A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,71
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.
All except Emma. She came out wearing tight black jeans, white Reebok Classics, and a billowy top the color of root beer. She looked beautiful, I thought, as she turned to frown at a mirror.
“I look like a man.”
“You look great. And modern.”
She sighed and lifted the plastic bag into which her old dress had been rudely stuffed. “I miss this already.”
“This fabric is so . . . itchless,” said Bronwyn, pulling at the gray henley shirt we’d bought her. “I can’t get used to it.”
Enoch emerged from the bathroom in thick-soled creeper sneakers, pajama bottoms with flaming skulls emblazoned on each knee, and a T-shirt that read NORMAL PEOPLE SCARE ME.
Emma shook her head. “That’s the last time you pick out your own clothes.”
There was no time to return anything, so we walked out—somehow attracting even more stares than we did walking in. As we pushed our cart through the automatic doors, a loud, bleeping alarm sounded.
“What’s that?” Emma yelped.
“We may not have, er, paid for everything,” said Millard.
“What! Why?” I said.
Two guys in blue vests were speed-walking toward us.
“Old habits die hard,” Millard said. “Never mind, run for it!” He grabbed the cart from me and sprinted toward the car with it—and now easily a hundred people were watching the cart apparently steer itself across the pavement, followed by a clutch of weird-looking kids and two loss-prevention agents.
We dove into the car with our bags. I jammed the key into the ignition and twisted it, and the car started with a loud bark that made me cringe. I floored the gas, tore down the aisle of cars and through the two blue-vested agents, who dove in opposite directions to avoid being run over.