A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,24

used the dock for one thing: sitting on the end with my feet dangled into the brown water, thinking about unpleasant things. Which is what I did now.

After a minute or two, I heard footsteps coming down the planks. I was ready to turn and bark at whoever it was to please go to hell, but then the slightly uneven gait gave her away, and I couldn’t bring myself to be rude to Miss Peregrine.

“Watch out for nails,” I said without turning.

“Thank you,” she replied. “May I sit?”

I kept my eyes on the water. Shrugged. A boat puttered by in the distance.

“It’s done,” she said. “Your parents are in a suggestible state now, ready for input. I need to know what you’d like me to tell them.”

“I don’t care.”

A few seconds passed. She sat down on the dock beside me.

“When I was your age,” she said, “I tried something similar with my parents.”

“Miss Peregrine, I really don’t feel like talking right now.”

“So, listen.”

Sometimes Miss Peregrine couldn’t be argued with.

“I had been away at Miss Avocet’s ymbryne academy for a few years,” she began, “when it occurred to me that I still had a mother and father, and it would please me to see them again. Because some considerable time had passed since I’d gotten my wings and been rather unceremoniously driven from my home, I thought they might see me in a different light—as a person, and a daughter—rather than some loathsome aberration. I found them living in a hovel on the outskirts of our village. They had been shunned because of me. Even our relations refused to associate with them. Everyone believed they were consorts of the devil. I tried to win them over. They still loved me, but they feared me even more. It ended with my mother cursing the day I was born and my father chasing me from the house with an iron from the fire. Years later, I heard they had died—sewed stones into their pockets and walked into the sea.”

She sighed. A breeze whisked up, carrying away the stagnant summer heat for a moment. It hardly seemed possible that the world she was describing could exist alongside this one.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said.

“Our blood relationships often don’t survive the truth,” she replied.

I thought about that for a moment, and then I got annoyed. “That’s not what you said an hour ago. You said the truth is worth the trouble, or something.”

She shifted uncomfortably, brushing sand from the hem of her dress. “I thought I should let you try.”

“Why?” I said, my voice starting to rise.

“It’s not my place to tell you how to be a son to your parents.”

“As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have parents.”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “I know they said terrible things to you, but you can’t—”

I stood up suddenly and jumped into the water. I held my breath and stayed down, hoping the blackness and the sudden chill would blot out my thoughts:

He doesn’t want to know you.

He chose oblivion rather than knowing you.

And then I screamed into the muddy depths until I ran out of breath. When I surfaced again, maybe twenty feet from the dock, Miss Peregrine was on her feet, about to dive in after me.

“Jacob! Are you—”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said. The water was so shallow that I could easily touch bottom. “I told you I didn’t feel like talking.”

“That you did,” she said.

She stood on the dock and I stood in the bay up to my waist, my feet sinking into the mud while little fish nibbled at my legs.

“I’m going to say something,” she said, “and you aren’t allowed to throw a tantrum in response.”

“Fine.”

“I know you don’t like it much right now, but I promise you will regret throwing this normal life away.”

“What life? I’ve got no friends here. My parents are afraid and ashamed of me.”

“They are alive, which is more than most of us can say. And, as of five minutes ago, they don’t remember any of what just happened.”

“Well, I do. And I’m not interested in pretending I’m someone I’m not for the rest of my life. If that’s the price of being their son, it’s not worth it.”

She looked as if she wanted to shout something at me, but then swallowed it back. “I never claimed being peculiar was easy,” she said after a moment. “There are many unpleasant and difficult things about being one of us. Learning how to negotiate a world