Remarkable (3 page)

This wouldn’t have been a problem if Jane were more like her mother. Jane’s mother never forgot anything. As an architect, she had many important projects and proposals to keep track of, so she kept a planner filled with daily to-do lists, weekly schedules,
and monthly timetables to help her keep everything straight. Right now, she was looking over her list of family-related action items.

“How was school today, Jane?” she asked. “Demonstrate interest in Jane’s life by asking her about school” was Action Item #27. Other items included “Make sure Anderson Brigby Bright has unplugged his electric paint warmer” (Action Item #16), and “Don’t let Penelope Hope eat citrus fruit because she is allergic” (Action Item #22).

Jane shrugged without answering as she served herself some salad. Her mother wasn’t interested in the truth, which was that school, as usual, had been very boring. She passed the salad bowl to her brother, who didn’t even look up when she set it down in front of him. Anderson Brigby Bright was busy sketching a picture of a girl with chic glasses, a well-shaped nose, and long black braids on his napkin. Her father was staring into space and muttering to himself—something he did when he was thinking about his novel. Jane’s mother gave him a nudge and nodded toward Jane to remind him to take an interest in his middle child (Action Item #32).

“Oh, hello, Jane,” her father said. It was as if he’d
noticed her at the table for the first time. But Jane didn’t take this personally. Her father was deeply absentminded. “Did you enjoy your bagpipe lesson today?”

The bagpipe lessons were a birthday present he’d given her. He’d mistakenly believed that this would be something she would be good at. Sadly, she was even more average at bagpipes than she was at most things. Still, it had been a better present than the one her mom had given her, which was a book entitled
Your Exceptional You-ness, A Preteen’s Guide to Discovering Your Hidden Talents, Even When No One Thinks You Have Any.

“My lesson wasn’t today. It was on Tuesday,” Jane said.

“Isn’t it Tuesday?” He tended to lose track of Tuesdays the same way he lost track of his keys, his umbrella, and the phone bill.

“It’s Friday, Dad,” Penelope Hope Adelaide Catalina said, looking up from a notebook she’d been filling with quadratic equations.

“Oh. It’s Friday! So Grandpa took you out for ice cream after school today, right?”

Jane didn’t answer him. She’d suddenly remembered
what it was she’d forgotten. “Oh no,” she groaned. “Grandpa!” She excused herself from the table and ran back to the park.

There was a slight chill in the air, and it was just starting to get dark by the time Jane reached the bench where she had left her grandfather—but he was still sitting and waiting patiently.

“Oh, Grandpa!” Jane said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you here!”

“It’s perfectly all right, my dear.” He never minded being forgotten, which somehow made Jane feel even worse. He stood up, moving a little stiffly after sitting for so long.

“I don’t suppose you remembered to buy my figgy doodles, did you, Jane?” Grandpa asked as they started walking back to her house together.

“No,” Jane said miserably as she realized she still had the dollar he’d given her. “I’m afraid I forgot about them, too.”

“It’s not important,” Grandpa John said. “I think I still have a few left over.” He patted his coat pocket, and Jane heard the crinkle of a paper figgy doodle wrapper.

Remarkable was lovely in the dusky evening light. Fireflies hovered in the air. Birds twittered their evening love songs. People were out and about, enjoying the last few moments of the beautiful day before night set in.

As they walked, Jane glanced up at Grandpa John, and wondered—as she often did—if anyone recognized him as the husband of the mayor of Remarkable. She doubted it. Most people were stunned when they realized that Grandmama was married to Grandpa John. They had a hard time imagining how such an incredibly boring man had won the heart of someone as awe-inspiring and dynamic as Julietta Augustina.

The story went like this: When Jane’s grandfather was a young man, he decided to learn to juggle. So one day he went to the side of the road with three oranges and started to practice. He soon figured out that juggling with three oranges was practically impossible, so he tried juggling with just two, but that wasn’t much less impossible. Finally he settled for juggling just one orange.

Right then, Julietta Augustina came racing past in her high-performance sports car. When she saw the man tossing the orange into the air, she hit the brakes,
turned the steering wheel hard with just one hand, and skidded in a perfect U-turn so that her car screeched to a stop in front of him.

Julietta Augustina took off her crash helmet and shook out her long auburn curls. She pulled off her racing goggles and looked at him with eyes that were a blue so electric that the summer sky looked gray in comparison. Then she’d folded her arms and said:

“What are you doing?”

“I’m juggling,” he replied.

“Hmph!” she said, snorting just a little as she spoke. “I’m not very impressed.”

“So what?” he answered.

Grandmama Julietta Augustina stared at him. She’d never before met anyone who didn’t care what she thought. Grandpa John stared back. It was the first time in years that anyone had bothered to ask him what he was doing and then stayed to listen to the answer. And right there, right on that spot on the side of the road, they fell in love. Grandpa John climbed into her sports car, and they drove to Remarkable to get married that very day. It all made perfect sense to Jane. Grandmama and Grandpa were such opposites that it was obvious they belonged together.

When Jane and Grandpa John reached the front steps of her house, he gave her a kiss on the forehead and told her good night.

“Aren’t you going home?” Jane asked. Normally, he would have continued past her house and on to the mayor’s mansion, which was farther up the road. But today he turned to walk back the way they’d just come.

“I’ll head there soon enough,” Grandpa John said. “I just have to run a quick errand down at the lake first.”

“Oh,” Jane said. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.” Then she went inside and left Grandpa to wander off in the direction of Lake Remarkable by himself.

D
espite what some people may say, it doesn’t take much to put a town on the map. Usually, all a town has to do is exist, and cartographers—the people who draw maps for a living—will mark its location on any map they’re making with a small dot. It doesn’t matter if the town is so dull that no one wants to know where it is, or so boring that no one would ever want to visit it. Cartographers don’t like to leave things out, and they will still put all the boring, dull towns on their maps because that’s what cartographers do.

