A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(22)

I stood up suddenly and jumped into the water. I held my breath and stayed down, hoping the blackness and the sudden chill would blot out my thoughts:

He doesn’t want to know you.

He chose oblivion rather than knowing you.

And then I screamed into the muddy depths until I ran out of breath. When I surfaced again, maybe twenty feet from the dock, Miss Peregrine was on her feet, about to dive in after me.

“Jacob! Are you—”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said. The water was so shallow that I could easily touch bottom. “I told you I didn’t feel like talking.”

“That you did,” she said.

She stood on the dock and I stood in the bay up to my waist, my feet sinking into the mud while little fish nibbled at my legs.

“I’m going to say something,” she said, “and you aren’t allowed to throw a tantrum in response.”

“Fine.”

“I know you don’t like it much right now, but I promise you will regret throwing this normal life away.”

“What life? I’ve got no friends here. My parents are afraid and ashamed of me.”

“They are alive, which is more than most of us can say. And, as of five minutes ago, they don’t remember any of what just happened.”

“Well, I do. And I’m not interested in pretending I’m someone I’m not for the rest of my life. If that’s the price of being their son, it’s not worth it.”

She looked as if she wanted to shout something at me, but then swallowed it back. “I never claimed being peculiar was easy,” she said after a moment. “There are many unpleasant and difficult things about being one of us. Learning how to negotiate a world of people who can’t understand you and don’t want to—that’s probably the hardest bit. Many find it impossible and retreat into loops. But I never saw that for you. You’ve got a very special talent, and I don’t mean your facility with hollowgast. You’re a shape-shifter of sorts, Jacob, able to move easily between worlds. You were never meant to be tied to just one home, or one family. You’ll have many, like your grandfather did.”

I looked up as a pelican sailed overhead, each wingbeat a little sigh, and imagined my grandfather’s life. He had lived most of it in a crappy little house on the edge of a swamp. His wife and kids hardly knew him. He risked his life, year after year, fighting for the peculiar cause, and his reward in the end was to be treated like a senile old crank.

“I don’t want to be like my grandfather. I don’t want his life.”

“You won’t, you’ll have your own. What about school?”

“I don’t think you’re listening to me. I don’t want”—I turned around, flung my arms wide, screamed it across the water—“ANY! OF THIS! SHIT!”

I turned back to her, face flushing.

“Are you quite finished?” she said.

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“Good. Now that I’m fully briefed on all the things you don’t want . . . what do you want?”

“I want to do something to help the only people in the world who ever truly gave a damn about me. Peculiars. And I want to do something important. Something big.”

“All right, then.” She crouched down and extended her hand. “You can start right now.”

I waded over and she hoisted me up onto the dock.

“I have a job that’s absolutely crucial and that no one in peculiardom can do but you,” Miss Peregrine was saying as we walked.

“Okay. What is it?”

“The children need contemporary outfits. I need you to take them shopping.”

“Shopping?” I stopped walking. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

She turned to face me. Her expression was flat.

“I am not.”

“I said I want to do something important. In the peculiar world!”

She moved in close, her voice low and intense. “I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. It is imperative to the future of that world that these children understand how to navigate this one. And there is no one but you to teach them, Jacob. Who else? The ones who’ve been living in loops for decades know nothing of it—they couldn’t manage a modern-day street crossing! And the ones who haven’t lived in loops are either very old or so young and new to our peculiar world that they’re but neophytes themselves.” She grabbed my shoulders in her hands and squeezed them. “I know. I know you’re angry and you want to leave. But I beg you. Stay just a little longer. I think I know a way for you to exist here—only sometimes, whenever you like—while also doing important work with us in the loops.”

“Yeah?” I said skeptically. “What is it?”

“Give me until—” She fished her pocket watch from her pants and glanced at it. “Until nightfall. Then you’ll see. Satisfactory?”

My first thought was that it had something to do with the Panloopticon in Devil’s Acre, but the closest loop, the one they’d used to get here last night, was hours away in the middle of a swamp. And, anyway, I didn’t want to come and go like a commuter. I wanted to leave all this behind, to go and stay gone. But Miss Peregrine was hard to say no to, and I had agreed to help my friends learn something about the present. I didn’t feel right reneging on that promise outright.