me, then snapped her fingers, her thumb sparking like struck flint. I startled and came back to myself.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Where’d you go?”
“I’m just—” I waved as if raking cobwebs from the air. “It’s good to see you, that’s all.” Completing a sentence felt like trying to gather a dozen balloons in my arms.
Her smile couldn’t mask a look of mild concern. “I know it must be awfully strange for you, all of us dropping in like this. I hope we didn’t shock you too badly.”
“No, no. Well, maybe a little.” I nodded at the room and everyone in it. Happy chaos accompanied our friends wherever they went. “You sure I’m not dreaming?”
“Are you sure I’m not?” She took my other hand and squeezed it, and her warmth and solidness seemed to lend the world some weight. “I can’t tell you how many times, over the years, I’ve pictured myself visiting this little town.”
For a moment I was confused, but then . . . of course. My grandfather. Abe had lived here since before my dad was born; I’d seen his Florida address on letters Emma had kept. Her gaze drifted as if she were lost in a memory, and I felt an unwelcome twinge of jealousy—then was embarrassed for it. She was entitled to her past, and had every right to feel as unmoored by the collision of our worlds as I did.
Miss Peregrine blew in like a tornado. She had taken off her traveling coat to reveal a striking jacket of green tweed and riding pants, as if she’d just arrived on horseback. She crossed the room tossing out orders. “Olive, come down from there! Enoch, remove your feet from the sofa!” She hooked a finger at me and nodded toward the kitchen. “Mr. Portman, there are matters which require your attention.”
Emma took my arm and accompanied me, for which I was grateful; the room had not quite stopped spinning.
“Off to snog each other already?” said Enoch. “We only just arrived!”
Emma’s free hand darted out to singe the top of his hair. Enoch recoiled and slapped at his smoking head, and the laugh that burst out of me seemed to clear some of the cobwebs from my head.
Yes, my friends were real and they were here. Not only that, Miss Peregrine had said they were going to stay awhile. Learn about the modern world a bit. Have a holiday, a well-earned respite from the squalor of Devil’s Acre—which, with their proud old house on Cairnholm gone, had become their temporary home. Of course they were welcome, and I was inexpressibly grateful to have them here. But how would this work, exactly? What about my parents and uncles, who at this very moment Bronwyn was guarding in the garage? It was too much to grapple with all at once, so for the moment I shoved it aside.
Miss Peregrine was talking to Hugh by the open fridge. They looked jarringly out of place amid the stainless steel and hard edges of my parents’ modern kitchen, like actors who had wandered onto the wrong movie set. Hugh was waving a package of plastic-wrapped string cheese.
“But there’s only strange food here, and I haven’t eaten for centuries!”
“Don’t exaggerate, Hugh.”
“I’m not. It’s 1886 in Devil’s Acre, and that’s where we had breakfast.”
Horace burst from our walk-in pantry. “I have completed my inventory and am frankly shocked. One sack of baking soda, one tin of sardines in salt, and one box of weevil-infested biscuit mix. Is the government rationing his food? Is there a war on?”
“We eat a lot of takeout,” I said, walking up beside him. “My parents don’t really cook.”
“Then why do they have this whomping great kitchen?” said Horace. “I may be an accomplished chef de cuisine, but I can’t make something from nothing.”
The truth was that my father had seen the kitchen in a design magazine and decided he had to have it. He tried to justify the cost by promising he would learn to cook and then throw legendary dinner parties for the family—but, like a lot of his plans, it fizzled after a few cooking lessons. So now they had this hugely expensive kitchen that was used mostly to cook frozen dinners and heat up day-old takeout. But rather than say any of that, I shrugged.
“Surely you won’t perish of hunger in the next five minutes,” Miss Peregrine said, and shooed both Horace and Hugh from the kitchen. “Now, then. You were looking a bit wobbly earlier, Mr.