Remarkable (2 page)

Now all babies are beautiful, but some babies are less beautiful than others, and then there are some babies who are just beautifully plain. Jane’s parents had intended to name their daughter Penelope Hope Adelaide Catalina, but when they looked at her face for the first time, they realized that the name would not do at all. She was the plain kind of baby, maybe the plainest baby anyone had ever seen, and much too plain to have a long and fancy name. After a hushed discussion, they named her Jane instead.

They saved the name Penelope Hope Adelaide Catalina for Jane’s younger sister, who was born two years and two days after Jane. Penelope Hope was an adorably cute child with a wonderfully practical mind.
She also happened to be a genius at math. Once, when she was just six years old, the cash register broke at Mr. Filbert’s fine grocery store, so she’d been asked to spend an entire afternoon adding up all of the customers’ purchases in her head. She also went over Mr. Filbert’s taxes and found that he was owed a great deal of refund money from the government—enough, in fact, that he was finally able to afford to send his two children to Remarkable’s School for the Remarkably Gifted. Mr. Filbert offered Penelope Hope a giant lollipop as a thank you, but Penelope Hope was as sensible as she was good at math, and she asked if she might have a nice healthy apple instead.

It was a sad day for Jane when Mr. Filbert’s children, Antonia Annabelle and her brother, Humphrey Douglas Filbert, were enrolled in Remarkable’s School for the Remarkably Gifted. It meant that she was the only student in the entire town left at the regular public school. Her brother and sister had been going to the gifted school ever since preschool, but her parents had never bothered to send Jane there, because there wasn’t any reason to.

So now Jane sat alone in the middle seat in the middle row of the fifth-grade classroom where every
desk was empty except for hers. She had no one to push in the swing at recess, no one to eat lunch with, and no one to serve the volleyball to in gym class. Given that she was the only student in the whole school, she should have at least gotten a lot of attention from the teachers. Unfortunately, this was not the case. As often as not, the teachers forgot she was there at all and spent the entire day drinking coffee and playing fantasy football in the teachers’ lounge.

Penelope Hope was sure Jane must be lonely, and because she was as kindhearted as she was good at math, she tried to help.

“Maybe,” she told Jane, “you could convince Mom and Dad that you’re gifted at being unremarkable. Maybe they’d let you go to the gifted school then.”

It wasn’t a bad idea, but Jane knew it wouldn’t work. She might be unremarkable, but compared to her grandfather John, she wasn’t even all that remarkable at being unremarkable. Her grandfather was the most unremarkable man in the world. He was so unremarkable that people were always introducing themselves to him like they’d never met before, even though he’d lived in the town for years and years. Then they’d immediately have to ask him his name
again because they would have forgotten what he had just told them.

Of course, it didn’t really matter that Jane’s grandfather was easy to forget, because Jane’s grandmother was memorable enough for both of them. Grandmama Julietta Augustina was Remarkable’s mayor and had lived in Remarkable longer than anyone else. In fact, she’d been there so long that she’d started taking the town’s remarkableness for granted. As a result, she was remarkably hard to impress. She nearly always snorted “hmph!” disapprovingly whenever anyone tried to show off for her. Of course, this meant that every talented person in Remarkable was desperate to get her approval, and she could hardly go anywhere without having someone try to astound or amaze her.

Grandmama Julietta Augustina was always very nice to Jane, partly because Jane never tried to impress her, and if she was disappointed that her granddaughter had no special talents, she never let anyone know about it.

“I’m glad you’re you, Jane,” she’d say, unless she was having one of her distracted days, in which case she might temporarily forget Jane’s name and have to call her “honey” or “sweetheart” until she remembered it again.

O
n Friday afternoons after Jane got out of public school, her grandfather would take her to Mrs. Peabody’s Colossal Ice Cream Palace, which served the best ice cream in the whole world. It was supposed to be a special treat—but it never wound up being very special, because they never actually got any ice cream.

