A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(18)

Then it was time to deal with my parents. I asked Bronwyn to carry them upstairs to their bedroom before the sleep dust wore off, so they wouldn’t wake up in a wrecked car, surrounded by reminders of the previous night’s trauma. She left them in their bed and closed the door, and for a minute I paced the hall outside, leaving sandy footprints on the carpet, nervously trying to figure out what to say.

Emma came up the stairs. “Hey,” she whispered. “Before you go in, I wanted you to know something.”

I went to her and she clasped my hand. “Yeah?”

“She fancied you.”

“Who?”

“Janine Wilkins. A girl doesn’t lose her kiss virginity to just anyone, you know.”

“I, uh—” My brain was trying and failing to be in two very different places at once. “You’re messing with me, right?”

She laughed and looked down. “I mean, she did, but yes. I just came to wish you good luck. Not that you need it. You’ve got this.”

“Thanks.”

“We’re right downstairs, should you need anything.”

I nodded. And then I kissed her. She smiled and slipped back down the stairs.



* * *



? ? ?

They woke up gently in their own bed, sun laddering through the shutters. I watched them from a chair in the corner, nibbling my fingernails and trying to stay calm.

My mom opened her eyes first. She blinked, rubbed them. Sat up and groaned and massaged her neck. She had no idea she’d been sleeping in a car for eighteen hours. It would make anybody sore.

Then she saw me, and her brow furrowed.

“Honey? What are you doing here?”

“I, uh—I just wanted to explain some things.”

Then she looked down at herself, noticed that the clothes she was wearing were the same she’d been wearing last night. A confused look stole over her face.

“What time is it?”

“About three,” I said. “Everything’s okay.”

“No,” she said, looking around the room, confusion turning to panic.

I stood up. She pointed at me. “Stay there.”

“Mom, don’t freak out. Let me explain.”

She looked away—ignored me, as if maybe I weren’t really there. “Frank.” She shook my father awake. “Frank!”

“Mmm.” He rolled over.

She shook harder. “Franklin.”

This was it: my last opportunity. The moment I’d been readying myself for. I had run through a few different approaches in my mind, but they all sounded ridiculous to me now—too blunt, too dumb. Just as my dad sat up and began to rub the sleep from his eyes, I all but lost my nerve, suddenly convinced I didn’t have the right words.

It didn’t matter. Ready or not, it was showtime.

“Mom, Dad, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

I walked to the foot of their bed and started talking. I can hardly remember what it was I said, only that I felt like a door-to-door salesman whose pitch was bombing. I tried to explain how my grandfather’s last words and his strange snapshots and the postcard from Miss Peregrine had led me to discover the peculiars’ house, and in it all of Abe’s old friends, who were not only still alive, they weren’t even old. But I found myself dancing around terms like time loop and powers because it just seemed like it was too soon, too much. My clumsily censored version of the truth combined with jitters seemed only to confirm to them that I was out of my mind, and the more I talked, the more they inched away from me, my mom drawing the comforter up around her shoulders and my dad scooting back against the headboard, that vein that popped out from his forehead when he was stressed dancing a jig. As if whatever mania was in me might be contagious.

“Just stop!” my mom shouted, finally interrupting me. “I can’t listen to any more of this.”

“But it’s true, and if you’d only hear me out—”

She threw the covers back and leapt out of bed. “We’ve heard enough! And we already know what happened. You were torn up about your grandpa. You secretly quit taking your medication.” She was pacing, angry. “We sent you halfway around the world at the worst possible time on the advice of a quack, and you had a breakdown! It’s nothing for you to be ashamed of, but we have to deal with this honestly. Okay? You can’t keep hiding behind these . . . stories.”

I felt like I’d been slapped. “You won’t even give me a chance.”

“We’ve given you a hundred,” my dad said.

“No. You never believe me.”

“Well, of course we don’t,” my mom said. “You’re a lonely boy who lost someone important. And then you meet these kids, who are ‘special’ just like your grandpa was, and only you can see them? It doesn’t take a PhD to diagnose. You’ve been making up imaginary friends since you were two.”

“I didn’t say I was the only one who could see them,” I said. “You met them last night in the driveway.”

Both my parents looked, for an instant, like they’d seen a ghost. Maybe they had blocked what happened last night from their minds. That can happen sometimes, when an isolated event so thoroughly disagrees with a person’s concept of reality.