Miss Peregrine shot Olive a warning look and stepped smartly to the center of the room. “I don’t want to hear another word of complaint,” she said. “With the extraordinary new freedom of movement you’ve been given, you’ll be invaluable to the reconstruction effort. With the right preparation, you could be ambassadors to other peculiar peoples one day. Explorers of new loops and territories. Planners and cartographers and leaders and builders—as crucial to the work of remaking our world as you were to the wights’ defeat. Don’t you want that?”
“Of course,” said Emma. “But what does that have to do with taking a holiday?”
“Before you become any of those things, you must first learn to navigate this world. The present day. America. You must familiarize yourselves with its idioms and customs and ultimately be able to pass as normal. If you cannot, you’ll be a danger to yourselves and all of us.”
“So you want us to . . . what?” said Horace. “Take normalling lessons?”
“Yes. I want you to learn what you can while you’re here, not just bake your brains in the sun. And I happen to know a very capable teacher.” Miss Peregrine turned to me and smiled. “Mr. Portman, would you accept the job?”
“Me?” I said. “I’m not exactly an expert on what’s normal. There’s a reason I feel so at home with you guys.”
“Miss P’s right,” said Emma. “You’re perfect for it. You’ve lived here all your life. You grew up thinking you were normal, but you’re one of us.”
“Well, I had planned on spending the next few weeks in a padded room,” I said, “but now that that’s not happening, I guess I could teach you guys a thing or two.”
“Normalling lessons!” said Olive. “Oh, how fun!”
“There’s so much to cover,” I said. “Where do we start?”
“In the morning,” Miss Peregrine said. “It’s getting late, and we should all find beds.”
She was right—it was nearly midnight, and my friends had begun their day in Devil’s Acre twenty-three hours (and one hundred thirty–odd years) ago. We were all exhausted. I found places for everyone to sleep—in our guest bedrooms, stretched out on couches, in a tangle of blankets in a broom closet for Enoch, who preferred his sleeping arrangements dark and nest-like. I offered my parents’ bed to Miss Peregrine, since they wouldn’t be using it, but she demurred. “I appreciate the offer, but let Bronwyn and Miss Bloom share it. I’ll be keeping watch tonight.” She flashed me a knowing look that said, And not just over the house, and it took a lot of effort not to roll my eyes at her. You don’t have to worry, I almost said, Emma and I are taking things slow. But what business was that of hers? I was so irritated that the minute she left to tuck Olive and Claire into bed I found Emma and said, “Want to see my room?”
“Absolutely,” she replied, and we snuck into the hall and up the stairs.
I could hear Miss Peregrine’s voice drifting up from one of the guest bedrooms, where she was singing a soft and sad lullaby. Like all peculiar lullabies it was mournful and long—this one a saga about a girl whose only friends were ghosts—which meant we had several minutes, at least, before Miss P came looking for Emma.
“My room’s kind of a mess,” I warned her.
“I’ve been sleeping in a dormitory with two dozen girls,” she said. “I am unshockable.”
We darted up the stairs and into my bedroom. I flipped on the lights. Emma’s mouth fell open.
“What is all this stuff?”
“Ah,” I said. “Right.” I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Explaining my room was going to eat up time we otherwise might have spent making out.
I didn’t have stuff. I had collections. And I had a lot of them, spread across bookshelves that lined my room. I wouldn’t have called myself a pack rat—and I wasn’t a hoarder—but collecting things was one of the ways I had dealt with loneliness as a kid. When your best friend is your seventy-five-year-old grandpa, you spend a lot of time doing what grandpas do, and for us that meant hitting garage sales every Saturday morning. (Grandpa Portman might have been a peculiar war hero and a badass hollowgast hunter, but few things thrilled him more than a bargain.)
At each sale I was allowed to pick out one thing that cost less than fifty cents. Multiply that by several garage sales per weekend and that’s how I amassed, over the course of a decade, a huge number of old records, dime-store detective novels with silly covers, MAD magazines, and other things that were objectively junk but nevertheless arranged like treasures along the shelves around my room. My parents often begged me to cull the herd and throw most of it away, and while I had made a few halfhearted attempts, I never got far—the rest of the house was so big and modern and blank that I had developed a sort of horror of empty space, so when it came to the only room in the house over which I had some control, I preferred it full. Which is why, in addition to all the overflowing bookshelves, I had plastered one wall floor to ceiling with maps, and another with old record album covers.
“Oh, wow. You really like music!” Emma broke away from me and went to the wall—the one with album covers growing over it like scales. I was starting to resent my distracting decor.
“Doesn’t everyone?” I said.
“Not everyone papers their walls with it.”
“I’m mostly into the older stuff,” I said.
“Oh, me too,” she said. “I don’t like these new groups, with their loud guitars and long hair.” She picked up a copy of Meet the Beatles! and wrinkled her nose.
“That record came out, what . . . fifty years ago?”
“Like I said. But you never mentioned liking music so much.” She walked along the wall, trailing her hand over my records, looking at everything. “There are lots of things I don’t know about you, but I want to.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I feel like we know each other so well in some ways, but in others it’s like we just met.”
“In our defense, we were both quite busy, what with trying not to die and rescuing all those ymbrynes and such. But now we have time.”
We have time. Whenever I heard those words, an electric feeling of possibility uncoiled in my chest.
“Play me one,” said Emma, nodding at the wall. “Whichever is your favorite.”
“I don’t know if I have a favorite,” I said. “There are so many.”
“I want to dance with you. Pick a good one for dancing.”
