welcome to the Rubber Cave
8. When Zombies Attack
9. Zero Out of Five Dentists Recommend
10. The End of Rubberband Boy?
11. The Cliffhanger
The school bus came to a screeching halt, tires squealing against pavement
as honking cars whizzed by. The children on the bus pulled their faces out of the
backs of the seats in front of them and began rubbing their noses and groaning in
pain.
“Vait vone minute, I go get borscht in bottle.”
The small yellow bus tipped over to the side as the short, heavy, hairy bus
driver, Igor, lumbered out. As he wobbled toward a convenience store, Igor’s
checkered shirt snagged on a fire hydrant and began to unravel behind him. By
the time he entered the store, the shirt was completely gone, and the children
heard a number of women shriek. It had already been four years with Igor as
their bus driver, and the kids were still amused by his numerous peculiarities.
They especially loved his foreign accent and all of the funny-sounding words he
used, like “borscht.” In the past, Igor had made the children go to the store for
him, but after one kid accidentally got run over by an escaped buffalo from the
zoo, numerous phone calls from surprised and angry parents had quickly put a
stop to that.
Toward the back of the bus, Dave, a freckle-faced fifth grader, pulled his
glasses out of his curly brown hair. Thanks to the sudden short stop, Dave’s face
had plunged directly into an abnormally large glob of pink bubblegum stuck to
the back of the seat in front of him. He was now desperately trying to detach his
cheek from the gum. With his cheek still glued to the seat in front of him, he
held his glasses in front of his eyes in order to get a good look. As he feared, the
glasses were now badly bent out of shape.
“No! The screw popped out again! My mom is going to be so mad.”
A snickering face popped up from behind. It was Dave’s best friend, John.
John looked at Dave, then at the gum, and then back at Dave and smiled.
John thought back to first grade, the year he had first met Dave. While
attempting to check Dave for head lice, Mrs. Beigleeisen, the school nurse, had
accidentally breathed in some laughing gas. Suddenly, she got a funny look in
her eyes, shrieked, and began chasing Dave. She chased him all the way to the
school kitchen, where she grabbed a rolling pin and began swinging at Dave,
yelling “Cockroach! Cockroach!” John had been in the cafeteria at the time, and
he had come to Dave’s rescue by quickly tipping over the giant pot that was
supposed to have been that day’s lunch. The tidal wave of sticky purple glop (the
school had called it “Mystery Surprise”) engulfed Mrs. Beigleeisen, trapping her
until the effects of the gas had worn off. As a consequence of the two boys
having ruined his lunch, an enraged Fatsinoff, the school’s ironically-named
600-pound cook, would spend the next two years trying to exact his revenge (but
that’s a story for another day).
“How do things like this always happen to you?” John asked laughing.
John reached into his knapsack, dug around a bit, and then pulled out
something small and silver. He handed Dave a paper clip. “Here, I saved it from
the last time you broke your glasses.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Dave mumbled as he grabbed the paper clip.
John didn’t mind seeing Dave annoyed, but only if he was the one doing
the annoying. He decided to try to cheer Dave up.
“Well, at least this year you still have your pants.”
The previous year on the first day of school, Igor had been running late,
and so he decided that it would be quicker to get to the school by taking a
shortcut. The only problem was the shortcut was through a lake. The bus made it
about twenty feet into the water before Igor realized that apparently, buses don’t
work the same way as boats. While the kids were on the roof of the slowly-
sinking bus waiting to be rescued, they were attacked by a particularly angry
flock of birds, attracted to the smell of a tuna fish sandwich that Dave had been
keeping in his pocket.
Dave slowly cracked a smile and then let out a big laugh. He attempted to
turn his head to face John, but his face was still very stuck to the gum.
“Yeah, they never did find my pants.”
Dave tried to pull his head off of the gum, but to no avail.
“And at least you got your two seats back,” Dave said as he tried to push
off the seat in front of him with his right hand.
