Double Trouble

SPLOG ENTRY #1:

Hard Work Is Hard!

Dear Kids of the Past,

Hi. My name's Bob and I live and go to school in space. That's right, space. Pretty sporky, huh? I'm the new kid this year at Astro Elementary, the only school in orbit around one of the outer planets. There's just one micro little problem:

GETTING GOOD GRADES HERE IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE!

I mean, back on Earth at my old school, I got a trophy for learning how to Velcro my shoe. But if you dare ask the teachers here for a little help putting on your space helmet the right way so your head doesn't explode, they deduct six points from your grade average and make you sharpen pencils for a week!

Beep just clapped and said, "Head go pop, yay!" Beep is a young alien who got separated from his 600 siblings when they were playing hide-and-seek in some asteroid field. Then he floated around space for a while, until he ended up here. Sad, huh?

You know what's even sadder? I was the one who found him knocking on our space station's air lock door and let him in. Now he thinks I'm his new mother!

On the bright side Beep not only likes sharpening pencils but also most of the other mind-numbing tasks I give him. Which frees up my time to do more important things like . . . like . . . like . . .

"Bob-mother like sleep late!" Beep said.

Well, who doesn't?

Beep is also really good at drawing, so I let him do all the pictures for these space logs (splogs, as we call them) before sending them back in time for you to read. Beep says to tell you that he once was terrible at drawing, but that he worked really hard and that you can too. (Unlike me, of course, who was smart enough to give up art the second I realized I could draw only stick figures!)

Anyway, I promise to try to write more entries soon, maybe between my after-school nap and my predinner rest time.

Enjoy!

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Excerpted from Double Trouble by Jonathan Roth
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.