Remarkable Read online

  “Does your parrot have a name?” Penelope Hope asked Captain Rojo Herring.

  “I calls her Salzburg,” the pirate answered. “She won’t answer to it though. But then, I don’t think she like me much.”

  From her seat on Grandmama’s shoulder, Salzburg growled at Captain Rojo Herring like an angry cat.

  “Now now,” Grandmama said sternly. She did not approve of growling birds. Salzburg immediately stopped and went back to eating pineapple.

  The pirate had lovely table manners. He always said please and thank you, he took off his giant pirate hat before he sat down, he kept his elbows off the table, and he remembered to put his napkin on his lap. He was also much too polite to mention that Anderson Brigby Bright and Penelope Hope were blue.

  “Is it true you came to Remarkable just to see the bell tower?” Penelope Hope asked Captain Rojo Herring.

  “Aye, it is indeed. Bell towers be a hobby of mine.”

  “You can’t have come across too many at sea.”

  “True enough,” said Captain Rojo Herring. “But I love to hear them chime, I do. Such a disappointment to find out that I won’t be hearing the fine sounds of yours today.”

  “It will be chiming soon enough,” Grandmama told him.

  “Ye mentioned thar be complications with its construction?”

  “I’m afraid not everyone agreed that it should be built,” Grandpa John told him.

  “Well, blow me down,” the pirate said. “Why on earth not?”

  “Oh, Charles Duke Anno, the celebrated astronomer, thought we should add a planetarium to the post office instead of a bell tower,” Grandmama explained. “And Dr. Bayonet wanted the space to build another glass-domed butterfly house.”

  “And some people think the post office looks just fine without an addition,” Grandpa John added. “Some people like the post office just the way it is.”

  Grandmama glanced at Grandpa John with irritation. “Who thinks that?”

  “Well, I do I guess,” Grandpa John answered, but by that point Grandmama Julietta Augustina was no longer paying attention to him.

  Anderson Brigby Bright wasn’t paying attention either. He was busy starting at the reflection of his handsome blue face in the back of a serving spoon.

  “Do you think,” he asked as he twisted the spoon to get a better angle on his debonair smile, “that maybe Lucinda Wilhelmina Hinojosa will finally notice me now that I’m bright blue?”

  “Doesn’t seem likely to me,” Penelope Hope told him. “Since everyone else at the school has been turned bright blue, too.”

  Anderson Brigby Bright’s beautiful smile drooped down to a pout. “Do you always have to be as logical as you are good at math?” he snapped, and then he ran upstairs and slammed his bedroom door behind him.

  “What on earth was that about?” Grandmama Julietta Augustina asked. She did not approve of sudden departures from the dinner table.

  “Anderson Brigby Bright’s in love,” Penelope Hope explained, rolling her eyes at the ridiculousness of it all. “Her name is Lucinda Wilhelmina Hinojosa.”

  “And apparently, she has perfect pitch,” Jane added. “I don’t know what that is, though.”

  “It be the ability to hear a note of music and know where it be on the musical scale,” Captain Rojo Herring said. “If she hears a song, she would be able to say ‘ah, that first note be a D-flat, and that second note be a G-sharp, and that third note be a middle C without even looking at the sheet music.”

  “Really?” Jane hoped he’d say more about perfect pitch, but he was distracted when Penelope Hope passed him a plate of toast. His eyes lit up when he saw it.

  “I don’t suppose you might have a wee smidgeon of jelly to go with the likes of this toast, would ye?” he asked. “I do likes a smidgeon of jelly with me toast.”

  Penelope Hope ran to the kitchen. A moment later she was back holding a big jar of violently purple jelly with a large label that read MUNCH JELLY FACTORY on one line and GENERIC FRUIT FLAVOR underneath.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is all we have.”

  The pirate didn’t seem to mind. He grabbed a spoon to serve himself some—but he served himself more than just a wee smidgeon. In fact, he put nearly half the jar onto his slice of toast. He took a bite and chewed it with great enthusiasm.

  “Har!” he said, sounding as happy as a pirate can sound. “This be the best jelly I ever did taste. I’ll wager it be the best jelly in the whole wide world.”

