Remarkable (4 page)

So, instead, Jane was stunned. Dr. Pike had remembered her name, and she was looking forward to seeing her? It was very, very strange.

She looked around to see if anyone in her family had noticed what had happened to her, but of course, no one had. Her mother had pulled out her planner and was showing her grandmother a detailed flow chart of tasks that needed to be completed before the bell tower’s groundbreaking ceremony. Her father was still signing copies of his new book. Penelope Hope had finished explaining compound interest to Mr. Phelps and had moved on to helping him understand third-world debt relief, and Anderson Brigby Bright was staring off into the distance at nothing in particular.

Or so it seemed at first. But the more Jane looked
at her brother, the more she recognized that he was staring at a girl.

The girl was humming—and rather loudly, too—as she listened to a small music box that Jane’s mother had put in the dollhouse-sized architectural model. The music box played a simple version of Ysquibel’s thrilling composition. Every time it stopped, she wound it up again and hummed along as if this was the most important task in the world.

The girl looked familiar, but it took Jane a moment to realize why. She was the same girl that Anderson Brigby Bright had been sketching on his napkin at the dinner table. It would be impossible not to recognize the long black braids, chic glasses, and well-shaped nose from Anderson’s photorealistic napkin sketch. The only detail he had missed was a large button pinned to the girl’s lapel that read S.Y.N!C.

“Who’s that?” Jane asked her brother.

“Her name is Lucinda Wilhelmina Hinojosa,” he said wistfully. “She has perfect pitch.”

“What’s perfect pitch?”

Anderson Brigby Bright didn’t answer her, and it occurred to Jane that he was looking at Lucinda Wilhelmina Hinojosa the same way that most of the girls
from Remarkable’s School for the Remarkably Gifted looked at him.

“Oh,” said Jane. “Oh. You like her, don’t you?”

Anderson Brigby Bright tore his eyes away from the strange, humming girl long enough to give Jane a mournful look.

“I think I’m in love,” he said. “But she doesn’t know I exist. Can you imagine anything more awful?”

Jane’s imagination didn’t have to run away with her at all for her to understand how he felt. It was a feeling she knew all too well.

J
ane was late to her dentist appointment on Tuesday, but this was not her fault.

Her father was supposed to pick her up from school and drive her to Dr. Pike’s office. For once, he’d remembered to show up on time (reminding him about important appointments was Action Item #34 on Jane’s mother’s list), but then he had accidentally locked his keys in the car. So Jane wound up having to walk up the hill to Dr. Pike’s office while her father waited in the school’s parking lot for one of Remarkable’s highly competent automotive locksmiths to open his car door for him.

Jane wanted to explain to Dr. Pike about the locked
car and the long uphill walk, but Dr. Pike—who’d been torturing herself with the thought that Jane wasn’t coming after all—was eager to get to work. She hurried Jane into the exam room and began X-raying her mouth.

“So tell me,” she asked Jane. “Have you been brushing twice a day?” She was hoping Jane would say no, so she could deliver a nice stern lecture on the importance of oral hygiene. But all Jane said was “Urgurguhuhruf.” She had the bitewing tray in her mouth, and she couldn’t really talk.

Dr. Pike finished with the X-rays and began examining Jane’s teeth. “Hmmm,” she murmured. “Open wider.” She poked and prodded at Jane’s mouth with a periodontal probe and dental mirror. “It looks like you have a teensy bit of plaque and just a hint of tartar…but I guess it’s not too bad. Have you been flossing regularly?”

“Uhguhguhgugh,” Jane said.

“I see,” Dr. Pike said. She poked around Jane’s mouth some more. She switched her periodontal probe for a dental explorer, and her mirror for a tongue retractor.

Finally, she was done. “Well,” she said. “I don’t
see any cavities right now. Not even a tiny one.…” She sighed despondently, set her dental instruments down on a tray, and handed Jane a cup of water so she could rinse and spit.

“But that’s good, right?” Jane asked. She wasn’t sure why Dr. Pike seemed so disappointed.

“Well, yes, I suppose so. I mean, of course it is. I was just hoping…” Dr. Pike let her thoughts drift. “Well, thank you for coming in. I guess I’ll see you in six months? Does that sound okay?”

“Sure,” Jane said. “I’ll see you then.”

As soon as Jane was gone, Dr. Pike grabbed a lollipop from inside her desk and stuck it in her mouth. She knew better than to eat something that was so likely to promote tooth decay, but she couldn’t help herself. She was depressed, and she always craved sugary snacks when she was depressed.

Dr. Josephine Christobel Pike was a very good dentist. She could put a filling in a tooth so gently that she didn’t even need to use novocaine. She could take dull, yellow teeth and polish them until they were bright and white again. She had a wonderful flair for curing gum disease and gingivitis, and her patented techniques for
performing dental extractions and root canals were taught in every dental school in the country.

Dr. Pike had replaced Dr. Bayonet, who’d been the dentist in Remarkable before she arrived. Dr. Bayonet was gruff and grouchy—which was possibly due to the fact that he was much more interested in being an amateur lepidopterologist (who is a person who collects butterflies) than he was in fixing teeth. One day he decided to build the world’s largest live butterfly collection—and he’d become so preoccupied with catching specimens for it that he’d quit coming into work. Eventually, Grandmama Julietta Augustina was forced to hire a new dentist. She’d heard that Dr. Pike was the best, and so she asked her if she’d be willing to take over Dr. Bayonet’s practice. Dr. Pike was only too happy to accept.

