For Billy and Ollie, nothing really changed after the night Ollie had officially been made a favorite—except that life got even more yum.
All day long there were forts to build and trees to climb and bikes to ride and games to make up. Billy and Ollie lived most of their time in made-up adventures. Sometimes the couch was made of rocks, and the carpet was a sea of lava, and they had to make their way to the kitchen by stepping on chair cushions to avoid being melted. Sometimes they were bumblebees and buzzed and hovered everywhere making a bzzzzzzzzzz sound and stinging the car. It didn’t matter if it was rainy and they were inside, or if it was sunny and they were out. All that mattered, from morning to night, was that Billy and Ollie were always together, never apart.
When Billy was small he would simply grab Ollie by an arm or leg or ear—whichever was handiest at the moment—and carry him from place to place. As Billy grew bigger, however, his parents gave him a backpack, and that backpack happened to be the perfect size for carrying Ollie around on an A-venture. This was Billy’s way of saying “adventure.” So when he would say to Ollie, “I believe we need to go on a huge A-venture,” the toy always knew what he meant.
An A-venture could involve something with Billy’s mother and father, like going to the zoo or a baseball game or even just the grocery store. But an A-venture could also be something for just the two of them—Billy and Ollie, alone together. These were called “huge A-ventures.”