  “Hmph!” said Grandmama, and when she “hmphed” this time, it was with so much emphasis that the pirate looked up from his toast to see how he had offended her.

  “That jelly is not the best jelly in the world,” Grandmama Julietta Augustina corrected him sternly. “That jelly will rot your teeth. We produce a much finer jelly here in Remarkable.”

  “Is that so?” Captain Rojo Herring said as he slathered another huge helping of generic jelly on his toast. “Well, I’ll have to try to get me hands on some.”

  When dinner was over, Captain Rojo Herring politely thanked Jane’s family for a delightful meal, gathered up his large pirate hat, and headed for the door. The parrot screeched and bit Captain Rojo Herring on the thumb when he went to take her off of Grandmama’s shoulder. It was clear to everyone that Salzburg would have much rather stayed where she was.

  “That’s a fine bird,” Grandmama said approvingly as Captain Rojo Herring and his parrot disappeared into the night. “But I don’t think Captain Rojo Herring is much of a pirate. It’s such a shame. If Remarkable is going to have another pirate captain, it would be nice if he were a little more impressive.”

  “What do you mean, Grandmama?” Penelope Hope asked. “There aren’t any other pirate captains in Remarkable.”

  “Never you mind, dear,” Grandmama said. And she refused to speak about pirates again for the rest of the evening.

  Dangerous Deeds and Dastardly Intentions

  The next day, when Jane arrived at school, she found a big surprise waiting for her. It was an even bigger surprise than finding out that Dr. Pike knew her name, having her brother and sister turn blue, or seeing a pirate on the doorstep of her house.

  When Jane went to take her seat in Ms. Schnabel’s room, she saw that the Grimlet twins had arrived before her, and that they were both busy defacing school property. Melissa Grimlet was carving her name on the top of her desk with the jagged edge of a broken ruler. Eddie Grimlet was drawing mustaches on important historical figures in his social studies textbook with a permanent marker.

  “What are you doing here?” Jane asked. Both Grimlets looked up and gave her identically wicked grins.

  “We finally managed to realize our lifelong dream of not attending the gifted school anymore,” Eddie Grimlet said.

  “We were expelled,” Melissa said proudly. “And no one has ever been bad enough to get expelled from there before.”

  Ms. Schnabel was in a foul mood that morning. Given that there were only three students in the whole school, it seemed abominably and horribly unfair to her that they had all wound up in her class. And it seemed even more abominably and horribly unfair that two of the three students were the Grimlet twins. She was sure that this was her sister’s way of punishing her for skipping the emergency meeting.

  “I don’t want any trouble out of you two,” Ms. Schnabel told the Grimlet twins sternly as she sat down at her desk.

  “We will be on our best behavior,” Eddie said.

  “You promise?” Ms. Schnabel asked suspiciously.

  “Of course we do!” Melissa said. “We wouldn’t want to make a bad first impression.”

  But what the Grimlet twins promised to do and what they actually did were two wildly different things. As soon as Ms. Schnabel’s back was turned, they started making rude squeaking noises and passing notes. When Ms. Schnabel tried to confiscate the notes, Melissa Grimlet ate them.

  After that, the Grimlet twins had a spitball fight, which was followed by a hair-pu
lling contest, which was followed by a shoving match, which resulted in a temporary truce in which they traded blue gum balls and then chewed them loudly with their mouths open.

  Gum chewing, especially loud, openmouthed gum chewing, was not allowed at the public school, and so Ms. Schnabel decided to punish the Grimlet twins with a pop quiz. But they were only too happy with this punishment, since it gave them the opportunity to cheat off of each other, trading answers back and forth, and forth and back, and back and forth again until nothing they wrote on their test made any sense at all.

  After the pop quiz, Melissa Grimlet complained that her stomach hurt from having eaten so much paper, and Eddie Grimlet ran with scissors.

  “ENOUGH!” Ms. Schnabel bellowed. She sat down at her desk at the front of the room and sank her head into her hands. She stayed that way until the bell for recess rang.

