Inordinate

Chapter 1: Meetings

Victory. That's what Jo decided the feeling welling up inside of her was. After finally standing up to Carmelita Spats, she felt as though she had accomplished something previously far out of reach to her. Jo (Isadora, Duncan, and the Baudelaire siblings behind her), walked back to the lunch table with a newfound sense of confidence. Of course, curiosity was already pulsing through her veins like a flood of water through a pipe too thin to contain its volume. It was not every day that a fellow orphan came to Prufrock Preparatory School. Jo sat down to Isadora's left, facing the Baudelaires. Tilting her head downward at the lunch tray, her mind drifted to the picnic lunches that she used to eat on taxi trips before she was sent to boarding school. This ugly meal in the bleak lunchroom simply could not compare to the girl's fond memories of her past. They seemed not so long ago and yet so very out of reach, like a paper that has just flown off of the edge of a cliff and is drifting slowly downward into the river below.

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Two Years Ago:

Jo sat outside of the Vice Principle's office alone. The terrible, scratchy sound of someone who cannot play the violin attempting to compose a song on the thing penetrated the air in the room and made the thirteen-year-old wince- and fight the instinct to cover her ears with her hands, or else rip her ears plain off. So this is what school's like, she thought. Why did she send me here?

After waiting for an inordinate amount of time, Jo finally decided to stand up and knock on the door. A man of about fifty-five years old with mousy brown hair that stuck up towards the ceiling as if he had been electrocuted answered her knock.

"Who dares interrupt a genius when he's practicing?" the man demanded.

"My name is Jo Snicket," Jo had responded, "I am the new student."

The vice principal, whom she would later find out was named Nero, had repeated her last name questioningly as if he had heard it before but could not place his finger on where or when. It looked as though he was about to ask but he instead said, "That's absurd. Jo is a boy's name, not a girl's."

Jo's trying-to-be-pleasant face that had been nicely smiling morphed into a frown and a glare, "There are plenty of girls named Jo. I happen to be one of them."

"That's nice," Vice Principal Nero had told her dismissively, "The three twins outside of the door will show you to the shack where you'll be staying. And get you out of those hideous clothes and into your school uniform."

The girl looked down at her red-and-black plaid flannel shirt and her ripped baggy jeans. Lifting her head ever-so-slightly, she thought that a uniform might be nice. But a shack? Where she would be staying? Jo thought that to be a different story. Nero opened the door (which was marked with his name and title) to find the three siblings who would be showing Jo the school. At seeing them, she processed the mistake that the vice principal had made when he had told Jo about the siblings.

"They're triplets," she corrected, "They're three triplets. Twins would be two."

Nero scoffed, pushing Jo out of the door and leaving her face-to-face with the triplets. They had dark hair and wide eyes, and the two boys were identical, whereas the girl was not the same but looked very similar. The three of them looked to be about two years younger than Jo, but they held themselves with a very mature stance.

"I'm Isadora Quagmire, and these are my brothers, Duncan and Quigley," the girl told Jo, gesturing to the other two triplets.

"My name is Jo. Jo Snicket," the new student responded.