“‘Supersonic Man versus the Pickled Tomatoes’!” George Brown said as he read the title of the comic book. “This one looks awesome. The squirty red stuff looks just like blood.”
It was Tuesday afternoon. George and his pals Alex and Chris were hanging out at the Made for Mutants Comic Book Shop.
Chris shook his head. “I already have that one,” he said. “Supersonic Man defeats the tomatoes with garlic, the same way you would ward off vampires.”
“Sounds like he’s making tomato sauce,” George said. “Maybe he should be called Supersonic Chef.”
George and Alex started laughing. But not Chris. He took his comic books seriously.
“They must have the one I’m looking for somewhere,” Chris said. He started thumbing through another stack of comics. “I just have to keep searching.”
“Why don’t you ask Rodney?” Alex asked Chris. He nodded in the direction of the owner of the store.
“Because looking for just the right comic book is half the fun,” Chris explained.
George didn’t see what was so fun about searching through stacks and stacks of comic books. Sure, comics were fun to read, but this didn’t seem all that different from going shopping with his mother. And shopping was boring.
“Hey, what’s this?” George asked suddenly. He pointed to a sheet of paper taped to the counter. The paper said Pay It Forward Day Sign-Up Sheet.
Alex looked over George’s shoulder. “It’s the sign-up sheet for Pay It Forward Day,” he said.
“I get that,” George replied. “But what’s Pay It Forward Day?”
“Oh, right. You moved to Beaver Brook after Pay It Forward Day last year,” Alex remembered. “It’s a community-service day we have every year. People help out with things around town. Last year my family helped clean the park. The year before, we painted lampposts.”
George looked at the sheet. There were a lot of things you could do on Pay It Forward Day—collect coats for needy people, plant flowers around City Hall, read to little kids in the library . . .
“What are you doing this year?” he asked Alex.
“We’re signed up to serve food to homeless families at the shelter,” Alex replied. “You want to come with us?”
“Sure,” George agreed. Serving food sounded a lot better than collecting coats or planting flowers. Food was always fun.
“You want to help at the shelter this year, too, Chris?” Alex called across the store.
“Okay,” Chris answered without looking up from the stacks and stacks of comic books.
“What is it you like so much about this Supersonic dude, anyway?” George asked Chris.
“He’s cool,” Chris explained. “He has the power to travel through time and space, but he uses his mind to fight the bad guys. This one time, he was trapped in a basement with no way out. He found an old metal pipe and turned it into a torpedo. Then he blasted a tunnel and . . .”
Chris kept talking, but George wasn’t listening anymore. He was too busy worrying about the disaster brewing in his belly. There were bubbles in there. Hundreds of them. And they were going crazy.
That could only mean one thing. The magical super burp was back.
George knew that trouble was on its way. After all, it had happened to him many times before.
