17
Fire Flies
It is one thing to make the decision to go on the Hugest A-venture Ever in order to find your favorite toy. It is quite another to actually do it.
Billy had gotten as far as the front porch. He stood staring out at the dark. He knew he must walk down the steps and then walk down the sidewalk—that part would be easy. He’d done that a million times. But he wasn’t quite sure what to do afterward.
Had they turned right or left when his dad had driven to the Wedding? Billy closed his eyes. First, he had to make sure he remembered which was left and which was right. Okay. I draw with my . . . right hand, he reminded himself. He held his right hand up at the elbow, which made him look like he was sort of waving.
Ollie didn’t agree with the terms “right” and “left.” He always said “patchpaw” and “the other way.” His right hand (or paw) had a small patch on its underside. He and Billy had gotten caught in a sticker bush one day, and they both came out a bit worse for it. Ollie had ripped the stitching on his right paw, so Billy’s mom added a yellow patch to close it up. Bill had needed Band-Aids on his chin, his elbow, and coincidentally, the palm of his right hand. Ollie was fascinated by the Band-Aids, which he called “patches,” and he had taken great pleasure in the fact that he and Billy had matching “patchpaws,” even though Billy’s had a dinosaur on it and Ollie’s matched the color of his paw.
So, Billy stood there with his right hand in the air, and he found himself feeling kind of brave, because thinking of rescuing Ollie made him that way. He also realized that his dad’s car had gone right when they backed out of the driveway. Patchpaw it is, Billy decided, and turned left. Oh wait, thought Billy. That’s the other way. So he turned patchpaw. Why was keeping that straight so hard? Anyway. The park was on the right, and he could walk all the way to the park, no problem. He’d been doing that on his own for a whole year now. No big deal.
Except . . . he had never walked to the park in the dark before. Who knew that the dark could be . . . well . . . so dark?
Things got better when he reached a street lamp. The street lamp created a whole big circle of light, and it was the perfect place to rest between the darkness. That’s exactly how Billy thought of it: resting inside a nice, round, warm circle of light before plunging into the dark again.
Billy did a quick count. There were eight more street lamps till the park. And then there was a big light at the entrance. Billy rested for a while. No one else was out. The whole neighborhood seemed totally empty. It was so strange and quiet and alone feeling. He knew that people were inside all of the houses. But it didn’t feel like they were. Then a slight breeze sent leaves tumbling and tapping down the sidewalks like zillions of tiny skeletons sneaking all around him. Billy decided he should stop resting and start walking, and fast. He wasn’t scared, NOT AT ALL, but he did feel really relieved each time he reached a streetlight. He felt relief until he reached the park. Because then he remembered: the park was across the street.
Which meant Billy would have to cross a street. Alone. Without Mr. B. Without a grown-up.
Billy heaved a huge, long, worried “this is impossible” sigh. He had come so far on his own! But he couldn’t cross a street alone. It was against the law. For a moment he wondered if an alarm would go off or something, and the cops would swoop down and scoop him up and put him in jail, and then he’d never find Ollie. But he realized that he had never ever heard any alarm go off when any other kid had crossed the street alone. So . . .
He took a deep breath.
He looked right (or patchpaw) and then left, and then patchpaw again as he had been taught. He did it three more times. No cars, no people—just spooky leaves sounding all Halloweeny. Then he put one foot onto the street, and then the other.
And nothing happened!
Wow.
Billy hustled across the street, just in case the alarm was slow or something. And boy, did it take a long time to get across. It was just a regular street, but being by himself made it seem twenty times wider than usual. It seemed to take forever to get across. But finally he was on the other side. He waited. No alarms. No police. All clear. Just the wind and the leaves.
And the spookiness.
Wow. Wait till Ollie hears about this, Billy thought, but his moment of victory quickly vanished. He had no idea which way to go next. This was a big problem. Who was he kidding, anyway? He was just a kid. How could he ever make it all the way to the Wedding place on his own in the dark, and rescue Ollie?
