This chapter is tagged to the scene where Jake visits Miss Peregrine's house for the second time. To refresh, Bronwyn answers the door and invites him to "come and play," but he says that he needs to see Miss Peregrine. I decided to change things up a bit. :)

Jake had tucked his grandfather's letter to Miss Peregrine safely in his pocket, and he tried to rehearse what he would say to her about it as he walked the long path out to her house on the edge of the island. When the trees finally parted and the house came into view, he saw the younger children on the front lawn, playing in the warm September sun. Their game looked strange; they were all running about, some waving broomsticks, some throwing balls. As Jake approached, Bronwyn spotted him first and hurried over, still clutching a broomstick in her hand.

"Jake, you're back!" she cried excitedly, her curly brown hair flying out behind her. "Come and play with us! We're making up a Muggle version of Quidditch."

Jake blinked, caught off-guard by Quidditch and Muggle. He knew the words, of course, but he'd never expected to hear them here in 1943; those words belonged to his time. He heard Millard exclaim, "Look, Jake's come back!" and soon, the other children were gathered around him too, all pink-cheeked and a little out of breath.

"You're playing Quidditch?" he asked slowly, looking around at their brooms.

"Yes, you know, like in Harry Potter," Brownwyn said.

"Haven't you read Harry Potter?" Hugh asked, brushing his sweaty bangs off his forehead.

"Well, yeah, but... how have you read it? Those books haven't been written yet." He was sure that JK Rowling hadn't even been born yet.

He must've looked bewildered, because Fiona giggled a little, pressing one hand over her mouth to hide her smile. "Abe sent them to us from your time," she explained. "He sent us all seven books, and Miss P read them to us, one chapter a night."

"They got so exciting at the ends that we wanted her to read more," Millard went on, "but she said no, we had to make them last."

"She says making things last is very important," Claire added, in the no-nonsense voice she used for quoting Miss Peregrine.

Jake nodded. He hadn't thought about it before, but it had to be hard for Miss Peregrine to keep all her children entertained living in a time-loop. Anything new or different probably had to be stretched out and made to last as long as possible. But then he frowned as he remembered Miss Peregrine's strictest rule.

"But... I thought Miss Peregrine didn't let you have things from the future?" he asked slowly.

"Oh, she doesn't, usually, but Harry Potter is just a fantasy series, of course," Horace explained in his posh way. He began smoothing the lapels of his jacket, which had gotten mussed while playing. "None of it actually happens, so Miss P said it was all right. But she would never let us have, say, a newspaper from the future, or a history book, or anything like that."

"Those wouldn't be as good as Harry Potter, anyway," Millard said. Jake was getting better at telling what the invisible boy was doing, and now he heard the scoff in Millard's voice and noticed how his shirt sleeve bobbed, as if he were waving one arm dismissively. "Jake, are there Harry Potter movies in your time, too?"

"Yeah, there's a whole series of them," Jake answered, and the kids all looked jealous.

"Blimey, imagine getting to see a movie of Harry Potter," Hugh said wistfully.

Bronwyn titled her head to one side. "But I wonder, how do they do the Quidditch scenes? And the Weasleys's flying car? And all the magic?"

Jake considered telling them about computers and special effects, but he held back. How could he explain all that? And besides, Miss Peregrine had made it very clear that she didn't want him telling her children about his time.

"I know, they must be cartoon movies," Horace said, and Jake decided it was best to just nod.

Jake had always liked the books, but when he was nine, the last movie was released, and it had swept him along into a more avid Harry Potter phase. Between his birthday and Christmas that year, his parents gave him all seven books, all eight movies, a t-shirt, and some toys... but they had never once read the books to him. He remembered lying on the floor of his quiet bedroom, reading the books by himself... and then, with a pang, he pictured Miss Peregrine sitting in her armchair in the parlor, reading aloud from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, with all her kids gathered around her and a fire in the fireplace, like a scene from a movie. An empty feeling spread in his chest, and Jake thought he understood now why his grandfather always got so wistful when he told stories about Miss Peregrine's home.

"And after she'd read them all to us," Fiona told him excitedly, "we started acting them out."

