After that conversation Billy was determined. He would not go anywhere without Ollie, especially not to the Wedding.
Billy prepared his Getting to Bring Ollie to the Wedding speech with considerable skill. He had put Ollie in his backpack, which was on his shoulder. So when his parents were standing at the front door—ready to leave and saying loudly, “Come on, Billy. Let’s go! We’re going to be late!”—Billy walked toward them and began his “explaineration.”
He talked very fast. “I have to bring Ollie ’cause he really wants to see a wedding and he’d be too lonely if we left him here and I’ve got him in my backpack, which I need to bring anyway because I just wanna bring home a hunk of the giant wedding cake and no one will see Ollie or anything and it’ll help me stay still and not run and all the other ‘nots’ I’m not supposed to do at this Wedding. . . .”
Billy hadn’t even finished and his parents had given up and opened the door and were walking him toward the car. Billy didn’t understand many things about grown-ups, but he had developed a sense of how his parents would respond in certain situations. For instance, when they were in a hurry, it was much easier for Billy to get his way if he explained to them exactly why he wanted to do something they did not want him to do. Crying to get his way made his parents cranky. Yelling made them angry. But explaining seemed to confuse them, and it took time, which, when you’re a grown-up in a hurry, is the one thing you don’t want to have taken.
As they drove to the Wedding, his parents made Billy promise to keep Ollie safe inside the backpack at all times. They said that since he was older now, it was Billy’s responsibility to keep track of the backpack so that Ollie would not get lost.
Billy agreed to all the terms just as they pulled up at the Wedding.
“Victory, Ollie,” whispered Billy.
“Ditto,” Ollie whispered back.
When they got to the Wedding, it was a little overwhelming because there were so many people, and Billy wanted to run and jump and shout immediately because it felt like his whole body was going to explode out of the Suit and the Nice Shoes, and the Tie was driving him out of his mind. But he knew he couldn’t do any of those things, so instead he talked to Ollie, giving a constant (but quiet) play-by-play of the goings-on in a sportscaster voice.
“About a million gazillion people are here,” Billy told Ollie. “Lotta suits. Lotta grown-ups. Lotta fancy dresses. Lotta weird hair.”
“Why do grown-ups do weird stuff to their hair?” asked Ollie.
“Beats me,” said Billy. “The older the ladies get, the bigger the hair.”
Later, after they sat down on long, hard benches and Billy had tucked the backpack at his feet because an old lady was squished up on one side of him and his mom was on the other, Billy (quietly) kept up the commentary:
“Nothing’s happening, we’re all just sitting here. . . . Wait . . . wait. Now a bunch of guys in suits are standing up in front and they are waiting for something. . . . One guy has a flower on his suit! Now everybody’s standing up again. . . . Is it over? No, not over. A line of ladies is coming down the middle. They’re wearing really nice dresses. But one lady is wearing a really, really nice dress. Big. Puffy. White. That lady is smiling. . . . No, hold on a minute, she’s crying. . . . No, she’s smiling again. Okay, we’re sitting down.”
The sitting down went on for some time. Billy didn’t have to say anything because a man in a long black coat was talking in a booming voice, and Billy knew Ollie could hear that, and then someone else was singing a song, and then someone else was reading a poem, and this seemed to go on forEVER, and Billy started to get superbored and kinda sleepy.
After a while the main lady in the big, puffy, white dress was talking, and then the man with the flower on his suit beside her was talking. Then the lady in the dress was smiling and crying, and the man in the suit with her was holding her hand and he was smiling and looking like he was gonna cry. But then other people were smiling and crying too. When Billy looked around it seemed like lots of folks were smile-crying—including the old lady beside him and his own mom!