"Oh, leave them alone, Carmelita!" a voice cried over the chanting. The Baudelaires turned around and saw a boy with very dark hair and very wide eyes. He looked a little older than Klaus and a little younger than Violet and had a dark green notebook tucked into the pocket of his thick wool sweater. "You're the cakesniffer, and nobody in their right mind would want to eat with you anyway. Come on," the boy said, turning to the Baudelaires. "There's room at our table."
"Thank you very much," Violet said in relief and followed the boy to a table that had plenty of room. He sat down next to a girl who looked absolutely identical to the boy. She looked about the same age, and also had very dark hair, very wide eyes, and a notebook tucked into the pocket of her thick wool sweater. The only difference seemed to be that the girl's notebook was pitch black. Seeing two people who look so much alike is a little bit eerie, but it was better than looking at Carmelita Spats, so the Baudelaires sat down across from them and introduced themselves.
"I'm Violet Baudelaire," said Violet Baudelaire, "and this is my brother, Klaus, and our baby sister, Sunny."
"It's nice to meet you," said the boy. "My name is Duncan Quagmire, and this is my sister, Isadora. And the girl who was yelling at you, I'm sorry to say, was Carmelita Spats."
"She didn't seem very nice," Klaus said.
"That is the understatement of the century," Isadora said. "Carmelita Spats is rude, filthy, and violent, and the less time you spend with her the happier you will be."
"Read the Baudelaires the poem you wrote about her," Duncan said to his sister.
"You write poetry?" Klaus asked. He had read a lot about poets but had never met one.
"Just a little bit," Isadora said modestly. "I write poems down in this notebook. It's an interest of mine."
"Sappho!" Sunny shrieked, which meant something like "I'd be very pleased to hear a poem of yours!"
Klaus explained to the Quagmires what Sunny meant, and Isadora smiled and opened her notebook. "It's a very short poem," she said. "Only two rhyming lines."
"That's called a couplet," Klaus said. "I learned that from a book of literary criticism."
"Yes, 1 know," Isadora said, and then read her poem, leaning forward so Carmelita Spats would not overhear:
The Baudelaires giggled and then covered their mouths so nobody would know they were laughing at Carmelita. "That was great," Klaus said. "I like the part about the bowl of bats."
"Thanks," Isadora said. "I would be interested in reading that book of literary criticism you told me about. Would you let me borrow it?"
Klaus looked down. "I can't," he said. "That book belonged to my father, and it was destroyed in a fire."
The Quagmires looked at one another, and their eyes grew even wider. "I'm very sorry to hear that," Duncan said. "My sister and I have been through a terrible fire, so we know what that's like. Did your father die in the fire?"
"Yes he did," Klaus said, "and my mother too."
Isadora put down her fork, reached across the table, and patted Klaus on the hand. Normally this might have embarrassed Klaus a little bit, hut under the circumstances it felt perfectly natural. "I'm so sorry to hear that," she said. "Our parents died in a fire as well. It's awful to miss your parents so much, isn't it?"
"Bloni," Sunny said, nodding.'"
"For a long time," Duncan admitted, "I was afraid of any kind of fire. I didn't even like to look at stoves."
Violet smiled. "We stayed with a woman for a while, our Aunt Josephine, who was afraid of stoves. She was afraid that they might explode."
"Explode!" Duncan said. "Even I wasn't afraid as all that. Why aren't you staying with your Aunt Josephine now?"
Now it was Violet's turn to look down, and Duncan's turn to reach across the table and take her hand. "She died too," Violet said. "To tell you the truth, Duncan, our lives have been very topsy-turvy for quite some time."
"I'm very sorry to hear it," Duncan said, "and I wish I could tell you that things will get better here. But between Vice Principal Nero playing the violin, Carmelita Spats teasing us, and the dreadful Orphans Shack, Prufrock Prep is a pretty miserable place."
"I think it's awful to call it the Orphans Shack," Klaus said. "It's a bad enough place without giving it an insulting nickname."
"The nickname is more of Carmelita's handiwork, I'm sorry to say," Isadora said. "Duncan and I had to live there for three semesters because we needed a parent or guardian to sign our permission slip, and we didn't have one."
"That's the same thing that happened to us!" Violet cried. "And when we asked Nero to make an exception-"
"He said he was too busy practicing the violin," Isadora said, nodding as she finished Violet's sentence. "He always says that. Anyway, Carmelita called it the Orphans Shack when we were living there, and it looks like she's going to keep on doing it."
"Well," Violet sighed, "Carmelita's nasty names are the least of our problems in the shack. How did you deal with the crabs when you lived there?"
Duncan let go of her hand to take his notebook out of his pocket. "I use my notebook to take notes on things," he explained. "I plan to be a newspaper reporter when I get a little older and I figure it's good to start practicing. Here it is: notes on the crabs. They're afraid of loud noises, you see, so I have a list of things we did to scare them away from us."
"Afraid of loud noises," Violet repeated, and tied her hair up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes.
"When she ties her hair up like that," Klaus explained to the Quagmires, "it means she's thinking of an invention. My sister is quite an inventor."
"How about noisy shoes?" Violet said suddenly. "If we took small pieces of metal and glued them to our shoes? Then wherever we walked would make a loud noise, and I bet we'd hardly ever see those crabs."
"Noisy shoes!" Duncan cried. "Isadora and I lived in the Orphans Shack all that time and never thought of noisy shoes!" He took a pencil out of his pocket and wrote "noisy shoes" in the dark green notebook, and then turned a page. "I do have a list of fungus books that are in the school library, if you need help with that tan stuff on the ceiling."
"Zatwal!" Sunny shrieked.
"We'd love to see the library," Violet translated. "It sure is lucky that we ran into you two twins."
Duncan's and Isadora's faces fell, an expression which does not mean that the front part of their heads actually fell to the ground. It simply means that the two siblings suddenly looked very sad.
"What's wrong?" Klaus asked. "Did we say something that upset you?"
"Twins," Duncan said, so softly that the Baudelaires could barely hear him.
"You are twins, aren't you?" Violet asked. "You look just alike."
"We're triplets," Isadora said sadly.
"I'm confused," Violet said. "Aren't triplets three people born at the same time?"
"We were three people born at the same time," Isadora explained, "but our brother, Quigley, died in the fire that killed our parents."