Every week, Grandpa John ordered two medium-sized vanilla sundaes with no chocolate sauce, no whipped cream, and no cherry on top. And every week, Mrs. Peabody forgot to bring their order to them. Mrs. Peabody didn’t blame herself for this. It wasn’t her fault that Jane and Grandpa John were so much less memorable than all of her other customers.

But on this Friday, while they were waiting in vain for Mrs. Peabody to notice them, a straw wrapper suddenly came flying out of nowhere and struck Grandpa John in the middle of the forehead.

Now, Jane knew that someone had deliberately blown the straw wrapper, but she didn’t for a second think that whoever it was had meant to hit her grandfather. Grandpa John had probably just been in the way of whomever the straw-wrapper shooter had intended to hit.

But then the most remarkable thing happened. Another straw wrapper came gliding through the air and struck Grandpa John above the left eyebrow. When a third straw wrapper hit him, this time a little lower and right between the eyes, Jane had to consider the possibility—impossible though it seemed—that someone was deliberately targeting her grandfather.

She turned around and saw that the wicked Grimlet twins were sitting behind her. They had a big stack of wrapped straws on their table, and they were peeling the ends so they could blow the wrappers off. The Grimlet twins were new to town, and they came from a notorious family. Mr. and Mrs. Grimlet were rumored to have robbed a bank before moving to
Remarkable, and no one had been able to prove that the rumor wasn’t true.

Jane didn’t know what to do. If she’d been Anderson Brigby Bright Doe III, she would have marched right over and told them to stop. He was so handsome that people always did what he asked. If she’d been Penelope Hope Adelaide Catalina, she probably would have gotten her own pile of straws and engaged the Grimlet twins in a wrapper-shooting battle, which they were sure to lose because Penelope Hope Adelaide Catalina had deadly aim. But since she was just Jane—and there wasn’t anything she was particularly good at—she chose to do nothing at all.

The Grimlet twins were identical, which was surprising considering that Eddie Grimlet was a boy and Melissa Grimlet was a girl. They both had short blond hair, squinty eyes, and runny noses that were covered in dirt and freckles. Neither one of them smiled very often, unless they were smiling about getting away with something nefarious.

Jane waved shyly at one of the twins, and he or she grinned back. The other twin shot a straw wrapper at her, and it hit Jane squarely on the tip of her very plain nose.

* * * * *

The Grimlet twins were long gone from the Colossal Ice Cream Palace by the time Jane and her grandfather came to their usual sad conclusion that they might just as well give up on Mrs. Peabody and go home hungry. But Grandpa John was still craving something sweet, and so he gave Jane a dollar and asked if she would mind going to Wembly’s Superior Drugstore to buy him a packet of figgy doodles. Then he sat down on a bench in the park across the street to wait for her.

It was an errand that should have only taken a minute. Grandpa John liked a plain, mostly tasteless kind of figgy doodle that came in an old-fashioned paper wrapper. Mr. Wembly kept them on a bottom shelf at the back of the store because no one else ever wanted them.

As she walked past the pet supply aisle, Jane couldn’t help slowing to look at the many fine products Mr. Wembly had for sale. She wished she had a reason to buy a fancy beaded dog collar, or a box of all-natural dog chews. Jane loved dogs and suspected that she’d discover she was a highly talented dog owner if her parents ever remembered to let her get one.

When Jane paused to admire a particularly fluffy cashmere dog sweater, the Grimlet twins came around the corner as they stampeded toward the drugstore’s exit. And since Jane wasn’t the sort of person that other people notice when they are stampeding, the Grimlet twins ran right into her.

WHOMP!

The Grimlets had just purchased five hundred gum balls, eighteen bottles of bluing rinse, and fifty-four boxes of mousetraps. The gum balls shot all over the floor; the mousetraps started snapping away in their boxes; and the bottles spun and skidded in every which direction. One of the bottles broke and made a big blue puddle on Mr. Wembly’s freshly mopped floor.