She smiled and went back to looking at things. I thought for a moment, then found Harvest Moon by Neil Young. I slid the album from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable, and dropped the needle carefully into the gap between the third and fourth song. There was a warm crackle and then the title track began to play, wistful and sweet. I was hoping she’d join me in the middle of the room, where I’d cleared a little space for us to dance, but she had come upon my wall of maps. There were layers upon layers of them—maps of the world, city maps, subway maps, tri-fold maps torn from old National Geographic magazines.
“These are amazing, Jacob.”
“I used to spend a lot of time imagining I was somewhere else,” I said.
“Me too.”
She came to my bed, which was shoved against the wall and surrounded by maps. She climbed up onto the comforter to examine them.
“Sometimes I remember you’re only sixteen,” she said. “Actually sixteen. And it kind of breaks my head open.”
She turned to look down at me in wonder.
“What made you say that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just strange. You don’t seem only sixteen.”
“And you don’t seem ninety-eight.”
“I’m only eighty-eight.”
“Oh, well, you definitely seem eighty-eight.”
She laughed and shook her head, then looked back at the wall.
“Come back here,” I said. “Dance with me.”
She hadn’t seemed to hear. She had come to the oldest part of my map wall—the ones I had made with my grandfather when I was eight or nine, drawn on everything from graph paper to construction paper. We’d spent many a long summer day making them, inventing cartographical symbols, drawing strange creatures in the margins, sometimes overwriting real places on the maps with our own invented ones. When I realized what she was staring at, my heart sank a bit.
“Is this Abe’s handwriting?” she asked.
“We used to do all kinds of projects together. He was basically my best friend.”
Emma nodded. “Mine too.” Her finger traced some words he had written—Lake Okeechobee—and then she turned away from it and climbed down from the bed. “But that was a long time ago.”
She came over to where I stood, took my hands, and rested her head on my shoulder. We began to sway with the music.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That caught me by surprise.”
“It’s okay. You were together for so long. And now you’re here . . .”
I felt her shake her head. Let’s not ruin it. Her hands slipped out of mine and wrapped around my waist. I lowered my cheek to her forehead.
“Do you ever still imagine you’re somewhere else?” she asked me.
“Not anymore,” I said. “For the first time in a long time, I’m happy where I am.”
“Me too,” she said, and she lifted her head from my shoulder, and I kissed her.
We danced and kissed until the song ended. Eventually, a soft hiss filled the room, and we kept dancing awhile longer because we weren’t ready for the moment to end. I tried to forget the strange turn things had taken, and how I’d felt when she’d mentioned my grandfather. She was going through something and that was okay. Even if I couldn’t understand it.
For now, I told myself, all that mattered was that we were together and we were safe. For now, that was enough. It was more than we’d ever had. There was no clock counting down to the moment she would wither and turn to dust. There were no bombers turning the world to fire around us. There were no hollowgast lurking outside the door. I didn’t know what our future held, but in that moment it was enough just to believe we had one.
I heard Miss Peregrine talking downstairs. That was our cue.
“Until tomorrow,” she whispered in my ear. “Good night, Jacob.”
We kissed one more time. It felt like an electric pulse, and left every part of me tingling. Then she slipped out the door, and for the first time since my friends had arrived, I was alone.
That night, I could hardly sleep. It wasn’t so much the snores of Hugh as he dozed in a pile of blankets on my floor as it was a buzzing in my head, filled now with uncertainty and exciting new prospects. When I left Devil’s Acre to come back home, it was because I had decided that finishing high school and keeping my parents in my life were important enough goals that they were worth enduring Englewood for a couple more years. The time between now and graduation had promised to be a special kind of torment, though, especially with Emma and my friends stuck in loops on the other side of the Atlantic.
But so much had changed in one night. Now, maybe, I didn’t have to wait. Maybe now I wouldn’t have to choose one or the other: peculiar or normal, this life or that. I wanted, and needed, both—though not in equal measure. I had no interest in a normal career. In settling down with someone who didn’t understand who I was, or in having kids from whom I had to keep half my life a secret, like my grandfather had.
That said, I didn’t want to go through life a high school dropout—you can’t exactly put hollowgast tamer on a résumé—and though my mom and dad were never going to win Parents of the Year, I didn’t want to cut them out of my life, either. I also didn’t want to become so alienated from the normal world that I forgot how to navigate it. The peculiar world was wonderful and I knew I would never be whole without it, but it could also be extraordinarily stressful and overwhelming. For the sake of my long-term sanity, I needed to maintain a connection to my normal life. I needed that balance.
So: Maybe the next year or two didn’t have to feel like a prison sentence as I waited for it all. Maybe I could be with my friends and with Emma and have my home and my family. Emma could even go to school with me. Maybe all my friends could! We could take classes together, eat lunch together, go to stupid school dances. Of course—what more perfect place to learn about the lives and habits of normal teenagers than high school? After a semester of that, they’d be able to impersonate normals with no problem (even I had learned to do it, eventually), and to blend in when we ventured out into the larger world of peculiar America. Whenever time permitted we would travel back to Devil’s Acre to help the cause, rebuild the loops, and hopefully make peculiardom impervious to future threats.
Unfortunately, the key to it all was my parents. They could make this easy or they could make it impossible. If only there was a way for my friends to be here without my mom and dad losing it, so that we wouldn’t have to tiptoe around them, afraid that an accidental display of peculiarness would send them screaming into the streets and bring hell down upon our heads.
There had to be something I could tell my parents that they would believe. Some way to explain my friends. Their presence, their strangeness—maybe even their abilities. I racked my brain for the perfect story. They were exchange students I had met while in London. They had saved my life, taken me in, and I wanted to repay them. (That this wasn’t far from the truth appealed to me.) They also happened to be expert magicians who were always practicing their act. Masters of illusion. Their tricks so refined you can never tell how they achieve them.
Maybe. Maybe there was a way. And then things could be so good.
My brain was a hope-making machine.