A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,11

I kissed her.

We danced and kissed until the song ended. Eventually, a soft hiss filled the room, and we kept dancing awhile longer because we weren’t ready for the moment to end. I tried to forget the strange turn things had taken, and how I’d felt when she’d mentioned my grandfather. She was going through something and that was okay. Even if I couldn’t understand it.

For now, I told myself, all that mattered was that we were together and we were safe. For now, that was enough. It was more than we’d ever had. There was no clock counting down to the moment she would wither and turn to dust. There were no bombers turning the world to fire around us. There were no hollowgast lurking outside the door. I didn’t know what our future held, but in that moment it was enough just to believe we had one.

I heard Miss Peregrine talking downstairs. That was our cue.

“Until tomorrow,” she whispered in my ear. “Good night, Jacob.”

We kissed one more time. It felt like an electric pulse, and left every part of me tingling. Then she slipped out the door, and for the first time since my friends had arrived, I was alone.

* * *

• • •

That night, I could hardly sleep. It wasn’t so much the snores of Hugh as he dozed in a pile of blankets on my floor as it was a buzzing in my head, filled now with uncertainty and exciting new prospects. When I left Devil’s Acre to come back home, it was because I had decided that finishing high school and keeping my parents in my life were important enough goals that they were worth enduring Englewood for a couple more years. The time between now and graduation had promised to be a special kind of torment, though, especially with Emma and my friends stuck in loops on the other side of the Atlantic.

But so much had changed in one night. Now, maybe, I didn’t have to wait. Maybe now I wouldn’t have to choose one or the other: peculiar or normal, this life or that. I wanted, and needed, both—though not in equal measure. I had no interest in a normal career. In settling down with someone who didn’t understand who I was, or in having kids from whom I had to keep half my life a secret, like my grandfather had.

That said, I didn’t want to go through life a high school dropout—you can’t exactly put hollowgast tamer on a résumé—and though my mom and dad were never going to win Parents of the Year, I didn’t want to cut them out of my life, either. I also didn’t want to become so alienated from the normal world that I forgot how to navigate it. The peculiar world was wonderful and I knew I would never be whole without it, but it could also be extraordinarily stressful and overwhelming. For the sake of my long-term sanity, I needed to maintain a connection to my normal life. I needed that balance.

So: Maybe the next year or two didn’t have to feel like a prison sentence as I waited for it all. Maybe I could be with my friends and with Emma and have my home and my family. Emma could even go to school with me. Maybe all my friends could! We could take classes together, eat lunch together, go to stupid school dances. Of course—what more perfect place to learn about the lives and habits of normal teenagers than high school? After a semester of that, they’d be able to impersonate normals with no problem (even I had learned to do it, eventually), and to blend in when we ventured out into the larger world of peculiar America. Whenever time permitted we would travel back to Devil’s Acre to help the cause, rebuild the loops, and hopefully make peculiardom impervious to future threats.

Unfortunately, the key to it all was my parents. They could make this easy or they could make it impossible. If only there was a way for my friends to be here without my mom and dad losing it, so that we wouldn’t have to tiptoe around them, afraid that an accidental display of peculiarness would send them screaming into the streets and bring hell down upon our heads.

There had to be something I could tell my parents that they would believe. Some way to explain my friends. Their presence, their strangeness—maybe even their abilities. I racked my brain for