  “Yay!” shouted the Grimlet twins as they hurled themselves out of their chairs and ran off in the direction of the playground. Jane followed after them more slowly. She took the big red playground ball with her, thinking that recess might be a lot more fun now that she had someone to kick it to. The Grimlet twins, however, weren’t interested in playing kickball. They had other plans.

  “We have to update our Book of Dangerous Deeds and Dastardly Intentions,” Melissa Grimlet explained as she took off her shoe and shook a stubby black pen out of it.

  “Your what?”

  “Our Book of Dangerous Deeds and Dastardly Intentions,” said Eddie Grimlet, pulling a big black notebook with big black pages out of his backpack. “It’s a book where we record every crime we’ve ever committed so we don’t lose track. It’s also where we write down our plans and schemes for future ill deeds so we don’t forget what we’re plotting.”

  “Oh,” Jane said again. “I see.”

  But she didn’t see, not really. When the Grimlet twins opened the book, it didn’t seem to her as if anything had ever been written on any of the pages. They were all as blank and black as if the big notebook were still new.

  “Now what did we do today?” Melissa mumbled to herself as she scrawled her handwriting across the pages of notebook. “Chewed gum in class, ate paper, ran with scissors, cheated on a test…”

  “Don’t forget the spitball fight,” Eddie said helpfully.

  Melissa Grimlet dutifully made a note of the spitball fight.

  “Is your pen working?” Jane asked, noticing that as Melissa Grimlet wrote, the pen didn’t seem to be leaving any words on the blank black pages.

  “Oh, yes,” Melissa said. “I’m just writing with invisible ink. That way no one can read what we’re planning.”

  “Not even us,” Eddie said.

  The Grimlet twins plotted and scribbled in their book until recess was over. As the bell rang, Jane jumped up to go inside, but promptly fell on her face when she took her first step. Somehow, either Eddie or Melissa had managed to tie her shoelaces together when she wasn’t looking.

  After recess the twins did something truly diabolical—they behaved themselves for the rest of the day. It might seem like this would have made Ms. Schnabel ecstatic, but it did not. It only made her think that they were busy planning something truly dreadful. And the quieter and better behaved they were, the more she was sure that something awful was about to happen. Poor Ms. Schnabel had to leave the classroom several times to steady her nerves by blowing into a brown lunch sack, and when the bell rang at the end of the school day, it startled Ms. Schnabel so much that she leaped out of her seat as if another blue bomb had gone off.

  The Grimlet twins were still so busy chortling about it as they walked home that they could barely be bothered to shove each other off the sidewalk.

  “What should we do tomorrow?” asked Melissa. Her squinty eyes were gleaming.

  “I think we should stage a paste-eating contest,” Eddie said. “Then one of us could pretend to have paste poisoning. Jane, you could help if you want.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Jane said nervously. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  “Sometimes it’s nice getting into trouble.”

  “But, what if it upsets Ms. Schnabel?” Jane asked. “I don’t want her to think I don’t like her.” The Grimlet twins shook their heads at Jane and sighed identically wicked sighs.

  “It is strange how the victims of our criminal impulses always seem to think we don’t like them,” said Eddie Grimlet.

  “Quite often, the victims of our criminal impulses are the very people we like the most,” Melissa Grimlet added, patting Jane on the back.

  By this time, they were in front of the Grimlets’ creepy black house. Jane was once again hoping that maybe today they would invite her inside, but they didn’t. They ran down the weedy sidewalk and disappeared behind the front door without even bothering to say good-bye.

  Jane felt different that day as she walked the rest of the way home. She might be just as ordinary as ever, but for once something interesting had happened to her. It even seemed to Jane that people in town were noticing her just a little bit more than they ever had before. She was almost certain that Mr. Filbert had very nearly called after her as she passed his grocery store.

  When she got to the front porch of her house, however, she figured out that people hadn’t been staring at her at all. They were staring at a piece of paper that Melissa Grimlet had taped to her back.

  It was a sign, and it read “JANE IS A TEACHER’S PET!” in great big letters. Underneath, in very small letters so faint that they might almost have been written in invisible ink, were the words “BUT WE HOPE WE CAN BE FRIENDS ANYWAY.”

