Chapter One
The Day School Closed Early (The Puddle Badge)
It all started on the day school closed early, which Theo still calls the best day of his life, even counting his birthdays.
A water pipe under the street had burst, and school shut at lunchtime, and it had just stopped raining, and the whole world was wet and shiny and smelled like clean pennies, and outside their gate was the biggest puddle Nia and Theo had ever seen. It was so big it had its own weather. It was so still you could see the whole sky in it, upside down, clouds and all.
Theo, obviously, jumped in it.
Nia, who was nine and liked to measure things, was measuring it with her school ruler when Grandpa Béla came out with his coat over his shoulders to see where the water was coming from. But he did not look at the pipe. He looked at the puddle, and at Theo dripping, and at Nia's ruler, and his big white moustache moved the way it did when he was smiling underneath it.
Forty years I was a weather officer on ships, he said. Every morning the captain asked me one question: what is the sky sending us today? And do you know, in forty years, the answer was never once the same. He crouched down by the puddle, and the sky looked up at all three of them out of it. People complain about weather, he said. This puzzles me more than anything on land. Complaining about weather is complaining about your own collection arriving. There is no such thing as boring weather. There is only weather you have not collected yet.
