I nodded sheepishly. But yes, undoubtedly. Anyone could see it.
“You may have other loves,” Miss Peregrine said. “Young hearts, like young brains, can have short attention spans.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I’m not like that.”
I knew it sounded like something an impulsive teenager would say, but at that moment, I was as sure about Emma as I’d ever been about anything.
Miss Peregrine nodded slowly. “I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “Miss Bloom may have given you permission to break her heart, but I have not. She’s very important to me, and not half as tough as she lets on. I can’t have her mooning about and setting things on fire should you find yourself distracted by the feeble charms of some normal girl. I’ve been through that already, and we simply haven’t the furniture to spare. Do you understand?”
“Um,” I said, caught off guard, “I think so …”
She stepped closer and said it again, her voice dropping low and stony. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, Miss Peregrine.”
She nodded sharply, then smiled and patted my shoulder. “Okay, then. Good talk.” And before I could respond she was marching back into the library and calling out, “Breakfast!”
* * *
I left an hour later, accompanied to the dock by Emma and Miss Peregrine and a full complement of our friends and ymbrynes. Sharon was waiting with a new boat left behind by fleeing Ditch pirates. There was a long exchange of hugs and tearful goodbyes, which ended with me promising I would come and see everyone again—even though I didn’t know how I’d manage that anytime soon, what with international flights to pay for and parents to convince.
“We’ll never forget you, Jacob!” Olive said, sniffling.
“I shall record your story for posterity,” Millard promised. “That will be my new project. And I’ll see that it’s included in a new edition of the Tales of the Peculiar. You’ll be famous!”
Addison approached with the two grimbear cubs trailing him. I couldn’t tell if he had adopted them or they him. “You’re the fourth-bravest human I’ve ever known,” he said. “I hope we’ll meet again.”
“I hope so, too,” I said, and meant it.
“Oh, Jacob, may we come and visit you?” begged Claire. “I’ve always wanted to see America.”
I didn’t have the heart to explain why it wasn’t possible. “Of course you can,” I said. “I’d love that.”
Sharon rapped his staff on the side of the boat. “All aboard!”
Reluctantly I climbed in, and then Emma and Miss Peregrine boarded, too. They had insisted on staying with me until I met my parents, and I hadn’t put up a fight. It would be easier to say goodbye in stages.
Sharon unmoored the boat and we pushed off. Our friends waved and called to us as we floated away. I waved back, but it hurt too much to watch them recede, so I half closed my eyes until the current had taken us around a bend in the Ditch, and they were gone.
None of us felt like talking. In silence we watched the sagging buildings and rickety bridges pass. After a while we came to the crossover, were sucked rudely through the same underpass by which we’d entered, and spat out the other side into a muggy, modern afternoon. The crumbling tenements of Devil’s Acre were gone, glass-fronted condos and shining office towers risen up in their place. A motorboat buzzed past.
The sounds of a busy, preoccupied present-day filtered in. A car alarm. A cell phone ringing. Jangly pop music. We passed a fancy canal-side restaurant, but thanks to Sharon’s enchantment, the diners on the patio didn’t see us as we floated by. If they had, I wondered what they would’ve thought of us: two teenagers in black, a woman in Victorian formalwear, and Sharon in his Grim Reaper cloak, poling us out of the underworld. Who knows—maybe the modern world was so jaded that no one would have batted an eye.
My parents were another story, though—and now that we were back in the present, just what that story would be was starting to concern me. They already thought I’d lost my mind, or gotten into hard drugs. I’d be lucky if they didn’t ship me off to a mental hospital. Even if they didn’t, I’d be doing damage control for years. They would never trust me again.
But it was my struggle, and I would find a way to deal with it. The easiest thing for me would be to tell them the truth—but again, I couldn’t. My parents would never understand this part of my life, and to try and force them to could land them in a mental hospital.
My dad already knew more about the peculiar children than was good for him. He’d met them all on Cairnholm, though he’d thought he was dreaming. Then Emma had left him that letter and a photo of herself with my grandfather. As if that weren’t bad enough, over the phone I’d actually told my dad I was peculiar. That had been a mistake, I realized, and selfish. And now here I was heading to meet them with Emma and Miss Peregrine at my side.
“On second thought,” I said, turning to them in the boat, “Maybe you shouldn’t come with me.”
“Why not?” Emma said. “We won’t age forward that quickly …”
“I don’t think my parents should see me with you. This is all going to be hard enough to explain as it is.”
“I’ve given some thought to this,” said Miss Peregrine.
“To what? My parents?”
“Yes. I can help you with them, if you like.”
“How?”
“One of an ymbryne’s myriad duties is dealing with normals who become problematically curious about us, or otherwise troublesome. We have ways of making them uncurious, of making them forget they’ve seen certain things.”