At some point, I'll probably rearrange these chapters and put them in the order that they occur. But for now, we're still looping back and forth through the movie.
"Miss Peregrine, there's a policeman at the door! He says it's about the pub!"
The excitement of Jake's visit to their time-loop kept the children up later than usual after he left. Claire, Bronwyn, and the twins all piled into Claire's bed that night, whispering and giggling excitedly behind their hands until Miss Peregrine made them go to sleep. Down the hall in Emma and Olive's bedroom, lantern light still burned brightly beneath the closed door. Their room had electricity of course, like the rest of house, but Olive preferred fire that she'd made herself.
Inside, in the gentle orange glow, Emma and Olive were huddled around Fiona, who sat quietly on a chair between them. "It-it doesn't look quite like the picture, does it?" Emma asked Olive, as the two of them studied the back of Fiona's head. "I can't get the strands to stay even. Doesn't it say anything about how to do that?"
Olive flipped through the pages of the old magazine where they'd found instructions for making a French braid. "Um... no," she answered, scanning the page. "It just says to keep adding more hair as you bring the braid down her head."
Emma sighed and picked up the comb again. Because of her peculiarity, her sighs were always heavy, but this one was especially so. Fiona's hair swayed in her sigh like it was a gust of wind. Fiona's long, fine hair was the best in the house for braiding, and she'd been very patient while the older girls practiced on her, but Emma was getting frustrated.
Olive rallied to encourage her. "All right, we'll just try starting over again," she said cheerfully, her gloved fingers undoing the half-made twists in Fiona's hair. She glanced sideways at Emma as she combed it out again. "Why are you suddenly so eager to learn a French braid, anyway?"
Emma stayed focused on combing Fiona's hair and shrugged in what she hoped was a nonchalant manner. "Oh, I was just bored. I wanted to try something new."
"It doesn't have anything to do with Jake, does it?" Olive asked, a hint of teasing in her voice.
Emma sighed again and gazed away out the window. Outside, the night was clear enough that she could see beyond the garden, almost all the way down to the seashore. "He's from the year 2016," she said slowly. "That's so far in the future, I can't even imagine..."
But she was interrupted by Miss Peregrine's footsteps in the hall outside, and then the door opened. "Emma, Olive, you two should start getting ready for b – " But Miss Peregrine stopped when she saw Fiona in their room. "Fiona, what are you still doing up?" she asked the younger girl. "You should've been asleep twenty-six minutes ago."
"It's our fault, Miss P," Emma said quickly. "Olive and I wanted to learn a French braid, and we asked Fiona to let us practice on her."
Fiona stood up from the chair, but she stayed close to it, her fingers fiddling with the top rung. Emma suddenly realized that Fiona had been very quiet all evening, barely saying a word as she and Olive tried braiding her hair.
"Miss P," she asked suddenly, "am I a... a freak?"
Freak was something of a slur in Miss Peregrine's house. Her children all had unpleasant memories of being called freaks, or worse, before they'd come to live with her, often by their own families. Emma and Olive glanced worriedly at each other, but Miss Peregrine just puffed her pipe.
"And what makes you ask that, Fiona?"
Fiona tried shrugging and looking away, but of course Miss Peregrine wasn't fooled.
"No," she said gently, "you need to tell me."
Fiona shuffled her bare feet against the floor. In her pajamas, with her hair loose, she looked smaller than usual. "Well... when the man from the pub came to our house today, he said I was a freak."
"He did not," Olive gasped, while Emma fumed, "What a horrible old man! Did you kill him this time, Miss P?"
She hadn't, but she would kill him next time, Miss Peregrine decided. Perhaps she would even find some way to kill him slowly, and really make him pay for calling one of her children a freak. But nothing of her anger showed in her face. She simply sat on the edge of Olive's bed and held out one arm to Fiona. "Come sit with me and tell me what happened," she said, and Fiona did.
She smiled when she heard the shrill ring of the doorbell, but as soon as she opened it, the balding, heavy-set man on their porch took one look at her and spat, "She's probably a little freak too, just like the ones who burnt down my pub."