Of course, even cartographers had to admit that a small dot was not enough to do justice to Remarkable. Whenever Remarkable was put on a map, its name
was marked by an asterisk as well as a dot, and this asterisk guided the map reader’s attention to the lower right-hand corner where there would be an extra box under the map’s legend that listed many of Remarkable’s finer attributes. This extra box would no doubt mention that a great many of the town’s citizens were people who were famous, but it would also have to acknowledge that the town’s most famous citizen wasn’t a person at all, but rather a serpent named Lucky.

Lucky lived in Lake Remarkable, which was a beautiful lake that was known for its sweet-tasting waters and its large schools of flying fish. Lucky was larger than Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster of Scotland, even if she wasn’t as famous. Of course, this was only because Lucky was much more elusive and much too clever to ever allow herself to be photographed. Those few who had been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Lucky claimed that she was purple and black with a snakelike body, three big humps, and a long snout full of very sharp teeth.

Lucky had been heard more often that she’d been seen. It was said she made a soft calling sound that was somewhere between an eerie
hoot
and a haunting
coo
. In Remarkable, nearly everyone believed
that hearing Lucky’s call was a sure sign of good luck. Bronson Seurrier claimed to have heard it just as he bought the lottery ticket that won him the mega jackpot for the second time. Elinor Rosalind Wallace heard it just before the Swedish king called to tell her she’d won her third Nobel Prize in Chemistry and one in Physics, too. Even Grandmama had heard it once—on the night before she met Grandpa—and she always said that meeting Grandpa was the luckiest thing that had ever happened to her.

Of course, Lucky’s existence wasn’t just interesting to those who lived in Remarkable. Many people from outside of Remarkable were interested in her, too. Once a year, the government would send a team of cryptozoologists—who are people who investigate mysterious creatures for a living—to try to capture Lucky so that she could be studied by important scientists.

The cryptozoologists would spend a week hiding in the bushes with tranquilizer guns or rowing around the lake with large fishing nets and blowing on small whistles to try to lure Lucky out into the open. It never worked. Lucky was even more elusive during this week than usual.

When the week was over, and the cryptozoologists had packed up their nets and whistles and gone home, the town would celebrate with its renowned Lucky Day Festival. It was a marvelous event. There were snow cones and cotton candy, free T-shirts, and carnival rides. Every year Jane went with her family, and she enjoyed standing off to one side watching as everyone else in town had a great time.

This year, the town was using the festival to raise money to build a bell-tower addition to the post office to keep it from looking so ordinary. The town had commissioned a thrillingly talented composer named Ysquibel to write a song that would chime every day at noon from the tower’s fifty-seven brass bells.

Ysquibel was Europe’s most famous composer, who had recently and mysteriously disappeared during a performance of his latest opera,
Prise de Corsaire
. Fortunately, the last thing he did before he vanished was put the sheet music for Remarkable’s bell tower in the mail.

Jane’s mother was the architect for the new bell tower, and she’d brought a dollhouse-sized model of her design to display on a pedestal near the free T-shirt stand. It was the best architectural model of a
post office addition that anyone had ever seen. People kept coming up to Angelina Mona Linda Doe to tell her she’d outdone herself. Even Grandmama Julietta Augustina had been impressed enough to say, “Well, Angelina, it’s not completely terrible.”

The rest of Jane’s family was getting a lot of attention at the festival as well. Jane’s father’s newest book had just hit the bestseller list, and he was being followed by crowds of people who wanted him to sign their copies. Mr. Phelps, the bank president of Remarkable Savings and Loan, had asked Penelope Hope Adelaide Catalina to explain compound interest to him, and Anderson Brigby Bright III was being giggled at by a bevy of girls from Remarkable’s School for the Remarkably Gifted. They all thought he was so cute and so modest, and they were all hoping to get a chance to ask him to the upcoming annual Science Fair Dance.

It was while Jane was standing off to one side watching her family have such a good time that she suddenly had the sensation that someone was staring at her. Now, the sensation of being stared at is always an uncomfortable one, but to Jane it was even more uncomfortable because it was also unfamiliar.

She looked around, half expecting to find the four beady eyes of the Grimlet twins watching her. She winced in anticipation of being hit with a straw wrapper again. But the Grimlets were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps her imagination was running away with her, but this seemed unlikely because her imagination wasn’t the kind that did much running.

Then Jane saw someone wave to her. It was Dr. Josephine Christobel Pike, Remarkable’s exceptionally proficient dentist. Dr. Pike was making her way to Jane through the crowd while carrying an enormous puff of bright pink cotton candy on a paper cone.

“Hello, Jane,” Dr. Pike said. “Are you enjoying the fair?”

“Uh-huh,” Jane said, but she was too surprised to say more. Dr. Pike had a small wisp of cotton candy stuck to the corner of her mouth. Such a sugary snack seemed like an odd choice for a dentist, but it wasn’t odder than the fact that Dr. Pike knew Jane’s name. Dr. Pike only saw Jane twice a year. Usually people needed to see Jane a lot more often than that to remember her.

“I just wanted to remind you that you have an appointment on Tuesday. It’s at two thirty,” Dr. Pike told her.

“Yes, right…umm. I’ll be there,” Jane stammered.

“Wonderful. I’ve been looking forward to it for months.”

If Jane had been able to read minds, she might have been surprised to discover just how eagerly Dr. Josephine Christobel Pike anticipated her twice-yearly dental appointments. But Jane wasn’t the least bit telepathic, and so she had no idea that she was Dr. Pike’s favorite patient.