Basia and Kuba attend a school where hats have moods, opinions, and a talent for mischief. When Professor Klaps's ancient hat vanishes before the Laughing Hat Festival, the search leads them to a forbidden cloakroom.
The Magic Hat School was not the sort of place where anything stayed ordinary for long. Lessons began not with a bell, but with the headmaster’s yellow parrot sneezing so loudly the windows rattled. Every pupil wore a hat of their own, and every hat had a personality, an opinion, and a talent for trouble.
Basia adored hers: green, spotted with yellow peas, with a feather that sprang upright whenever someone said something funny. Kuba wore a tall blue cylinder that changed size whenever it felt like it. Some days it was so huge he nearly disappeared inside it. Other days it shrank until it barely covered one ear, as if it were ashamed to be seen.
On Monday, after a maths lesson so strange the numbers tried to escape through the open window, the corridor erupted into chaos. Hats were hopping from head to head, spinning in circles, singing opera, and laughing so hard they toppled off shelves. Even the headmaster looked as if he had bitten into a lemon by mistake. Then Professor Klaps let out a groan.
His hat was gone.
Not just any hat, either. It was the oldest hat in the school, the moodiest, the most troublesome, and the one that had to appear at the Laughing Hat Festival that very afternoon. Without it, the whole event would collapse.
Basia and Kuba exchanged a quick look. No one else in the corridor seemed brave enough to move, because a missing hat could mean anything in that school. It might be hiding in a teapot, perched on a chandelier, or pretending to be a cushion.
Then came a faint scrabbling sound from behind the door of the old cloakroom, the one nobody used because, according to school legend, a deeply offended ghost-hat lived there. Basia stepped forward, and her green hat gave a nervous rustle. Kuba clutched his blue cylinder, which instantly grew so wide it almost knocked him sideways. Together they pushed the door open.
A sharp flash of light burst out from the darkness, and something moved inside the cloakroom that neither of them had expected at all....