A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(60)

“Give us a week before you start worrying,” I said.

“Way ahead of you,” said Horace. “I’m worrying already.”





We drove down the key and over the bridge, then out toward the boonies and the far edge of town. That’s where we would pick up Interstate 75 and head north. The first stop was Flaming Man, whatever that was, which H had indicated could be found inside the wet-glass ring he’d made on the Mel-O-Dee map. That narrowed down our destination to about thirty square miles in the swampy middle of the state, a few hundred miles to the north.

I was at the wheel, consumed with the task of mastering my grandfather’s powerful but quirky old car. It had heavy steering and lurched around corners in a way that made my heart skip, and all its dials and gauges were located in odd places. Emma sat beside me in the passenger seat, a regular, non-peculiar road atlas of Florida spread across her lap. (Millard had also brought along Peculiar Planet, though its maps were very out-of-date.) I had insisted Emma be our navigator because it gave me an excuse to force Enoch into the back seat and to spend the next couple of days glancing over at her face instead of his. Enoch sulked out the window and periodically gave the back of my seat a kick. Millard sat beside him, squished against Bronwyn, who had to turn diagonally so her long legs would fit.

“From here to the ring on the map it’s about three hundred miles,” said Emma, looking from the cartoon map to the road atlas and back. “If we don’t stop, we could be there in five hours.”

“We’ve got to stop sometime,” said Bronwyn. “You haven’t bought us modern clothes yet.”

She was right. Everyone I’d taken shopping had stayed behind; the ones who had come were still wearing the clothes they had arrived in. Their outfits would soon become a liability.

“We’ll stop soon,” I said. “I just want to put some distance between us and Miss Peregrine first.”

“Where do you think Portal is?” asked Enoch. “Very far?”

“Could be,” I said.

“Will you be able to stand that much driving?” asked Millard.

“I’ll have to,” I said. We couldn’t drive in shifts because my friends didn’t have licenses. And besides that, Millard was invisible, which would get us pulled over instantly, Bronwyn was too scared to drive, and Enoch had no experience. Only Emma was competent behind the wheel, but again, no license. So it was all me.

“Just keep me caffeinated,” I said.

“I’ll help,” said Enoch. “I’ll get us there a lot faster than you could, too.”

“Forget it,” I said. “You can take a driver’s-ed class when we get back, but this is no time to learn.”

“I don’t need lessons,” he said. “I already know everything about how cars work.”

“It’s not the same.”

He kicked my seat again, hard.

“What was that for?”

“Driving like a granny.”

We happened, just then, to arrive at the interstate on-ramp. I swung the car onto it and floored the accelerator. The engine wailed and I let out a giddy laugh, and by the time we’d merged onto the highway Enoch was screeching at me to slow down. I checked my mirrors for police cars, eased back on the gas, and pushed all the window buttons.

“Oooooh,” Bronwyn cooed as her window slid down. “Fancy!”

“Music?” I said.

“Yes, please,” said Emma.

Abe had a radio and some ancient kind of tape deck. There was already a cartridge inside, so I hit play. A moment later, a wailing guitar and a huge voice came crashing out of the speakers—Joe Cocker singing “With a Little Help from My Friends.” After three minutes I was convinced no music had ever sounded as good, and my friends, who were all grinning and bopping in their seats, the wind in their hair, seemed to agree. There was something in the act of shouting along to that particular song with these particular people while driving that particular car that gave me a crazy, spine-tingling high like I’d never experienced before. It felt like we were claiming the world for ourselves and our lives as our own.

This is mine. Yes. I’ll do with it what I like.



* * *



? ? ?

It felt so strange and unnatural to think of Miss Peregrine as anything other than our protector and champion, but today she felt like an adversary. When she found out that we had left, it was inevitable she would come looking for us, and she’d do it the best way she knew how—from the air. Her speed, the heights she could fly to, her precise, long-distance vision, and her inbuilt radar for peculiar children meant that we wouldn’t be hard to find if we were within a hundred miles and out in the open. That’s why I didn’t stop at all for the first three hours, not even to let Bronwyn use the bathroom. I wanted to put as much distance between the headmistress and us as possible. After two hundred miles, I finally relented to the rising chorus of complaints from the back seat, but even then I was wary, glancing at the clouds as we exited the highway into a shopping center parking lot. I saw Emma do the same thing.

I filled the Aston’s tank while the others used the bathroom in the filling station’s convenience store. Through its big windows, I could see the clerk and a few other customers checking out my friends as they waited their turn for the single restroom—craning their heads, whispering to one another, outright staring. One guy even took a picture of them with his phone.