by Ransom Riggs
“You just wanted a normal father,” I said.
“Right,” said my dad, as if, finally, I had understood.
“Well, he wasn’t,” I said. “And neither am I.”
“So it would seem.” He stopped pacing and sat on the edge of the bed, his body angled away from mine.
“Your son is a brave and gifted young man,” Miss Peregrine said icily. “You should be very proud of him.”
My father muttered something. I asked him what he’d said.
He looked up, and there was a look in his eyes now that hadn’t been there a moment ago. It was something like loathing.
“You made a choice.”
“It wasn’t a choice,” I said. “It’s who I am.”
“No. You chose them. You chose these . . . people . . . over us.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that. Either-or. We can coexist.”
“Tell that to your mother, screaming like a lunatic! Tell that to your uncles, who are—where? What did you do to them?”
“They’re fine, Dad.”
“Nothing is FINE,” he bellowed, jumping to his feet again. “You’ve destroyed everything!”
Miss Peregrine had been lingering at the door but now stormed into the room, Bronwyn close behind her. “Sit down, Mr. Portman—”
“No! I will not live in a madhouse! I will not subject my family to this insanity!”
“This could work,” I said, “I’m telling you—”
He came at me in a rush, and I thought for a moment he might hit me. But he stopped short. “I made my choice, Jacob. A long time ago. And now it looks like you’ve made yours.” We were chest to chest, my father red-cheeked and breathing hard.
“I’m still your son,” I whispered.
His jaw was set, but I saw his lip tremble, as if he were about to speak. Then he turned away and went to the chair and sat again, his head in his hands. It was silent in the room for a moment, the only sounds his uneven, hitching breaths.
Finally, I said, “Tell me what you want.”
He raised his head without looking at me. Pressed a finger to his temple. “Go ahead,” he said hoarsely. “Wipe it. That’s what you were going to do anyway.”
I felt a sudden desperation.
“Not if you don’t want us to. Not if you think—”
“It’s what I want,” he said, looking to Miss Peregrine. “Only this time, finish the job.”
He sat back in the chair, limp, and the light seemed to go out of his eyes.
Miss Peregrine looked at me.
I could feel myself going numb, head to toe.
I nodded at her. And then I left the room.
* * *
• • •
Emma stopped me as I was rushing down the stairs.
“Are you okay? I didn’t hear what happened—”
“I’m fine,” I said.
I was not, but I did not yet know how to talk about it.
“Jacob, please talk to me.”
“Not now,” I said.
I needed, very badly, to be alone. More specifically, I needed to scream out the window of a fast-moving car until my breath gave out.
She let me go. I didn’t look back; I didn’t want to see the look on her face. I ran past my mother crumpled on the couch and my friends in a nervous, whispering cluster. I snatched the car keys from the wooden bowl on the kitchen counter, went into the garage, and slapped the door button. The garage door made a painful grinding whine as it tried to open, but the car’s rear bumper was so badly wedged into it that it would not, and a moment later it gave up and went silent. I swore and kicked the closest thing to me as hard as I could. It happened to be a boxy old TV stashed under the garage workbench. My shoeless foot went through the back of it and shards of plastic went flying, my foot now numb and probably cut. I extracted it roughly and limped out the side door into the yard and screamed at the trees.
The knot of boiling anger in my chest shrank a little.
I rounded into the backyard, crossed the grass, and walked down our little sun-warped dock that jutted into the bay. My parents didn’t own a boat. Not even a canoe. I only ever 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 of people who can’t understand you and don’t want to—that’s probably the hardest bit. Many find it impossible and retreat into loops. But I never saw that for you. You’ve got a very special talent, and I don’t mean your facility with hollowgast. You’re a shape-shifter of sorts, Jacob, able to move easily between worlds. You were never meant to be tied to just one home, or one family. You’ll have many, like your grandfather did.”
I looked up as a pelican sailed overhead, each wingbeat a little sigh, and imagined my grandfather’s life. He had lived most of it in a crappy little house on the edge of a swamp. His wife and kids hardly knew him. He risked his life, year after year, fighting for the peculiar cause, and his reward in the end was to be treated like a senile old crank.
“I don’t want to be like my grandfather. I don’t want his life.”
“You won’t, you’ll have your own. What about school?”
“I don’t think you’re listening to me. I don’t want”—I turned around, flung my arms wide, screamed it across the water—“ANY! OF THIS! SHIT!”
I turned back to her, face flushing.
“Are you quite finished?” she said.
“Yes,” I said quietly.
“Good. Now that I’m fully briefed on all the things you don’t want . . . what do you want?”
“I want to do something to help the only people in the world who ever truly gave a damn about me. Peculiars. And I want to do something important. Something big.”
“All right, then.” She crouched down and extended her hand. “You can start right now.”
I waded over and she hoisted me up onto the dock.
“I have a job that’s absolutely crucial and that no one in peculiardom can do but you,” Miss Peregrine was saying as we walked.
“Okay. What is it?”
“The children need contemporary outfits. I need you to take them shopping.”
“Shopping?” I stopped walking. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
She turned to face me. Her expression was flat.
“I am not.”
“I said I want to do something important. In the peculiar world!”
She moved in close, her voice low and intense. “I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. It is imperative to the future of that world that these children understand how to navigate this one. And there is no one but you to teach them, Jacob. Who else? The ones who’ve been living in loops for decades know nothing of it—they couldn’t manage a modern-day street crossing! And the ones who haven’t lived in loops are either very old or so young and new to our peculiar world that they’re but neophytes themselves.” She grabbed my shoulders in her hands and squeezed them. “I know. I know you’re angry and you want to leave. But I beg you. Stay just a little longer. I think I know a way for you to exist here—only sometimes, whenever you like—while also doing important work with us in the loops.”
