A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(61)

“We’ve got to buy you modern outfits,” I said when they came back outside. “Now.”

No one objected. And anyway, I had chosen this highway exit with that in mind. Across the street from the filling station was the biggest of all big-box stores: a twenty-four-hour Super All-Mart. It was the retail mother ship. A city unto itself.

“My God, what is this place?” Millard said as we pulled into its endless parking lot.

“It’s just a store,” I said. “A big one.”

We crossed the parking lot to the entrance, and a bank of automatic doors hissed open before us. Enoch leapt with fight-or-flight surprise.

“What, what, WHAT!” he shouted, raising his fists.

Now people were staring. We hadn’t even made it inside.

I took my friends aside and explained about motion sensors and sliding doors.

“What’s wrong with using a handle to open a door?” Enoch asked, irritated and embarrassed.

“It’s hard if you have a lot of stuff,” I said. “Like this guy.” I pointed at a man pushing a full cart out through the whooshing doors.

“Why would anyone need so many things?” said Emma.

“Maybe he’s stocking up for an air raid,” said Enoch.

“I think you’ll understand once we’re inside,” I said.

I’d grown up shopping at stores like All-Mart, so the essential strangeness of them had never fully occurred to me. But as my friends followed me inside and came to a dead stop at the checkout stands, shock and wonder on their faces, I began to understand.

Aisles stretched into a hazy distance. A kaleidoscopic array of items sang out for attention from every shelf. A small army of sullen stock clerks patrolled in uniforms emblazoned with giant yellow smiley faces. It was a thousand times larger than the corner store Millard had stolen groceries from. Of course my friends were overwhelmed.

“Just a store, he says,” Emma said, craning her neck to take it all in. “This isn’t like any store I’ve seen.”

Enoch whistled. “More like a blimp hangar.”

I grabbed a cart, and, with some cajoling, managed to get us moving again, if not quite in the right direction. Once they got over the sheer size of the place, they marveled at the huge and bizarre variety of things for sale. I was attempting to navigate us toward the clothing section, but my friends kept getting distracted, splitting off from the group, and plucking random things from shelves.

“What’s this?” Enoch said, waggling a pair of slippers with microfiber knobbles on the bottom.

I took it from him and put it back. “It’s so you can dust the floor with your feet? I think?”

“And this?” said Emma, pointing at a box labeled TALKING BIRD FEEDER—NOW WITH BLUETOOTH!

“I’m not really sure,” I said, feeling like a harried mom herding toddlers, “but we only have seventy-two hours to complete these tasks, so we shouldn’t—”

“Sixty-two now,” said Emma. “Or maybe less.”

A display of books came tumbling down at the end of the aisle, and I had to run and stop Millard—naked and thus invisible—from trying to right it again. I kept an especially watchful eye on Millard (or where I thought he might be) because I really didn’t want to lose an invisible boy in All-Mart.

Our momentum never lasted long. We’d just moved past the Bluetooth bird feeders when Enoch got hung up in the sporting goods aisle. “Ooh, this little sweetheart would make quick work of a chicken’s rib cage!” he cooed at some folding knives in a locked case.

Emma kept asking why. Why did we need so many varieties of everything? What was it all for? She found the women’s beauty aisle especially vexing. “Who would need so many different kinds of skin cream?” she asked, plucking a box labeled EXTRA-FIRMING ANTI-AGING OVERNIGHT RENEWAL SERUM from a shelf. “Is everyone ill with skin diseases? Has there been a plague of skin-related deaths?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

“It’s very strange!”

“Easy for you to say, honey,” said a lady with voluminous hair and hoop earrings who’d been standing nearby. “You’ve got skin like a baby!”

Emma returned the box quickly to its shelf, and we slinked away.

Millard didn’t say much (because I’d begged him not to), but I could tell he was taking mental notes from the little sighs and hmms he made. How many lifetimes of loop days would it take, I wondered, for Millard to make a history of everything that happened in this place in a twenty-four-hour period?

When we finally made it to the clothing section, I was feeling pressed for time—I worried about the ticking clock, about the normals who’d been staring since we walked in, about Miss Peregrine finding us if we stayed put too long, even though we were hundreds of miles from my house and she was hopefully still sleeping off the effects of Mother Dust’s powder. I barely paid attention to the clothes my friends put into our cart. And I only realized that I was hungry as we were checking out. Everyone else was, too, but rather than diving back into the store itself for food, we grabbed what we could from the checkout lane: chocolate bars, Funyuns, candy.

“Immortal food,” Emma said, noting the expiration date on the back of a bag of Wild Cherry Jim Jams. “How novel.”

We cleared the checkouts and headed for the bathrooms, where everyone ducked inside to change into the clothes they’d bought. As they emerged one by one, it was clear there was more work to be done. They were wearing the most normal clothes from the most normal store there was, but they did not yet look convincingly normal. Maybe they weren’t comfortable, or I was so used to seeing them in their old clothes that the sudden change in their appearance threw me off, but for some reason it looked like they were wearing costumes.