A Map of Days Read online

  “The man in the back,” she was saying, pointing at my uncle Bobby, “I seen him using his, his little—” She pulled Bobby’s phone from her pocket.

  “Cell phone,” I said.

  “Right—that,” she continued. “So I took it away, which made all of them as mad as a bag of ferrets, and then I did like Miss P showed me—”

  “You used the powder?” said Miss Peregrine.

  “I blew it right at ’em, but they didn’t fall asleep straight off. Jacob’s dad started up the car, but instead of going forward, he—he—” Bronwyn gestured to the dented garage door, words failing her.

  Miss Peregrine patted her on the arm. “Yes, dear, I can see. You handled things just right.”

  “Yeah,” said Enoch. “Right through the wall.”

  We turned to see the other kids peeping at us from a tight cluster in the hallway.

  “I told you to stay where you were,” said Miss Peregrine.

  “After that noise?” said Enoch.

  “I’m sorry, Jacob,” Bronwyn said. “They got so upset, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t hurt ’em, did I?”

  “I don’t think so.” I had experienced the velvety sleep induced by Mother Dust’s powder, and it wasn’t a bad place to spend a few hours. “Can I see my uncle’s phone?”

  Bronwyn handed it to me. The screen was spider-cracked but readable. When it lit up, I saw a string of texts from my aunt:

  What’s happening?

  When will u be home?

  Everything ok??

  In reply, Uncle Bobby had started to type CALL THE COPS and then probably realized that he could just as easily call them himself. But Bronwyn had taken his phone before he was able to. If she’d been a few seconds slower, we might’ve had a visit from the SWAT team. My chest tightened as I realized how fast our situation could have become dangerous and complicated. Hell, I thought, looking from the ruined car to the ruined wall to the ruined garage door. It already has.

  “Don’t worry, Jacob. I’ve handled much stickier situations.” Miss Peregrine was walking around the car, examining the damage. “Your family will sleep soundly until morning, and I daresay we should try to do the same.”

  “And then what?” I said, anxious and starting to sweat. The unair-conditioned garage was sweltering.

  “When they wake, I’ll wipe their recent memories and send your uncles home.”

  “But what will they—”

  “I’ll explain that we’re distant relatives from your father’s side of the family, here from Europe to pay our respects at Abe’s grave. And as for your appointment at the asylum, you’re feeling much better now and no longer require psychiatric care.”

  “And what about—”

  “Oh, they’ll believe it; normals are highly suggestible following a memory wipe. I could probably convince them we’re visitors from a moon colony.”

  “Miss Peregrine, please stop doing that.”

  She smiled. “My apologies. A century of headmistressing trains you to anticipate questions for the sake of expediency. Now come along, children, we need to discuss protocol for the next several days. There’s much to learn about the present, and no time like the present to start learning.”

  She began herding everyone out of the garage while they peppered her with questions and complaints:

  “How long can we stay?” said Olive.

  “May we go exploring in the morning?” said Claire.

  “I would like to eat something before I perish from the earth,” said Millard.

  Soon, I was alone in the garage, lingering partly because I felt bad about leaving my family there overnight, but also because I was anxious about their impending memory wipe. Miss Peregrine seemed confident, but this would be a bigger wipe than the one she had performed on them in London, which had only deleted about ten minutes of their memories. What if she didn’t erase enough, or erased too much? What if my dad forgot all he knew about birds, or my mom forgot all the French she learned in college?

  I watched them sleep for a minute, this new weight settling upon me. I felt suddenly, uncomfortably adult, while my family—vulnerable, peaceful, drooling a bit—looked almost like babies.

  Maybe there was another way.

  Emma leaned in through the open door. “Everything okay? I think the boys are going to riot if dinner doesn’t appear soon.”

  “I wasn’t sure I should leave them,” I said, nodding toward my family.

  “They aren’t going anywhere, and they shouldn’t need watching. With the dose they got, they’ll sleep like rocks into the middle of tomorrow.”

  “I know. I just . . . I feel a little bad.”

  “You shouldn’t.” She came and stood next to me. “It’s not your fault. At all.”

  I nodded. “It seems a little tragic, is all.”

  “What does?”

  “That Abe Portman’s son will never know how special a man his father was.”

  Emma took my arm and draped it over her shoulders. “I think it’s a hundred times more tragic that he’ll never know how special a man his son is.”

  I was just leaning down to kiss her when my uncle’s phone buzzed in my pocket. It made us both startle, and I pulled it out to find a new text from my aunt.

  Is crazy J in the loony bin yet?

  “What is it?” Emma asked.

  “Nothing important.” I returned the phone to my pocket and turned toward the door. Suddenly, leaving my family in the garage overnight didn’t seem like such a bad idea. “Come on, let’s figure out dinner.”

  “Are you sure?” Emma said.

  “Very.”

  I flipped off the lights as we left.

  * * *

  • • •

  I suggested we order pizza from a place that delivered late. Only a few of the kids even knew what pizza was, and delivery was a totally foreign concept.

  “They prepare it remotely and bring it to your home?” said Horace, as if the idea were vaguely scandalous.

