A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(9)

“So you want us to . . . what?” said Horace. “Take normalling lessons?”

“Yes. I want you to learn what you can while you’re here, not just bake your brains in the sun. And I happen to know a very capable teacher.” Miss Peregrine turned to me and smiled. “Mr. Portman, would you accept the job?”

“Me?” I said. “I’m not exactly an expert on what’s normal. There’s a reason I feel so at home with you guys.”

“Miss P’s right,” said Emma. “You’re perfect for it. You’ve lived here all your life. You grew up thinking you were normal, but you’re one of us.”

“Well, I had planned on spending the next few weeks in a padded room,” I said, “but now that that’s not happening, I guess I could teach you guys a thing or two.”

“Normalling lessons!” said Olive. “Oh, how fun!”

“There’s so much to cover,” I said. “Where do we start?”

“In the morning,” Miss Peregrine said. “It’s getting late, and we should all find beds.”

She was right—it was nearly midnight, and my friends had begun their day in Devil’s Acre twenty-three hours (and one hundred thirty–odd years) ago. We were all exhausted. I found places for everyone to sleep—in our guest bedrooms, stretched out on couches, in a tangle of blankets in a broom closet for Enoch, who preferred his sleeping arrangements dark and nest-like. I offered my parents’ bed to Miss Peregrine, since they wouldn’t be using it, but she demurred. “I appreciate the offer, but let Bronwyn and Miss Bloom share it. I’ll be keeping watch tonight.” She flashed me a knowing look that said, And not just over the house, and it took a lot of effort not to roll my eyes at her. You don’t have to worry, I almost said, Emma and I are taking things slow. But what business was that of hers? I was so irritated that the minute she left to tuck Olive and Claire into bed I found Emma and said, “Want to see my room?”

“Absolutely,” she replied, and we snuck into the hall and up the stairs.



* * *



? ? ?

I could hear Miss Peregrine’s voice drifting up from one of the guest bedrooms, where she was singing a soft and sad lullaby. Like all peculiar lullabies it was mournful and long—this one a saga about a girl whose only friends were ghosts—which meant we had several minutes, at least, before Miss P came looking for Emma.

“My room’s kind of a mess,” I warned her.

“I’ve been sleeping in a dormitory with two dozen girls,” she said. “I am unshockable.”

We darted up the stairs and into my bedroom. I flipped on the lights. Emma’s mouth fell open.

“What is all this stuff?”

“Ah,” I said. “Right.” I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Explaining my room was going to eat up time we otherwise might have spent making out.

I didn’t have stuff. I had collections. And I had a lot of them, spread across bookshelves that lined my room. I wouldn’t have called myself a pack rat—and I wasn’t a hoarder—but collecting things was one of the ways I had dealt with loneliness as a kid. When your best friend is your seventy-five-year-old grandpa, you spend a lot of time doing what grandpas do, and for us that meant hitting garage sales every Saturday morning. (Grandpa Portman might have been a peculiar war hero and a badass hollowgast hunter, but few things thrilled him more than a bargain.)

At each sale I was allowed to pick out one thing that cost less than fifty cents. Multiply that by several garage sales per weekend and that’s how I amassed, over the course of a decade, a huge number of old records, dime-store detective novels with silly covers, MAD magazines, and other things that were objectively junk but nevertheless arranged like treasures along the shelves around my room. My parents often begged me to cull the herd and throw most of it away, and while I had made a few halfhearted attempts, I never got far—the rest of the house was so big and modern and blank that I had developed a sort of horror of empty space, so when it came to the only room in the house over which I had some control, I preferred it full. Which is why, in addition to all the overflowing bookshelves, I had plastered one wall floor to ceiling with maps, and another with old record album covers.

“Oh, wow. You really like music!” Emma broke away from me and went to the wall—the one with album covers growing over it like scales. I was starting to resent my distracting decor.

“Doesn’t everyone?” I said.

“Not everyone papers their walls with it.”

“I’m mostly into the older stuff,” I said.

“Oh, me too,” she said. “I don’t like these new groups, with their loud guitars and long hair.” She picked up a copy of Meet the Beatles! and wrinkled her nose.

“That record came out, what . . . fifty years ago?”

“Like I said. But you never mentioned liking music so much.” She walked along the wall, trailing her hand over my records, looking at everything. “There are lots of things I don’t know about you, but I want to.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I feel like we know each other so well in some ways, but in others it’s like we just met.”

“In our defense, we were both quite busy, what with trying not to die and rescuing all those ymbrynes and such. But now we have time.”