Remarkable Read online

  Dial Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Dial Books for Young Readers

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group • Published by the Penguin Group

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Lizzie K. Foley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Foley, Lizzie K.

  Remarkable : a novel / by Lizzie K. Foley. p. cm.

  Summary: Ten-year-old Jane Doe, the only student average enough to be excluded from the own of Remarkable’s School for the Remarkably Gifted, is joined at her public school by the troublemaking Grimlet twins, who lead her on a series of adventures involving an out-of-control science fair project, a pirate captain on the run from a mutinous crew, a lonely dentist, and a newly constructed bell tower that endangers Remarkable’s most beloved inhabitant—a skittish lake monster named Lucky.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-57533-8

  [1. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 2. Ability—Fiction. 3. Secrets—Fiction.

  4. Pirates—Fiction. 5. Community life—Fiction. 6. Humorous stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.F7316Re 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011021641

  Published in the United States by Dial Books for Young Readers,

  a division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  www.penguin.com/youngreaders

  Designed by Jennifer Kelly

  Printed in USA

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  Table of Contents

  1: A Remarkable Town

  2: The Grimlet Twins

  3: The Lake Monster Festival

  4: The Dentist’s Lament

  5: Wednesday

  6: The Captain

  7: A Pizza and a Pirate

  8: Dangerous Deeds and Dastardly Intentions

  9: Tea with the Pirate Captain

  10: A Bit about the Jelly

  11: Asta Magnifica’s Day at School

  12: Trouble Comes to Town

  13: Hmmm

  14: A Bit More about the Jelly

  15: Milk and Pizza

  16: A Crash and a Splash in the Night

  17: Never Ever Trust a Pirate

  18: More about the Jelly and the Dentist

  19: After School

  20: A Disharmony in the Daylight

  21: A Little Night Music

  22: Captain Schnabel

  23: Mediocrity

  24: Crisis at the Library

  25: Promises

  26: Truancy

  27: The Terrible Truth

  28: Last-Minute Preparations

  29: The Opening Ceremony

  30: Grandpa Gets Noticed

  31: A Captain Revealed

  32: The Story of the Mad Captain

  33: At the Jail

  34: The Pirates Versus the Grimlet Twins

  35: To the Mansion

  36: The Science Fair Dance

  37: The Storm of the Century

  38: Jane Makes a Discovery

  39: After the Storm

  40: At the Dentist’s Office

  41: The Return of the Captain

  42: After the Aftermath

  Acknowledgments

  A Remarkable Town

  High on the top of a majestic mountain, in a spot where every view of the valley below was more breathtaking than the next, was a small town called Remarkable.

  The town had not always had this name. It once had been called something rather ordinary, like Hoopersville, or Hill Valley, or some other name that no one could remember anymore. But whenever tourists came to visit, they couldn’t help but notice what a remarkably nice place it was. The air was always fresh and the weather was always pleasant. The parks smelled like newly cut grass, and unlike most local museums, the Museum of Remarkability wasn’t the least bit dusty or dull. There was a beautiful lake known as Lake Remarkable, and nearby were three elegant glass-domed buildings that housed the world’s largest live butterfly collection. Additionally, Remarkable was home to the world’s two tallest trees, a celebrated science fair, and the best organic jelly that anyone had ever tasted.

  As you might expect, the people who lived in Remarkable were pretty splendid, too. They tended to be terribly interesting and even more terribly talented. In fact, they were among the most terribly interesting and talented people in the whole wide world. The tourists felt lucky just to breathe the same sweet air as all of these important individuals, and the important individuals thought the tourists were lucky, too.

  Long after the tourists went back to their drab little lives in the drab little places they had come from (and their friends and coworkers had grown sick and tired of hearing about their vacations) they just couldn’t seem to stop talking about how the town they had visited had been remarkable—Remarkable. Eventually, the town was called Remarkable so often that this became its name.

  But this is not to say that everything in Remarkable was remarkable. It had a very dull post office, for instance, and it had a Coffeebucks that sold coffee that was very good, but certainly no better than the coffee served at any other Coffeebucks in any other town. And then there was Jane, who was a very unremarkable girl, ten years old, of medium height, with eyes of no particular color, and hair that was not quite brown enough to be called mousy.

  There was no reason that Jane should have been so unremarkable. She was the daughter of astoundingly brilliant parents. Her mother, Angelina Mona Linda Doe, was a famous architect who had designed the many spectacular buildings in Remarkable’s terrifically charming downtown. Her father, Anderson Brigby Bright Doe II, was an award-winning novelist whose thought-provoking books (and striking cleft chin) were discussed in depth at book groups all across the country. When they decided to start a family, everyone in town figured that their children would be geniuses. And everyone would have been right, too, if it were not for Jane.

  Jane had an older brother named Anderson Brigby Bright Doe III. He was remarkably good-looking—so handsom
e, in fact, that people often stopped him in the streets to tell him about it. These comments always made him blush right to the roots of his wonderfully wavy hair, giving everyone the impression that he was also quite modest—which made him seem even more handsome, since modesty is an attractive quality.

  Besides being good-looking, Anderson Brigby Bright Doe III could paint pictures with such precision that they looked just like photographs. His parents were so proud of him that they couldn’t wait to have another child. Two years and two days after Anderson Brigby Bright Doe III was born, Jane entered the world, although hardly anyone noticed.

  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.

  The Grimlet Twins

  On 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.