Cloudy

"Where was I?" said Cloudy.

Everybody had already moved on to the next thing. Cloudy had drifted somewhere around the second sentence and had come back to find the room had rearranged itself.

Cloudy floats. That is the best word for it. It is not that Cloudy is not listening; it is that Cloudy's head comes untethered and goes gently sideways, and by the time it comes back, ten minutes have passed and somebody has asked Cloudy a question twice.

It makes Cloudy feel stupid, which Cloudy is not, at all.

Wobbly, who notices everything, noticed this.

"Where do you go?" said Wobbly.

"I don't know. Up, sort of. It's quite nice up there."

"And how do you get back?"

"I don't," said Cloudy. "Somebody says my name and I sort of fall."

Wobbly nodded. "You need a way down that isn't falling."

The way down turned out to be feet.

Press them into the floor. Both of them, flat, and then actually notice them — the weight, the sock, the cold bit by the window. Ten seconds. That is all.

Cloudy tried it and was startled. The room came back gently instead of all at once, and Cloudy did not have the horrible lurch of arriving somewhere mid-sentence with everybody looking.

Cloudy does it three or four times a lesson now. Nobody can see it happening, which Cloudy likes very much.

And here is the part that matters, and the reason Zenny says nobody should ever try to cure Cloudy of the floating.

The place Cloudy goes to is where the good ideas are.

When the class needed a name for the boat, it was Cloudy's. When Humdy was bored on a rainy Tuesday, it was Cloudy who suggested the thing that turned into the best afternoon of the year. Cloudy daydreams the best ideas in Candyfloss Land, by a distance.

Cloudy just needed feet on the floor, so that going up stopped meaning getting lost.