He’s wearing a costume,” I whispered to Emma. Then, to the guy: “She doesn’t see a lot of movies.” “A costume?” Emma scrunched her brow. “But he’s a grown man.
I felt empty, too, and strangely heavy, like the planet was spinning too fast, heating up gravity, pulling me toward the floor.
She had maintained her strength in the face of all this for so long that we had come to take it for granted, but she wasn’t bulletproof. She might have been peculiar, but she was also human.
There was an iron will inside me, I knew that now, and I hoped I could hang on to it even as my life grew softer.
When I was a kid, Granpa Portman’s fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and to have your life made unrecognised by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be – THAT was magical.
Can you imagine, in a world so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?
They were the gods of this strange little heaven, and I was their guest.
But in general that is how we prefer to be thought of, for it tends to keep away unwanted visitors. These days fewer and fewer people believe in those things – fairies and goblins and all such nonsense – and thus common folk no longer make much of an effort to seek us out. That makes our lives a good bit easier. Ghost stories and scary old houses have served us well, too – though not, apparently, in your case.
I expected as much from you, girl,” said Caul. “You’re so typical of ymbryne-raised peculiars: no ambition, and no sense at all but one of entitlement. Quiet yourself, I am speaking to the male.
I left the house feeling like I was further than ever from the truth.
I think I’m in love.
Because if Grandpa Portman wasn’t honorable and good, I wasn’t sure anyone could be.
I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover – that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions – so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.
Then, a few years later, when I was fifteen, an extraordinary and terrible thing happened, and there was only Before and After.
He was cross-examining my subconscious .
I was left with the choice of wearing the pants either around my ankles or hitched up to my bellybutton. I decided the latter was the lesser of evils, so I went downstairs to have what would likely be the strangest meal of my life while dressed like a clown without makeup.
Travel is crucial to one’s development,” said Miss Peregrine, her tone strangely defensive. “Until they have traveled, even the most educated person is ignorant. It’s important the children learn that our society is not the center of the peculiar universe.
Those who escaped the noose settled here, at the very bottom, the absolute edge of peculiar society. Exiled from the outcasts of outcasts.
There were wooden toys moldering in a box; crayons on a windowsill, their colors dulled by the light of ten thousand afternoons; a dollhouse with dolls inside, lifers in an ornate prison. In a modest library, the creep of moisture had bowed the shelves into crooked smiles.
I searched for the words, but they’d gotten shy.