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

by Ransom Riggs

my Before and After, colliding with the force of planets.

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.)

The way people rejected anything that didn’t fit their narrow paradigm of acceptability, as if those who thought or acted or dressed or dreamed differently from them were a threat to their very existence. That, more than anything, was why I had felt so alone growing up. Things that normal people thought were important, I thought were dumb. And there was never anyone I could talk to about it, so I kept my thoughts to myself.

I had returned to that normal world with the assurance that I now had a home waiting for me in the peculiar world. But today in Devil’s Acre left me feeling like I was a stranger there, too—a hero to some, a phony to others. Misunderstood by everybody, just like at home.

They came from a time before the concept of teenager-hood even existed. That was an invention of the postwar years, before which you had been either a child or an adult.

“Forget standards. What of decency? What of self-respect?” A man walked by wearing camouflage pants, orange flip-flops, and a SpongeBob sweater with the sleeves scissored off. I thought Horace might cry.