A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(42)

Emma started to light a flame and Bronwyn looked ready to take a swing at Itch, but the others pulled them back. We were watched closely in Devil’s Acre, and hurting another peculiar, even in self-defense, would have looked very bad.

The dripping Ditch dwellers had backed us into an alley, their cries of “false prophet” turning into demands that we give up our secret. Finally, we had no choice but to turn and run, their shouts echoing after us as we turned a corner.

Somehow we found our way out of the dangerous part of town and back to the center, though everything after was a bit of a blur; we were shaken, and the friendly hellos and handshakes that came at us as we parted the crowd near Bentham’s house felt unreal.

What was behind all those smiles?

How many of them secretly resented us?

Then we were in the Panloopticon, getting waved through peculiar customs, plodding quietly up the stairs and down the long hall, everyone silent, in their own heads.



* * *



? ? ?

We packed into the broom closet, then stumbled, after a lurching rush, out into a hot Florida night. Faint steam rose from the shed’s peaked roof, accompanied by a light hissing sound, like a hot engine cooling down.

“Ozone,” said Millard.

“Twenty-two minutes forty seconds.” Miss Peregrine was standing in the yard, arms crossed. “Is how late you are.”

“But, miss,” said Claire, “we didn’t mean to—”

“No one say anything,” Emma hissed. Then, louder, “We tried a shortcut but got lost.”

We stood there in the yard, exhausted, still freaked out from our encounter at the Ditch, and endured a lecture about punctuality and responsibility. I could hear my friends’ teeth gritting. Once she’d made it overabundantly clear that she was disappointed in us, Miss Peregrine assumed bird form, flew to the top of my roof, and perched there.

“What just happened?” I said in a low voice.

“That’s what she does when she needs to be alone,” said Emma. “She must be really upset.”

“Because we were twenty-two minutes late?”

“She’s under a lot of pressure,” said Bronwyn.

“And she’s taking it out on us,” said Hugh. “It isn’t fair.”

“I think there are a lot of peculiars who don’t want to listen to the ymbrynes right now,” said Olive, “but Miss P has always been able to count on us listening. So when we muck something up, even a wee little bit . . .”

“Well, she can stuff it up her hindfeathers!” said Enoch a little too loudly.

Bronwyn clapped her hand over his mouth, and the two of them fell to the ground, scuffling.

“Stop it, stop it!” said Olive, and she and Emma and I pulled them apart and in the process were thrown to the ground ourselves, and then we were lying on the grass panting and beginning to sweat in the humid night air.

“This is so stupid,” said Emma. “No more fighting amongst ourselves.”

“Truce?” said Bronwyn.

Enoch nodded and they shook on it.

Everyone wanted a break and a reset from the events of the day, so we went inside the house, where Horace made something amazing from what remained of the stolen groceries, and then I introduced them to the time-honored American tradition of eating in front of the television. I channel surfed while my friends stared at the screen, some so absorbed in it that they forgot all about the plates of food growing cold in their laps. The Home Shopping Network, commercials for dog food and ladies’ hair products, a preacher on the religious network, a talent competition show, snippets of news about conflicts in foreign lands: It was all equally alien to them. Once they got over the shock of having a screen like this right in the house, with a full-color picture and surround sound and a hundred different channels to choose from, they started asking questions. Some took me by surprise.

While lingering on an old episode of Star Trek, Hugh asked, “Do a lot of people own spaceships now?”

Bronwyn, while watching The Real Housewives of Orange County: “Are there no poor people in America anymore?”

And Olive: “Why are they so rude to one another?”

During a car ad, Horace asked, “Is that noise meant to be music?”

Flipping past a news show, Claire winced and said, “Why are they shouting like that?”

I could see it was starting to upset them. Emma was tense, Hugh was pacing, and Horace was squeezing the arm of the sofa in a death grip.

“It’s too much,” Emma said, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Too loud, too fast!”

“It never settles on anything for more than an instant,” said Horace. “The effect is dizzying.”

“No wonder normals rarely notice peculiars out in the world anymore,” said Enoch. “Their brains have melted!”

“If modern people watch, then we shall, too,” said Millard.

“But I don’t want a melted brain,” said Bronwyn.

“Nothing’s going to melt,” Millard reassured her. “Think of it as a vaccine. Just a bit will be enough to inoculate you against the bigger shocks of this world.”

We flipped channels for a while longer, but its numbing effect began to wear off and my mind drifted toward unpleasant things. It occurred to me, as we lingered on an episode of The Bachelor, how little I understood the world I’d grown up in. All my life, normal people had mostly baffled me—the ridiculous ways they strove to impress one another, the mediocre goals that seemed to drive them, the banality of their dreams. The way people rejected anything that didn’t fit their narrow paradigm of acceptability, as if those who thought or acted or dressed or dreamed differently from them were a threat to their very existence. That, more than anything, was why I had felt so alone growing up. Things that normal people thought were important, I thought were dumb. And there was never anyone I could talk to about it, so I kept my thoughts to myself. I had returned to that normal world with the assurance that I now had a home waiting for me in the peculiar world. But today in Devil’s Acre left me feeling like I was a stranger there, too—a hero to some, a phony to others. Misunderstood by everybody, just like at home.