Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - BOOCarz

that week. I woke up screaming and was
unceremoniously ejected from the library, cursing Dr.
Golan and his stupid theories all the while.
The last straw came a few days later, when my
family decided it was time to sell Grandpa Portman’s
house. Before prospective buyers could be allowed
inside, though, the place had to be cleaned out. On
the advice of Dr. Golan, who thought it would be good
for me to “confront the scene of my trauma,” I was
enlisted to help my dad and Aunt Susie sort through
the detritus. For a while after we got to the house my
dad kept taking me aside to make sure I was okay.
Surprisingly, I seemed to be, despite the scraps of
police tape clinging to the shrubs and the torn screen
on the lanai flapping in the breeze; these things—like
the rented Dumpster that stood on the curb, waiting to
swallow what remained of my grandfather’s life—
made me sad, not scared.
Once it became clear I wasn’t about to suffer a
mouth-frothing freak-out, we got down to business.
Armed with garbage bags we proceeded grimly
through the house, emptying shelves and cabinets
and crawl spaces, discovering geometries of dust
beneath objects unmoved for years. We built
pyramids of things that could be saved or salvaged
and pyramids of things destined for the Dumpster. My
aunt and father were not sentimental people, and the
Dumpster pile was always the largest. I lobbied hard
to keep certain things, like the eight-foot stack of
water-damaged National Geographic magazines
teetering in a corner of the garage—how many
afternoons had I spent poring over them, imagining
myself among the mud men of New Guinea or
discovering a cliff-top castle in the kingdom of
Bhutan?—but I was always overruled. Neither was I
allowed to keep my grandfather’s collection of vintage
bowling shirts (“They’re embarrassing,” my dad