Bad News Bob

    I kept saying to myself, "What am I doing here? I could be safe at home watching TV, or doing homework, or cleaning up the dog’s mess in the backyard. I could be doing anything - anything but what I was doing right now!"

    There we were, my best friend Bob and I, standing in front of the scariest haunted house in town. The shutters on this old place squeaked and banged back and forth in the cool, New Jersey autumn wind. Occasionally, a bat soared over this deserted house patiently looking for a place to rest its weary bones. The sky above was beginning to turn gray, daring us to move closer to that abandoned dwelling. But all this didn't seem to bother Bob.

    My friend Bob had a reputation in the neighborhood. He wasn’t the local hero as you might have expected. He was a sort of “Sad Sack,” a guy who always had things go wrong, no matter what he did. The neighborhood kids called him "Bad News Bob," because every time he got mixed up in something, things always wound up becoming "bad news." He was pretty much used to it though.

   I suggested that we turn around and leave this spooky place before we got into big trouble. Why go looking for trouble when it always seemed to find us? And most of all, a place like this could be dangerous!

   "Come on, Marty," Bob said, "there's nothing to be afraid of."

   That was easy for him to say, because he wasn't scared. I was!   Actually, one of the reasons I liked to hang around with Bob was because things were never dull.   He was the strange kind of kid in your neighborhood who was a little nerdy and not very popular, and always managed to get us in and out of trouble. But we were a team, and he was my best friend. Bob was into exploring and had the courage of a lion... or a fool... it was hard to tell which. Either way, something exciting always happened when Bob was around, and I was proud to have him as my friend. I almost felt as though I had to stick with him to make sure he would be all right. I knew trouble would somehow find us, yet I also knew that he would depend on me to help if, or when, things turned out to be "bad news."

The wind suddenly picked up and seemed to be sending a warning, "Go back! Go back and leave this place!" That's the feeling I got as we passed between the rusty, wrought iron gates, and stepped into a mess of tangled weeds. We could have used a razor sharp machete to cut our way through hundreds of overgrown plants and bushes. Litter was scattered about from one end of the yard to the other.

If it was up to me, Bob and I would have turned around and gotten out of here long ago, but because friends like Bob are hard to find, and we seemed to always stick together whatever the problems (which happened a lot), I decided to "hang in there" with him. Hopefully, this wasn't a big mistake.

Finding a map to a secret treasure (which was carefully hidden in this deserted old house) was what he had in mind, and nobody could change his mind when he set it on doing something. Who knows, maybe we would be all right this time. We were due for some good luck for a change. But somehow, I knew we were going to be in for some "bad news" sooner or later.

Answer the following questions in complete sentences.

1. Why was Bob nicknamed "Bad News Bob?"

2. What is the narrator's name in this story?

3. Where were the two boys? Why were they there?

4. When and in what state does the story take place?

5. What is a "Sad Sack?"