A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(101)

She went out and showed him where it was. A minute later she came running back into the room, laughing and swatting at the air, and then a pigeon missing one wing and both its eyes flew into the room and fluttered around madly. The rest of us covered our heads and dove out of the way. The pigeon flung itself against the wall, dropped to the floor in a cloud of feathers, and stopped moving.

Enoch ran in. “I’ve never controlled a bird before! Wicked!”

“That was nuts,” Noor said, smiling while she caught her breath. “What the hell?!”

“What can I say?” said Enoch. “I’m extremely talented.”

“You’re a freak!” she said, laughing again. “But I think it’s cool. Really.”

Enoch beamed.

“Now you know everything,” said Emma, picking herself up from the floor.

“Your turn,” I said.

“Okay, okay.” Noor went to the couch and sat. “It’ll be a relief to tell you, actually. The only person who knows any of this is Lilly.”

We sat around her in a loose circle. The lights dimmed a bit. In a soft but unhesitating voice, Noor began to tell her story.

“The first time I noticed something weird was last spring.” She sighed, then looked around at us. “It’s so strange to be saying any of this out loud.”

“Take your time,” Emma said. “We’re not in a rush.”

Noor nodded appreciatively, and began again. “June second, a Tuesday, early afternoon. I had just gotten home from school, and Fartface—that’s my not-father—had been waiting around for me all day.”

The actual name she called her foster dad didn’t begin with Fart, but it did start with an F.

“We had a super-long talk about how I was wasting my time with clubs after school and instead I should get a crappy minimum-wage job at Ices Queen down the street. I told him my after-school things were for college applications and I didn’t need extra money, and anyway the state was paying him and Teena to take care of me. He didn’t like that. He started yelling. And I did what I always do when he yells, which is to run into the kids’ room, where my two not-siblings and I live, and which has a door with a lock. Greg and Amber weren’t home, so I was the only one in there, and Fartface wouldn’t leave me alone. He kept yelling through the door, and I was getting more and more upset, and I didn’t know what to do, and finally I opened my mouth to scream back at him, but instead of my voice coming out? All the lights in the room got brighter for a second—like much brighter—and then broke.”

“And that’s when you knew?” said Emma. “That you were different?”

“No, no, I thought there was a ghost in the room with me or something.” A quick and vanishing smile glanced across her face, and then she shook her head. “I didn’t realize anything until a few days later. At El Taco Junior.”

“Oh my God, right,” said Lilly. “That was the day?”

“Mm-hmm. I had just gotten accepted into this accelerated student arts program at Bard. I never thought I had a chance, but you made me apply.”

“You were always going to get in,” said Lilly. “Come on.”

Noor shrugged. “It was for college credit and everything, but it cost three thousand dollars, which was exactly two thousand and six hundred dollars more than I had. So I was going to quit the after-school stuff and get that job at Ices Queen to pay for it. Fartface said ‘damn right’ I was getting that job, but the money I made was going to their household bills, not to pay for some college before I was even out of high school. So I reminded him that I had the legal right to an emancipation bank account, and he started yelling again, and anyway that’s when I ran away and met you at El Taco Junior.”

“He followed her,” said Lilly, “and screamed at her right there in the restaurant. And then I started yelling at him, and I guess he couldn’t bring himself to scream at a blind girl in public, so he stormed off into the street to wait for us to finish.”

“So we had the longest taco meal in history.”

“We actually had time to finish the Macho Meal together,” said Lilly, “which we’d never done before because it’s forty-six hundred calories, but we sat there so long and I was just stress-eating . . .”

“While he was standing in the street just staring at us. Finally, I got really upset and couldn’t take it anymore, and to keep from losing my shit with Fartface watching, I ran into the bathroom. And that’s where it happened. I could feel it building up in me, and I was about to scream, but this time I held it in. And the lights in the bathroom started to flicker and get weird, and I—I don’t know how to explain it, I just knew what to do. Knew I could. I reached out, reached above me, and scooped the light out of the air. And the whole room went dark, but the little space inside my hands was glowing like I had caught the world’s brightest firefly.”

“That,” Enoch said, “is so wickedly cool.”

“You’d think so,” said Noor. “But it was scary as hell. I thought my brain had broken. It started happening all the time, and at first I didn’t know how to control it. Whenever I’d get really upset—sad or pissed off about something—it would start to happen. And because school is so awful, it happened a lot at school. I could feel it coming, though, and I always managed to run away just in time, into some room where I could be alone and no one would see. I think a few people did notice something, though they couldn’t exactly connect it to me—they’d just see me looking upset and some lights flickering. But it was about then that they started coming around school. The new people.”