John smiled and nodded in agreement. Ever since the first grade, it had
become the unspoken rule that John would get the two back seats of the bus to
himself. Last year, however, the bus company combined John’s route with that
of their cross-town rivals – the other fourth grade class – and John had lost his
second seat. This of course, resulted in much friction, pranking, and bedlam.
Eventually, the fighting escalated into a chaotic incident, in which John’s class
released a rabid raccoon onto the bus while the other class let loose three
pigeons. The resulting damage to the city from the bus ride eventually led to a
new city law that required all raccoons and pigeons to be attached to leashes at
all times. This year the bus company had thought it wise to once again separate
the routes.
The two seats were more than just bragging rights. They also were quite
handy. Thanks to the two seats, John’s face, unlike those of the other kids, had
avoided being smashed into the seat in front of him. John had been lying down
across the seats when the bus had shortstopped, and he had merely rolled over.
In fact, the sudden rollover removed some stiffness in John’s back that he had
been feeling. Two nights before, John had watched a TV show about bats, and
he had attempted to go to sleep by curling his feet over the sidebar of his bunk
bed and hanging upside-down. However, some dust had gotten into his nose and
he had sneezed and fallen off the bed onto his back. John made a note to himself
that next time, just to be safe, he was going to use some glue and tape.
Lucky things like that always seemed to happen for John. Dave, on the
other hand, had about as much luck as a boy crossing a black cat while walking
under a ladder and stepping on a crack in the sidewalk while breaking a mirror
on Friday the 13th. In other words, he was about the unluckiest kid you would
ever meet. John enjoyed pointing out Dave’s propensity for bad luck. John, who
would normally not read a book under any circumstance, had just spent many
summer days in the library researching superstition and bad luck. Not expecting
to be able to use his newfound knowledge so quickly, he was overjoyed at the
sudden opportunity.
“Hey Dave, did you recently hear an owl hoot three times?” he asked.
“What?” Dave replied, not really paying attention. Now in addition to his
cheek, Dave’s right hand had gotten stuck to the gum as well. He was pulling on
his right wrist with his left hand and trying to push off the seat with his left foot.
“Did you get out of bed with your left foot first this morning?”
“John, what are you talking about?” Dave asked exasperated. His hand
slipped off his wrist and he accidentally slapped himself across the face. The
shock made him jolt back suddenly, detaching his face from the seat. The gum
was still attached to both, however, and so now there was a large strand of gum
bouncing up and down in the air. Dave tugged at the gum to pull it off his cheek,
but it refused to let go. Dave tried to let go of the gum, but now his hands were
stuck as well.
“Get off, get off, GET OFF!” Dave howled in frustration.
John looked at Dave with a slight grin on his face.
“Dave, you do know that gum doesn’t understand English, right?”
“I KNOW!”
Dave picked up his right knee and tried to kick the gum off with his shoe,
but that just made the gum wrap around his leg. He then tried to push it off with
his elbows, and pretty soon Dave was entangled in a web of sticky, pink
bubblegum.
“Maybe you should try talking to it in Chinese.”
“ARGH!!!”
Dave gave up and starting to sob. John looked out the window and saw
Igor returning from the convenience store, an empty wooden pickle barrel over
his chest and a bottle of dark purple liquid in his hand. John had no idea what
“borscht” was or why anybody would want to drink it. It sounded like the noise a
cow would make in the bathroom if it ate some bad grass and got food
poisoning. John shuddered, trying to get the thought out of his head. Then he
thought about how difficult it would be for a cow to open the bathroom door in
the event of an emergency. There were separate doors for men and for women,
why shouldn’t there be a door for cows? One day, John resolved, he would
champion the fight for equal rights for all animals with hooves.
Igor got back onto the bus just as his name came over the bus radio.
“Umm, Igor, we just received a call from a parent who says that her son
was chasing your bus for three blocks before you sped away and left the child