“Yeah?” I said skeptically. “What is it?”
“Give me until—” She fished her pocket watch from her pants and glanced at it. “Until nightfall. Then you’ll see. Satisfactory?”
My first thought was that it had something to do with the Panloopticon in Devil’s Acre, but the closest loop, the one they’d used to get here last night, was hours away in the middle of a swamp. And, anyway, I didn’t want to come and go like a commuter. I wanted to leave all this behind, to go and stay gone. But Miss Peregrine was hard to say no to, and I had agreed to help my friends learn something about the present. I didn’t feel right reneging on that promise outright.
“Fine,” I said. “Tonight.”
“Excellent.” She was about to go when she said, “Oh, before I forget,” and pulled an envelope out of her other pocket and handed it to me. “To cover the shopping.”
I peeked inside. It was stuffed with fifty-dollar bills.
“Will that be sufficient?”
“Uh. I think so.”
She nodded smartly and started toward the house, leaving me stunned with the envelope in my hand. “Much to do, much to do,” she was muttering, and then she called over her shoulder, jabbing a finger into the air: “Tonight!”
Because my parents’ now-three-doored sedan could only accommodate half our group, we’d have to go shopping in two shifts. Shift one would include Emma, because I always gave her preferential treatment and made no secret of it; Olive, because she was a cheerful presence and I wanted some cheering; Millard, because he wouldn’t stop pestering me; and Bronwyn, because her muscles were the only way to force open the stuck garage door. I promised Hugh, Horace, Enoch, and Claire that I’d be back for them in a couple of hours. Horace said he wasn’t interested in buying new clothes, anyway.
“The day denim became acceptable as daily wear,” he said, side-eyeing me, “contemporary fashion lost all credibility. The modern runway looks like a hobo camp.”
“You have to have new clothes,” said Claire. “Miss Peregrine says.”
Enoch scowled. “Miss Peregrine says, Miss Peregrine says! You sound like a windup toy.”
We left them squabbling and went to the garage. With some duct tape, baling wire, and a little spot-welding by Emma, we managed to reattach the driver’s-side door; it didn’t open or close, but we were a lot less likely to get pulled over by curious police officers with four doors than with just three. When we were finished we all piled in. A minute later we were winding down the banyan-shaded road that traced the spine of Needle Key.
Big houses loomed on either side of us, glimpses of beach in the gaps between. It was the first time my friends had seen so much of this world by day, and they were quiet as they drank it in, the girls glued to the windows in back, Millard’s breath fogging the glass on the passenger’s side. I tried to imagine what it looked like to them, these sights that had long ago faded into near invisibility for me.
The key narrowed as we drove south, the big houses giving way to smaller ones, then to colonies of squat condos from the seventies, gaudy signs announcing their names: POLYNESIAN ISLES, PARADISE SHORES, FANTASY ISLAND. As we hit the commercial zone, more blasts of color: pink-roofed knickknack shops that sold sunscreen and beer cozies; bright yellow bait stores; striped-awning real estate offices. And bars, of course, their rows of tiki torches dancing and doors flung open to let the sea breeze in and the creaky warble of Jimmy Buffett karaoke covers out, echoing all the way down to the water’s edge. The speed limit was so glacial, and the road so clogged with sun-drunk beachgoers, that there was time to sing along as you passed by. None of it had changed in my lifetime. Like a long-running play, you could set your watch to the movements of the actors and the timing of the set pieces, the same every day: the European tourists red as lobsters, wilting in the pencil-thin shade of cabbage palms; the leathery fishermen standing sentry along the bridge, hats and bellies drooping, casting lines into the shallows beside their Igloo coolers.
Leaving the key, we rose above the shimmering bay, tires humming over the bridge’s metal grates. Then we descended to the mainland side, an archipelago of
mini-malls and shopping plazas encircled by oceanic parking lots.
“What a strange landscape,” said Bronwyn, breaking the silence. “Why did Abe move here, of all places in America?”
“Florida used to be one of the best areas for peculiars to hide,” said Millard. “Before the hollow wars, anyway. It was the winter home of all the circuses, and the whole middle of the state is a great trackless swamp. They said anybody, no matter how peculiar, could find a place to blend in here—or to vanish.”
We left behind the beige heart of town and headed out toward the boonies. Past the shuttered outlet mall, past the half-built housing development being slowly reclaimed by underbrush, loomed the biggest of the big-box stores. That’s where we were headed. I turned down Piney Woods Road, the mile-long corridor along which all the town’s nursing homes, over-fifty-five trailer parks, and retirement communities had been built. The road was lined with unsubtle billboards for hospitals, urgent care clinics, and mortuary parks. Everyone in town called Piney Woods Road the Highway to Heaven.
I started to brake as we approached a large sign depicting a circle of pine trees, and it wasn’t until I’d actually made the turn that I caught myself. There were several routes to the shopping center we were going to, but by force of habit I’d chosen this one, and because I’d let my mind wander, my subconscious had made the turn for me. It was the entrance to Circle Village, my grandfather’s subdivision.
“Oops, wrong way,” I said, stopping the car and putting it into reverse.
But before I could turn around and get back onto the road, Emma said, “Wait a minute. Jacob—wait.”
My hand lingered on the gearshift as a little wave of dread passed through me.
“Yeah?”
Emma was looking around, craning her neck to see out the back window.
“Isn’t this where Abe used to live?” asked Emma.
“It is, yeah.”
“Really?” said Olive, leaning up between the passenger’s and driver’s seats. “It is?”
“I turned in by accident,” I said. “I’ve driven here so many times, it was just, like, muscle memory.”