of green paint. In one corner was Mr. Weinschweig’s desk. It was as old as anything else in the room, and it was piled high with sheet music. Though Mr. Weinschweig was not a little guy, when he sat at his desk he was hidden by the sheet music except for his bald head and maybe the top of his tortoiseshell glasses.
Mr. Weinschweig nodded to Rodney when he entered the bungalow, then went back to scribbling notes on music paper. It was no secret that Mr. Weinschweig was writing a symphony.
The thing that only Rodney knew, because Mr. Weinschweig had admitted it during a kazoo lesson, was that he’d been composing the first movement for the past fourteen years, since about the time Rodney had been born. He was always changing things—sometimes little tiddles, sometimes vast melodies. “I want it perfect,” Mr. Weinschweig had told him. Maybe. But the result was that no one had ever heard one note of Mr. Weinschweig’s symphony. Maybe it was great. Maybe it was rotten. Probably nobody would ever know.
A lot of kids were already in the bungalow warming up by running their instruments up and down lopsided scales and playing bits of popular songs. The violins outnumbered everybody else, but the trumpets were the loudest. Once in a while the kid who played the drums would beat out a riff. The resulting chaos sounded like some of the overly modern music Rodney had heard on the radio.
Rodney sat down and plugged in his kazoo to conserve the battery power. He hummed into the kazoo and made a sound like a flying bee. He made the bee hum scales, adding to the confusion around him. Generally, Rodney wasn’t much of a team player, but he liked playing in the orchestra. It was fun being in the middle of all that loud organized sound and seeing how all the parts fit together. As a matter of fact, Rodney’s kazoo was one of the few highlights in his otherwise bleak life. Give him a kazoo and an empty room, and he could invent concerts that always got a standing ovation.
Pretty soon Mr. Weinschweig walked to the front of the room and began to conduct. If you took into account that they were just a junior high school orchestra, they sounded pretty good. They played the “Latvian Sailor’s Dance” (traditional) and the “Robin Hood Overture” by Rooski-Pedruski. Mr. Weinschweig sometimes got so carried away that he closed his eyes and pretended he was playing an invisible violin with his baton. It was all pretty entertaining.
Orchestra class always seemed the shortest one of the day, and pretty soon it was time for the students to put away their instruments.
While Rodney swabbed out his kazoo with a rag of old T-shirt, he thought, So much for adventure. So much for excitement.
* * * * * * *
The house was empty when Rodney got home. After a moment he remembered that his parents were at the Chocolatron sales conference.
Just as well. He felt like being alone. After he put his books and his kazoo away, he picked up a stack of letters from the floor in front of the front door and sorted through them.
His parents must have been on some funny lists. They got advertisements from some magazines that wanted to make them millionaires, and from others that wanted them to “discover the romance of collecting antique slot machines”; from manufacturers who wanted to sell them Chocolatron scoops, from societies dedicated to the UFO method of tax preparation. Each envelope said something like YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO PASS UP THIS OPPORTUNITY! Or SAVE THE UNIVERSE. SAVE YOURSELF! Or even YOU MAY ALREADY BE IMMORTAL AND NOT EVEN KNOW IT!
That was why when Rodney saw an envelope with a headline written in curlicues and dots and splashes of color, he didn’t think much of it. He guessed you were supposed to wonder what all that fancy art meant, and tear open the envelope in a sweat of curiosity. Like a lot of the other advertising, it was for his dad, but instead of it being typed or printed, the address was written in the scraggly longhand of a little kid. It was one curious package, all right. Rodney had to give the advertiser that.
He sat down with a plastic bag full of cherries and waited for his mom or dad to call in and ask about the mail.
CHAPTER TWO
YELLOW STICKERS
Rodney tried something with the cherries he’d once seen a cousin do. This cousin had a real talent for putting a whole cherry in one side of his mouth, and without seeming to stop for anything, roll a pit out the other side of his mouth. Rodney got the hang of it after a while, but by that time he had tracks of juice on his chin. He decided that he was too grown-up for this kind of thing and put the cherries away.
He’d just begun his math homework (everything they hadn’t done in class because of the singing, they had to do for homework) when the phone rang.
While grumbling about being interrupted, Rodney leaped down the stairs and grabbed the phone on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Rodney? This is your father.”
“Oh yeah. I recognize the voice.”
They both chuckled at the familiar little joke.
“So,” said Rodney, “how’s the conference?”
“My idea about putting Chocolatron into oatmeal went over very big.”
“That’s nice.”
“You don’t sound so good. Everything okay?”
Rodney was fine. He just wasn’t about to get excited about Chocolatron. He said, “Sure. Do you want to hear about the mail?”
Mr. Congruent did. Rodney read him the copy on each envelope, and only one of them interested Mr. Congruent at all. He’d heard all the other pitches before. He said, “Open the one with the weird writing on it.”
“Looks like more advertising to me,” Rodney said.
“Yeah, but for what? Think about it.”
Rodney didn’t have to think about it. It was advertising. He put the phone down and tore open the envelope. He pondered the contents until he heard a tiny voice coming from the phone.
“Yeah, Dad. Sorry. I was just looking at the stuff in the envelope.”
“Don’t keep it to yourself, Rodney. What is it?”
Rodney said, “There’s a pad of small yellow stickers, each about an inch square.” He dropped the pad back into the envelope and took out a sheet of paper. “And this,” he said, “looks like instructions.”
“Looks like instructions?”
“Well, there are no words. Just pictures. Like the directions you get with a Japanese radio.”
Excitedly, Mr. Congruent asked him what the instructions were.
“It looks,” said Rodney, “as if they want you to tear off a sticker and stick it on your forehead.”
A moment later, Mr. Congruent said, “Go ahead.”
“Go ahead? You mean you want your only son to just go ahead and stick this thing—which may be full of exotic skin poison—on his head? Just like that.”
“It’s not poison, Rodney. It’s an adventure.”
Well, here it was. His big
