The entire time Billy had waited for his parents to leave, for their voices to fade and the house to fall silent, he’d been doing more than struggling to stay awake. He’d been planning. He had been planning his OLLIE DANGER RESCUE NIGHTTIME SECRET MISSION OF SECRECY for what had seemed like at least 217 hours, or maybe all the way past midnight. He looked at his cuckoo clock with the little blue bird that came out every hour, but Billy never really knew what time it was because he’d knocked off both the hands when he was “little,” which was actually only five months earlier, but that seemed so long ago that he had to have been little.
He used a lot of consideration as he readied his backpack for this mission. “Consideration” was one of the longest words he knew. Con Sid Eration. Why was “consideration” so long when it really just meant “think”? Maybe it was just another grown-up way to make something more complicated than it really was. Grown-ups did that all the time.
But all this consideration and thinking it over had kept Billy’s mind busy and very unsleepy. His backpack was filled with basically everything he thought he might need:
1. His flashlight saber. It had a broken speaker so it didn’t make sword-like noises anymore, which was okay because Billy was trying to be supersecret and that meant being superquiet. The flashlight part of the saber was important. It helped him see (sort of, anyway) in the dark, and since it was past midnight, there was gonna be loads of dark. And dark was, well . . . scary, no matter what anybody said. Dark when you’re a littlish kid is scary, and since Billy was by himself, dark was gonna be a really big, fill-all-the-air-around-him-and-then-some SCARY THING. Plus, the flashlight saber was a major protection device in case of dogs, or werewolves, or crazy zombies or monsters of ANY KIND.
2. Crayons. Billy wasn’t sure why he needed crayons. They just made him feel safe.
3. String cheese and goldfish crackers. In case the journey was for a long time and he would starve.
4. Four green-apple lollipops. They tasted good, and Billy sometimes pretended that they made him invisible.
5. A couple handfuls of plastic action figures and one tiny, soft, plastic Pegasus. You just never knew when you’d need some toy action figures. Maybe they’d come magically alive and save Billy. Right? And a tiny, soft, plastic Pegasus was something everyone should have with them all the time no matter what.
That was pretty much it. Everything else was in his hoodie pockets. His parents’ cell phone numbers. His address. Some more string cheese.
Billy changed into his favorite pajamas. Put on his fastest shoes (they had some kinda air cushions in them). He squooshed his pillows in a lump under the covers, so it would seem like he was sleeping in his bed, and then he turned for one last look at his room before he tiptoed down the hall.
“So long, guys,” he said to everything. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”