The Grimlet twins stared at Jane, surprised to find her at their feet.

“So sorry,” one of them said, not sounding sorry at all. “We didn’t see you.”

“Which is strange when I think about it,” the other one said, “since we’ve been following you for days.”

“You’ve been following me?” Jane asked, hastily getting to her feet. The big blue puddle was spreading toward her sneakers. “What for?”

“Because you’re the girl who goes to the public
school,” replied the Grimlet twin standing closest to Jane.

“So very fortunate for you,” said the Grimlet twin standing farthest from Jane.

“What do you mean by fortunate?” Jane asked. She was sure that the Grimlet twins were making fun of her somehow, but their wicked faces were oddly earnest.

“It seems like a fascinating place,” said the first Grimlet twin. “I hear the food in the cafeteria is dreadfully ordinary.”

“And I hear,” said the other one, “that you can get into trouble for all kinds of things—like passing notes, and copying homework, and talking in class.”

“I suppose that’s true,” said Jane, even though she didn’t know this for a fact, since there was no one in the school for her to talk to, copy homework off of, or pass notes with. “Don’t you get in trouble for that at the School for the Remarkably Gifted?”

The Grimlet twins shook their heads sadly.

“I’m afraid not. We’ve tried many times, but the gifted teachers know we’re just trying to develop our talents for rule-breaking, so they encourage us to try harder.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Jane said. But the Grimlets once again shook their heads.

“There’s not much point in causing trouble if nobody minds.”

Just then, Mr. Wembly, the pharmacist who ran the drugstore, came running over to see what had happened. “I thought I told you two not to come back here!” Mr. Wembly shouted at the Grimlet twins. “Now clean this up and get out!”

He was an unpleasantly uptight man who hated noise and mess. Unfortunately, Jane’s accident with the Grimlet twins had produced a remarkable amount of both.

“Don’t mind him,” one of the twins told Jane. “He’s still angry at us for setting off his burglar alarm last week.”

“I’m sure you didn’t mean to,” Jane said.

“And I’m sure we did. We adore loud noises,” the other twin said.

The Grimlet twins began the grim task of picking up nearly everything they’d dropped in their collision—except for the broken bottle, which they kicked under the cosmetic counter with the hope that Mr. Wembly wouldn’t notice, and the puddle of bluing
rinse, which they left on the ground with the hope that someone would slip on it. They staggered under the weight of their purchases, and Jane could see that they were in danger of dropping everything again.

“Wait!” Jane called after them, “I could help you carry some of that if you want.”

“We’d appreciate it, of course,” one Grimlet said. “But you’d risk being implicated as our accomplice.”

Jane wasn’t sure what “implicate” or “accomplice” meant exactly, but she took two grocery bags full of mousetraps and followed the Grimlet twins out of the store.

The creepy black house where the Grimlet twins lived was not far away. Normally it should have taken only a few minutes to walk there, but the Grimlets couldn’t seem to go more than a few steps without trying to trip each other or knock each other off the sidewalk.

Jane followed along behind, hoping that the Grimlet twins might invite her to come inside when they arrived home. No one ever went into the Grimlets’ house, except for the Grimlets themselves, so it would be very exciting to be asked. But exciting things did not happen to Jane, and once they reached the front
gate of the creepy black house, the Grimlet twins stopped.

“Thanks for your help,” one Grimlet twin said, taking the two bags out of Jane’s hands. “But we have to go now. We have to get a very important school project ready for next Wednesday.”

“But we’ll see you around sometime,” said the other. “Sometime soon.”

Jane said good-bye and walked dejectedly back down the hill toward home. People were always telling her that they’d see her around, but then they usually forgot to ever notice her again.

That night at the dinner table, Jane’s mind was occupied with two things. The first was her brief and wild encounter with the Grimlet twins. The second was a nagging feeling that she’d forgotten something important. She’d had that feeling ever since she’d gotten home.