  “Pizza—is that Floridian cuisine?” asked Bronwyn.

  “Not really,” I said. “But trust me, you’ll like it.”

  I called in a massive order and we settled onto couches and chairs in the living room to wait for it to arrive. Miss Peregrine whispered in my ear, “I think it’s time to make that speech.” Without waiting for a reply, she cleared her throat and announced to the room that I had something to say. So I stood up and began, somewhat awkwardly, to improvise.

  “I’m so glad you’re all here. I’m not sure if you know where my family was taking me tonight, but it wasn’t a good place. I mean—” I hesitated. “I mean, it might be good for some people, you know, with real mental problems, but . . . long story short, you guys saved my ass.”

  Miss Peregrine frowned.

  “It was you that saved our . . . bums,” said Bronwyn, glancing at the headmistress. “We were only returning the favor.”

  “Well, thanks. When you all first arrived, I thought you were a dream. I’ve been dreaming about you visiting me here ever since we met. So it was pretty hard to believe it was really happening. Anyway, the point is, you are here, and I hope I can make you feel as welcome as you made me feel when I came to stay in your loop.” I nodded and looked to the floor, suddenly self-conscious. “So, basically, thrilled you’re here, love you guys, speech over.”

  “We love you, too!” Claire said, and she leapt out of her seat and ran to hug me. Then Olive and Bronwyn joined her, and soon almost everyone was bear-hugging the breath out of me.

  “We’re so happy to be here,” said Claire.

  “And not in Devil’s Acre,” added Horace.

  “We’ll have ever so much fun!” sang Olive.

  “Sorry we broke part of your house,” said Bronwyn.

  “What do you mean, we?” said Enoch.


  “Can’t breathe,” I gasped. “Squeezing too hard—”

  The pack expanded enough for me to inhale. Then Hugh inserted himself into the gap and poked me in the chest.

  “You know it’s not all of us who are here, right?” A solitary bee zipped around him in agitated circles. The others moved back, giving Hugh and his angry bee some space. “When you said you were glad we were all here. Well, we’re not.”

  It took me a moment to realize what he meant, and then I felt ashamed. “I’m sorry, Hugh. I didn’t mean to leave out Fiona.”

  He looked down at his fuzzy striped socks. “Sometimes I feel like everyone but me has forgotten her.” His bottom lip trembled, and then he clenched his fists to make it stop. “She’s not dead, you know.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  He met my eyes, defiant. “She’s not.”

  “Okay. She’s not.”

  “I really miss her, Jacob.”

  “We all do,” I said. “I didn’t mean to leave her out, and I haven’t forgotten her.”

  “Apology accepted,” Hugh said, and then he wiped his face, turned on his heel, and walked out of the room.

  “If you can believe it,” Millard said after a moment, “that was progress.”

  “He’ll barely even talk to any of us,” said Emma. “He’s angry, and he won’t face the truth.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible Fiona could be alive somewhere?” I asked.

  “I’d rate it unlikely,” said Millard.

  Miss Peregrine winced and put a finger to her lips—she’d been gliding toward us across the room—and with a hand on our backs, she pushed us into a private huddle. “We put out word to every loop and peculiar community we’re in contact with,” she said quietly. “We’ve distributed communiques, bulletins, photographs, detailed descriptions—I even sent Miss Wren’s pigeon scouts to search the forests for Fiona. Thus far, nothing.”

  Millard sighed. “If she was alive, poor thing, wouldn’t she have reached out to us by now? We aren’t difficult to find.”

  “I guess so,” I said. “But has anyone tried looking for her . . . um . . .”

  “Her body?” Millard said.

  “Millard, please,” said the headmistress.

  “Was that indelicate? Should I have chosen a less exact term?”

  “Just be quiet,” Miss Peregrine hissed.

  Millard didn’t lack feeling; he just wasn’t good at minding the feelings of others.

  “The fall that likely killed Fiona,” Millard said, “occurred in Miss Wren’s menagerie loop, which has since collapsed. If her body was there, it is no longer recoverable.”

  “I’ve been weighing whether to hold a memorial service,” Miss Peregrine said. “But I can’t even raise the topic without sending Hugh into a spiral of depression. I fear if we push him too hard—”

  “He won’t even adopt new bees,” said Millard. “He says he wouldn’t love them the same if they’d never met Fiona, so he only keeps the one, who’s of a rather advanced age at this point.”

  “Sounds like this change of scenery might do him good,” I said.

  Just then the doorbell rang. And not a moment too soon, as the mood in the room was growing heavier by the second.

  Claire and Bronwyn tried to follow me down the hall, but Miss Peregrine snapped at them. “I don’t think so! You’re not ready to talk to normals yet.”

  I didn’t think there was much risk in them meeting the pizza delivery guy—until I opened the door to see a kid I knew from school, balancing a stack of pizza boxes in his hands.

  “Ninety-four sixty,” he mumbled, then jerked his head in recognition. “Oh, snap. Portman?”

  “Justin. Hey.”

  His name was Justin Pamperton, though everyone called him Pampers. He was one of the pothead skaters who haunted the outer parking lots of our school.

  “You look good,” he said. “Are you, like, better now?”

