A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(47)

“They might have summer jobs part-time. I don’t know.”

“When I was growing up,” said Hugh, “if you were old enough to lift something heavy, you were old enough to work. There was no sitting around all day, eating and talking.”

“We were old enough to work even before we could lift heavy things,” said Olive. “My father sent me to work at a boot-blacking factory when I was five. It was awful.”

“Mine sent me to a workhouse,” said Hugh. “I spent all day making rope.”

“Good God,” I muttered.

They came from a time before the concept of teenager-hood even existed. That was an invention of the postwar years, before which you had been either a child or an adult. I wondered how they would be able to impersonate modern teenagers if the very concept was foreign to them.

What if this whole thing was a bad idea?

Nervously, I checked my phone.

Nothing from H. Nothing at all.

We went to buy clothes, but along the way we lost Horace, who veered off into a grocery store that occupied one whole wing of the mall. We found him standing awestruck before a massive wall of cheese in the refrigerated foods section.

“Feta, mozzarella, Camembert, Gouda, cheddar!” he said, rapturous. “A gourmand’s fantasyland.”

It was just cheese to me, but to Horace it was a miracle: thirty feet of the stuff, sliced, whipped, in blocks and chunks, separately packaged, available in skim, whole, and 2 percent fat. He stood reading the labels as if in a trance, and I had to keep shushing him, lest his amazement draw attention.

“It’s everything,” he muttered. “It’s everything.”

“Look at this!” he said, turning to an old man who happened to be pushing a cart nearby. “Look at it!”

The old man hurried away.

“Horace, you’re scaring people,” I said, drawing him close. “It’s only cheese.”

“Only cheese!” he said.

“Okay, it’s a lot of cheese.”

“It’s the pinnacle of human achievement,” he declared seriously. “I thought Britain was an empire. But this—this—is world domination!”

“My stomach hurts just looking at it,” said Claire.

“How dare you,” Horace replied.

When we finally managed to drag him out of the grocery store and into a shop that sold clothes, Horace was less impressed by the selection. I had purposely chosen the blandest store and steered them toward the blandest choices—simple colors, standard combinations; whatever the mannequins were wearing.

His mood darkened as we filled the basket.

“I’d rather go naked,” he said, holding a pair of jeans I’d handed him like it was a poisonous snake. “This is how you want me to dress? In denim, like a farmer?”

“Everybody wears jeans now,” I said. “Not just farmers.”

In fact, a pair of nice jeans was pretty fancy compared to what most people in the store were wearing that day. I saw Horace’s face pale as he took stock of the gym shorts, cargo pants, sweats, and pajamas nearby shoppers were sporting.

He let the jeans drop to the floor.

“Oh no,” he whispered. “Oh no, no.”

“What’s the matter?” said Enoch. “Their fashion not up to your high standards?”

“Forget standards. What of decency? What of self-respect?”

A man walked by wearing camouflage pants, orange flip-flops, and a SpongeBob sweater with the sleeves scissored off.

I thought Horace might cry.

While he mourned the end of civilization, we picked out clothes for everyone else. Because the lead shoes Olive usually wore looked like they belonged to Frankenstein’s monster, we let her choose a new pair—something a size or two too large, so we could fill the extra space with weights.

At my insistence the kids kept quiet as the cashier ran the items through the checkout. They stayed quiet even as they trailed me out of the mall and back across the parking lot to the car, their arms loaded with bags and their brains overloaded with stimuli.



* * *



? ? ?

We returned home to find everyone else gone to the Acre for the afternoon—something about reconstruction assignment orientation meetings, according to the note Miss Peregrine had left. Emma had stayed behind, said the note, but for the longest time I couldn’t find her. Finally I heard her whistling inside the upstairs guest bathroom.

I knocked. “It’s Jacob. Everything okay in there?”

A faint red light glowed beneath the door.

“Just a moment!” she called.

I could hear her fumbling around. A moment later the light clicked on and the door swung open.

“Did he call?” she said eagerly.

“Not yet. What’s going on?”

I peeked past her into the small bathroom. There was photo-developing equipment everywhere—metal canisters lining the toilet tank, plastic trays surrounding the sink, a bulky enlarger on the floor. I wrinkled my nose against the sharp smell of developing chemicals.

“You don’t mind if I convert the loo into a darkroom, do you?” Emma said with a sheepish grin. “Because I kind of already did.”

We had two other bathrooms. I told her I didn’t mind. She invited me inside to watch her work. There wasn’t much space, so I had to press myself into a corner. She was efficient but unhurried, talking as she went. Though she claimed to be new at this, her actions looked like muscle memory.