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usual outcome. After all, Rudy hadn’t missed a penalty in eighteen shots, even when the opposition made a point of booting Tommy Müller out of goal. No matter whom they replaced him with, Rudy would score.
    On this occasion, they tried to force Liesel out. As you might imagine, she protested, and Rudy agreed.
    “No, no.” He smiled. “Let her stay.” He was rubbing his hands together.
    Snow had stopped falling on the filthy street now, and the muddyfootprints were gathered between them. Rudy shuffled in, fired the shot, and Liesel dived and somehow deflected it with her elbow. She stood up grinning, but the first thing she saw was a snowball smashing into her face. Half of it was mud. It stung like crazy.
    “How do you like that?” The boy grinned, and he ran off in pursuit of the ball.
    “Saukerl,”
Liesel whispered. The vocabulary of her new home was catching on fast.
    SOME FACTS ABOUT RUDY STEINER
He was eight months older than Liesel and had bony legs, sharp teeth, gangly blue eyes, and hair the color of a lemon .
One of six Steiner children, he was permanently hungry .
On Himmel Street, he was considered a little crazy .
This was on account of an event that was rarely spoken about but widely regarded as “The Jesse Owens Incident,” in which he painted himself charcoal black and ran the 100 meters at the local playing field one night .
    Insane or not, Rudy was always destined to be Liesel’s best friend. A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.
    A few days after Liesel started school, she went along with the Steiners. Rudy’s mother, Barbara, made him promise to walk with the new girl, mainly because she’d heard about the snowball. To Rudy’s credit, he was happy enough to comply. He was not the junior misogynistic type of boy at all. He liked girls a lot, and he liked Liesel (hence, the snowball). In fact, Rudy Steiner was one of those audaciouslittle bastards who actually fancied himself with the ladies. Every childhood seems to have exactly such a juvenile in its midst and mists. He’s the boy who refuses to fear the opposite sex, purely because everyone else embraces that particular fear, and he’s the type who is unafraid to make a decision. In this case, Rudy had already made up his mind about Liesel Meminger.
    On the way to school, he tried to point out certain landmarks in the town, or at least, he managed to slip it all in, somewhere between telling his younger siblings to shut their faces and the older ones telling him to shut his. His first point of interest was a small window on the second floor of an apartment block.
    “That’s where Tommy Müller lives.” He realized that Liesel didn’t remember him. “The twitcher? When he was five years old, he got lost at the markets on the coldest day of the year. Three hours later, when they found him, he was frozen solid and had an awful earache from the cold. After a while, his ears were all infected inside and he had three or four operations and the doctors wrecked his nerves. So now he twitches.”
    Liesel chimed in, “And he’s bad at soccer.”
    “The worst.”
    Next was the corner shop at the end of Himmel Street.
Frau Diller’s
.
    AN IMPORTANT NOTE
ABOUT FRAU DILLER
She had one golden rule .
    Frau Diller was a sharp-edged woman with fat glasses and a nefarious glare. She developed this evil look to discourage the very idea of stealing from her shop, which she occupied with soldierlike posture, arefrigerated voice, and even breath that smelled like
“heil
Hitler.” The shop itself was white and cold, and completely bloodless. The small house compressed beside it shivered with a little more severity than the other buildings on Himmel Street. Frau Diller administered this feeling, dishing it out as the only free item from her premises. She lived for her shop and her shop lived for the Third Reich. Even when rationing started later in the year, she was known to sell certain hard-to-get items