At each sale I was allowed to pick out one thing that cost less than fifty cents. Multiply that by several garage sales per weekend and that’s how I amassed, over the course of a decade, a huge number of old records, dime-store detective novels with silly covers, MAD magazines, and other things that were objectively junk but nevertheless arranged like treasures along the shelves around my room. My parents often begged me to cull the herd and throw most of it away, and while I had made a few halfhearted attempts, I never got far—the rest of the house was so big and modern and blank that I had developed a sort of horror of empty space, so when it came to the only room in the house over which I had some control, I preferred it full. Which is why, in addition to all the overflowing bookshelves, I had plastered one wall floor to ceiling with maps, and another with old record album covers.
“Oh, wow. You really like music!” Emma broke away from me and went to the wall—the one with album covers growing over it like scales. I was starting to resent my distracting decor.
“Doesn’t everyone?” I said.
“Not everyone papers their walls with it.”
“I’m mostly into the older stuff,” I said.
“Oh, me too,” she said. “I don’t like these new groups, with their loud guitars and long hair.” She picked up a copy of Meet the Beatles! and wrinkled her nose.
“That record came out, what . . . fifty years ago?”
“Like I said. But you never mentioned liking music so much.” She walked along the wall, trailing her hand over my records, looking at everything. “There are lots of things I don’t know about you, but I want to.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I feel like we know each other so well in some ways, but in others it’s like we just met.”
“In our defense, we were both quite busy, what with trying not to die and rescuing all those ymbrynes and such. But now we have time.”
We have time. Whenever I heard those words, an electric feeling of possibility uncoiled in my chest.
“Play me one,” said Emma, nodding at the wall. “Whichever is your favorite.”
“I don’t know if I have a favorite,” I said. “There are so many.”
“I want to dance with you. Pick a good one for dancing.”
She smiled and went back to looking at things. I thought for a moment, then found Harvest Moon by Neil Young. I slid the album from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable, and dropped the needle carefully into the gap between the third and fourth song. There was a warm crackle and then the title track began to play, wistful and sweet. I was hoping she’d join me in the middle of the room, where I’d cleared a little space for us to dance, but she had come upon my wall of maps. There were layers upon layers of them—maps of the world, city maps, subway maps, tri-fold maps torn from old National Geographic magazines.
“These are amazing, Jacob.”
“I used to spend a lot of time imagining I was somewhere else,” I said.
“Me too.”
She came to my bed, which was shoved against the wall and surrounded by maps. She climbed up onto the comforter to examine them.
“Sometimes I remember you’re only sixteen,” she said. “Actually sixteen. And it kind of breaks my head open.”
She turned to look down at me in wonder.
“What made you say that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just strange. You don’t seem only sixteen.”
“And you don’t seem ninety-eight.”
“I’m only eighty-eight.”
“Oh, well, you definitely seem eighty-eight.”
She laughed and shook her head, then looked back at the wall.
“Come back here,” I said. “Dance with me.”
She hadn’t seemed to hear. She had come to the oldest part of my map wall—the ones I had made with my grandfather when I was eight or nine, drawn on everything from graph paper to construction paper. We’d spent many a long summer day making them, inventing cartographical symbols, drawing strange creatures in the margins, sometimes overwriting real places on the maps with our own invented ones. When I realized what she was staring at, my heart sank a bit.
“Is this Abe’s handwriting?” she asked.
“We used to do all kinds of projects together. He was basically my best friend.”
Emma nodded. “Mine too.” Her finger traced some words he had written—Lake Okeechobee—and then she turned away from it and climbed down from the bed. “But that was a long time ago.”
She came over to where I stood, took my hands, and rested her head on my shoulder. We began to sway with the music.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That caught me by surprise.”
“It’s okay. You were together for so long. And now you’re here . . .”
I felt her shake her head. Let’s not ruin it. Her hands slipped out of mine and wrapped around my waist. I lowered my cheek to her forehead.
“Do you ever still imagine you’re somewhere else?” she asked me.
“Not anymore,” I said. “For the first time in a long time, I’m happy where I am.”
“Me too,” she said, and she lifted her head from my shoulder, and I kissed her.
We danced and kissed until the song ended. Eventually, a soft hiss filled the room, and we kept dancing awhile longer because we weren’t ready for the moment to end. I tried to forget the strange turn things had taken, and how I’d felt when she’d mentioned my grandfather. She was going through something and that was okay. Even if I couldn’t understand it.
For now, I told myself, all that mattered was that we were together and we were safe. For now, that was enough. It was more than we’d ever had. There was no clock counting down to the moment she would wither and turn to dust. There were no bombers turning the world to fire around us. There were no hollowgast lurking outside the door. I didn’t know what our future held, but in that moment it was enough just to believe we had one.
I heard Miss Peregrine talking downstairs. That was our cue.
“Until tomorrow,” she whispered in my ear. “Good night, Jacob.”
We kissed one more time. It felt like an electric pulse, and left every part of me tingling. Then she slipped out the door, and for the first time since my friends had arrived, I was alone.
* * *
• • •
That night, I could hardly sleep. It wasn’t so much the snores of Hugh as he dozed in a pile of blankets on my floor as it was a buzzing in my head, filled now with uncertainty and exciting new prospects. When I left Devil’s Acre to come back home, it was because I had decided that finishing high school and keeping my parents in my life were important enough goals that they were worth enduring Englewood for a couple more years. The time between now and graduation had promised to be a special kind of torment, though, especially with Emma and my friends stuck in loops on the other side of the Atlantic.