He pulled out his light saber. Because from here on, there was a lot of dark.
And . . . and . . . what if he never found Ollie—not on this night, or any other? What if he never got the chance to tell him about this huge A-venture? But he remembered a movie he’d seen on his parents’ movie channel. It was in bright, bright color. And it was scary but wonderful. There was a girl with red shoes who wanted to go home, and all she had to do was find a man named Oz. To find this magic Oz man, these little bitty people who sang a lot told the girl to follow a yellow brick road. Billy wished the roads around him were some kind of color, as THAT WOULD BE HELPFUL, but they were all dark gray.
Billy stood there at the edge of the park, starting to feel scared. How many streetlights were there till he got to the Wedding place? He didn’t remember his dad’s car making many turns. He looked past the park’s entrance to the next row of streetlights, and that’s when he noticed a glow, a strange glow, just ahead of him. It was different from the glow of a street lamp—more like a cloud. A cloud made up of lots of tiny sparkling lights.
Fireflies! That’s what they were. Hundreds of them. Hovering just above Billy’s head.
The sight was so . . . ghostly but beautiful, and strangely unscary. Plus, he loved fireflies. Why, he and Ollie used to catch them in jars. . . . But wait! Something peculiar was happening. The fireflies were starting to move as one. The cloud of fireflies began to drift through the gate of the park. And Billy knew he was meant to follow them. They would be his yellow brick road.
18
A Game of Catch
Ollie had been running from Zozo for a pretty long time. He’d run through the Dark Carnival without even noticing what a bizarre place it was. He did not think of going right or left or “patchpaw” or “the other way.” He just ran as fast as was possible for a toy who was a little over a foot high, with legs less than six inches long. He knew he was being chased by the Creeps, and he knew they were sneaky, fast, and probably very good at following and catching toys who made “a break for it.” So, he just went blind crazy fast as he could. He tore through mud and ditches and weeds and sticker bushes so quickly that even when a piece of him snagged on a twig or a thorn, he ripped himself loose and kept going.
And as time passed and he still wasn’t caught, he slowed but only slightly, just enough so that he could think more clearly. I should try not to leave tracks they can follow, he told himself. I should not let my scarf unravel on a sticker bush. They will find the thread and know where I’ve been. And these thoughts calmed him, and he began to run and jump and dodge with a confidence he had never felt before. He was like Super Ollie, his scarf flapping behind him like a cape. He began to hold his arms out in front of him, like all superheroes do when they fly, and for a moment he actually wondered if he could, in fact, fly.
He had flown many times when pretending with Billy, and pretending felt real, but he knew it was different. Pretending was something he and Billy did together. Pretending was like a strange and wonderful place where things happened the way they wished them to. It was Real Life Plus with spaceships and dinosaurs and monsters and powers so super that you could always get out of trouble and save the day. Ollie liked pretending almost more than anything. So, on this crazy night of real life, he pretended that he could fly. Fly over the ground and trees and straight to Billy. And for a few moments he felt the great power of his own hopes as he believed that he was flying, and in his pretend he flew into the window of Bil
ly’s room and landed on the pillow where he always slept with his boy Billy.
But suddenly, he was jerked into the air. For a moment, just a moment, Ollie thought he had pretended so hard that he had broken through to real life! But then he realized the truth: he had been plucked up into the mouth of a large black dog, and the dog was running very fast. So fast that to Ollie, it did feel like flying.
Ollie must have been so lost in pretending that he hadn’t heard the dog coming, but now he heard the dog’s coarse huffing as they galloped from the trees and toward a street lined with parked cars.
Ollie’s experience with dogs was very limited. Billy’s family didn’t have one, but Ollie had watched dogs in the park with their people. Dogs seemed to belong to people the way toys belonged to kids. He saw that people talked to dogs, and though dogs didn’t exactly talk back, they did seem to understand. Sort of. Dogs didn’t always do what their people told them to do, which Ollie found odd. Dogs would just run off, and then their person would yell things, like “Come back, Rex! I mean it right now you bad dog come here I said COME HERE.”
