A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,139

my bed, pulled some wilted daisies from his pocket, and tossed them onto my blanket. “You’re no hero, either,” he said. “You’re not Abe Portman and you’re never going to be. So why don’t you just stop trying.” And he walked out.

I felt frozen. I didn’t know what to say.

“I’d better be going, too,” Millard mumbled. “I don’t want the headmistress to think we’re . . .”

I couldn’t hear the rest of what he said.

“What? Conspiring?”

“Something like that,” he said.

“What about the others? Are they coming to see me?” I hadn’t seen Horace, Hugh, Olive, or Claire since we’d left on the mission, which felt like a lifetime ago.

“I don’t think so,” said Millard. “See you later, Jacob.”

I didn’t like how this was ending. I could feel a line being drawn, with me on one side, and everyone else on the other.

Millard left, his coat and pants floating out the door. And now I was alone with Emma—and she was moving toward the exit, too.

“Don’t leave,” I said, a sudden, shameful desperation coming over me.

“I really should. I’m sorry, Jacob.”

“It doesn’t have to be over. This is just a setback.”

“Stop. Please.” Her eyes were brimming with tears, and so, I realized, were mine. “It does. It does have to be over.”

“We’ll get H on the phone somehow, talk about what happened, what to do next—”

“Listen, Jacob. Please listen.” She pressed her palms together and touched the tips of her fingers to her lips—prayerful, pleading. “You’re not Abe,” she said. “You’re not Abe, and I’m afraid if you keep trying to be, it will kill you.” She turned away slowly, the doorway framing her, and walked out.

* * *

• • •

I lay in bed listening to noise from the street, thinking, dreaming, talking with Rafael when he came in to sprinkle me with strange dusts. I drifted in and out of an uneasy sleep. My emotions swung between anger and regret. Yes, I felt abandoned by my friends—could I even call them that anymore?—but part of me understood why they’d refused to take my side. They had risked a lot for me and nearly lost it all. I didn’t know if you could be excommunicated from peculiardom, but I imagine we’d all come close.

I was angry at Emma, too, for what she’d done, for what she’d said, for walking away. But I also wondered if the breakdown of our relationship had been my fault. Had I pushed her toward old feelings she’d purposely avoided for years? If I had never gone into Abe’s bunker, never called H, never involved Emma in any of this, would we still be together?

And Miss Peregrine. Miss P could be suffocating and frustrating and condescending, but she did have reason to be angry with me. So did my friends. The whole undertaking had been motivated to an uncomfortable degree by my own frustration with the ymbrynes and anger at my parents. The problem, really, was that I had been trying to navigate a world for which I had not been prepared. The peculiar universe was deeply complex, with rules and traditions and taxonomies and histories that even my friends, who had been studying it for nearly all of their long lives, had not yet wrapped their minds around. Newcomers should be required to train and study as hard as astronauts preparing for space. But when Miss Peregrine’s loop collapsed, I was thrown into it with no choice but to swim for my life. Miraculously, through some combination of dumb luck, peculiar talent, and the bravery of my friends, I had survived—emerged victorious, even.

But luck isn’t something you can depend upon, and my mistake was thinking I could dive in again and everything would work out somehow. In a fit of pique, and completely of my own accord, I had jumped back into that dark water, and had lashed several of my friends to me in the bargain, which was not only unwise, ultimately, but unkind. And I had very nearly died.

I was underprepared and overconfident. I couldn’t blame Miss Peregrine for that. So I couldn’t even be mad at her, really, or at my friends. The more I mulled it over, the more my anger homed in on someone else. A person who hadn’t even been present. A person who wasn’t even alive: my grandfather. He had known, my whole life, who I was. He had known, as a peculiar, what I would have to face one day. But he had not prepared me for it