It didn’t take Dr. Pike long to discover that if a dentist wanted to look at rows and rows of perfect teeth, then Remarkable was certainly a good place to work. The citizens of Remarkable had remarkably strong teeth, and they knew how to take care of them, too. In the two years that she’d been in Remarkable, Dr. Pike had seen nothing but beautifully white teeth in beautifully wide smiles.

Now, Dr. Josephine Christobel Pike liked beautifully white teeth in beautifully wide smiles as much as the next dentist, but this meant that no one in Remarkable really needed her services. It didn’t matter that she knew how to cure all different kinds of gum disease when no one in town ever seemed to suffer from any of them. It didn’t matter that she could drill a painless filling when no one ever got a cavity.

The only exception to this was Jane. Jane’s teeth weren’t terrible—but she did have an average number of cavities for a girl her age, which wasn’t very many, but it was enough to remind Dr. Pike how much she liked fixing teeth. And now she wouldn’t see Jane again for six months, and Jane might not have any tooth-related woes for her to fix then, either.

In the meantime, all she could hope for was that the Grimlet twins would stop by again to visit her. They were tied for her second favorite patients, but this wasn’t because the Grimlets had tooth decay like Jane. Their teeth, although surprisingly sharp, were as white and perfect as everyone else’s.

Dr. Pike liked the Grimlet twins because they asked a lot of questions about cavities. Specifically, they wanted Dr. Pike to tell them how they might
cause cavities in other people. What would happen, say, if they managed to put sugar into sugar-free gum? Or if they managed to get the fluoride out of fluoride toothpaste?

Dr. Pike never answered because she didn’t want to encourage the wicked Grimlet twins in their wicked ways. But sometimes at night she’d dream that the Grimlet twins had succeeded in their dastardly plans and that she had patients needing root canals and multiple fillings lining up around the block. When she awoke, she’d find herself smiling a big, toothy grin.

I
t was Wednesday, the most ordinary day of the week, and the only day of the week that was neither at the beginning or the end. If Jane were a day of the week instead of a ten-year-old girl, she was sure she would be a Wednesday, just as she was sure if she were a kind of fruit that she’d be one of those dull red apples that don’t taste like anything, and if she were a color, she’d be beige or maybe clear.

This particular Wednesday was more ordinary than usual. Even Ms. Schnabel, Jane’s fifth-grade teacher, seemed to be feeling the effects of the day’s overwhelming ordinariness. She looked across the mostly empty classroom and said, “I don’t know why I bother,” in a
despairing voice just as if Jane wasn’t there. Then Ms. Schnabel walked out of the classroom and headed down the hall to the teachers’ lounge to get a cup of coffee and to see about trading her defensive linebacker for Coach Dunder’s up-and-coming cornerback.

Of course, Ms. Schnabel’s sudden departure from the room didn’t make this Wednesday any more interesting than it already wasn’t. Ms. Schnabel was always asking herself why she bothered and then wandering off to the teachers’ lounge for coffee and fantasy football trades on Wednesdays. And once again, Jane was left all by herself in the classroom with nothing to do but answer the questions about storm clouds on the science work sheet Ms. Schnabel had given her before she left. It was the same work sheet on storm clouds that Jane had to answer last Wednesday, because Ms. Schnabel had forgotten that she’d already given it to her.

Jane looked out the window hoping she might at least catch a glimpse of some real storm clouds, which—while not necessarily interesting—would at least be better than answering questions about them on a work sheet. But the weather was remarkably fine that day, as it often was.

In the distance, Jane could see the tall, castlelike
building that was home to Remarkable’s School for the Remarkably Gifted. She imagined that her sister and brother were having a fabulous, nonboring day at their fabulous, nonboring school. They probably hadn’t even bothered to notice how interesting this Wednesday wasn’t.

She took a deep breath, which she was planning on using to exhale a long, bored sigh, when suddenly she saw a straw wrapper float into the classroom through the open window. The wrapper glided toward her and landed gently on top of her desk.

Jane was so surprised that it took her a moment to notice that there was tiny spiky handwriting on the straw wrapper. She squinted at it.

“GET READY,” it read in all-capital letters.

“Ready for what?” Jane wondered.

BOOM!

The sound came from the direction of Remarkable’s School for the Remarkably Gifted.

The sound was followed by smoke—blue smoke—which billowed out of the school’s doors and windows. The school’s fire alarm blared loudly, and all of the students came running outside. Jane ran to the window to get a closer look.

The blue smoke, which had settled like a great blue storm cloud around the school, slowly drifted away. But somehow, the color blue lingered. The outside of the school was now blue, and the playground and everything in it—like the jump ropes and tetherballs and swing sets and slides—had turned blue, too. The big yellow school bus that had been parked in the asphalt-colored parking lot was now a big blue school bus parked in a blue parking lot.

Jane saw the esteemed Dr. Presnelda, headmistress of the gifted school, emerge from the building. Somehow she alone had retained her normal color. She shouted for calm as she strode through the crowd of panicked gifted students, who all suddenly seemed to have blue hair and blue skin and be wearing blue clothes.

And then a second straw wrapper—a blue straw wrapper—came drifting in through the window and landed on Jane’s desk.

“H
A HA HA
!” the tiny writing on the wrapper read. “S
EE YOU SOON.”