Ollie didn’t think the dogs were actually “bad.” It seemed to him they were just distracted by the general funness of the world. The same way Billy would sometimes get, and then he and Billy would break a few laws when no grown-ups were watching. So, Ollie assumed that this dog was doing the same thing, but then he remembered that pretending was sometimes quite loud, especially when flying, and that perhaps he had been making super flying sounds, so maybe, just maybe, the dog heard Ollie’s pretending and was trying to help him.
“Ummm. Hi, Mr. Dog Person,” Ollie began. “Thank you for giving me a ride. I guess you would know where Billy is?”
The dog didn’t answer; he just continued to run and was now on the street. Though he did glance down at Ollie, as if surprised the toy was talking.
Ollie was, of course, worried about being in the street, especially since the dog hadn’t looked both ways.
“Say there, Mr. Dog Friend, you know, it’s against the law to be in the street without looking—”
But before Ollie could finish, he was yanked out of the dog’s mouth and thrown into the air, and Ollie wasn’t sure if he was flying or falling. And before he could even figure that out, he felt himself being caught. He was in the hand of a boy, a bigger-than-Billy boy, who was riding on a skateboard. IN THE STREET. AT NIGHT. All Ollie could think was, This kid is some other kind of kid. He does a lot of “against the law.” He’s kind of a Danger Kid.
Then Ollie noticed there were several of these Danger Kids riding skateboards in the street, and the dog was running along with them. He wondered if they were a pack. Like wolves.
“Speedy brought us a toy!” yelled the kid who held Ollie.
“Lemme see!” said one of the other kids, and suddenly, Ollie was tossed through the air and caught by the Lemme See Kid.
“What’s he supposed to be?” Lemme See said with a laugh.
“Gimme a look,” said another kid. And just like that Ollie was tossed and caught again.
“Looks like a teddy rabbit!” shouted Gimme a Look. And then Ollie was tossed, and not very nicely, from one laughing Danger Kid to another, as if he were a ball in a very unfun game of catch.
“Look out, here it comes!”
“Heads up!”
“Whoever drops him has to go home!”
The boys wove quickly up to the sidewalk, back down to the asphalt, and then around the parked cars, and Ollie was very ready to be dropped. And sure enough, Lemme See threw him so far that nobody caught him. He landed in the grass near a curb, and none of the Danger Kids came back to find him. They just laughed as they skated away. Speedy the Dog, however, did come sniffing after him. Ollie felt his wet nose on his back, his hot breath all over him as the dog flipped Ollie over, about to snatch him up again.
“Come on, Speedy, leave it!” yelled Gimme a Look.
Instantly, the dog lifted his head, turned, and disappeared into the night.
Ollie sat there, stunned. Those were older kids. The kind of kids Billy told him about. The ones who forgot their toys. Would Billy ever become one of those kids? And somewhere deep inside him came a feeling he could not understand. His hope came up against what he had just seen and experienced, and he wondered about the difference between pretending and real life. He did not like feeling that one might be stronger than the other.
19
When Pretending Gets Nutty
Billy followed the small cloud of fireflies as they slowly drifted and curled through the deep night shadows of the park. Darkness transformed the park in ways that were surprising. The swings, which were usually full and busy, now swayed at a sluggish and ghostly pace in the steady evening wind. The long, low limbs of the oak trees, which during the day were so enticing to climb, lurched to and fro like giant fingers stiffly reaching for anything that came close. Places where Billy had played with Ollie and his pals seemed no longer welcoming and friendly, but rather mysterious, gloomy, and even a little frightening.
Billy tried to pretend that Hannah of the Runny Nose was with him, and Perry of the Sticks and even Muddy Butch, but in his pretending, they appeared as ghost versions of themselves, all pale and dim with eyes gleaming and eerie smiles.