  “What do you mean?” I said, not actually wanting to know what he meant, counting out his money as quickly as I could. (I had earlier raided my parents’ sock drawer, where they always kept a couple hundred bucks stashed.)

  “Word is you went, like, off the deep end. No offense.”

  “Uh, nope,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Righteous,” he said, nodding like a bobblehead figurine. “’Cause what I heard was—”

  He stopped mid-sentence. Someone inside was laughing.

  “Dude, are you having a party right now?”

  I took the pizzas from him, shoved the bills into his hand. “Something like that. Keep the change.”

  “With girls?” He tried to peek into the house, but I shifted to block his view. “I’m off in an hour. I can pick up some beers . . .”

  I had never wanted anyone off my porch so badly.

  “Sorry, it’s kind of a private thing.”

  He looked impressed. “You handle that, dogg.” He raised a hand to high-five me, realized I couldn’t because of the pizzas, then made a fist and shook it. “See you in a week, Portman.”

  “In a week?”

  “School, bro! What planet have you been living on?” He jogged off toward his idling hatchback, shaking his head and laughing to himself.

  * * *

  • • •

  Conversation ground to a halt as the pizza was distributed, and for a full three minutes there was only the sound of lips smacking and the occasional satisfied grunt. In the lull I kept replaying Justin’s words. School started in a week, and somehow I had forgotten all about it. Before my parents decided I was certifiable and tried to have me committed, I’d made up my mind to go back to school. My plan had been to stick it out at home long enough to graduate, then escape to London so I could be with Emma and my friends. But now the friends I had thought so distant, and the world I had thought so inaccessible, had landed on my doorstep, and in the space of one night everything changed. My friends were now free to roam anywhere (and anytime) they liked. Could I really imagine sitting through interminable classes and lunch periods and mandatory assemblies every day while all that was waiting for me?

  Maybe not, but it was too much to figure out right at that moment, pizza in my lap, still dizzy with the idea that any of this was possible. School didn’t start for a week. There was time. Right now all I needed to do was eat and enjoy the company of my friends.

  “This is the best food in the world!” Claire announced through a mouthful of gooey cheese. “I’ll be having this every night.”

  “Not if you want to live out the week,” said Horace, plucking the olives off his slice with fastidious precision. “There’s more sodium in this than in the whole Dead Sea.”

  “Worried you’ll get fat?” Enoch laughed. “Fat Horace. That I’d like to see.”

  “That I’ll bloat,” said Horace. “My clothes are tailored just so, unlike the flour sacks you wear.”

  Enoch glanced down at his clothes—a collarless gray shirt under a black vest, fraying black pants, and patent leather shoes that had long ago lost their shine. “I got these in Pah-ree,” he said in an exaggerated French accent, “from a fashionable fellow who was no longer in need of them.”

  “From a dead fellow,” said Claire, her lips curling in disgust.

  “Funeral parlors are the best secondhand boutiques in the world,” said Enoch, taking a massive chomp of pizza. “You’ve just got to get the clothes before their occupant begins to leak.”

  “Well, there goes my appetite,” said Horace, tossing his plate down on the coffee table.

  “Pick that up and finish it,” Miss Peregrine scolded him. “We don’t waste food.”

  Horace sighed and picked up his plate again. “Sometimes I envy Nullings. He could gain a hundred pounds and no one would notice.”

  “I’m quite svelte,
for your information,” said Millard, and made a sound that could only have been his hand smacking his bare stomach. “Come have a feel if you don’t believe me.”

  “I’ll pass, thanks.”

  “For bird’s sake, clothe yourself, Millard,” said Miss Peregrine. “What have I said about unnecessary nudity?”

  “What does it matter if no one can see me?” Millard replied.

  “It’s in bad taste.”

  “But it’s so hot here!”

  “Now, Mr. Nullings.”

  Millard stood up from the couch and grumbled something about prudes as he breezed past, then came back a minute later with a bath towel tied loosely around his waist. But Miss Peregrine disapproved of this, too, and sent him away again. When he returned the second time, he was overdressed in clothes he’d ransacked from my closet: hiking boots, wool pants, a coat, a scarf, a hat, and gloves.

  “Millard, you’ll perish of heatstroke!” said Bronwyn.

  “At least no one will have to imagine me in a state of nature!” he said, which had the desired effect of annoying Miss Peregrine. She announced that it was time for another security check and left the room.

  The laughs many of us had been holding in burst out.

  “Did you see her face?” said Enoch. “She was ready to kill you, Nullings!”

  The dynamic between the kids and Miss Peregrine had shifted a bit. They seemed more like teenagers now—real ones, beginning to chafe against her authority.

  “You’re all being rude!” said Claire. “Stop it right now!”

  Well, not all of them were chafing.

  “Don’t you find it wearying, being lectured about every little thing?” said Millard.

  “Little thing!” Enoch said, then burst out laughing all over again. “Millard has a—oww!”

  Claire had bit him on the shoulder with her backmouth, and while Enoch was rubbing the spot, she said, “No, I don’t find it wearying. And it is strange for you to be nude in mixed company for no good reason.”