Fiona's smile slid off her face. The policeman with him said something to him that she couldn't catch, but she heard the pub-owner's response. "I tell you, the things they did weren't bloody natural," he muttered, staring at Fiona with such cold, suspicious eyes that she had to swallow and look away.
"Where's your caretaker?" the policeman asked Fiona. His voice wasn't mean like the pub-owner's, but neither was it kind.
Fiona fiddled with the doorknob. "Sh-she's out in the garden."
"Well, go and fetch her. Tell her I need to speak to her about what happened in the pub."
Fiona glared at him, now feeling as thorny as a thistle. The policeman telling her what to do was almost as bad as the pub-owner calling her a freak. Miss Peregrine had a rule that her children were not to obey orders from anyone but her... but she would want to know that these men were here, so Fiona turned away and ran out to the garden to find her.
Miss Peregrine put one arm around her and pulled her close. Fiona leaned her head on her shoulder, breathing in the smokey smell of her pipe. "I'm sorry you had to hear that, Fiona," Miss Peregrine said, her voice as soft and warm as the firelight. "But tell me, why do you think the pub-owner called you that?"
Fiona blinked, and Olive and Emma, who were now sitting on the bed on the other side of Miss Peregrine, looked surprised, too. It had never occurred to them to consider things from the pub-owner's perspective.
Fiona puzzled out slowly, "Well... he was probably angry because Millard broke his dishes and Olive started a fire in his pub... and confused, because he didn't know how they did it, and he was probably scared of me, because he thought I could do it, too."
"Yes, exactly," Miss Peregrine nodded. "He was angry and confused and scared, and that didn't make it right for him to call you a freak, of course, but the point is that it didn't have anything to do with you. It had only to do with him. Do you understand?"
Fiona nodded, but it hadn't escaped her that Miss Peregrine still hadn't answered her original question. "But am I a freak, Miss P?" she asked again.
Miss Peregrine gestured to the older girls with her pipe. "Well, do you think we're freaks? Olive and Emma and I?"
She wasn't sure about herself, but when it came to Miss Peregrine and her housemates, Fiona didn't need to think about it. They couldn't possibly be freaks. Miss Peregrine was the finest ymbryne in the whole world, and Emma and Olive were like her own sisters. Olive had recently read Little Women to Fiona – Miss Peregrine was always encouraging her children to read to each other, even though they could all read themselves, because that kept at least two of them occupied – and Fiona felt sure that she loved them as much as Jo loved Amy, or even as much as Jo loved Beth.
"Oh no," she answered immediately, "of course you're not freaks."
Miss Peregrine smiled and tucked a lock of Fiona's hair behind her ear. "Well, you're peculiar just like us, aren't you, Fiona? If you were a freak, then we'd all have to be."
Fiona smiled. She hadn't thought about it like that, but Miss Peregrine had a way of explaining things so they seemed very obvious. "Oh, then I guess I'm not one," she said, and she giggled a little at how silly she'd been to ever think so.
"Of course you're not, but you are up thirty-four minutes past your bedtime," Miss Peregrine said in her usual serious voice again, standing up from Olive's bed. "So say goodnight and come along now."
Fiona recognized her tone and quickly stood up too. She took Miss Peregrine's hand and called goodnight to Emma and Olive over her shoulder as they left. Miss Peregrine gave them a stern look. "And you two know better than keeping her up so late."
"We're sorry, Miss P," Olive said. "Goodnight, Fiona."
"Thanks for letting us practice on your hair," Emma added.
The pub-owner's words had made her feel very small, but as she climbed into bed in her own room, Fiona felt quite big again – big enough to see beyond her own problems to other people's. She remembered her hair swaying in Emma's sigh. Emma had seemed sad since Jake left, almost like she had after Abe left them years ago.
"Miss P," Fiona asked, "will Jake come visit us again?"
"I don't know," Miss Peregrine answered, switching off her bedside lamp. "We'll have to wait and see."
Fiona didn't believe that. Miss Peregrine knew everything. "Do you think he will?"
"Is your peculiarity asking questions now? Go to sleep." She smoothed the covers over her and touched her cheek. "Goodnight, Fiona."
"Goodnight, Miss P," she answered, yawning, and she fell asleep hoping that Jake would come back.