“Yikes!” he whispered, quickly closing his eyes and shaking his head to make the pretend go away. He’d forgotten that sometimes pretending did what it wanted, especially when he was scared. It was like pretending decided to play a trick on him and made him see things he really did not want to see. Especially at night. In the dark.
Closets, the dark under beds, and shadowy places made pretending a “tricky customer.” Usually, Billy sort of liked that about pretending. It made it more like real life ’cause real life almost never did what you wanted. But Billy only liked it if Ollie was with him when the pretending got nutty. Being afraid with somebody, especially Ollie, made afraidness a lot less fearsome.
But the fireflies helped Billy feel better. And so he kept following them. They were real-life things that seemed made up and magic. Like rainbows and glowworms and hummingbirds and magnets. Fireflies were so cool that you almost couldn’t believe they were real, and they made Billy wonder what else there was in the world that seemed too good to be true.
So he kept following them deeper into the park, much farther than Billy had ever gone before, to a part of the park that seemed wild and overgrown. From this point on, Billy wasn’t sure if he knew the way home. So he decided to leave a trail he could follow. A trail of action figures from his backpack. The first one he pulled out was one of his oldest, Grongo the Twig Man of Planet Zoxxo. Billy had had Grongo for so long he couldn’t remember not having him. He placed the little action figure on top of a fair-sized rock that was at the place where Billy decided the park ended and the unknown rest of the world began. “Stay steady, Grongo,” he said. “I’m counting on you.”
As Billy walked away, he was sure that he was being followed by monsters. But he held his light saber tight and wouldn’t look back. And then the battery in the light saber died. Then the wind began to blow even harder, and the fireflies were being pushed all around, breaking up and spreading out in a way that made it difficult for Billy to know which way to go or which ones to follow. Then it started to thunder. Just a rumble or two at first, but soon louder and closer. This was “bad news” and “bummer” and “in trouble” all put together.
By the time the rain started and the first flash of lightning lit the sky, Billy felt like he had lost just about all his brave. Some fireflies scattered under the trees. But most of them had taken shelter under a strange-looking structure. It was a huge smiling boy with a pointy hat! And for a few seconds, Billy was sure his make-believe had gone completely nutty. A GIANT SITTING BOY?! Then he remembered—this boy was made of wood and plaster. This boy was the entrance to the old carnival. The place the other kids called the Dark Carnival. The giant boy looked pretty creepy, but the rain fell harder and the lightning
and thunder were close. So Billy huddled under the boy as the storm raged all around. He felt so lost. As lost as a little boy could feel. But he was not alone. The fireflies rested there with him. Several crawled around onto his hand as he shivered, lighting up for just an instant and then going dim and lighting up again. But it was hard not to see monsters and ghosts and skeletons. So Billy thought only of home and his parents and his best friend, Ollie.
20
Can Man
Ollie had not been sitting by the curb very long when the storm began to blow near. He had never been outside during a storm, and so he found the wind and thunder very interesting.
I wish Billy were here, he thought for the umpteenth time that night. Storms aren’t that scary. They’re kind of—he searched for a word that felt right—bigtastic! A couple of fat raindrops smacked Ollie on the head. Except for the getting wet part. He hoped he wouldn’t get any wetter. Being too wet was a major bummer. Ollie could barely walk when he got too wet. But as he wondered about his wet level, he heard a squeaking sound; it was coming closer and closer.
The Creeps! he instantly worried, swinging around in the direction of the squeaking. Through the rain, he could just make out a man slowly pushing a shopping cart. Odd, but at least it wasn’t the Creeps. The man was wearing several black garbage bags as a sort of raincoat, singing quietly under his breath. Ollie recognized the song and the man. Can Man! Ollie and Billy saw him in the neighborhood every week or so.
Sure enough, the man leaned over and picked up an empty soda can from the side of the road. He then stood it up straight and stomped on it once. The can went perfectly flat. He tossed it in one of the many bulging garbage bags in his cart. Ollie figured they were all filled with stomped cans.
Can Man looked up, scanning the pavement and curb ahead of him for more cans. His eyes fell upon Ollie.