  Tea with the Pirate Captain

  Jane could hardly wait until dinnertime. Tonight, when her mother asked her how school was, she could share the news that the Grimlet twins were now in her class. But her gleeful anticipation of how surprised everyone would be was suddenly interrupted by a loud noise.

  CRASH!

  And this crashing noise was followed by the sound of a slamming door, then flapping wings, then three loud squawks, and finally Grandmama’s angry voice.

  “Confound you, bird! Get away from me!”

  Grandmama had just come through the front door, and Captain Rojo Herring’s parrot had come in with her. She was fluttering around the entryway of the house, trying to land on Grandmama’s shoulder, and Grandmama was wildly shooing her away with a folded newspaper. Salzburg dodged her swings, and Grandmama knocked over an umbrella stand.

  “Now see what you’ve done, parrot!”

  “Is everything okay, Grandmama?” Anderson Brigby Bright Doe III asked. He’d been painting in the backyard, but came inside to see what all the commotion was. Penelope Hope Adelaide Catalina peeked out from the kitchen, and Jane’s father came out of his office.

  “This ridiculous bird has been following me all day,” Grandmama said, glaring as the parrot settled onto her shoulder. “I can’t seem to get rid of her.”

  “Does Captain Rojo Herring know?” Penelope Hope asked.

  “Of course he knows,” Grandmama said impatiently. “I’ve called him three times today and asked him to order his bird to leave me alone. But he said there wasn’t any point since the parrot never listens to him. Have you ever heard of such a thing? A pirate who can’t control his own bird? How did he control his own ship?”

  No one had an answer for her, even though Jane wondered if maybe controlling a parrot and controlling a pirate ship required very different skills.

  “I have to attend to another ridiculous letter about Lucky from the Scottish Parliament,” Grandmama continued, “and this feathered menace is distracting me beyond reason.”

  “Do you want me to take her home for you, Mom?” Jane’s dad volunteered. “I could take a little break as a reward for all of the brilliant writing I’ve been doing on my novel today.”

  “Er…no. That’s all right,” Grandmama said. She knew her son well enough to realize that he was more likely to lose Salzburg in the woods or abs
entmindedly stuff the poor bird in a mailbox than actually deliver her safely to Captain Rojo Herring. “It seems a shame to interrupt you when you’re working, especially if it’s going well.”

  “True,” he agreed. Then he looked over at his children. “One of you can do it, can’t you?”

  “I wish I could help,” Anderson Brigby Bright said, “but I’m working on my most brilliant masterpiece ever. I can’t risk losing my inspiration.”

  “And I’m estimating the final construction costs of the bell tower for Mom,” Penelope Hope said. “She has it marked on her to-do list for today, and you know how she gets when something on her to-do list doesn’t get finished.”

  Everyone turned to look at Jane, who couldn’t help noticing how the only time her family ever seemed to care that she was around was when they wanted her to do something that no one else wanted to.

  “I don’t even know where Captain Rojo Herring lives,” Jane protested.

  “He just moved into the Mansion at the Top of Remarkable Hill. Apparently, he’s decided to stay in town for awhile,” Grandmama Julietta Augustina said as she shooed Salzburg onto Jane’s shoulder. “Now, go on. It’ll do you good to make yourself useful.”

  Jane opened her mouth to complain, but then closed it again. It would only lead to an argument, and Grandmama was as good at winning arguments as she was at everything else.

  The Mansion at the Top of Remarkable Hill had stood empty for as long as Jane could remember. She’d heard that was haunted by a thousand ghosts, cursed by a beautiful gypsy woman, and dripping with an evil black mold. It was also rumored to have a creaky staircase, very drafty hallways, and a cracked foundation. Normally, she would have been excited to get a chance to see inside, but at that moment, Jane was too busy feeling sorry for herself to feel much else.

  “Why should I get stuck with extra chores just because I can’t paint and I’m not good at math?” she grumbled as she toiled up to the top of Remarkable Hill. The path was steep and winding, and she wondered how Captain Rojo Herring ever managed it with his two peg legs. Her regular, non–peg legs were aching from the climb.