"Not the entire books," Horace clarified. "We only perform select scenes, you know. We take turns doing different characters, but generally, I play Draco Malfoy, Fiona plays Hermione, Hugh plays Ron..."

"...and I play Harry," Millard finished proudly, "because I'm invisible, and Harry has the Invisibility Cloak. We've made costumes and everything. Hang on, I'll show my mask."

Jake watched as Millard's clothes turned and ran up the front steps onto the porch, where a Harry Potter book – he couldn't tell which one from this distance – and a mask sat on the rocking chair. Millard picked up the mask, tied it over the empty space where his head was, and ran back over to them. It was painted papier-mache mask, obviously homemade, but Jake could tell from the black hair around the edges, the glasses, and of course, the lightning bolt scar, that it was Harry Potter.

"Hey, that's pretty cool," he said. The emptiness behind the eye holes was only a little creepy.

Jake had dressed as Harry Potter for Halloween one year. His mom bought him an expensive costume online, but she'd never taken him trick-or-treating. His grandfather, or a neighbor, or a baby-sitter had always done that.

"We tried to get Miss P to take her bird-form and play Hedwig – you know, Harry's owl? – but she said no, because she's a falcon, not an owl."

"But she watches every production we put on," Bronwyn said. "She says they're very good."

The empty feeling inside Jake grew worse, as if he were a hollow. He had been in a school play once, back in fourth grade, a Thanksgiving pageant that assigned parts to every student in his class, or else he wouldn't have even thought about going near a stage. But his parents hadn't come to see it. Something had come up at his mom's job, and if his dad had even given an excuse, Jake didn't remember it now.

Fortunately, the children were too young to notice his melancholy. Horace said, "And Fiona used her peculiarity to grow a tree just like the Whomping Willow. It's really something."

The children all began talking at once then. "Yes, it's around behind the house!" "Wouldn't you like to see it, Jake?" "Fiona can make the branches fly about and everything." One of the twins took his hand, and it was hard not to let himself get pulled along with their enthusiasm. He had to remind himself of why he had come back to this time. His grandfather's letter.

"I need to see Miss Peregrine first," he said loudly, to make himself heard over their chatter. "Do you know where she is?"

They told him that she was in the kitchen and went back to their Quidditch game as he went inside. He glanced at them over his shoulder - all of them running this way and that, calling to each other. Maybe if Jake hadn't been an only-child, maybe if he'd had siblings to play with... but no, he had to stop comparing his childhood to these kids. It was looking lonelier and more depressing all the time.

Jake had secretly felt sorry for Miss Peregrine's children ever since he'd met them. Miss Peregrine kept them so sheltered; they would never know the future beyond 1943, never know the world beyond this little island. Jake knew a million things they didn't, and he knew that they were very jealous of him for it, but now, for the first time, he felt jealous of them. His time had computers and cell phones and the Internet, but they had something he didn't have, something more precious than technology.

Emma had been so impressed when Jake had secretly shown her his cell phone... but Emma had never seen his parents, always looking up from their phones with a distracted "What was that, Jake?" or "Hang on a sec, buddy, I gotta finish this text" - or even worse, not hearing him at all. Jake had been competing with his parents' phones and tablets for their attention for as long as he could remember. Miss Peregrine was strict, but he couldn't imagine her treating her children like that. There was, he realized with a jolt, not one single screen in her entire house.

A warm, pleasant feeling wrapped itself around him as he went up the steps to the front porch. The sadness that had filled him melted away. In some strange way, Miss Peregrine's house already felt more like home than the house in Florida where he'd grown up. But maybe that wasn't so strange. Miss Peregrine had raised his grandfather, and didn't that mean she was like family to Jake, too? Yesterday, when the little kids had invited him to move in, he'd dismissed it; after all, who in their right mind would want to leave 2016 to live in 1943? But as he went inside now, the idea began to feel vaguely tempting.

P.S. This was my entry for the "Little Free Library" challenge at Caesar's Palace. My prompt was "a character who feels as if they are stuck between two different worlds."

P.P.S. Reviews are love.